dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with meme: fandom alphabet

Today is the final day of the fandom meme, Day Twenty-Six:

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

I thought I'd write about something which has come up again and again in the comments to the various posts I've written for this meme, and, most recently, in a discussion

naye and I were having in the comments of one of her posts: fannish people, and stories.

This is not one of those posts where I talk about how unique and special and better fandom people are than those outside it: I find that attitude tedious. However, what I have noticed is that people in fandom — and here I mean transformative works fandom (and those who hang out in transformative works-adjacent spaces, whether they create such works themselves or not) — have this common thread, an origin story, if you like, of how they react to stories. How we have always reacted to stories.

We tend to react with a kind of emotional intensity to stories (whether those stories are books, TV shows, films, games, music, or the shared story which is RPF). Sometimes this is deeply personal ('this story really speaks to me'), or sometimes it is a more distant admiration of the narrative architecture of the story (although of course people outside fandom can have these kinds of reactions as well). What is common, though, is a sense that the story isn't over when the page is closed or the credits roll, that it's not contained by whatever the original creator(s) chose to show us — that it's only over when we stop being haunted by it and it leaves our mind.

I have spent a lifetime trying to explain this way of reacting and relating to stories to people around me who do not feel the same, firstly to family members, and later to my husband and various non-fannish friends, and while they can understand the phenomenon I'm explaining, it's as if I'm describing alien customs. For people outside fandom, once the canonical story is finished, it's over, and they don't think about it any more, apart from perhaps recommending it to others who they think might enjoy it.

Now obviously I, and other people in fandom, are not going around with every story we've ever read/watched/played running through our heads, never to disappear — but I struggle to get my head around never being haunted by stories in this way, because it is the way I have reacted to stories since I was a very small child, and I've never been able to switch it off.

And I guess that's what I love most about fandom. I don't have to explain any of this. The stories might be different, and the exact shape of that 'extreme emotional reaction' might look different, but it's a community where my way of responding to fiction makes sense, and is the norm. I love it.

What are the things you most enjoy about fandom?

We're nearing the end of the fandom meme — Day Twenty-Five:

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)?

At the moment it's definitely The Untamed and Guardian — I'd say a good 70 per cent of my circle is a fan of one or both of these and heavily involved in the fandom!

This is definitely not the first time I've had these kinds of secondhand fandoms (I can remember a lot of people being into e.g. hockey RPF, the MCU, podcast dramas, Sherlock, etc etc over the years — none of which I was involved in in the slightest, with the possible exception of the Thor films in the MCU). It's always nice to see people being happily fannish in their own corners, even if it's fandoms that I'm highly unlikely to be involved in.

( The final day )

Day Twenty-Four of the fandom meme prompts:

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

Hurt/comfort! I could expand on this and say that I have more specific preferences (such as which character is hurt and which is doing the comforting) depending on the fandom, but in general, this is a pretty solid trope for me. I like it in original fiction as well.

I also love 'across the barricades' kinds of relationships (whether romantic or platonic), villains/antagonists and heroes having to grudgingly work together and slowly becoming friends, and heists (particularly when they involve the two preceding tropes as well).

( The other days )

The sun is shining, I'm completely exhausted, and it's time for Day Twenty-Three of the fandom meme:

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

I think we've established from previous posts that I particularly dislike stories which 'reward' characters who spend the narrative drawing closer to other people, finding family and community and closeness and saving the(ir) world and each other by separating them forever from those connections, that community, and indeed the very world that they have saved. I think the only time it works is in The Lord of the Rings.

Other tropes which I really despise: characters being pressured by the other characters around them into forgiving or rebuilding a relationship with people who have abused or hurt them, and painted by the narrative as being unreasonable or heartless for not wanting to do so. (This happens frequently with teenage or adult children being pressured by other characters to restore contact with abusive parents who they previously cut out of their lives.) 'It was all a dream/hallucination/"just a story"' cop outs also irritate me, as well as situations which have characters doubting their own reality, or being disbelieved by everyone in their lives.

Generally you see these tropes in original works rather than fanfic (in fact fanfic often seems to be written as a deliberate effort to overturn a lot of these tropes).

Fanfic tropes I dislike include 'shovel talk' situations, any scenario in which friends and family members seem overly pushy or invested in other characters' potential love lives (I really hate when other characters just appear in the fic to be a sort of cheer squad of shippers to the main pairing), and making a character's canon love interest abusive (if they aren't abusive in canon) as a way to justify breaking them up for the fic's preferred pairing.

Due to tagging, the fanfic ones are generally pretty easy to avoid, but the tropes in original fiction can sometimes appear out of nowhere, souring me on stories that I'd previously enjoyed.

Do any of you have similar narrative dealbreakers, whether in original works or fanfic?

( The other days )

It's Day Twenty-Two of the fandom meme, and I'm tired and frustrated from battling with Wordpress while editing my work's website. Therefore you're just getting a short post from me for today's prompt:

V: Which character do you relate to most?

