Fannish origin stories

[dolorosa_12]

Here we are at Day Seven of the fandom meme, and the prompt is:

G: What was your first fandom?

Again, my answer depends on what you mean by 'fandom'.

If defined as feeling intense feelings about a story, my answer would be the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which I adored as a three-year-old, acquired various bits of merchandise (my aunt still tells the story of how she gave me a small Roger Rabbit stuffed toy for Christmas one year, and I thrust it into the air with an expression of utter jubilation, shouting 'yes!' as if I'd won some kind of lottery), dressed up as characters, and rewatched the film obsessively.

Again, if the definition involves some kind of shared input, it would have to be the film The Land Before Time — when I was seven, my friends and I first saw the film (back in the days when, if it rained, the school forbade the kids from playing outside, crammed us all into the school hall, and wheeled out a rickety TV and played a film for us). Although traumatised by the film like everyone in my generation (I remember us sobbing into each other's shoulders in the hall), we were also completely obsessed with dinosaurs, and swiftly acquired plastic toys of the characters (I believe Pizza Hut was giving them away with meals at the time), and spent every lunchtime pretending we were characters in the film.

If the definition specifically requires online shared participation and the production of fanworks, meta, and shared fannish discussion, my first fandom was Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody, when I was urged by a school friend who also loved the books to join the very early iteration of the Obernewtyn.net forums. This would have been around 2002. I think I signed up, found the site impossible to navigate (and my family only had dial-up at that point so the internet was very slow and frustrating), and forgot about it for five years, before rejoining in 2007 and getting much more heavily involved.

What were your first fandoms?


H: Do you prefer live action TV shows or animated TV shows?

I: Has online caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

J: Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over the internet.

K: What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

L: Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves.

M: Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

N: Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

O: Choose a song at random, what ship does it remind you of?

P: Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).

Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

R: Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?

S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon.

T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

V: Which character do you relate to most?

W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!

Comments

[naye]

Falling for a movie as a group of little kids and then playing that movie sounds just fantastic.

And awwww, wee baby fan Ronnie is too adorable for words.

The first fandom I can remember is a 1970's anime that's a sci-fi retelling of Journey to The West? It had the four main characters protecting a princess rather than a priest, and I had a lot of daydreams about being part of that crew. This was about the time I started school...

Oh, and before then my grandmother read me all the Narnia books, and I desperately wanted to find a portal in a wardrobe.

[dolorosa_12]

I was just such an earnest nerd as a child (I mean, nothing much has changed, I'm just more self-aware about it now).

I love hearing about friends' childhood fannish behaviour — the experiences are all so similar, it's just the specific stories that are different.

[trepkos]

Intense feelings ... I think it was Star Trek: TOS. And I did go to a con. in the 80s. First real involvement - Buffy. Most intense work - including research - Arthur of the Britons.

[dolorosa_12]

I suspect some iteration of Star Trek was the gateway drug for a lot of people in fandom, and so many people I know on Dreamwidth seemed to have started out in Buffy (or other Whedonverse shows) fandom as their first online fannish community.

[geckoholic]

Ohh you sure started early. ;D My first, hmm... it also depends. First only fandom was Queer As Folk, followed by Doctor Who and Torchwood, and Supernatural; my oldest longstanding fannish obsession is probably Terminator.

[dolorosa_12]

I think it depends how you define fandom, though. Children playing imaginative games with other children is common — but how many of those children continue with the same attitude to stories into adulthood? I think only the latter really counts as being 'in fandom'.

[geckoholic]

I think I was "in fandom", kinda, since I was a teen, but without the internet and as the only person I knew who was this enthusiastic about that kinda thing, it was more of a solitary activity, lol.

[dolorosa_12]

Yeah, absolutely. I think your experience pretty much mirrors my own — and it wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I realised there was a whole community of people who felt the way I did about stories, hanging out on the internet. Before that I'd just assumed that I was a lone weirdo.

[geckoholic]

Oh man, yes. And what a revelation that was, finding out there's a whole lot of us weirdos, actually. XD