All the internet Dolorosae
Jun. 9th, 2021 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I'm back for another three answers to the June fandom meme.
Day 4: What are the origins of your penname/username?
If you've known me for a long time, you may know this already, but it's been a while since I explained the backstory to my username(s).
I should preface this by saying that my preferred username, if I can get it, is Dolorosa (or dolorosa if the site in question doesn't do uppercase letters). However, although I managed to snare that name on AO3 and Tumblr (and smaller, niche sites that never took off as fannish platforms, where I basically signed up in order to get that username before anyone else could), in most places someone else had got there first and claimed the Dolorosa name. In my earlier years online, I dealt with this by sticking the number 12 at the end (as per Dreamwidth, Livejournal and Wordpress), as 12 was my favourite number. In later years (after using it in the His Dark Materials forum's IRC channel, where using real-life first names or nicknames was common), I tended to go for ronnidolorosa if 'Dolorosa' was taken (as per Twitter and Instagram). (This was basically a nod to the fact that on such platforms I was interacting with some people who know me as 'Ronni' — my real-life nickname — and some who know me as 'Dolorosa'.)
So, why 'Dolorosa'?
Back when I was in the early years of secondary school — I think I was thirteen or fourteen years old — my English class read Ruth Park's book Harp in the South, a classic Australian family saga of immigration, poverty, and the lives of women in early twentieth-century Sydney. One of the characters in the book is called Dolour. The name was so strange to me that I looked up its meaning, and when I saw that it meant pain or grief, I was immediately hooked. Although my online presence was extremely limited at that point, I think I signed up for various email services with that name, and I kept paper journals in those years where I started signing off as 'Dolour'. (The fact that thirteen-year-old Ronni saw a name that meant 'grief' and immediately went, yep, I want that probably tells you all you need to know about what a melodramatic teenager I was.)
Almost immediately, though, I was dissatisfied with 'Dolour' as a username. I didn't like that in my dialect of English it was pronounced the same way as 'dollar'. But I soon learnt that the Latin 'Dolorosa' was a satisfactory Latin alternative to the English 'Dolour'. It sounded much better, it had the same meaning, and it had the added bonus of enabling me to tag any post about my everyday life as the via dolorosa.
I've been using some iteration of Dolorosa as a username for close to twenty years at this point. And the origin is a book that my class read in secondary school.
Day 5: Compare and/or contrast your very first fandom obsession and your very latest fandom obsession.
I never really know how to answer this because it's so hard for me to define my 'first fandom' — does it mean the first fandom which drove me to seek out a community of fellow fans (in which case it's His Dark Materials), does it mean the first fandom for which I created fanworks (in which case it's the Pagan Chronicles), or does it mean the first thing about which I felt intense fannish feelings? I tend to go with the latter, meaning my 'first fandom obsession' was Gillian Rubinstein's book Galax Arena — a work about which I still feel deeply fannish, and for which I produced fanworks as recently as last year (to put this into context, I first read the book in 1994).
Again, 'current fandom obsession' is difficult to define, because the way I do fandom means that once I'm fannish about something, I'm fannish about it for life — so all those important books of my childhood are still right there inspiring fannish feelings. Anything new that I fall in love with just gets added to the pile, rather than displacing something that was there before.
In terms of the most recent thing to inspire fannish feelings (I don't want to be specific here because it's so left field a thing for me to be fannish about), I suppose it has one single commonality with Galax Arena (or at least the element of Galax Arena about which I have always been fannish: the relationship between Presh and Allyman). Both are about people swept up by awful — evil, exploitative — things much bigger than themselves, things that turn them into cogs in a horrifying machine. And both are about the corrosive poison of violence, and how this violence keeps spiralling outwards, drawing the characters into worse and worse violence, destroying themselves and everyone around them. It's weird, because I'm not into gore or graphic depictions of violence in any way, but I find myself drawn to canons in which the connection between fear and violence is a central element: characters are afraid, they hate being afraid, and they try to create a situation in which they will never feel fear again — through an endlessly escalating cycle of violence. Think Peaky Blinders.
Day 6: What's a fandom that you wish had a bigger following?
I say this every time I'm asked this question, but Catherine Jinks's Pagan Chronicles. It's not that I'm expecting a children's book series published in the 1990s (with the last installment in the early 2000s) to generate a sprawling megafandom that produces new fanworks every day — but I'm always baffled that it doesn't generate more interest around Yuletide, or during other small fanworks exchanges. This is because the series has all the things that I normally think of as fandom catnip:
Found families
Endless whump and hurt/comfort
Multiple potential slash pairings (there's one for people who like 'us against the world' loyalty-type ships, and one for people who like snarky bantering antagonists)
Lots of big gaps in the chronology for potential missing moments
Plus historical religious controversies and heresies, Saladin being awesome and Crusaders being incompetent idiots.
