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silveradeptChallenge #9 wants to know what's the newest thing to capture our fannish interest.
With this particular phrasing, the back of my head pings at me a suggestion that perhaps my days of fannish obsessions are over and have been for a while. Because there aren't any shows where I'd be devastated at their cancellation or completion, or games where I've been upset at their finishing for knowing there's nothing else, or things that I keep circling back to over and over again. It's entirely possible that my novelty-seeking side is winning, wanting to go seek the next best thing (the next best thing is still just a band), but it's also that I think some of the fun of going back and revisiting is doing so with someone else who hasn't seen it (or who has and that you can geek out together about it,) and that's not something that's happened much for me. And I'm often the person who is watching someone else's shows and fandoms to see why they're likable and liked. (Which is how I ended up watching a couple of shows where the cat was the stoic lead, the somewhat playboy-esque second who touches on many of my "I would have hated you in high school" bits but is a competent person when they have to be, the nerdier third who does a decent job with technology and often gets made fun of by the other two, and the only person in the cast with an actual personality, the highly caffeinated tech wizard woman who may or may not be patterned on the manic pixie dream girl. (Abigail and Penelope, I'm sorry you had to deal with the rest of them.))
But I also haven't done anything where I've gone from being super into a specific property, then leaving it behind hand falling healing into a new fandom and rolling around in it with the same kind of obsession. I'm very rarely that pulled into any fandom to where I'm trying to do a lot of output for it specifically. I'm much more a syncretist, a person who likes making connections between fandoms, and who likes to hear other people talk about their blorbos from their shows and how their fannishness shows up for them and how they view their ships. My fandom is often other people and their fandom and getting to see how happy people are when they get to talk about their fandoms. (Good thing I'm an information professional, right?)
With the way that streaming has failed us, becoming something other than what we had hoped it would be, where we could subscribe to one, maybe two services and get a back catalog that would cover everything that isn't on the media shelf, it's hard to rewatch or introduce people to the older fandoms of our lives. The worse part of it is we had assumed official media releases would be basically left alone so that those who couldn't stream premieres would still have the opportunity to watch, and that didn't happen, so now we're in a situation where we need to keep circulating the tapes if there's a hope in the universe where we can introduce new fans to our shows. I suppose this qualifies as everything old being new again. (Books continue to chug along, at least, even if their electronic counterparts are infested with spying and digital locks that we do not have the keys to.)
There's also the logarithmic exploration of content that's happened as I've gotten older, both on official broadcast and streaming platforms and all the content that's on YouTube and other "user-generated" sites. And all the Indies out there, and the fanworks. It makes it impossible for any one person to know the bounds of the universe or the ends of the Internet (although The End of the Internet still exists, as far as I know, so that is a terminus somewhere in the land of the hyperconnected.) And there are a lot of things that I like that may never make it to the level of being a fannish obsession.
Further making things difficult for me to point at stuff as the newest thing, I tend to gravitate toward fandoms that have built a world that can be played in, where it becomes relatively clear that the stories we're following are not the only stories going on in the world. Pern is my go-to example of a place where the world is more interesting than the stories the authors have put in front of us. (Or where the authors have done a terrible job of telling stories in this world, so they get ignored as much as necessary to tell a better story.) The last author's only-so-far offering is going to be five years old. But every person who discovers the big meta on it and then engages in dialogue makes the old new again. I think of RWBY's Remnant, and The Hunger Games's Panem, and the version of Earth that includes Beach City and the entire history of the Crystal Gems as worlds much bigger than the limited perspective we get by following who we are through the seasons. Even as I'm looking at Tortall, which I suppose qualifies as the most recent, in that it's where the book club currently is, I'm looking at it from the perspective of "there are clearly more gods, heroes, and countries in the world than what this narrative is giving us," and sometimes that means I go "hang on a minute, if that's true, it implies this, and it's really hard to get away with that in the world as constructed so far." It's why I like games like Epistory and Nanotale, because they pack snippets of a story and show a bigger world, even if there only things that are alive are a girl, a fox, and a lot of chitinous creatures. (And a cactus.)
I suppose my fannish orientation is much more towards the worldbuilding than the shipping, which might make me an odd duck, comparatively. I think about what the social norms are like in a world with sex rays or sex pollen or ponn far or a caste system based upon hormones and aggressive behavior, rather than going "a convenient way to get two (or more) characters banging each other!" I'm trying to think about what might be the necessary things on hand to have when you're working through the process of doctoral defense in a world where fighting and defending a snake is an accepted part of the defense process. I think I might have described it pretty well when talking about Calvin in a fic (that's five years old, wow):
So, yeah. That's what came out, a want for more people to poke at worldbuilding or something like it.
Rec Us Your Newest Thing.
[…]
Obsessions come in a lot of shapes and sizes, some of them come and go and some linger. You can absolutely use this space for that manifesto or fandom promo that you’ve always wanted to pen. You can also use it to share an earworm that you can’t get out of your head and think the best way to do it is to share it with the world. Or something in between.
