Beyond Selidor

Today's January talking meme post is something of a follow on from yesterday's topic. schneefink asked me what 'fandom' means to me, given all the things I feel fannish about are tiny fandoms [the implication being, I think, that in such tiny fandoms I would miss out on the community aspect of fandom]?

It's a fair point. Essentially the only two times I was in a fannish space where other people were all sharing in their delight at the same piece of media was when I first went online, in the mid-2000s, and joined two forums, for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series respectively. They were fairly small fannish spaces — I'd say there were about thirty active members in the former, and forty or fifty in the latter — and although a handful of members wrote and read fic, they weren't really transformative works fandom in any recognisable sense — you got people writing meta, discussing plot points, speculating about the ending of Carmody's series (which was at that stage incomplete), and bemoaning the dreadful film adaptation of Pullman's book, but it was rare for people in either space to create fanworks for either canon. (That's not to say forum members were hostile to it — my friend bethankyou, who I met on the Pullman forum, was the one who introduced me to the concept of fanfic as it existed online at that stage, and we used to link each other to stuff we liked and discuss it together — just that in those particular forum spaces, the communities seemed to have very little interest in creating or engaging with fanworks for those particular canons. I still have pretty much zero interest in His Dark Materials fanfic, and flee to the hills at the sight of a dæmon AU.)

That is by way of preamble to explain that I do have some limited experience of being in a community of fans of the same specific canons, but it's not in the kind of fandom that most Dreamwidth people would think of as fandom community.

However, those two forums are probably the exception. 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).

So what, then, does 'fandom' mean to me? Probably one of two things. The first is the way I've always engaged with stories, since I was a very small child, before I knew to name it as fannishness: to read/watch a story with critical faculties engaged, pulling out themes, connecting it with other stories I'd read/watched in the past and enjoyed or felt extreme emotions about, to care about what happened in a story after the last page was turned or the credits rolled, to feel haunted by a story, as if it and its characters couldn't let me go, to find myself thinking about its characters as if they were my friends, or real people. To identify with characters, to find a story's themes resonant, to spend long hours wondering where a story was heading. As a child this generally resulted in me keeping up a kind of internal monologue in my head in which I was one of the characters who'd gripped me so, imagining them living my life (or translating the elements of my ordinary daily life into something that such a character might have realistically been experiencing), or writing what might have happened to them next. As an adult, this resulted in fic — but generally only after someone had requested such fic for an exchange or fest. I find it easier to write to prompts.

I think that because my childhood 'fannishness' was a solitary activity (at best, my younger sister and one of my cousins might have been roped into games, but generally it was just me, a book, and my own imagination), I never felt the lack of shared community regarding these fandoms of one. None else in my life had interest in, say, Presh from Galax Arena, Sara Crewe from A Little Princess, or Pagan Kidrouk from The Pagan Chronicles, or in the fact that I realised when I was about ten that there was a recognisable subgenre of Australian dystopian fiction aimed at teenagers, mainly written in the 80s and 90s, and that I could identify which contemporary Australian political and environmental problems it was trying to address — so when I was older, and went online, and found other fans, I never expected anyone else to be interested in these things either.

This brings me to the other way I define 'fandom': for me it doesn't mean a shared community creating and reacting to fanworks about a single work of media, but rather a shared way of reacting to, and engaging with stories. Because while my time online has not introduced me to a vast horde of people clamouring to write fic about the Pagan Chronicles, or who write passionate walls of text about how Sophia McDougall's character Noviana Una is someone with whom we identify deeply or why Presh (and Allyman) deserved better than the ending Gillian Rubinstein wrote for them, it did introduce me to people who reacted in this way to other stories, and other characters. Fandom to me is an attitude: that stories matter, that it is worthwhile and good to have strong emotional reactions to fictional characters and the stories they inhabit, and that the creations sparked by those emotional reactions: fanworks, discussion, comments, and the sharing of said creations with others, are a way of creating and sustaining friendships. While I almost never share fannish interests with the people I know here on Dreamwidth, we do share this underlying attitude, and that's always been enough to create a sense of community, and make friends, for me.