Fannish Drift

[jadesfire]

With Dreamwidth rapidly hurtling towards reality, I've been doing a lot of mulling (read: staring out of the window chewing a pencil) about the way I thought I'd use my LJ and the way I actually do.

Since that bit's of no interest to anyone but me, I've also been thinking about Fannish Drift as a phenomomonemon*. I came to LJ for House-fic, stayed for Torchwood/Doctor Who/Jack, got hooked, lined and sinkered by SGA and am now watching my flist diversify into Merlin, Leverage, Psych, Due South and all kinds of other shows. Fortunately, my flist is based not only on shared fandom interests, but actually getting on with people - if you've friended me and I haven't friended you back, it's not because I don't like you or find your journal offensive or not worth looking or anything, it's because I don't feel I know you yet. Well, at the moment it's more likely to be because I have enough flist-neglect-guilt as it is and can't take any more, but not knowing people is the other reason.

But it's at times like these that I'm relieved my flist is as much personal as it is fannish, because else I'd be left sort of standing in the corner, shuffling my feet and watching everyone else wander off. I've been trying to throw myself into Criminal Minds¹, and am partially succeeding, but it's a heavily slash-based fandom and I'm still a gen-ficcer at heart. Not that people are friendly or hostile or anything like that about gen. They're just not interested, which again, is fine, but leaves me without people to engage with fully in the fandom. I'm still trying to seek out the gen-coterie that I'm sure is out there somewhere², but that's going to take a while.

I'm going to have a look at Merlin at some point, but again, the fandom seems to be all-slash, all the time. I'm also toying with Numb3rs (2 seasons down, 2.5 to go), and Supernatural (6 episodes in - no detailed spoilers, please!), but I'm not used to being multi-fannish. That's probably why the writing's dried up; it's hard to focus on one show when you're watching 3 others. In a slight breaking of the meme rules, I can tell you that five of them are SGA, two are Criminal Minds, one is Torchwood and one is a CM/Numb3rs crossover. Juggling these, plus my own ficverse is just not possibly for my distracted little brain.

There may have been a point to this post at the beginning, but I think where I've ended up is actually where I started: gratitude that my flist sticks around despite fannish divergence. I'm going to add to that generalised frustration that I can't seem to focus on one thing at the moment, but maybe that's what I need right now. When things in Torchwood started getting drama-prone, I retreated to my flist, and I did the same in SGA. Criminal Minds seems too sensible for that, but I'm not ruling it out. But at the end of the day, this is where I come home to, and I love having a space where my whole fandom is at my disposal with one click

Judging by this report, I'm not the only one to view LJ this way. If you haven't seen it already, it makes fascinating reading, even if you do want to keep going "well, duh". I have to keep reminding myself that it's for people who don't necessarily use LJ!

¹On the off-chance that a bau_inbox mod clicked the cut, no linky thanks :)

²Hell, I can write Torchwood gen. I'm sure I can find it in Criminal Minds.

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*Like Nanny Ogg, I know how to begin spelling things, I just have trouble knowing where to stop

Comments

[aeshna_uk]

I seem to have a remarkably sturdy fannish anchor! I'm not a heavy TV/film viewer though there are a good number of shows that I enjoy watching. There are, however, damned few that I would call myself fannish over. In terms of "places where I feel the urge to be in any way creative", I think I've only ever had three in my life!

I have one lit fandom (shared universe, all-OC) that I've been in for over 16 years now and that has gone through a lot of changes in that time with things moving out of paper publications and onto the web. It's one where - let's be honest - the canon presents a nice concept and a universe as complex or simple as you want it to be, but the original author... well, let's just say that I'm one of the ones who got in on the basis of "jeez, I can do better than that!". ;) When said fandom first cropped up back in the mid-70s it was "semi-official" in that the copyright holder gave their blessing subject to a few basic rules, one of which was that folks didn't use the canon characters. I think that has actually contributed to its longevity, and if you can navigate your way through the numerous Mary-Sues (canonical and otherwise!), there's some interesting stuff out there.

To this day, I know folks who don't believe I'm in Pern fandom as it seems far too fluffy for my tastes. ;) But the world isn't all that bad if you deconstruct and look at the bits that the author hinted at and then ignored. Of course, it may help that I've not touched any new canon in the entirety of those 16 years as the cash cow influence got seriously bad after the 80s.... ;)

My first real media fandom was Star Wars (new trilogy!) and fell into pretty much the same category as above - lovely-looking universe that I knew from childhood, huge potential, but the story presented barely scratched the surface, and badly at that. That seems to be my default - I need to have a universe that I can explore beyond what is presented on the page/screen, be it with full canon characters, minor characters, or OCs; I'm crap at AUs as for me the characters are an integral part of that universe. I was in SW for a few years, but my interest faded somewhat over time and somehow vanished entirely after the last film.

