Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

Challenge #14 asks us to talk about our favorite trope(s). Here's the challenge text to help us get started:

One of my favorite things about fandom is the way we revel in the tropes -- we take those tidbits from favorite canons and twist them, turn them, fix the way the tropes were done wrong and come up with brand-new tropes so we can do them right.

In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) What makes it particularly appealing for you? What do you like in fanworks featuring that trope?

If you’d rather answer a quick question here than do an in-depth analysis (or both? And thanks to [Bad username or unknown identity: summerstorm"] for this idea): If you’re consuming a work featuring your favorite thing, what’s the moment (The Moment) that really hooks you? When that bulletproof kink hits you right in the heart (or elsewhere)?

This is another one of those "it must be nice to be singularly focused" questions for me.

( If only that were the case. )

I guess there's really only one thing that I've found is consistent about my likes and dislikes across all the media that I've encountered. I want media that consistently plays by its own worldbuilding rules, and that provides explanations when those rules are violated. Magic A is Magic A, even when you take into account the infinite creative possibilities that a mind can come up with while still adhering to those rules. I might disagree entirely that those rules are good ones, or I might think of better ways to engage with those rules, but I will treat as canon rules that stay consistent. Works that break their own rules without an explanation present (or at least the strong insistence that an explanation is forthcoming) well toss me from the narrative extremely quickly.

So, yeah. That's not exactly an exciting thing to gush about. Keep your world consistent and I will likely enjoy your work. Woo. (On the other hand, there are a lot of works that don't manage to get over this bar and don't explicitly disclaim their continuity like Doctor Who does.)

Challenge #12 asks us to increase the amount of kindness in the world through our actions. This does not have to involve other people or entities.

This challenge can be interpreted in many ways and all of them are valid. Some people go out of their way to open doors, say hello to strangers, give something, take a burden from someone. Some people stroll through people’s Wishlist and grant wishes. [a reference to Challenge #6] Maybe your kindness this year will be to yourself. Maybe you’ll take yourself out for a nice meal, tell yourself how awesome you are in the mirror in the morning.

There's also an explicit disclaimer on the idea that talking about what you are doing ruins the kindness value of it.

Maybe you think your kindnesses have to be selfless or that posting about them will make you feel like you’re bragging. It’s okay, firstly it’s not if it’s an assignment, but more importantly, like all challenges, you only have to do what you are comfortable with. That’s our kindness to you. ♥.

And the whole thing leads with a quote from someone nearly-universally considered to be a kind man, from all those who met him, whether in person or through the television screen.

Imagine what our real neighborhoods would be like if each of us offered, as a matter of course, just one kind word to another person.

--Mister Rogers

It would be been nice to have this challenge coincide with this year's More Joy Day on 17 January, but schedule coordination is always a bear. (And now you know another thing that is all about spreading joy and kindness in the world.)

In terms of being kind to oneself, Challenge #7 was how I did it. Because I know I can wield other people's words against myself when I want to believe that there's no reason for anyone to think positively of me.

I use awesomeers for accountability, as a daily reminder that there is usually one thing, even in the worst of days, that was a positive thing that happened, and that even if I have to think about it, I can find it.

( More thinking, if you want to subject yourself to this )

Which is to say, the challenge is completed every day, every time I use someone's pronouns correctly, when I thank people for loading and unloading the dishwasher, for making food, and for writing really neat things for me to read. For every time where I fight the weasels off, or when I take time to myself, or even when I tell myself to do something, because if I look like a mediocre white dude, I should have the confidence of one, as well. Because I'm as guilty as others of thinking that kindness needs to be big, and planned, and done selflessly, with no expectation that things will improve or good consequences will redound to me for what I have done.

And it's really kind of others to tell me that I'm wrong when I want to blame myself for everything that goes wrong, or think I'm responsible for the misfortune of others. Old habits die harder, and double-Hufflepuffs can get caught in a trap that says "if only I work harder, then everyone else can be happy." So it can really be kind when someone says "Okay. Have fun." when I say I want to do something for myself.

Challenge #10 asks us to talk about inspiration and those who have provided it.

