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Fannish origin stories
Apr. 8th, 2020 03:53 pmHere 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?
( The other days )
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?
( The other days )
