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Dec. 31st, 2013 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
issenlloqem_chibati asked: Fannish history? By which I refer to, for lack of better description, my adventure(s) in being a fan, closely associated with fandom... (wow, it got long)
Well, when I was a child, being a fan was not something that I did much of, unless you meant that I caught every single episode of Hong Kong dramas like Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre solely to watch Tony Leung being indecisive as Zhang Wuji. Then listening obsessively to Mandopop and a bit of Cantopop. Opportunities for being fannish were pretty limited in my family and in those days, when British dinosaurs ruled Hong Kong. I didn't listen to pop music (or any other genre) in English. American and English movies we sometimes caught on TV, but my family was and is intensely Chinese and didn't care much for such.
I was all at sea when confronted with American culture as a teen. Eg, my pre-university classmates were all crazy about Michael Jackson (or at least, knew about him) but my mum thought he was a pervert (I realised this later), so I'd not listened to a single MJ song before I was sixteen or seventeen. My parents are still in the "Think of the Children!" stage of parenthood despite the fact that their kids are now far older than the age they were when they had kids.
(I proffer this little bit of personal history to explain why, everything I did as a fan, I did as an adult, so I'd never really ended up doing the same things that younger fans did, like watch anime in AV clubs, create websites and post long rants and flames about the advisibility of certain pairings, plot devices, what is yaoi, OOC-ness of fic, etc. I lurked a lot, everywhere, being extremely cautious. Frankly, if I didn't love Hikago so much, I'd never have posted anything.)
Ok, anyway, other than HK dramas, the next fannish thing would have to be my actual introduction into fandom. This was after I was in university with access to the internet and I had heard or read somewhere that there were people who had made websites about the manga series I was reading (CLAMP, mainly). Ah, the days of Netscape and dial-up connections: I spent so much time watching that stupid animated comets (they were comets, right?) while waiting for
webpages to load. And then I discovered the English-speaking fandom and this little thing called fanfic...
Being a CLAMP fan, and especially a Tokyo Babylon fan, male/male pairings (aka yaoi) didn't surprise me very much - c'mon, every fan was thinking the same thing, right? - though the sex scenes did make me feel awkward at first. But you get over that. Though I couldn't quite believe at the ratings system: lemon, lime, citrusy? WTF? There was a persistent disbelief that fic writers were taking this description that seriously. But I was reading everything I came across, even the homophobic, sexist posts, the weirdly mpreg scenarios, the seme/uke thing. Sometimes I would be convinced for a while, but most of the time I simply had a "I can't believe I'm reading something so ridiculous" vibe going on.
Then came Gundam Wing. I buried an incredible amount of, well, incredulity because I loved (still do!) Heero. Duo, well... I accept that he's the one that Heero loves, at least in most of the fics that I did enjoy liking, and the series itself was suggestive like whoa to my easily persuaded eyes. So I was a 1x2 fan. At that time there was a signficiant segment that was devoted to Quatre/Trowa (or should that be Trowa/Quatre? ^_-). I joined mailing lists! To read fic! Speculation about Heero! Duo! I actually wrote my first fic there. I remember I was half cynical, half envious of those authors on the mailing lists because so many people were following and liking them (in Twitter and FB parlance), and I thought those immortal thoughts: how difficult can it be?
True: it's not difficult at all to write something that resembles a fannish spewing of how tortured and angsty post-war Heero was, with a thin scenario of crisis to bring in Duo. That doesn't mean it's actually a good fic. It was... not horrible, I would say. But as soon as I got a couple of people who admired the fic, I got even more cynical, and I stopped writing, and didn't start writing fanfic again until Hikago, which was much later. That particular fic is now lost to the bowels of cyberspace; just as well. I was an adult, but a young one and as a fan, I was not a very nice person - and it shows.
Then I got into western fandoms: the main ones were X-files, Due South, Star Trek, The Pros, if I remember right. A lot depended, of course, on how accessible the fic archives were, or what Alta Vista threw up. There were websites that were devoted to pairings and there were discussions about pairings. And I came across a lot of handwringing about slash and whether it was ok to write slash while hating gay people, which I thought was insane and inconsistent. I honed my "eh" response well in those days. I read a lot of good fics, a lot of bad fics and a lot more very mindblogging ones. Does anyone still remember the one where Fox Mulder was turned into a hermophrodite so that, I would imagine, the author could do mpreg without stretching incredulity too far, except she already had, especially when Mulder started to pop out babies at regular intervals in the future fic? (You mean there's more than one fic using this scenario?) Due South fics were very explicit, but of very high quality: there were fics I didn't like, but not for reasons of bad writing. Star Trek fandom was crazy and wonderful and there was so much of it... The Pros, through the Circuit Archive, also very good but was a bit frustrating for the characters' insistence in quite a few fics about how they weren't gay, they were in love. Okaaay. It was not convincing, but I was there for the fic, not for intense discussions about the acceptance of homosexuality.
I wasn't following anime fandoms except for GW and a bit of X/1999 and Tokyo Babylon. And there was fanfiction.net, of course. Exciting and sometimes alarming (they accepted explicit sex scenes at that time) - one learnt to weed out the terrible fics pretty quickly. Later there was Smallville fanfic archive.
Then Livejournal offered free accounts. That was a great opportunity to start friending my favourite authors and read Smallville fics.
And then I fell in love with Hikago. I'll elaborate on this in a later post. Suffice it to say that LJ is where I engaged with fandom actively, instead of simply reading fics and relationship manifestos (really!) and discussions and where the most I did was to end feedback to authors. I still do that if I come across a fic I really enjoy, I just log on to one of my fannish webmail and send an email, even if the fic is years old. Luckily journals like LJ and DW and fic archives (ff.net, AO3) make it really easy, so there's no reason not to! And then I hope other people liked the same fic I did, and I recc. LJ is where I got into the Harry Potter fandom, not to mention Prince of Tennis, Naruto, The Sentinel, and whatever was recced by crack_van that week.
There were times when fandom nearly became an addiction, especially I was stressed by real life and wanted an escape. But it's one of the best things I've ever done. The perspective it gives you is amazing: you love a show or a movie and have repeated viewings for the squee factor, but at the same time you can see the all the places where slippages can occur, where the so-called off-camera POVs are, all the ways a relationship can be re-interpreted, re-cast, and re-fantasied. You have AUs. Your favourite character is older, younger, male instead of female or vice versa; they meet the other characters earlier or later, they have angsty backstories. It's a richer experience and I wouldn't stop being a fan for anything.
Especially not with Sherlock season 3 coming up!
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Feel free to suggest a topic for other days! Comment either at DW or at LJ, either is fine.
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Date: 2013-12-31 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
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