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Snowflake Challenge Day 11
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:
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.
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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
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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 :)