For years when asked this question, I've responded with the following three characters:

Amy Santiago from Brooklyn Nine Nine (for the nerdiness, love of stationery and rules and organisation and excessive deference to authority figures)

Tara Maclay from Buffy (for the shyness, although I'm not very shy any more, and her steely kindness to her friends, and her difficulties asserting herself)

Emily Fields from Pretty Little Liars (for her kindness and resolve and strong sense of loyalty)

I know identifying yourself with a Hogwarts house is a bit passé, but what can I say? I'm one of life's eternal Hufflepuffs.

I identify in various ways with the characters I listed as my favourite's in yesterday's post, or characters in the various series that I really love, but only in terms of certain facets of their personalities and experiences, whereas I feel like the above three characters are sort of cartoonish, extreme versions of most components of me as a whole.

( The other days )

It's Day Twenty-One of the fandom meme:

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

I have a lot of favourite characters, so limiting myself to three is hard.

I love Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. She is my default icon on Ao3 and Dreamwidth, and I wrote a gushing post about her for another meme a while ago. Rather than write everything out again, I'll put what I wrote about Una in that other post behind a cut, because it explains why she's my favourite ... at length.

( A lot of words about Una )

The second character I'll list here is Mai, from Kate Elliott's Crossroads series. I've spoken a bit about her in an earlier post for this meme, and I also wrote about her at length in an older post for another meme. Again, I'll repost what I wrote behind the cut:

( More on Mai )

And the final character I will talk about is my beloved Pagan Kidrouk, the narrator of the first three of Catherine Jinks's wonderful Pagan Chronicles books, who is probably my favourite fictional character of all time. Weirdly, I don't think I've actually ever written down all my thoughts about him and why he is my favourite, but in brief: he is a dispossessed refugee who has to make a life for himself in a land where he knows no one (in his case, he is a Christian Arab who leaves Jerusalem in the twelfth century and ends up living in Languedoc), he is a literate person in a world where most people he encounters do not know how to read, he is traumatised and alone and has to build his own found family, and he uses words as his strength and weapons to make sense of situations where he is frequently at a massive disadvantage, and, slowly, over the years, he builds a new home for himself in the strange land in which he ends up.

Generally, for characters to be my favourites, they need to be at least one of these things:

Immigrants or refugees who find a new home and a sense of home and belonging in other people

Women whose heroism lies in their talents at quiet, unglamorous, unnoticed 'women's work'

Women who almost always read situations correctly and know the right actions to take, but whose advice is often ignored

Characters who are soft-hearted and sentimental and dismissed as being weak because of this

Characters who are hyper-observant of other people's moods, bodies, behaviour, reactions and perceptions out of grim necessity, for the sake of their own survival

Competent, maternal older women

Women who have survived trauma and reacted in certain ways which I find hard to summarise/articulate here

( The other days )

We're up to Day Twenty of the fandom meme:

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

I'm not sure I'd quite go to the extreme of dying to defend it, but I remain eternally irritated with the ending of Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows series. I'll explain my irritation (and the headcanon which negates it) behind a cut, due to spoilers.

( Spoilers )

( The other days )

Day Nineteen of the fandom meme asks:

S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon.

This one is deeply silly, but it's one I came up with when I was a teenager and for which I still retain a lot of affection: Allyman and Presh escape from Galax Arena and wind up working for Cirque du Soleil's show Alegría. (This was, of course, my attempt to create a crossover between two of my oldest and dearest fandoms: Galax Arena and Cirque du Soleil.) Why Alegría specifically? It happened to be the show which had most recently toured Australia in the year I came up with the idea, on one of my endless rereads of Galax Arena during a holiday when my mother, sister and I were staying in a holiday rental flat in Coogee. (This was the same holiday when I got incensed with what I perceived to be a poor quality newspaper review of The Amber Spyglass and wrote this extraordinarily pompous letter to the literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, accusing her of not reading the books she had reviewed. Teenage me was ... something else.)

But getting back to Presh, Allyman and Alegria: I came up with this hugely elaborate character and narrative architecture to support this headcanon, complete with Presh feeling utter contempt for the Alegría performers because they actually cared about safety and performed difficult tricks with wires and safety nets, and Presh having something of an emotional crisis because she'd never relied on anyone else as a circus performer in the Galax Arena and didn't trust anyone but herself (and to a certain extent Allyman) and had enormous difficulties coming to trust her fellow performers, and the pair being continually hunted by the shadowy organisation that ran the Galax Arena, etc etc.

One of these days I should make the effort to write this thing, if I felt I could do it justice — but mostly it's just a lot of unfocused emotion about Presh as a character. I just love her so much, and have done since I was ten years old.

( The other days )

It's now Day Eighteen for the fandom meme, and today's prompt is a great one:

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

Given I generally only feel fannish about something if I love the characters, and given that a lot of what makes me love characters is how they interact with the other characters around them, I am a huge fan of fictional friendships.

