Beyond Selidor

Again, I've elected to roll the current snowflake_challenge prompt into today's open thread, since it's a fun prompting question:

Share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.



I always feel a bit weird doing these, because all my fandoms of the heart are fandoms-of-one, the sorts of things that I'd be lucky to get given as gifts for Yuletide, and they have potentially offputting elements (teenage protagonists, a writing style people will either love or hate, divisive relationship dynamics, and so on). So I can talk about why I love them forever, but assume that no one will take me up on the recommendation, or not be hooked by the same things that first hooked me. A lot of these canons are things that I've loved unstintingly for three decades; they're a part of me — they've seeped into my bones, into the story I tell about myself.

I've written a lot of primers/manifestos/gushing walls of emotion over the years!

( I've gathered a bunch behind the cut )

What about you? Feel free to link back to your own posts if you've already answered this prompt for Snowflake.

I've spent most of my free time this week rereading the five books in Catherine Jinks's Pagan Chronicles series — a collection of books which I have loved for close to two-thirds of my life, and to which I always return for comfort and consolation. When asked which books have had the most impact on me, I'll generally immediately answer with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, but if I take proper time to consider the question, it's obvious that while Pullman's books are indirectly responsible for a lot of the choices in my life that got me to where I am, what I do, and who I'm with now, the Pagan series got into my bones and blood in a much deeper way.

I talk about these books a lot, but I'm not sure I've ever laid out what they're all about — or at least not recently.

( A multigenerational medieval found family )

Good morning, and welcome to Day Four of the fandom meme:

D: What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?

My answer to this depends on how you define 'a fandom'. Like most fannish adults, rewriting the endings of my favourite stories, or imagining I was a character in said stories was a major feature of my childhood. Indeed the fact that I a) had very poor hearing as a young child until I got grommets put in my ears to unblock the eustachian tubes and b) generally spent my time imagining I was a character from one of my favourite books doing all the things I did in my daily life meant that I was an extremely vague child who found it very difficult to focus on the words coming out of real-life people's mouths. Because I did this sort of thing for as long as I can remember (I have memories of myself as a three-year-old toddler pretending my doll was a character in a picture book I enjoyed at my childcare centre), it's impossible to name my first 'contribution' to fandom if we're counting childhood play as fannish activity.

If participation in fandom as a shared activity is how you're defining it, it would have been some time around the early 2000s, when I first dipped my toes into fan forums for two of my favourite book series: Bridgetothestars, a Philip Pullman fansite with its Republic of Heaven forum, and Obernewtyn.net, a fansite for Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. I made a couple of posts, but at the time was not very interested in the internet and mostly just wanted to be on my own reading books, so I drifted away until 2007, when a combination of intense situational depression, and living away from my support network forced me back online in a kind of desperation. Both sites welcomed me with open arms, and on the Republic of Heaven in particular I racked up a massive post count. Over the years I met most of the people on those sites in real life — the Obernetters were easier, as almost everyone on that site lived in Australia, whereas apart from lowercasename, all the Pullman fans lived in Europe or North America, so I didn't meet most of them until I moved to the UK. I wouldn't be able to track down my first 'contribution' to either site, but it would have been a post replying in some way to some discussion thread about either series.

If your definiation of fandom solely relates to fanworks posted online in shared spaces, that's easy: it's 'Bodies of Clay', the first fic I published on Ao3, back in 2012:

Bodies of Clay (3638 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 10/10
Fandom: Pagan Chronicles
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Isidore Orbus/Babylonne Kidrouk
Characters: Isidore Orbus, Babylonne Kidrouk
Summary:

Ten moments in Isidore and Babylonne's life together. Post Pagan's Daughter/Babylonne.

How would you define 'fannish activity'?

( The other days )