[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

[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

[ljwrites]

I feel you, after the 50th favorite character list and 500 different shipping combinations I start wondering if fandom is the place for me, too. It does become a matter of finding like-minded individuals to be fannish with in a way that you want to be, which is harder because, as you pointed out, they're not nearly as organized and visible (which is probably part of the reason why some of us get so invested in getting friends into our shows/books). Good meta and interesting fanfics are still out there, and are in some ways more abundant than ever, but searching them out is often a matter of luck and chance in my experience.