rocket ship to fandom
Jul. 16th, 2015 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
veronica_richPart of being a fan of something, for me, is finding new things to like or at least ponder in a movie series, or a TV show, or book (or these days, any media, up to and including the presidential race on Twitter). When I find something I like, I want to see or read all of the canon.
Canon, in case you're not familiar, is the official materials written/filmed by the creator of something - so named, apparently, because of its tendency for later episodes or installments to blow the earlier assumptions you thought you were safe with clean out of the water.
When I was small and Mom watched original Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes, I'd sit with her and listen as she described what was going on - the parts I didn't understand. Grandpa and I watched Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk on TV each week, both in companionable silence until the commercials, when I would race around the room singing "YOU'RE A WONDER, WONDER WO-MAAAAAAAAN" and getting Grandma off the phone in the other room to holler at us to pipe down. Saturday nights when I was 8 were spent playing Pac-Man and then watching reruns of The Three Stooges with Dad (and getting Mom to wake up in the other end of the small house to hiss at us to quit laughing so loud).
As a 13-year-old, I found my own first fandom independent of my family, in Back to the Future. It was 1986; I watched the first movie repeatedly, as often as I could afford to rent it from the video store in town ($4.99 for two nights, more if you weren't kind enough to rewind). After almost a year of this, the video store owner took pity and sold me one of his two well-worn VHS tapes.
My friend Eric and I would sit together at lunch discussing it at length. It took forever to find someone in that high school of about 350 kids who had any similar interest to mine in time travel, sci-fi, old mad scientists inexplicably befriending and mentoring teen guitar players, and the plausibility of the flux capacitor as a thing in our lifetimes. (Gas was 79 cents or less a gallon, so the desirability of wanting a Mr. Fusion that powered the car on trash was still a few years off.)
In college, being forced to watch new episodes of Star Trek: TNG on Saturday nights in the dorm lounge led to actual interest in the show. Finding fellow fans wasn't nearly as difficult as in high school - they were all around me in the lounge. Some were casual watchers, alternating weeks with Saturday Night Live on another floor's lounge. Others wanted to talk about the show, the hard sci-fi of it - the way Eric and I had dissected BTTF on lunches and dates. But there was another group I was about to meet, that I'd never heard about or even realized was something that could exist in connection to a piece of media: Fanfic writers and readers.
And man, was THAT weird.
(This is an idea I’ve had for some time, that I’m experimenting with; I’d like to continue with some more installments if my memory and writing ability will cooperate. Feel free to comment or not; it’s reading for its own sake, not just to garner remarks.)
Canon, in case you're not familiar, is the official materials written/filmed by the creator of something - so named, apparently, because of its tendency for later episodes or installments to blow the earlier assumptions you thought you were safe with clean out of the water.
When I was small and Mom watched original Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes, I'd sit with her and listen as she described what was going on - the parts I didn't understand. Grandpa and I watched Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk on TV each week, both in companionable silence until the commercials, when I would race around the room singing "YOU'RE A WONDER, WONDER WO-MAAAAAAAAN" and getting Grandma off the phone in the other room to holler at us to pipe down. Saturday nights when I was 8 were spent playing Pac-Man and then watching reruns of The Three Stooges with Dad (and getting Mom to wake up in the other end of the small house to hiss at us to quit laughing so loud).
As a 13-year-old, I found my own first fandom independent of my family, in Back to the Future. It was 1986; I watched the first movie repeatedly, as often as I could afford to rent it from the video store in town ($4.99 for two nights, more if you weren't kind enough to rewind). After almost a year of this, the video store owner took pity and sold me one of his two well-worn VHS tapes.
My friend Eric and I would sit together at lunch discussing it at length. It took forever to find someone in that high school of about 350 kids who had any similar interest to mine in time travel, sci-fi, old mad scientists inexplicably befriending and mentoring teen guitar players, and the plausibility of the flux capacitor as a thing in our lifetimes. (Gas was 79 cents or less a gallon, so the desirability of wanting a Mr. Fusion that powered the car on trash was still a few years off.)
In college, being forced to watch new episodes of Star Trek: TNG on Saturday nights in the dorm lounge led to actual interest in the show. Finding fellow fans wasn't nearly as difficult as in high school - they were all around me in the lounge. Some were casual watchers, alternating weeks with Saturday Night Live on another floor's lounge. Others wanted to talk about the show, the hard sci-fi of it - the way Eric and I had dissected BTTF on lunches and dates. But there was another group I was about to meet, that I'd never heard about or even realized was something that could exist in connection to a piece of media: Fanfic writers and readers.
And man, was THAT weird.
(This is an idea I’ve had for some time, that I’m experimenting with; I’d like to continue with some more installments if my memory and writing ability will cooperate. Feel free to comment or not; it’s reading for its own sake, not just to garner remarks.)