Which provides an interesting juxtaposition for me, as elsewhere in the aether, someone indicated that they found it fascinating the way I approach fandom and being a fan as a field of study. I am sure this was 100% intended as "I appreciate that you talk about structures and history and mechanics and your approach and provide background details so that we see not only the finished product, but how you got there from here," which is the sort of thing I like reading in the first place.

( Write what you want to read, right? )

Inspiration continues because of all of this. alexseanchai is the person that got me involved in the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, but also has an entire world of things not explicitly pointed out in the canon that I usually think of as part of the world I want to write in as well. I think that world is itself influenced and inspired by other people's statements and headcanons and suppositions scattered across tumblr and Discord and other places as well, so inspiration is recursive and twisty and complex as much as it is finding a lineage of where ideas come from and how they spread. And shadaras just had a post linking to Leonard Cohen songs, which was a thing I recognized from how many people use Cohen lyrics in their works, but now I understand a lot more how Cohen's work is inspiring to others who are making fic.

And sometimes, people take inspiration to their lives from the works they consume. Because sometimes there are characters, situations, songs, and a package that helps you come to terms with your own situation. And seeing those characters succeed and find their way and learn how to believe in themselves, even when they have to make really hard decisions and strike out on their own with a much less solid support system than where they are coming from, can sometimes inspire someone to say, "I might make it after all" and make changes in their own life.

And, perhaps, at some point in time, someone else will say "silveradept inspired me, because they were patient while I struggled, because their ideas are so interesting, because they improve ideas shared with them, because they looked at my work and said 'This is excellent. I look forward to seeing what you produce in the future.' " Or they will talk about things that I have done and contributed to as parts of what inspired them. Because I've had the closure of the loop happen once or twice, but not nearly as often as I'd like, at least for my professional self, and that is both a gratifying and terrifying thing to experience.

Challenge #8 asks us to recommend the fanworks of others.

( Let's talk about recs )

So, here are the recommendations that I have for you.

• I use my AO3 bookmarks specifically for recommendations, so there are two dozen possibilities there that you might enjoy across a large swath of possible fandoms.


• I have always enjoyed it when receiving art gifts for exchanges from laughingpineapple, and they also do words works, but of the art gifts I have received for exchanges, they have detailed work and they are worthy of being wallpapers of their own right. As the Wood Is Still, But It Is Certain I Am Loved Of All Ladies, Only You Excepted, and Hold Off The Dreams have been lovely.


• I was recently reminded that a work that takes advantage of metatextual elements is often rather fun to read. Bright Darkness by used_songs joins the cast of Torchwood and some pilgrims on the way to a religious shrine, for example. One of the ones I really enjoyed seeing the metatext work on was Guard Your Eggshell Heart, by AlexSeanchai because once you know what happens, you realize that everything to come to that conclusion was available right from the beginning.

So there are some recommendations for works created by people who are not me. I hope you find them enjoyable.

Challenge #6 asks us to imagine an ideal and publish it, in case we find someone who shares our ideals. Here's the challenge text:

In your own space, make a list — anything between one and ten things is a sweet spot, but don't feel constrained by that! - of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, or that you'd like someone to make for you.

There are some suggestions as to what might go on such a list.

Are you dying for podfic of your writing? Do you need icons for a character that doesn't get much fanart? Is there a story you want to read? Are you looking for new canons to get into? Would you like a collaborator for a project?

Maybe you want more people to talk about a certain fandom with, or you'd love to trade ficlets with somebody over email. Maybe you're new to a fandom and would like some recs to start reading, or communities to join. This is the time to ask!

( Why wishing is less easy for me )

So, understanding this is an effort, and I'm probably thinking "what would be doable?" rather than "what do I want?", here is a list of things that I would fannishly like.

1. Transformative works made of stories.

I'm pretty sure my blanket permissions are up to date, as well, but I would be thrilled if people wanted to make art of particular scenes or podfic out of stories. I realize that takes a lot more collective effort and time, and a very different skill set, than dashing off a few thousand words, but it would be very validating for someone to believe or enjoy a story that much that they wanted to transform it more.


