Fandom Snowflake 2020 - Challenge #2

[scrubjayspeaks]

Challenge #2 In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

I suppose my fannish history looks a lot like that of other people in my age bracket--(mid-to-late) 80s brats--insofar as I first got meaningfully involved as a tween, there was a lot of anime influence, the college years were pretty dry, and adulthood brought a renewed and broadened interest. Oh, and being fannish and being queer ended up inextricably linked. This, as far as I can tell, is not an unusual trajectory.

I was present on a lot of the early internet platforms, but a) my timing usually brought me there just as that platform was fading, and b) I was almost always a lurker more than anything. So while yes, I was there, Gandalf, for things like egroups and webrings, the geocities era of websites, livejournal and ffn, it always seemed to be the last days before the fall of Rome. And I didn't have any significant interactions online. (With the exception of a furry-adjacent Yahoo group, the less said about which, the better.) I taught myself HTML to code a Yu Yu Hakusho fansite that no one, as far as I know, actually visited.

In hindsight, it occurs to me that I was...not completely hopeless, considering I really was out there in the goddamn Wild West, teaching myself coding and design and image editing just because it was fun.

I was lucky to have a brickspace group of friends who shared my fandom interests, so there was a lot of printing out stories we wrote and passing them around at school and such. Sailor Moon and Gundam Wing and Yu Yu Hakusho were more than fandoms; they were a kind of social structure to build my life around. We fit ourselves into our shared fandoms as a way of relating to each other. Because god knows, we were some awkward pups back then and needed all the help we could get.

Perhaps that's why, actually, the college years largely dried up my fandom connections. I lost contact with all but one of my high school friends. Fandom become something...preserved, for me. Trapped in amber. Read the same fic from a decade earlier. Live in nostalgia. There were only a handful of active authors I read during those years, and fandom very much felt like something Other People did and I merely observed.

Then I ended up in the Avengers fandom, circa 2012, and suddenly things were ALIVE again. I liked so much of what I was seeing, and I read voraciously. It was one of those rare bits of luck that life throws my way, to counteract my generally cursed status, because then my life fell apart in 2013. Fandom was the only thing keeping me alive for a year and a half.

And I got lucky again, because tumblr was the place to be at that moment, and it was a low-impact way of actually engaging. I had never had any fandom platform where interaction seemed within my capacity. (See above re: awkward pup.)

I know tumblr has some serious problems. I know it's fashionable to shit on it. Valid. But you know what? I never would have had the guts to leave comments or send messages or post fic again or collaborate on podfic, if not for that first baby step of liking a Clint/Coulson gifset someone else had reblogged. I wouldn't have the friends I have now.

So. Let's hear it for low-impact options and easy entry points.

While my reading has not dropped off quite as sharply as it did in college, I still think I'm in one of those lulls again. I haven't been writing in fandom for a few years now. Podtogether gets me one new AO3 entry each year, but that's been it. I read a couple people, mostly friends. Sometimes I worry that I'm broken, that my fannish impulse has gone fully and forever. But then I look back at the peaks and troughs of fandom across a couple decades for me, and I see that nothing is new in the world.

I'll come back eventually. I'll sync up again. It'll be at exactly the right time. It'll be in exactly the right format. That's how I'll know it's time again. And it'll be fun. And it'll be worth the wait.

Comments

[shipperslist]

Oh dear lord, I’d all but forgotten about Geocities...

[anna_bird]

i love this! And really identify with it, particularly the idea of easy entry points -- though I'm not a big tumblrer, I still have an account and occasionally peek in on it. That feeling of a new busy fandom, too <3

[scrubjayspeaks]

Those fandom histories I see sometimes invariably have some relic I had forgotten I lived through. Some days, I really miss the raw enthusiasm and bonkers aesthetic choices of millennium era websites.

[scrubjayspeaks]

Sometimes, there's a comfort in knowing I'm just one more user name in a sea of notifications on any given post. So as long as I'm behaving in a civil way, I'm probably not going to attract a lot of attention. I know that's a downside for anyone trying to get more eyes on their work. But sometimes, what I need to say to myself is just, I'm not hurting anyone and no one minds that I'm here.