Starting out.
Jan. 10th, 2025 07:42 pmChallenge #2
In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
My fannish origin story is distinct from my fannish beginnings, which go back to the first grade where I wrote a one-page story about Kermit and Miss Piggy getting married and the house they lived in. They go through morning conversations on the playground, afternoon cartoons, chatting about the latest Animorphs novel while standing in line at summer camp. They go through Yahoo groups and message boards and Livejournal invite codes. They even go through my first big fandoms where I made lasting friendships and started writing stories where I had something to say and managed to say most of it, too.
My fannish origin comes in two parts. The first happened a few US presidential administrations ago in a fairly small, niche fandom. It was simply reading someone's comment about not following a common trend in the fandom at the time - giving an unnamed character a different name than most people did - which had me realize I was simply going along with the flow for a lot of things. It had me stop, step back, and start questioning why I was doing certain things. Was it really because I thought it was a good idea? Was I doing it just because it was de rigueur at the time? While it may have been a common convention in fics of the day, where did it come from? Did it arrive from the canon itself or one person writing a well-regarded story?
That simple comment from nearly twenty years ago still has me looking at fandom patterns, fashions, and trends with a critical eye. It's had me set heads spinning here and there by reminding people what does and doesn't come from the canon, and raised a few heated arguments about what's in the canon versus what's implied by throwaway lines of dialogue versus what's one person's idea being taken as writ across the board. There's some "trust, but verify" mentality, and there's a good bit of constantly and intentionally parsing out where I've gotten things and why I'm using them.
The second part happened not much later. It's akin to that comment about not following a given trend, where I looked around at a bunch of stories all being written around the same time, all doing their own spin on a given set of ideas, all of them wildly creative - except nobody had done it or was doing it in one particular way I thought would be a fascinating, compelling take on things. This came after wandering into a lot of fandoms twenty minutes late with Starbucks, asking about things I thought were at least somewhat creative that many, many people had already done by the time I got there. Having it happen to me repeatedly, especially at that point in my life when I hadn't even yet graduated college, got me thinking that while it was true someone else writing a given idea wouldn't get the same story as myself writing it, if I'd thought of something, to employ one of my favorite phrases, it must be so blindingly obvious you'd need to put on sunglasses.
Except nobody else had done it. I looked, and waited, and looked some more. I asked people who knew more than I did, I used Boolean searches and targeted keywords, I snooped and peered and scrounged around, and nothing. Something I thought was quite obvious - simply taking the basic idea and turning a handful of bits of the premise around a full 180 degrees, turning it inside-out, rotating it on the Y axis, pick your favorite geometric and spatial metaphors - hadn't occurred to anyone else.
It was a lesson in trusting myself, in always looking to see what wasn't there, and in committing to doing something new and different. Because if I wanted to read something I couldn't find, I'd have to write it myself.
And it turned out that chances were good other people wanted to read it, too.
I like to say I've made my name and earned my reputation by constantly doing my own thing, going against common trends, always trying to see what fandoms take as their sacred cows and questioning their assumptions and conventions, challenging preconceived notions. More than once I've slammed my hand down on the nearest desk or flat surface because by golly, nobody else has done this idea yet and I've got to get on that. I'm not saying I never write things in what I'd say is the typical mode - I've done a fair bit of writing that's been deeply conventional for the given fandoms - as much as I'm saying I love being able to do something that I know nobody else has done yet. I struggle to internalize the idea that as obvious as something might seem to me, it's eminently possible I'm the first person who's thought of doing it like that.
I can talk about the timeline of my fandoms, the chronology, how I found them, how they brought me to the next one and the next one and the one after that. I can talk about learning to write by writing a lot and in doing a lot of writing, trusting my voice. All that's part of where I come from. Where I start, where I originate, is in how I learned to approach fandom. To figure out the difference between what I was looking at, and what I could see.
In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
My fannish origin story is distinct from my fannish beginnings, which go back to the first grade where I wrote a one-page story about Kermit and Miss Piggy getting married and the house they lived in. They go through morning conversations on the playground, afternoon cartoons, chatting about the latest Animorphs novel while standing in line at summer camp. They go through Yahoo groups and message boards and Livejournal invite codes. They even go through my first big fandoms where I made lasting friendships and started writing stories where I had something to say and managed to say most of it, too.
My fannish origin comes in two parts. The first happened a few US presidential administrations ago in a fairly small, niche fandom. It was simply reading someone's comment about not following a common trend in the fandom at the time - giving an unnamed character a different name than most people did - which had me realize I was simply going along with the flow for a lot of things. It had me stop, step back, and start questioning why I was doing certain things. Was it really because I thought it was a good idea? Was I doing it just because it was de rigueur at the time? While it may have been a common convention in fics of the day, where did it come from? Did it arrive from the canon itself or one person writing a well-regarded story?
That simple comment from nearly twenty years ago still has me looking at fandom patterns, fashions, and trends with a critical eye. It's had me set heads spinning here and there by reminding people what does and doesn't come from the canon, and raised a few heated arguments about what's in the canon versus what's implied by throwaway lines of dialogue versus what's one person's idea being taken as writ across the board. There's some "trust, but verify" mentality, and there's a good bit of constantly and intentionally parsing out where I've gotten things and why I'm using them.
The second part happened not much later. It's akin to that comment about not following a given trend, where I looked around at a bunch of stories all being written around the same time, all doing their own spin on a given set of ideas, all of them wildly creative - except nobody had done it or was doing it in one particular way I thought would be a fascinating, compelling take on things. This came after wandering into a lot of fandoms twenty minutes late with Starbucks, asking about things I thought were at least somewhat creative that many, many people had already done by the time I got there. Having it happen to me repeatedly, especially at that point in my life when I hadn't even yet graduated college, got me thinking that while it was true someone else writing a given idea wouldn't get the same story as myself writing it, if I'd thought of something, to employ one of my favorite phrases, it must be so blindingly obvious you'd need to put on sunglasses.
Except nobody else had done it. I looked, and waited, and looked some more. I asked people who knew more than I did, I used Boolean searches and targeted keywords, I snooped and peered and scrounged around, and nothing. Something I thought was quite obvious - simply taking the basic idea and turning a handful of bits of the premise around a full 180 degrees, turning it inside-out, rotating it on the Y axis, pick your favorite geometric and spatial metaphors - hadn't occurred to anyone else.
It was a lesson in trusting myself, in always looking to see what wasn't there, and in committing to doing something new and different. Because if I wanted to read something I couldn't find, I'd have to write it myself.
And it turned out that chances were good other people wanted to read it, too.
I like to say I've made my name and earned my reputation by constantly doing my own thing, going against common trends, always trying to see what fandoms take as their sacred cows and questioning their assumptions and conventions, challenging preconceived notions. More than once I've slammed my hand down on the nearest desk or flat surface because by golly, nobody else has done this idea yet and I've got to get on that. I'm not saying I never write things in what I'd say is the typical mode - I've done a fair bit of writing that's been deeply conventional for the given fandoms - as much as I'm saying I love being able to do something that I know nobody else has done yet. I struggle to internalize the idea that as obvious as something might seem to me, it's eminently possible I'm the first person who's thought of doing it like that.
I can talk about the timeline of my fandoms, the chronology, how I found them, how they brought me to the next one and the next one and the one after that. I can talk about learning to write by writing a lot and in doing a lot of writing, trusting my voice. All that's part of where I come from. Where I start, where I originate, is in how I learned to approach fandom. To figure out the difference between what I was looking at, and what I could see.
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