[PUBLIC POST] Let's talk fandom!

[ljwrites]

All right, the weekly open posts are back! This week let's talk about our fandom obsessions, or just works that we really like. Here are some possible discussion launchers, but feel free to ignore some or all of them and add your own:

- What are some of your favorite works?
- Were you or are you involved in fandom?
- How did your favorite works or fandoms influence your writing?

Go to town, folks!

Comments

[dhampyresa]

Favourite works: mine or other people's? Not that either is easy to answer.

I am involved in fandom and have been for years. I currently have a most terrible case of the Star Wars.

That is an excellent question. I'm not sure. I do know that if I not recently read a 300k+ Star Wars AU/time-travel fic, I would most likely not be planning a Star Wars AU right now.

[inkdust]

Now actually relevant to me!!

Well, I've always read some fic now and then, but I've never been involved in a fandom until now. AO3 account is rather new and shiny.

Things are still all Agent Carter all the time over here, and I don't expect to write for another fandom anytime in the near future, if at all - though of course this one came out of nowhere. But it's been an awesome experience to go beyond individual stories and identify actual writers whose work I admire (Paeonia, Eienvine, LadyWillow, *wistful sigh*). I don't think it's something I could have done, or done as well, earlier in my writing history. I can recognize specific skills and strengths now.

So it's been a little backwards for me - my writing initially influenced my foray into fandom, but I'm excited for the reverse as I continue on. The experience of feedback has been incredibly encouraging, and the practice finishing things and releasing them into the wild (five things now - three chapters and two shorts) is excellent. And I appreciate that I haven't entered this world until now. I know many people grew up as writers through fandom and benefited from that, but for me it's...testing grounds. It's exciting.

[ljwrites]

The first time I ever showed strangers my fictional writing was when I started posting Harry Potter fanfic as a college student, and for a long time my fictional writing was almost exclusively fanfic. My most recent fandom obsession was Avatar: The Last Airbender, for which I wrote a bunch of fanfics including a giant 160K fic. The HP fic starred Snape while the ATLA fic was about Prince Zuko, so being obsessed with morally ambiguous antiheroes and redemption arcs seems to be A Thing for me. (Other characters I've focused on: Seifer from Final Fantasy VIII, Sesshomaru from Inuyasha, Denahi from Brother Bear. Yup, all villains at some point or morally grey in some way.)

For a long time I was content with almost exclusively writing fanfic, despite being asked by some friends and readers why I didn't write original fiction. (I did, a little, but they were drawerfics for my own consumption. One of these manuscripts is 150 pages long.) It was fanfic that ultimately inspired me to start working on original fiction, though. After I wrote the giant ATLA fic I started chafing against the restrictions of canon and wanted to try something different. Joke's on me, though, because I started working on historical fiction which is basically fanfic with a bigger and more complicated canon.

Another area of fiction that I worked on for a long time was roleplaying fic, where I would write novelizations of roleplaying sessions or character backstories. Another writer told me that I was the most communally-minded writer she knew, and I think that's a common thread through all my fiction-writing efforts: From fanfic to roleplaying fic to historical fiction, I always want to write something with relevance to specific communities whether it's my roleplaying group, a fandom, or a country. I even co-created this community of writers! :P

[jae]

Fandom has been a hard thing for me lately. I still feel fannish, but the last few years have been a time of realizing just how little organized fandom and I actually gel. I feel like my organized fannish experience has mostly been characterized by investing energy into understanding the kinds of things that other people care about without fandom as a whole ever investing the same kind of energy into the things I care about (which, I mean, that's totally fair, if they're just not interested in those things? but it gets old!). And while I do know from experience that there are plenty of individual fans out there who get fannish in the same ways I do (usually on the edges of fandom, the "barely-fannish"), it's gotten much more difficult to find them since fandom as a whole has become less interested in having complex, multi-threaded conversations about fictional characters.

I think I will always get emotionally invested in fictional characters--other people's as well as my own--and I will always want to write and talk about them. But I'm not sure fandom-as-a-community is actually for me in the long run.

-J

[lilly_c]

I've been doing fandom since I was a kid and now at 32 there are times when I feel old especially with the ones I was invovled with growing up. Mainly Simpsons, Star Trek (TNG; DS9; Voy), X-Files and Stargate SG-1.

At the moment I'm involved with Agent Carter fandom although very quietly but still I'm around, thankfully it is quite supportive and inclusive even though I primarily write a seemingly rare pairing.

Favourite works of mine are always the same of If You Asked (Killer Instinct), Haunted (SG1), and Twice Unjust (Taggart). I don't read as much fic as I'd like because RL is a pesky wee so and so but my current favourites are Moments (Agent Carter), Finally (Agent Carter) and Give Up The Ghost (MCU/Agent Carter) and two of those are WIPs which I usually avoid reading because of being burned in the past with WIPs.

Most of my fandoms are sci-fi/cult/horror so the influence on my own writing from those is that the possibilities are endless and that anything from canon can be turned into something completely different and that is quite freeing.

[tblspoon]

I am and will be forever- a lurker. I am that silent reader who watches as the fandom explodes with works and then wanders off in chase of some new shiny fandom.

My favorite kind of fanfic to read are Crossovers. Generally, I find one fandom I know, get introduced to a completely new one, read all I can of it, determine the 'best' authors in the fandom, then get introduced to another new fandom based on the wonderful authors' other works and bookmarks. I find my experience with wikipedia and AO3 very similar in how I wander from topic to topic.