And yet, the fandom remains:
Me bringing it up on Dreamwidth at the drop of a hat
Old Tumblr posts from me back when I had a Tumblr
An LJ comm that was dead when I joined it, and very inactive before that
Four fics on AO3 written by me
One fic on AO3 written for me (thanks, laurenthemself!)
One fic from 2008
One fic abandoned after two chapters
I generally don't expect my book fandoms to be massively popular, but this one truly baffles me. I don't know if it's too risky to get into a fandom that would require buying old books sight unseen, or that I'm not selling it well (or that the people who might like it aren't people I know so they're not seeing me shout about it repeatedly on Dreamwidth), or that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that those who are into fandom for the engagement, kudos and comments aren't going to make the effort to get into a fandom that by definition won't bring them a whole lot of such things. As I have said in other posts, though, I'm used to fandom for me being a very solitary affair, so my reaction to this state of affairs is bafflement rather than frustration.
Day 7: What's the longest time you've been in a fandom. Not necessarily your oldest fandom, but a fandom that you started and still continue to read/write/create content for in some way.
Day 8: Crack!fic - We all know it. What's your opinion of it, and if you want, show us an example.
Day 9: Drop the cast of a fandom you follow into a reality tv show - who/what/why?
Day 10: Drop your OTP or small ensemble from the fandom they're in into another fandom - how do they do?
Day 11: What would make you leave a fandom, or prevent you from getting into it in the first place?
Day 12: Who is someone that you share the most fandoms with?
Day 13: Squicks - What are some things that squick you in fandom - not necessarily "icky", though it can be. From anything involving blood, to bad grammar.
Day 14: What fandom broke your heart?
Day 15: What fandom pairing took you over like Venom took over Eddie?
Day 16: Do you have a fandom that you follow - either regularly or casually - with little to no knowledge of canon?
Day 17: Do you prefer art, fic, or vids? Why? Bonus: If someone was to give you a fandom gift, what format would it be?
Day 18: Recall a time when two of your fandoms collided, at least in some way. For example, a song that you fell in love with from one fandom showed up in a second fandom.
Day 19: What is something that you associate with a character in fandom, but aren't sure if it's canon or fandom?
Day 20: A random character shows up at your doorstep at dinnertime saying a friend sent them. Why did your friend send that person, how does it go, and what do you talk about?
Day 4: What are the origins of your penname/username?
If you've known me for a long time, you may know this already, but it's been a while since I explained the backstory to my username(s).
I should preface this by saying that my preferred username, if I can get it, is Dolorosa (or dolorosa if the site in question doesn't do uppercase letters). However, although I managed to snare that name on AO3 and Tumblr (and smaller, niche sites that never took off as fannish platforms, where I basically signed up in order to get that username before anyone else could), in most places someone else had got there first and claimed the Dolorosa name. In my earlier years online, I dealt with this by sticking the number 12 at the end (as per Dreamwidth, Livejournal and Wordpress), as 12 was my favourite number. In later years (after using it in the His Dark Materials forum's IRC channel, where using real-life first names or nicknames was common), I tended to go for ronnidolorosa if 'Dolorosa' was taken (as per Twitter and Instagram). (This was basically a nod to the fact that on such platforms I was interacting with some people who know me as 'Ronni' — my real-life nickname — and some who know me as 'Dolorosa'.)
So, why 'Dolorosa'?
Back when I was in the early years of secondary school — I think I was thirteen or fourteen years old — my English class read Ruth Park's book Harp in the South, a classic Australian family saga of immigration, poverty, and the lives of women in early twentieth-century Sydney. One of the characters in the book is called Dolour. The name was so strange to me that I looked up its meaning, and when I saw that it meant pain or grief, I was immediately hooked. Although my online presence was extremely limited at that point, I think I signed up for various email services with that name, and I kept paper journals in those years where I started signing off as 'Dolour'. (The fact that thirteen-year-old Ronni saw a name that meant 'grief' and immediately went, yep, I want that probably tells you all you need to know about what a melodramatic teenager I was.)
Almost immediately, though, I was dissatisfied with 'Dolour' as a username. I didn't like that in my dialect of English it was pronounced the same way as 'dollar'. But I soon learnt that the Latin 'Dolorosa' was a satisfactory Latin alternative to the English 'Dolour'. It sounded much better, it had the same meaning, and it had the added bonus of enabling me to tag any post about my everyday life as the via dolorosa.