2. More meta, please!

There's nothing wrong with fic. And especially nothing wrong with fic that tackles issues left on the table or reimagines canonical events with different characters or different identities. But I find myself wanting people to examine the issues and contexts of the media they consume, either sticking solely to their own universe or examining shows in the context of our world around them. People using their training or life experience to go "this is excellent!" or "oh, wow, this is terrible and we don't think the creators understood" or "oh, wow, this is terrible and we're pretty sure it's intentional." I'm pretty sure that's also a different skill set than writing fic, but a good non-fic essay is really nice to read and recommend to others. (They can be hosted at AO3, too.)


3. Comments, whether here or AO3 or somewhere else.

I really like the opportunity to talk and find out what people enjoy about things they read. I realize that comments take effort, even the ones that are produced with the help of comment templates, so I wouldn't want anyone to feel obligated in any way to have to leave comments. Kudos are great, and are nice ways of saying "I read and enjoyed this", as are the short comment forms that work here, things that are single words, emoji, or otherwise that don't need a lot of ramble with them, if you don't want to ramble.


4. Be for, rather than against.

That's not quite the right way of putting it, though. Because there's a lot of value in voicing and acting in opposition to toxic and terrible influences and people in the world. It seems like, as fans, we do our best work when we're striving toward something, rather than simply voicing our opposition. And being opposed to things can get caught up in things like ship wars and purity tests and having language meant to inspire people to action be used instead to declare that certain people are beyond the pale and to stop the conversation at that point. Sure, not everyone subscribes to the theory of the death of the author, but there's value in being able to say "Well, hell, J.K. Rowling's interpretation of canon contains racist interpretations of the indigenous people of the United States, excuses and encourages the abuse of students by other students and by faculty, and is gender-essentialist in the way it constructs dormitories (among other things, I suspect). So if and when I write Potter fic, I'm going to avoid using J.K.'s interpretation of canon and substitute a more trans-inclusive, less-racist, and less abusive one."

By generating transformative works, most of us, I think, don't want to recreate the canon world perfectly, but instead to create the canon that we wish was there. Which allows us to have dialogue with the canon, so that we take away the bad and add more good things to it. We might have some disagreements about how that gets done, but that conversation is made richer by each new participant. If everyone had simply said "J.K. Rowling is dismissed from the fannish collective consciousness because she supports TERFs," then the people for whom Harry Potter was/is formative are bereft of the ability to talk about that part of their existences. If Anne-of-Green-Dragons is sent off because sex on Pern is almost always bereft of the modern concept of consent, then there's no audience for the Grief-Giving that revisits those scenes from a more modern lens and grapples with the question of "knowing what I do now, do these things still have value?"

Eventually, everyone is going to end up cancelled for something, because values and morals change over time, and no author, not even the purest of cinnamon rolls that you are thinking of right now, is going to successfully have anticipated every change in values to the point where they are timelessly always perfectly moral. And so if you maintain being against everything that's vile and wrong, wherever it should appear, no matter how small, eventually the bubble of acceptable things shrinks to nil. Think about the Bechdel Test. If a person refuses to see any movie or TV show that doesn't pass the Bechdel, that's a large swath of shared culture they're not viewing, some of which they might have a lot of Opinions on or end up really falling in love with, if they were to watch it. Instead, if a person says they'll prioritize their viewing toward things that pass the Bechdel test, that gives them the flexibility to find things they love (and might want to write Bechdel-passing fic of) while still setting their trajectory such that they want to see more of the things that match their values. I think the if we set our minds to encouraging (or creating) the things that we want to see come into existence and stay in existence, we'll find the things we're opposed to or want to stop existing will fade out, or at least, we will have successfully curated our viewing experiences and our friends groups such that we are not supporting the things we don't want to see. I think it ultimately makes us happier and feel more like we're doing something to be enthusiastically for things instead of stridently against them, with the acknowledgement that being stridently for something often also means being intentionally opposed to something else. (Or several somethings else.)


