dolorosa_12 | (Reply)

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Everything else I've felt fannish about — the lengthy list of books, many from my childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s, that I wheel out whenever people ask me to list my fandoms — has been very much a series of fandoms of one, or something that others engage with fannishly only for events like Yuletide. So fandom, in the sense of a shared community of people actively creating and engaging with fanworks over a consistent, unbroken period of time, is pretty alien to me, at least insofar as my main fandoms are concerned. I've happily read fanfic in big megafandoms like the MCU, Star Wars, Harry Potter, SPN and similar over the years, but I've never felt any interest in creating any myself, and I never interacted with other people in those fandoms (apart from people here on Dreamwidth who I met in other contexts).

This is very much my experience (though there are a few larger fandoms I've dabbled in other the years, and I think I'd count ATLA as a megafandom if I hadn't discovered it years after the fandom had mostly moved on). I will read works in megafandoms, but I don't have a drive to create them, and I'm much more interested in talking enthusiastically about books. Dreamwidth is pretty great for that! I have had less luck at transformative works conventions, where I always feel like the odd one out for not being megafannishly enthused.