I've been using some iteration of Dolorosa as a username for close to twenty years at this point. And the origin is a book that my class read in secondary school.
Day 5: Compare and/or contrast your very first fandom obsession and your very latest fandom obsession.
I never really know how to answer this because it's so hard for me to define my 'first fandom' — does it mean the first fandom which drove me to seek out a community of fellow fans (in which case it's His Dark Materials), does it mean the first fandom for which I created fanworks (in which case it's the Pagan Chronicles), or does it mean the first thing about which I felt intense fannish feelings? I tend to go with the latter, meaning my 'first fandom obsession' was Gillian Rubinstein's book Galax Arena — a work about which I still feel deeply fannish, and for which I produced fanworks as recently as last year (to put this into context, I first read the book in 1994).
Again, 'current fandom obsession' is difficult to define, because the way I do fandom means that once I'm fannish about something, I'm fannish about it for life — so all those important books of my childhood are still right there inspiring fannish feelings. Anything new that I fall in love with just gets added to the pile, rather than displacing something that was there before.
In terms of the most recent thing to inspire fannish feelings (I don't want to be specific here because it's so left field a thing for me to be fannish about), I suppose it has one single commonality with Galax Arena (or at least the element of Galax Arena about which I have always been fannish: the relationship between Presh and Allyman). Both are about people swept up by awful — evil, exploitative — things much bigger than themselves, things that turn them into cogs in a horrifying machine. And both are about the corrosive poison of violence, and how this violence keeps spiralling outwards, drawing the characters into worse and worse violence, destroying themselves and everyone around them. It's weird, because I'm not into gore or graphic depictions of violence in any way, but I find myself drawn to canons in which the connection between fear and violence is a central element: characters are afraid, they hate being afraid, and they try to create a situation in which they will never feel fear again — through an endlessly escalating cycle of violence. Think Peaky Blinders.
Day 6: What's a fandom that you wish had a bigger following?
I say this every time I'm asked this question, but Catherine Jinks's Pagan Chronicles. It's not that I'm expecting a children's book series published in the 1990s (with the last installment in the early 2000s) to generate a sprawling megafandom that produces new fanworks every day — but I'm always baffled that it doesn't generate more interest around Yuletide, or during other small fanworks exchanges. This is because the series has all the things that I normally think of as fandom catnip:
Plus historical religious controversies and heresies, Saladin being awesome and Crusaders being incompetent idiots.
And yet, the fandom remains:
laurenthemself!)I generally don't expect my book fandoms to be massively popular, but this one truly baffles me. I don't know if it's too risky to get into a fandom that would require buying old books sight unseen, or that I'm not selling it well (or that the people who might like it aren't people I know so they're not seeing me shout about it repeatedly on Dreamwidth), or that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that those who are into fandom for the engagement, kudos and comments aren't going to make the effort to get into a fandom that by definition won't bring them a whole lot of such things. As I have said in other posts, though, I'm used to fandom for me being a very solitary affair, so my reaction to this state of affairs is bafflement rather than frustration.
Day 7: What's the longest time you've been in a fandom. Not necessarily your oldest fandom, but a fandom that you started and still continue to read/write/create content for in some way.
Day 8: Crack!fic - We all know it. What's your opinion of it, and if you want, show us an example.
Day 9: Drop the cast of a fandom you follow into a reality tv show - who/what/why?
Day 10: Drop your OTP or small ensemble from the fandom they're in into another fandom - how do they do?
Day 11: What would make you leave a fandom, or prevent you from getting into it in the first place?
Day 12: Who is someone that you share the most fandoms with?
Day 13: Squicks - What are some things that squick you in fandom - not necessarily "icky", though it can be. From anything involving blood, to bad grammar.
Day 14: What fandom broke your heart?
Day 15: What fandom pairing took you over like Venom took over Eddie?
Day 16: Do you have a fandom that you follow - either regularly or casually - with little to no knowledge of canon?
Day 17: Do you prefer art, fic, or vids? Why? Bonus: If someone was to give you a fandom gift, what format would it be?
Day 18: Recall a time when two of your fandoms collided, at least in some way. For example, a song that you fell in love with from one fandom showed up in a second fandom.
Day 19: What is something that you associate with a character in fandom, but aren't sure if it's canon or fandom?
Day 20: A random character shows up at your doorstep at dinnertime saying a friend sent them. Why did your friend send that person, how does it go, and what do you talk about?
no subject
Date: 2021-06-09 11:11 am (UTC)Me too. It fascinates me how some people skip fandoms really quickly, actually. To me, it IS a long-lasting obsession. I went by my oldest internet fandoms, but I agree with your consensus overall. It's a bit more complex.