With this particular phrasing, the back of my head pings at me a suggestion that perhaps my days of fannish obsessions are over and have been for a while. Because there aren't any shows where I'd be devastated at their cancellation or completion, or games where I've been upset at their finishing for knowing there's nothing else, or things that I keep circling back to over and over again. It's entirely possible that my novelty-seeking side is winning, wanting to go seek the next best thing (the next best thing is still just a band), but it's also that I think some of the fun of going back and revisiting is doing so with someone else who hasn't seen it (or who has and that you can geek out together about it,) and that's not something that's happened much for me. And I'm often the person who is watching someone else's shows and fandoms to see why they're likable and liked. (Which is how I ended up watching a couple of shows where the cat was the stoic lead, the somewhat playboy-esque second who touches on many of my "I would have hated you in high school" bits but is a competent person when they have to be, the nerdier third who does a decent job with technology and often gets made fun of by the other two, and the only person in the cast with an actual personality, the highly caffeinated tech wizard woman who may or may not be patterned on the manic pixie dream girl. (Abigail and Penelope, I'm sorry you had to deal with the rest of them.))
But I also haven't done anything where I've gone from being super into a specific property, then leaving it behind hand falling healing into a new fandom and rolling around in it with the same kind of obsession. I'm very rarely that pulled into any fandom to where I'm trying to do a lot of output for it specifically. I'm much more a syncretist, a person who likes making connections between fandoms, and who likes to hear other people talk about their blorbos from their shows and how their fannishness shows up for them and how they view their ships. My fandom is often other people and their fandom and getting to see how happy people are when they get to talk about their fandoms. (Good thing I'm an information professional, right?)
With the way that streaming has failed us, becoming something other than what we had hoped it would be, where we could subscribe to one, maybe two services and get a back catalog that would cover everything that isn't on the media shelf, it's hard to rewatch or introduce people to the older fandoms of our lives. The worse part of it is we had assumed official media releases would be basically left alone so that those who couldn't stream premieres would still have the opportunity to watch, and that didn't happen, so now we're in a situation where we need to keep circulating the tapes if there's a hope in the universe where we can introduce new fans to our shows. I suppose this qualifies as everything old being new again. (Books continue to chug along, at least, even if their electronic counterparts are infested with spying and digital locks that we do not have the keys to.)
There's also the logarithmic exploration of content that's happened as I've gotten older, both on official broadcast and streaming platforms and all the content that's on YouTube and other "user-generated" sites. And all the Indies out there, and the fanworks. It makes it impossible for any one person to know the bounds of the universe or the ends of the Internet (although The End of the Internet still exists, as far as I know, so that is a terminus somewhere in the land of the hyperconnected.) And there are a lot of things that I like that may never make it to the level of being a fannish obsession.
Further making things difficult for me to point at stuff as the newest thing, I tend to gravitate toward fandoms that have built a world that can be played in, where it becomes relatively clear that the stories we're following are not the only stories going on in the world. Pern is my go-to example of a place where the world is more interesting than the stories the authors have put in front of us. (Or where the authors have done a terrible job of telling stories in this world, so they get ignored as much as necessary to tell a better story.) The last author's only-so-far offering is going to be five years old. But every person who discovers the big meta on it and then engages in dialogue makes the old new again. I think of RWBY's Remnant, and The Hunger Games's Panem, and the version of Earth that includes Beach City and the entire history of the Crystal Gems as worlds much bigger than the limited perspective we get by following who we are through the seasons. Even as I'm looking at Tortall, which I suppose qualifies as the most recent, in that it's where the book club currently is, I'm looking at it from the perspective of "there are clearly more gods, heroes, and countries in the world than what this narrative is giving us," and sometimes that means I go "hang on a minute, if that's true, it implies this, and it's really hard to get away with that in the world as constructed so far." It's why I like games like Epistory and Nanotale, because they pack snippets of a story and show a bigger world, even if there only things that are alive are a girl, a fox, and a lot of chitinous creatures. (And a cactus.)
I suppose my fannish orientation is much more towards the worldbuilding than the shipping, which might make me an odd duck, comparatively. I think about what the social norms are like in a world with sex rays or sex pollen or ponn far or a caste system based upon hormones and aggressive behavior, rather than going "a convenient way to get two (or more) characters banging each other!" I'm trying to think about what might be the necessary things on hand to have when you're working through the process of doctoral defense in a world where fighting and defending a snake is an accepted part of the defense process. I think I might have described it pretty well when talking about Calvin in a fic (that's five years old, wow):
I think there's a part of his brain that's labeled Story, and anything that's in a story that he likes gets smashed in there and stuck to other parts of other stories until they've become one giant story that connects everywhere to everything inside it. Which makes it easy for, say, a story about rescuing a princess from a dragon to turn into a science-fiction rayguns-and-dinosaurs adventure and eventually wrap up as a pulp hard-boiled detective noir before he gets either bored with it or done with that fragment, which gets folded back into that Story part for the next time."
So, yeah. That's what came out, a want for more people to poke at worldbuilding or something like it.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 04:23 am (UTC)World building is fun. I always love to read about meta and fanwork that engage with the world of the canon and explore possibilities.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 08:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 02:52 pm (UTC)