TW (and I am much more TW than DW here) is interesting as it's the first fandom I've had where I've latched onto a character as well as the universe... although the two are rather intimately tied, these days! But Jack could pretty much have crawled out of my brain and the whole TW concept hits all of my buttons - British-based, rarely any easy answers, high mortality, complex morality, unafraid of killing characters off or of just having them act in a very human way. When the show was first announced, I was excited. Then we learned that the Institute was founded in 1879 and I was all up for writing all-OC Victorian steampunk adventures. ;) Then they threw in Jack's immortality and long history with the Institute....

So, yeah, I'm happy here. ;) No urge to drift, though I may end up lonely here in my little mostly-gen TW ghetto as everyone else buggers off to pastures new! :D

(my, that ended up longer than I expected!)

[caersmane.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with you about the cash cow influence with Pern. I've just had my daughter read the Harper Hall trilogy to start her off on the series, and she just loves it, as much as I did when I first read it. I'd love to read some good fic of the Pern world, if you have any recs.

[aeshna_uk]

Pern is an odd one - the early books, through to Moreta, were great fun and gave the sense of this entire world and complex society existing in the background of the stories. It had a foot in SF and a foot in Fantasy, but then the author tried to make it explicitly SF... and the whole thing fell apart at the seams. But it was still making money, so on it went, and now her son has taken over and is, by all accounts, even worse....

The fandom these days is mostly odd little RPG sites but there are still some story sites out there. I have to give a plug for the group I'm most involved in, Kadanzer Weyr - it's an old-style 'zine group that has gone fully online and takes its cues from the earlier novels. There are a lot of the stories up on the public pages of the site and more in the members section - have a look around and see if it's the sort of thing you might be interested in. :)

I've not read it myself yet, but you might also want to have a look at Dragonchoice which is a fan-written novel. I don't know what the rating there is, though.

[aeron-lanart.livejournal.com]

I've never been in Pern Fandom, but I loved the earlier books. I do actually posses a fair bit of the later stuff too (though not the mega recent stuff by TMc) but my pride and joy book wise has to be my Atlas of Pern...

Oh and Myfanwy is the closest I've got to a Dragon icon...

[aeshna_uk]

The Atlas is a lovely book, far superior to the unholy mess that was the Dragonlovers' Guide that appeared some years later. Of course, you need to multiply all the distances given on the maps by about 7 in order to get a world large enough to hold an atmosphere, but that's a minor quibble in Pern terms. ;)

I gave up on the books 4 chapters into AtWoP when I realised that while the names were familiar, they weren't attached to any characters I actually recognised. That and them going from mediaeval technology to genetic engineering in a fortnight.... *sigh*

[aeshna_uk]

Oh, and for a pro rec, you might like to check out Naomi Novik's Temeraire books, which are basically Anne McCaffrey meets Patrick O'Brian and are great fun! :)

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah - I don't watch torchwood_three any more, but if sga_newsletter is anything to go by, Gen-ficcers are becoming an endangered species!

I was definitely distracted by the shiny of SGA, which seemed to offer what Torchwood did - interesting characters with unexplored potential - but in space, and with Latin, which pushed my buttons. Hard. But I think I'm more or less done with them - I've got some unfinished business, but then? I'm happy to leave the fandom to the McKay/Sheppard folks.

I don't think I'll ever be finished with Jack. My thing is always to latch onto characters, rather than universes - I've read the Pern books, but none of the characters 'pinged' me enough for fanfic. Since my plotting sucks, and story ideas come slowly and painfully, I have to have that character connection to make it worth the effort. No one in Criminal Minds, Numb3rs or SPN makes my writing-brain tingle the way Jack does, and I think I'll always end up coming back. Not to Torchwood or Doctor Who, but to Jack specifically.

We all have our buttons! :D

[aeshna_uk]

I'm still on torchwood_three - as I don't read torch_wood much, it's my fandom-at-a-glance guide! - but it's certainly true that there are precious few gen writers around. But then, that always seems to be the way in fandom....

I've never seen so much as an episode of SGA - I was pretty much put off the whole SG thing by a friend who tried to pass on her great love of SG1 by force-marching me through the highlights of 6 seasons while I was crashing on her couch for a couple of weeks! As aversion therapy goes, it's pretty effective! But while there are other shows that I like, none have given me the urge to join in - I'm happy to see the stories unfold each week, but that's all. :)

Ah, Jack. :D Jack was the point at which I really sat up and took notice of DW s1 - until then I'd been enjoying it but Jack was a character who could have been written to my own personal specifications (seriously - I've had a number of promiscuously bi OMCs over on the Pern side and they're always hugely popular). I'd probably have ended up writing him solo anyway, but then TW was announced before I'd really got anywhere and I loved the concept. He's just so incredibly flexible (sorry!) as a character - one of the good guys but with a fairly heavy-duty dark side, compassionate yet ruthless, caught in a continuum of teams of which the current group are only the most recent. There's an awful lot to get your teeth into there! :D