5. Say nice things about me (and others) where I (we) can see them, please.

If you have organically nice things to say, that is. I don't want sycophants or, hell forbid, people to think that they have to praise me and feed my ego to interact with me in some way. The sort of things that, say, if you rec a work of mine, maybe drop a link somewhere so that I can see what you've said about it? Or if you see someone else rec a thing of mine, and it's a public post (or you have permission to share), let me know where it happened? Or if there's one of the many "reply to the comment with this user's name and say something good about them, or something they've said or did that you appreciated or wanted to emulate" threads, maybe participate in it. You don't usually have to be signed in to participate in those, so if you don't want to attach your username to it, that's fine.

I think a lot of transformative works and creative people do a lot of things that get posted, and we see the direct interactions through the kudos buttons and the comments left on the place where the work is posted, but unless we're really tuned into the fandom and where all of it hangs out, there's a good chance we'll miss someone making a recommendation in their own space about the things they enjoyed. I still don't actually know how Chat Noir's Convention Cosplay Crisis became my flagship (Plaggship?) work for just about all of my statistical categories, because I saw all of one outside-of-AO3-bookmarks place where it was mentioned at the time. But a thing does not generate 300+ kudos on one rec (unless the person that recced it has that kind of reach, who knows?) and a growing list of bookmarks that don't have commentary or the rec symbol attached. Unless it does. But, as you can see, the process is pretty opaque.

So it would be nice, in a "re-orient your worth judgment more toward reality instead of the self-deprecation that is your default" sort of way, to have the impacts of what I've done, said, supported, or just sat quietly with you through something foregrounded and made more explicit. Because brainweasels are looking for every weak spot they can find to swarm, and having a more accurate model of how the people around me or the people that interact with me perceive me is helpful at knowing whether what I'm feeling about the world outside is something I need to pay attention to and start putting effort in to change, or whether it's the brainweasels lobbing things over the walls in an attempt to break morale.

Five's a good number, and I think all of those are achievable.

None of these things take any priority over you taking care of you. So if you want to, but you're swamped right now, that's fine. If you looked at the list and didn't see anything that felt worthwhile, that's okay. Thanks for reading. There are other challenge participants who might have something that you can and do want to fulfill.

And update your transformative works statements. People seized by inspiration want to get started right then, rather than having to find a way of contacting you and then waiting for permission. Please.

Challenge #4 asks us to set goals for ourselves, whether fannish or not, in public or in private. Here's the extra text:

The beginning of a new year can feel like a magical time, full of promise and hope. It can be a great time to make a few goals for the year ahead. Your goals don't need to be big or span the whole year. They can be as big or as small as you want them to be. You don't even need to complete your goals in order to consider them successful. Every little step closer toward what you're trying to achieve can be viewed as a success.
Remember: progress not perfection ♥

[Challenge Text]

Maybe you're not really into making goals, maybe you choose a word or a theme for the year instead. Feel free to post about that. And if you've already made a post about your goals this year — feel free to link to that if you'd like!

Goals are, to put it mildly, difficult for a large part of the population. If your energy, time, and brainpower are already consumed with the lowest points of Maslow's pyramid, there isn't enough left over to contribute to the idea of thinking about the future. And a lot of things that would help with that area scarily dependent on things outside your control, including whether or not enough of the people who also live in your nation-state think you are a human that deserves to be there and to succeed. And whether those people work in the necessary industries and professions so that you can get through all of the things that are between you and the thing that will help.

Goals can also be tricky if they create obligations rather than endpoints and checkpoints. "I have to do this" is a very different setting than "I want to do this," and there are consequences involved if you end up turning a "want" into a "have to". It's like turning a hobby into a hustle or deciding to go pro. Getting stuff done on a deadline can be the worst thing ever to getting stuff done.

Which isn't to say that goals aren't useful. Some people thrive on deadline pressure, and others really like having a set schedule where time is devoted to various tasks toward an endpoint in sight. Our, sometimes, they like having something to go to that has a definite end and stop so they can evaluate and decide to keep going or to say "That was fun, but I don't intend on doing that ever again."