I wonder too if people just assume their books don't have fandoms? Or they're harder to find? I know I'll sometimes desperately scour the internet for discussion about books I loved, and there will be nothing. Just a thought.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-11 02:45 pm (UTC)I would assume that this is the case. And generally with books (with some rare exceptions) if you want there to be a fandom, you're going to have to be the one to do the work to generate that critical mass of visible enthusiasm and community so that others can find it and join in. I'm not sure I'm well suited to the task (and certainly my years of being alone in book fandoms would suggest that this is the case).
no subject
Date: 2021-06-09 03:51 pm (UTC)Do you think this is just the way you are as a person or is it by virtue of the kind of fandoms you're attracted to?
Because I am very intensely into big fandoms for a matter of years and then slowly outgrow them. I always retain intense affection for the original canons, but I no longer feel fannishly about them. So the Star Wars EU, Buffy, and Infinite were my big fandoms at other points in my life. I participated in them hardcore for 5-7 years with the first two and then about 3 years with Infinite. Then I slowly moved on. It was like...I got enough of what I wanted from the fandom and I no longer needed it. After reading hundreds of fics, having hundreds of meta conversations, etc., my fannishness wore itself out.
Whereas with fandoms that were never big/active, I can maintain fannish feelings for much longer. Like, they could be resurrected at a moment's notice if I was given any kind of nudge in the form of someone else being fannishly interested in them. Since I know that you tend to feel fannishly about small/not-very-active fandoms, do you think that's the case for you? Or in a world in which Pagan Chronicles has thousands of fics to choose from and you spent a decade immersed in the fandom, would your fannishness still burn as hot?
no subject
Date: 2021-06-11 02:55 pm (UTC)It's a mystery to me where fannish feelings come from — I can't control where the lightning will strike. But I know that I have a sweet spot in terms of the speed at which fannish content moves, and the volume which exists — and it's way below the average fast-moving, popular megafandom. I would be exhausted trying to keep up with that, and I would struggle to participate in any community that had grown up around it. So it's as if I switch off or hold back fannish feelings if they're threatening to emerge in relation to a huge fandom, because I know I'm going to feel as if I'm drowning. Book fandoms are safer — I'm not going to get overwhelmed, and I can dip in and out of them without feeling like the bandwagon is going to pass me by.
Your mention of Buffy is an interesting one. I would consider myself a 'fan' of the series — I've watched it so many times I can quote it verbatim, I had strong opinions about various ships, episodes, characterisation choices and whole seasons' arcs, I was in a Buffyverse student club back when I was an undergrad, I won a Buffy trivia contest when I was at uni, and I was always happy to talk about Buffy when I discovered someone I knew in person was a fan. But I never had any desire to participate in the online fandom, because the sheer volume of it daunted me. I think if I had been in the Buffy fandom (or something of a similar size), I would have talked myself out eventually. Certainly this happened in relation to His Dark Materials — my friends and I were on the fan forum so long that we talked ourselves out of HDM-related topics, but our friendship remained, and we just moved on to talking about other things.
It's hard to know if this would happen with my book fandoms, because a world in which hundred of people were as involved with e.g. Pagan Chronicles-related discussion as Buffy fandom was with its own fic/discussions is impossible for me to imagine.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-14 01:59 pm (UTC)Yes, understandable. To me, the ideal fandom experience (and the one I had in Buffy fandom) was being in a very large, active fandom so there's always tons of fic to read, but only really interacting with a small group of people who I like and whose opinions I enjoy. To me, that was the best of both worlds--I didn't feel overwhelmed the way I sometimes do in Untamed fandom because it was just our little corner of people hanging out that I needed to keep up with.
my friends and I were on the fan forum so long that we talked ourselves out of HDM-related topics, but our friendship remained, and we just moved on to talking about other things.
Exactly what happened to me with Buffy! And with kpop!
no subject
Date: 2021-06-14 04:19 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely! And that was kind of the case with my HDM friends — we were off on our own, doing our own thing, and barely interacting with other people in the fandom (indeed, there was an entire other forum of people that we pretended didn't exist).
I think it's harder to find those kinds of pockets of like-minded people since fandom moved to Tumblr (and after that to Twitter and beyond) — finding people through the tags is such a risky endeavour.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-09 08:56 pm (UTC)I'm mostly the same with this. Everybody seems to move through fandoms quite quickly these days. I wonder if there's a difference between people who joined fandom in the era of streaming and binge watching versus those who joined before it.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-11 03:00 pm (UTC)