Fandom Snowflake 2019 #1: The Good Place
Jan. 1st, 2019 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIn your own space, talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane.
Now would be the perfect spot for a Dear Author letter. Except I don't really have one, because that says I have tastes and preferences and enough experience with everything to put down what I like into a post and be reasonably assured that someone else will understand it.
But language is ambiguous, to some degree, and besides, I haven't read my one thousand works on each trope I might be interested in to know whether or not I really do like it.
And there really isn't a home fandom for me. I find Steven Universe and Miraculous Ladybug charming for their own reasons, and I can appreciate the classical quality of the Merrie Melodies, and Farscape and Killjoys are equally up there as good things with Big Hero 6 and Kubo and the Two Strings. (Good Godfrey, Laika, that has all the feels.)
I love being able to peer into someone else's ideas and write something they'll find good or worthy of a long comment as a gift, because it means success in my endeavors. I don't necessarily have as well-developed a sense of writing something for myself or because that idea really needs to be written and I don't care how many words it takes to get done.
I'm not broken. But nowhere feels especially like home. And it might be because I spent a lot of my life feeling apart from everyone else, having weird interests and not having a lot of people around who shared those interests. (More people had those interests than I thought, but I didn't know that at the time.) And then a lot more of my life being actively separated from the people who would share those interests and be friends, because I didn't feel like I was allowed to have friends, much less do anything with them.
I've finally got art out on the walls that represents me and my interests, rather than it being closed away where the guests don't see it. I have friends that I see regularly and places to go and conventions to do. There's a lot more happiness in these last two years than there has been in the many before them. That happiness is often tempered by time and the knowledge that it eventually ends up coming to an end. Which is not to say that I don't fling myself headlong into it all, because I totally do. And I'm really happy and enjoying myself while I'm there. It just means there's a period of down that follows the up where I have to get readjusted to the idea that it's back to the regular world.
The idea of the Happy Place, where someone can go back to of the day is bad, or if they need cheering up, or just to be there and enjoy the sunshine and the friendly entities around, well, it sounds nice. And I'd like to have one or two around.
More and more, it seems like I'm getting too old to discover them, or I'm too old to hang out in those spaces without getting suspicious looks. By fandom standards, I'm probably already ancient, tapping away on Dreamwidth, not where the Zeitgeist is (or was) on Tumblr, watching as the new generation of fans do many of the same things we did when we were that age, but on topics that were on the fringes when we were arguing about them.
It is difficult to feel at home in a place that you're never sure you really belong in. (That's mostly brainweasels at work, honestly.) But it's nice to ride the coattails of other people as they get enthusiastic about things, or to give them encouragement as they go about their way, cheering in their successes and consoling them when it's less successful.
And to hope, perhaps someday, to experience what they are experiencing for myself.
A customer I interacted with frequently at work used to sign off, as it were, with this thought, "If you are well, then I am well." His context of meaning was very informed by Christianity, but I think that might be the closest thing I have to a Happy Place right now. If you are well, then I am well.
Be well.
Now would be the perfect spot for a Dear Author letter. Except I don't really have one, because that says I have tastes and preferences and enough experience with everything to put down what I like into a post and be reasonably assured that someone else will understand it.
But language is ambiguous, to some degree, and besides, I haven't read my one thousand works on each trope I might be interested in to know whether or not I really do like it.
And there really isn't a home fandom for me. I find Steven Universe and Miraculous Ladybug charming for their own reasons, and I can appreciate the classical quality of the Merrie Melodies, and Farscape and Killjoys are equally up there as good things with Big Hero 6 and Kubo and the Two Strings. (Good Godfrey, Laika, that has all the feels.)
I love being able to peer into someone else's ideas and write something they'll find good or worthy of a long comment as a gift, because it means success in my endeavors. I don't necessarily have as well-developed a sense of writing something for myself or because that idea really needs to be written and I don't care how many words it takes to get done.
I'm not broken. But nowhere feels especially like home. And it might be because I spent a lot of my life feeling apart from everyone else, having weird interests and not having a lot of people around who shared those interests. (More people had those interests than I thought, but I didn't know that at the time.) And then a lot more of my life being actively separated from the people who would share those interests and be friends, because I didn't feel like I was allowed to have friends, much less do anything with them.
I've finally got art out on the walls that represents me and my interests, rather than it being closed away where the guests don't see it. I have friends that I see regularly and places to go and conventions to do. There's a lot more happiness in these last two years than there has been in the many before them. That happiness is often tempered by time and the knowledge that it eventually ends up coming to an end. Which is not to say that I don't fling myself headlong into it all, because I totally do. And I'm really happy and enjoying myself while I'm there. It just means there's a period of down that follows the up where I have to get readjusted to the idea that it's back to the regular world.
The idea of the Happy Place, where someone can go back to of the day is bad, or if they need cheering up, or just to be there and enjoy the sunshine and the friendly entities around, well, it sounds nice. And I'd like to have one or two around.
More and more, it seems like I'm getting too old to discover them, or I'm too old to hang out in those spaces without getting suspicious looks. By fandom standards, I'm probably already ancient, tapping away on Dreamwidth, not where the Zeitgeist is (or was) on Tumblr, watching as the new generation of fans do many of the same things we did when we were that age, but on topics that were on the fringes when we were arguing about them.
It is difficult to feel at home in a place that you're never sure you really belong in. (That's mostly brainweasels at work, honestly.) But it's nice to ride the coattails of other people as they get enthusiastic about things, or to give them encouragement as they go about their way, cheering in their successes and consoling them when it's less successful.
And to hope, perhaps someday, to experience what they are experiencing for myself.
A customer I interacted with frequently at work used to sign off, as it were, with this thought, "If you are well, then I am well." His context of meaning was very informed by Christianity, but I think that might be the closest thing I have to a Happy Place right now. If you are well, then I am well.
Be well.