Goals don't work all that well for me. I tend to take failure personally (as in "The reason why this goal was not met had something to do with you as a person and your intrinsic worth") and approach their completion as something that needs intense effort until they are done, rather than as something that can be worked at a little at a time over time. Because I tend to miss slow improvement by focusing on what has not yet been done or mastered. Progress is, but it often takes an outside perspective for me to notice that progress has happened. And, to some degree, a lot of my progress towards becoming a better human is absence of things that would have happened before. If they reoccur, that's seen internally as total failure, rather than "it has been Z days since the last time this happened." I would never demand perfection of anyone other than myself, because I understand how much it messes someone up to internalize that perfection is the only way you don't suffer getting made fun of by your school peer group.

Habits would be a better thing to strive for, because habits are about making a regular time commitment to the thing. So hobbies and habits go well together, and there's (no/less) pressure to succeed to a high level for something that you've only committed time to. And, eventually, with time and practice, you do get good at something, even if you don't notice it. Habits are also schedulable in external memory, which makes them more doable and easier to remember.

So, habits, goals, or other such, for the upcoming year?

• Peace on Terra, good will towards fen. Which might be best rendered as "do no harm, but take no shit," as a sticker I have suggests.


• Write regularly. Which will likely involve a fair number of exchange fests, because I'm still a lot better at "yes, and" rather than developing a something completely out of whole cloth (they say, adamantly insisting you pay no attention to the part where participating in exchanges means having to provide optional details or other things that might help shape a story and give it direction, a skill that has been explicitly remarked upon as good by several exchange authors.)


• Continue to try to work on things being enjoyable because I am doing them, rather than because of their results. Which has the corollary of "know when to stop, and then stop, when something starts being more frustrating than enjoyable," which can be a problem for me. Especially when it's something that's just out of reach and seems entirely attainable of only the stars would align properly.


• And several more things that are more personal than I feel like sharing in this space and time, many of them related to figuring out how much I'm not actually doing fine, no matter how much I pretend I am, and trying to heal or provide useful workarounds for.

Good skill and fortune to all of your in your endeavors for the year, whether it is in achieving lofty goals or in sticking around long enough to spite the assholes (or politicians, but for the grand majority, I repeat myself) who thought this was the year they would finally get rid of you.

Challenge #2 asks us to talk about our fannish history. Here's the extra text to go along with it:

To know where we are, we must know where we’ve been. Fanlore keeps up with the history of fandom as a whole, but what is your personal fannish history? How did you get here and now in fandom? What detours, curves, or shortcuts did you take in your journey? What were your first influences? Your most important influences?

I have a feeling this is easier for the people who are more monofannish or who are new to fandom, but the closer you get to being a Fandom Ancient, the longer your history gets.

Where do I say "this is where it begins?" Is it the first story I wrote that I remember? That would put my beginning of fandom at Batman '66, because there's a notebook of short one-page stories I remember writing in the style thereof, even if they were crossovers with other entities entirely. (Adam West is my Batman, although Kevin Conroy will be a close second, but that's getting ahead of my planned structure.)

Is it, instead, the first thing that I remember thinking about self-inserts for? Because that can go a lot of different places. I know that Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers is too late for that idea, but I don't exactly know the right spot, because I don't remember if there was anything before the beginning of school that would qualify.

Is it the first thing I remember being invested in and wanting to catch updates as soon as they came out? Then it's Calvin and Hobbes, even if I didn't actually get the entire collection until much later on in life. But it would lead to a little bit of heartbreak at the end of the series. And also would get me enthralled with Dana Simpson's work, Ozy and Millie (and subsequent work, Phoebe and Her Unicorn), because the drawing and humor style very much was compatible with someone who loved Calvin and Hobbes.

Is it the first thing that I was charmed by when I watched it? Because that's Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Even if I would eventually end up liking The Muppet Show a lot more than Sesame Street, since that's pitched to a particular demographic that you eventually age out of. And no, I didn't really appreciate Fred Rogers for the genius he was while he was around.

If you ask my parents, I was already trying to emulate the walk of game characters when I was small, which made them want to have me play games less, so that's possibly a starting point, too, although I'll reject it out of hand because my parents didn't get that I had a perfectly good distinction between fantasy and reality, and I had probably read something somewhere that said swinging your arms more was good for circulation or something.

