Your post is along the lines of thoughts I've been having lately re: fandom, and where I fit in (or not). :) It's not new; I went digging around LJ archives and found this post I wrote about a year ago. I think it's the great wave of emotional outpouring re: the Angel finale, the excitement about the HP movie, and the negative reaction to Troy that's got me realizing again how out of step I am with most fans. (Angel and Joss in general tend to leave me cold, my allergy to HP continues unabated, while I really enjoyed Troy and could easily become fannish about it). But I wonder if your return to B5 isn't like my rekindled affair with Kirk and Spock. Nothing like feeling lonely to make you call up your old boyfriend, is there? *g*
I'm living in a place where I don't really have a participatory fandom; where my diversity is manifest as dilution, or the center cannot hold...
Yup. If you mean, by "participatory fandom," one where you're actively participating with other people, I can relate. I'm certainly "participating" in K/S, Jeremiah, Highlander and Mag7, as well as Deadwood, Hornblower and possibly Troy, but most of that is me over here in the corner, playing alone with my toys. HL's probably the biggest exception, in that I do actually interact with other fans a bit, but I can't seem to tolerate the active mailing lists. Yesterday, before I read your post, I did some housekeeping and deleted about 6 of my few remaining (nomail) lists, mostly in Hornblower, M7 and HL fandoms, keeping only one each.
Maybe LJ and the current tread toward polyfanism has created a dilution of the big-ass fandoms, but they're still around.
I think that's exactly it. The comments from the Escapade vidshow, particularly those that complained about "not enough vids in my fandom/my pairing," make this painfully clear, to me. As I said then, there were vids from many of the bigger fandoms: SV, LotR, Hornblower, dS, HL, Buffy/Angel, etc. The problem wasn't the vids; the problem was that fandom has become so diluted/diversified that there was no way a two-hour vid could represent everyone, or even come close. And in my own experience, Hornblower and Jeremiah in particular have disappointed me this way -- there are some wonderful folks in both places, but not one soul who relates to them in quite the way I do, and that seems to make a big difference in how I feel about them. In Hornblower, the Horatio/Archie fans all love Archie best, while I'm all about Horatio; then there's the Bush fans, the Pellew fans, the Edrington fans -- but again, the fans of these characters tend to put Horatio second, if they even really like him at all. In Jeremiah, it's the same. Many Markus fans, but Jeremiah's my guy -- and Jeremiah/Kurdy is really my pairing, even if Jeremiah/Markus is a lovely distraction. But of those who like Kurdy, it seems to be Kurdy/Smith that gets written. In Kirk/Spock fandom, I've found some wonderful folks, but there, my very polyfannishness is a drawback, and frowned upon; I often feel like an alien there, too, because the kinds of stories I want to read and the ideas I want to talk about are in the small minority.
(aside: I just read a Hornblower story yesterday that made me so incredibly happy, it may have singlehandedly revived my seriously waning interest in that fandom. *g* And further disproving my "nobody to talk to" theory, I just found out that one of my favoritest of Mag7 writers likes Jeremiah/Kurdy. Must send her eps pronto!)
And for you kids who are still in Big Fandoms -- where are they? HP, SV, Alias? How're they workin' out for you?
Is Alias a big fandom? *g* I'm not really involved in it (again, where is the Will/Sydney that I crave?), but it seems to be smallish, though very talented. I guess Star Trek: TOS and Highlander still count as big fandoms, but I really don't participate in them much more than I do in Hornblower or Mag 7, because the conversation just isn't going where I want to go, you know? Sometimes I tune in and listen a bit, but the meaningful conversation for me happens with one or two individuals, and between me and my toys over here in the corner.
rambling, rambling... did any of that make sense? *g*
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Date: 2004-05-21 04:17 am (UTC)I'm living in a place where I don't really have a participatory fandom; where my diversity is manifest as dilution, or the center cannot hold...
Yup. If you mean, by "participatory fandom," one where you're actively participating with other people, I can relate. I'm certainly "participating" in K/S, Jeremiah, Highlander and Mag7, as well as Deadwood, Hornblower and possibly Troy, but most of that is me over here in the corner, playing alone with my toys. HL's probably the biggest exception, in that I do actually interact with other fans a bit, but I can't seem to tolerate the active mailing lists. Yesterday, before I read your post, I did some housekeeping and deleted about 6 of my few remaining (nomail) lists, mostly in Hornblower, M7 and HL fandoms, keeping only one each.
Maybe LJ and the current tread toward polyfanism has created a dilution of the big-ass fandoms, but they're still around.
I think that's exactly it. The comments from the Escapade vidshow, particularly those that complained about "not enough vids in my fandom/my pairing," make this painfully clear, to me. As I said then, there were vids from many of the bigger fandoms: SV, LotR, Hornblower, dS, HL, Buffy/Angel, etc. The problem wasn't the vids; the problem was that fandom has become so diluted/diversified that there was no way a two-hour vid could represent everyone, or even come close. And in my own experience, Hornblower and Jeremiah in particular have disappointed me this way -- there are some wonderful folks in both places, but not one soul who relates to them in quite the way I do, and that seems to make a big difference in how I feel about them. In Hornblower, the Horatio/Archie fans all love Archie best, while I'm all about Horatio; then there's the Bush fans, the Pellew fans, the Edrington fans -- but again, the fans of these characters tend to put Horatio second, if they even really like him at all. In Jeremiah, it's the same. Many Markus fans, but Jeremiah's my guy -- and Jeremiah/Kurdy is really my pairing, even if Jeremiah/Markus is a lovely distraction. But of those who like Kurdy, it seems to be Kurdy/Smith that gets written. In Kirk/Spock fandom, I've found some wonderful folks, but there, my very polyfannishness is a drawback, and frowned upon; I often feel like an alien there, too, because the kinds of stories I want to read and the ideas I want to talk about are in the small minority.
(aside: I just read a Hornblower story yesterday that made me so incredibly happy, it may have singlehandedly revived my seriously waning interest in that fandom. *g* And further disproving my "nobody to talk to" theory, I just found out that one of my favoritest of Mag7 writers likes Jeremiah/Kurdy. Must send her eps pronto!)
And for you kids who are still in Big Fandoms -- where are they? HP, SV, Alias? How're they workin' out for you?
Is Alias a big fandom? *g* I'm not really involved in it (again, where is the Will/Sydney that I crave?), but it seems to be smallish, though very talented. I guess Star Trek: TOS and Highlander still count as big fandoms, but I really don't participate in them much more than I do in Hornblower or Mag 7, because the conversation just isn't going where I want to go, you know? Sometimes I tune in and listen a bit, but the meaningful conversation for me happens with one or two individuals, and between me and my toys over here in the corner.
rambling, rambling... did any of that make sense? *g*