Snowflake Challenge Day 11

[jadesfire]

Day 11

Share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life.

So. This is an interesting one. Because the media that changed my life was Doctor Who. I grew up in a non-geeky household, but the last of the Seventh Doctor stories were airing when I was about 8, and I remember specifically seeing parts of Battlefield on the TV in our living room. But Mum must have decided it was too scary, or we were out at the wrong time, because I definitely didn’t see anything else. Still, they stayed with me, and when I was eleven, I discovered the novelisations. And I devoured them. Imagine seeing all your favourite Classic Doctor Who stories, but without any slightly iffy special effects to detract from them. I got all of that.

I bought the VHS of Third, Fourth and Fifth Doctor stories. I had the little metal TARDIS box that contained the Trial of a Time Lord VHS set. I bought book after book. My most vivid memory is sitting on the floor in a dark corner of the Waterstones in Lakeside, trying to decide which ones to buy, and trying to sneakily read a few before Mum came back for me.

Doctor Who made me a geek. It’s sort of that simple.

But there’s another part to this question, so I’m going to cheat and answer that too:

How’d y'all get drawn into fandom? Fall into a favorite book, or movie? Something about a character caught your eye and made you think… huh, I’d like to know MORE about them.



I didn’t really get into Fandom through Doctor Who. I came to online fandom later than most of my contemporaries - no Usenet or mailing lists for me - and so my first fannish experience was setting up my LJ in summer 2006. House Fandom was very friendly and welcoming, and my longest standing fannish friends come from that time. But the Fandom that changed me was SGA.

Looking back through my journal, I was running SGA and Torchwood pretty much alongside each other. And I think Jack Harkness will always be the character whose voice came most easily to me. But the Torchwood fandom was a difficult place to be for me, for all kinds of reasons. SGA...wasn’t. I learned to write in Torchwood fandom, but I learned to Fan in SGA.

Lots of my House friends were getting into it, and it must have been airing on a British terrestrial channel somewhere. And I lapped it up. Again, many of the people I met in SGA fandom are still around (*waves*), with friendships that lasted beyond the fandom going quiet. At its height, SGA felt like a almost insanely creative, energising world to be in, and I remember it with deep fondness. The characters were great, but canon had enough nooks, crannies and flaws that there was lots to get your teeth into. AUs abounded - seriously, even Merlin has nothing on SGA for AUs - and it was a crazy-supportive environment to be a Genficcer in.

The whole show really pushed my buttons, in all the best ways, and while I’m not sure about revisiting either as a viewer or as a writer, I’m eyeing up all kinds of things to podfic. They’re good memories, which is something I need at the moment, and it would be nice to put them back where they belong.

Comments

[wendelah1]

Not a cheat, not at all. Both of your gateway fandoms are pretty amazing, too.

[jadesfire]

They really are - I mean, both have very up and down canon, but the fans? Generally awesome :D

[tangeriner]

I love reading other people's fan stories! Thanks for sharing. My earliest geeky exposure was Dr. Who too -- except I barely knew what I was watching. It just happened to come on after a show I loved, and it terrified the daylights out of me, but I couldn't stop watching either.

SGA fandom sounds awesome. There's nothing more energising to me, as a fan, than being in a fandom at its height. So inspiring! So fun!

[jadesfire]

I think my Mum was a bit baffled to have a tiny geek on her hands, and didn't understand why I wanted to watch these things!

SGA fandom really felt like something special at the time, and I feel very lucky to have been part of it <3

[alessnox]

I have always adored Dr Who and I remember oooing and aaawing over how trials of the timelord used a motion control camera. Go you!

[jadesfire]

Heh, I think I was more preoccupied with how cool the TARDIS box looked on my shelf! Trials of a Time Lord isn't universally loved, but I'll always have a soft spot for how important it was to me as a fan :)

[sholio]

Oh wow, it sounds like we got into SGA at just about the same time! :D I got my LJ in late 2005, but I didn't really start using it until I got into SGA in early 2006 (around March, I think - why I still remember that, after all these years, beats the heck out of me). I had been in fandom for a number of years before that (I put up my first fic on ff.net in 2000) but I hadn't really done the social side of fandom before, or made friends that way (except for a handful of friends made via places like ff.net; that's where I know Xparrot from). But SGA, via LJ, was the first time I really dived into being social with other fandom people, and it also started an unbroken chain of fandom socializing continuing to the present day. I had definitely been around in Internet social spaces before that (I was on a number of comics and sci-fi message boards and mailing lists going all the way back to when I was in college and first got online in '95) but there wasn't a, hmmm, a continuity of social presence. I would spend a little while on one board or mailing list, and then wander off to somewhere else when it started to die down. But since I got on LJ, when I go to new sites like Tumblr, it's basically an extension of my existing social media presence rather than a whole new one, if that makes any sense ...

Anyway, I agree about SGA being a great place to get into genfic. It was also my first live-action Western media fandom (I was pretty much entirely in anime fandoms before then).

I think it's cool how many SGA people are still around and still in fandom. I'm also really delighted that we got to meet and hang out in person; I wish we lived close enough to do it more often than once every ten years. :D

[jadesfire]

Oh gosh, you know, I'd actually forgotten about ff.net. I put X-men fic up there...*checks*...at the end of 2004. Yeesh! But that wasn't really a fandom for me at that point.

I get the feeling that SGA ended up defining "how to fan" for a lot of us, which was probably greatly influenced by the number of 'old school' fans who got into it - the folks who'd been into TOS, and then dS, and sort of shepherded (took me three goes to spell that right!) us through everything. There's a nice sense of continuity about that, because we've sort of dispersed through other fandoms and taken our culture with us.

Ah, SGA Gen was so much my happy place. It was *such* an enormous fandom, that even the small corners were well populated :)

[akamine_chan]

I'm a pretty latecomer to fandom, too. March 2007 for me, though I had been on the internet during the Usenet days.

I started out in due South fandom, which, by the time I'd gotten there, most of the big names had moved onto SGA... :D

[jadesfire]

Bwah, yes, that was how it felt. All the BNFs definitely already knew each other, and they moved en masse, they brought a lot of folks with them. I never got much into due South - I watched the show, but not *fannishly*, although a close friend was v into it, and I read some good fic :)

[fannishliss]

Here in the US they showed Doctor Who on public television late on Saturday nights. So they would start a story and just keep showing half hour episodes until the story was done. It was exhausting but so fun!
I still remember my friend who discovered Doctor Who before I did trying to describe what a TARDIS was. Baffling!!!

[naye]

That's such a good gateway to fandom - and of course, Atlantis was all of our home for a while. My memories are probably rose-tinted, but I think the city itself sums it up: beautiful and light and airy and positively brimming with possibilities. Those who found it didn't really know what to do with it, but in the right hands, it can soar.

It really was the last fandom megalith, the perfect storm of pre-Tumblr, post-torrent, everyone can get together and watch this one thing and write about it on this one platform. And it helped that the cast were darling - no matter what the writers did (or didn't do), the acting and the friendships on set were like fandom catnip.

I kind of miss it.