Is it the first point where I recognized that something interesting and special might be happening? That's Batman: The Animated Series (there's Kevin Conroy), which told a deliberately anachronistic Batman story in an art deco style, and I remember loving it all. There's support here from from Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, X-Men (the animated series), and many of the other groundbreakers of the animation renaissance that brought it out of the "kids' stuff" department where it never was (beceause Looney Tunes was never just slapstick, and Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Wacky Races, and other things that would be displayed on Cartoon Network weren't completely for children.) But without this boom, I doubt that the subsequent anime boom (and the Toonami block) would have become as large as it did, which would have prevented me from seeing tings like Quack Experimental Anime Excel Saga, getting introduced to portal fantasy classics of anime like Escaflowne and Fushigi Yugi, or getting to know the comics of 9th Elsewhere and The Tea Dragon Society. And all of that together gives me the tools to understand Miraculous Ladybug as a magical-girl anime and see the different approaches of its main characters. (And proclaim witout irony that Adrien Agreste fits the model of a Disney Princess.)

If I'm supposed to start at the oldest fandom, I could make a case that my fandom starts at the creation of the universe, given that I've enjoyed (although not written) stories about the deities and heroes of the earliest human writings and stories that we remember.

Any point that I say "well, it started here," from, there's a web of interconnected tings both to the past and the future. Each node is a start point, but it's also in conversation with every other node in the web, so everything connects to everything. I guess that's why it's probably best to impose an arbitrary scale on it, like time, just so I can have a point to begin with. And an arbitrary definition of what fandom means, so that I can find a boundary where I can say "before, I was not, after, I am."

That boundary is mostly memory. Even as a small child, I can remember voraciously working my way through the shelves on the library, reading just about anything that fell into the idea of fantasy or science fiction. Reading was an encouraged habit, although I don't have enough memory to know whether or not my parents attempted to guide or shape what I was reading and possibly steer me away from material that I wasn't cognitively ready to handle. Given that I adapted well to the OPAC where I could request materials from other branches of the library, I'm guessing it was probably much more likely that the librarian at the branch was involved in making sure I got enough to read of things that I would like. It's almost certain that the Suck Fairy has been very busy setting up slums across a wide swath of my childhood reading. Because I had to deal with the science fiction and fantasy canon as it was, in the days before the Web and before ubiquitous broadband access. I know full well that the author who I've taken my online person username from has Suck Fairy high-rises in it. At least I was smart enough to use something that was a transformative twist on the concept, a self-insert, a color not in the canonical spectrum. That's a starting point, as well, the space where I showed that I enjoyed the work, but not so much that I wanted my online self to be a perfect reflection.

The games I played and the comics I followed led me to some role-playing forums, where a few characters interacted for years, and where we built shared fanon and learned the art of getting along with each other (which sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't). That had stories posted and published, too, crossovers and original works and other such things. Because where I started writing is a lot earlier than when I started posting to AO3 and making it official, as it were, that what I was doing was fanworks. There's nearly two decades between "first story in the notebook" and "first story posted to AO3", with some lack-of-awareness that I was already in the thick of fandom and fannish activities.

Because the pathway I took around "fandom" and what it does isn't one like others, where people go looking for stories an find them and eventually start contributing their own. My pathway of fandom was mostly consumption of canon, and there were discussion forums that had some interesting games to play and a shared universe we built out of it, but that wasn't the thing that fandom-as-I-conceived was doing, because somewhere, and I can't blame Harry Potter for it, because I was doing these things long before Harry Potter came out and really raised the cultural knowledge and understanding of what shipping and slash was for my particular generational cohort, I think I had cemented on the idea of fandom as convention-going folk, and it wouldn't be until university or so that I went to my first convention. And graduate school before I really paid attention to the fic side of the equation and recognized it for what it was, since I was still sitting pretty firmly on the meta and canon discussion side of it. Thus, calling myself "fandom-adjacent" for a lot of my life, because I didn't go to conventions and I didn't write fic or think about shipping characters too much. Despite writing fic, shipping characters, and going to conventions. The brain is a wonderful thing, and it occasionally does not let go of a wrong thing of that wrong thing is important to how a person sees themselves. Best I can guess, I had internalized somewhere that fandom was squeeing girls and ficcing women, and since I identified as neither, I was not part of it. I would like to believe that I was at least sensible enough not to look down on them for it, but I grew up in a provincial place and didn't question a lot of it, so unless there's something in a journal entry proving otherwise, it is safer to assume I was worse then.

But I watched syndication of Star Trek, from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and weekly feeds of Babylon 5. I would watch Buffy from start to finish after I had already seen the DVDs of Firefly. Farscape was great. And Eureka and Warehouse 13 and Leverage and The Librarians. (And Castle, because Stana Katic and Molly Quinn made that show better than it had any right to be.) And Fringe (which influenced the enjoyment of Alice Isn't Dead). So lots of science fiction and fantasy programming. And Doctors Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen. And Person of Interest, which I found fascinating because of the Machine, who is nominally the viewpoint character for everything that happens in that show.

Watched almost none of the X-Files, though.

But also the animation boom! Which paved the way for Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend of Korra. And Accel World, which developed out of the same prompt that produced Sword Art Online (and possibly the entire .hack franchise). Where Trigun became hot and Gatchaman rebooted.

And also where the United States got to see the raw material of the various series of Power Ranges and realize just how much got changed in the transition and then slowly get introduced to some of the other shows that had provided raw footage for other United States localizations, and that one series that has had maybe one localization that was terrible and one that was pretty good.

And also all the books and the manga and the everything, and watching with a certain amount of delight as representation begins to matter, and then good representation begins to matter, too. And the podcasts like Welcome To Night Vale where representation just is, rather than being a selling point or something that's supposed to be special.

And watching in horror and cynicism as platform after platform courted fen to get big and then stabbed them in the back when the people who controlled the purse strings said "No, not that. We want fen and interaction and content, but we cannot have smut."

And a series called RWBY, that will always be near and dear to my heart, because it understands what resilience is, and what forms it takes, and how you survive in hostile environments without losing who you are.

And some commentfic on someone else's deconstructions and eventually getting up enough courage (and encouragement from others) to get an Archive invitation and stash some stuff there, and sign up for an exchange, and then from there, start writing a lot, as well as taking on the big meta project, and a hundred thousand conversations, in person and over forums, about topics both fannish and not, and journals and everywhere except, it seemed, where fandom was congregating and now, well, I'm here. It all contributed to what I became. To the point where I can look back and say "I've always been in fandom, it just took me a long time to figure it out."

Which is a lot of words, frankly, to figure out that one sentence. But all of those words, and the shows, and the books, and the podcasts, and the forums, and the comments, and the scribblings in a notebook, and the posting of fic, they all contributed to that sentence and give it depth and nuance and provide the story that sits behind that sentence. A complete fannish history would take as long as my memory goes back to account for, because there's so much there, in different places, and forms, and ways, and all of it is important, even if some of it thinks it's more important than the others.

And that single sentence elides the impostor syndrome that comes along with not recognizing were you are. Because I still worry about whether a recipient will enjoy their work. Or whether my fandom way is a right way or not. Or whether small numbers are an indication of what people think of the quality of the work. Or whether I'm always going to be at arms-length from the heart and core of fandom, not because they're deliberately trying to exclude me, but because people who look like me have hurt them and they can't afford to trust anyone who looks like me fully.

I still maintain, however, that no matter what anyone else says, I've got at least some miniscule fragmentary part of a Hugo Award, because the technical achievements of the Archive cannot be realized without the corpus contained within. So, to whatever degree my fics and interactions and comments and kudos and the like contributed to the Archive's win, that's my tiny part of the Hugo all to myself.

That's at least some part of my history, of what I can recall and remember right now. Ask me questions, and more will appear. Tell me about your history, and we might have places where we share. And maybe, when I'm talking about something else entirely, I'll end up telling you more, because it seems relevant at the time.