I'm not sure I could decide on an absolute favourite, though. I really love the central friendship of the four girls in Pretty Little Liars (and I love that the series is a celebration of the power of friendships among teenage girls, and that it is their friendship which saves and uplifts them, time and time again). I also love the friendships of Beatrice and Cat in Kate Elliott's Cold Magic trilogy and among the sisters in Elliott's Court of Fives trilogy (Elliott is just so good at writing friendships between girls and women, especially sisters). Sarah Rees Brennan is another author who writes friendship so well — her Demon's Lexicon and Lynburn Legacy series being prime examples.

I also adore all the frienships between the characters in Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart series, particularly Sally and Jim, and Sally and Rosa.

Which fictional friendships are your favourites?

( The other days )

Day Seventeen of the fandom meme prompts me to write about:

Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

I don't tend to leave fandoms — as should be very obvious to anyone who's been reading my various posts for this meme, once I love something, I love it forever.

But my feelings about Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series have decidedly cooled since she wrote the concluding book several years ago.

This is a series for which — along with a lot of Australian women of my generation — I felt a great deal of affection. It's almost as old as I am; the first book was published in the 1980s, and I grew up with the series. For years most fans assumed it would never be finished. And then, a couple of years ago, Carmody finally published its conclusion.

To say this book was met with disappointment would be an understatement. I don't think I know a single fan who was happy with how the series ended, and the forum Obernewtyn.net, the first fannish community I ever joined, was ablaze with critical discussions of the book's ending. I had begun to cool on the series a bit earlier than that, basically at the point that I realised a) because it had dragged on so long the political situation to which it had been written in response was no longer relevant (it is extremely influenced by its Cold War context, with the nuclear arms race playing a major role, and had to scramble to adjust to a post-9/11 'war on terror' context) and b) because Carmody began writing the series as a teenager she was no longer able to distance herself from the story and felt paralysed about finishing it because it would, metaphorically, be closing that childhood chapter of her life.

I'm still good friends with the people I met through the fandom — we just don't talk about the books all that much any more — and I did dip my toes into Obernewtyn fanfic waters in an exchange a few years back. Inevitably, that fic was a canon divergent fix it fic that overwrote and ignored the last book's ending.

( The other days )

*The title of this post refers to another incomplete (and unlikely ever to be completed) Isobelle Carmody series, The Legendsong, rather than Obernewtyn. Are you sensing a pattern?

I am aware I have a lot of comments to catch up with, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. Suffice it to say that if you have written a comment, I am aware of it and know I need to respond.

It's Day Sixteen of the fandom meme:

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

This prompt really doesn't play to my strengths. The only kind of AU I've ever read or written are canon-divergence AUs in the vein of 'this character didn't die, what happened next?'

So instead I'm going to throw this prompt back to you all: those of you who enjoy AUs (either reading or writing them), what are your favourite AU scenarios? And why do you like those scenarios in particular?

( The other days )

montfelisky asked me to write about bullet journalling, and I finally managed to get around to doing so. The post is over at

dolorosa12, my longform blogging site, and you can read it here. As always with posts over on Wordpress, please feel free to comment either here or there.

Day Fifteen of the fandom meme is a prompt very much to my taste, because I am all about the song lyrics:

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

I have been listening to a lot of Promenade Cinema at the moment, so why not have a song selected at random from their discography?

I've chosen 'The Quiet Silently Wait':

I keep a candle for the nights when the lights go out.
I watch the sun depart & leave the sky to darkness.
Beneath the windows are the faces without features,
And in the mirror, the shadows drawing closer.
As the candle goes out,
They give you nothing.
Under street lights in the rain,
I am dissolving, I am dissolving.
As the quiet silently wait, see them smile.

To be honest, this could be any of my ships: I tend to like melodramatic 'us against the world' ships where at least one half of them is leading a revolution, usually against the beings/rulers/social class to which the other half of the ship belongs.

But in the instant where I first read the lyrics, the first ship that popped into my head was Tommy Shelby/Grace Burgess from Peaky Blinders. He's a 1920s Birmingham gangster, traumatised by his experiences in World War I and a childhood of the quiet violence that comes with extreme poverty, who reacted to his experiences by doing everything he could to insulate himself against the possibility of ever feeling fear again. (In his case this means terrorising everyone else and acquiring as much money as possible.) She is the spy sent to infiltrate his operation. (Together they ~~fight~~ do crime!) They find happiness, occasionally, in quiet moments, in the dark, in the spaces between. But, mostly, they're doomed to tragedy — the fatal flaw for Tommy, for anyone whose greatest horror is the thought of ever being afraid again, is caring about other people. If you care about a single other person it is impossible to live without fear.

They're messed up, they hurt themselves and each other, and I still love them anyway.

( The other days )

I'm back at work, I feel like I've been run over by a bus, but the fandom meme continues. Day Fourteen is:

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

I think I've established in the past thirteen entries here that I'm happy to kind of go my own way and tend my own fannish garden, cultivating the kinds of spaces and fannish behaviour/activity I want to see, even if it means sticking to fandoms-of-one and prioritising friendships with people whose attitudes and approach to fandom match mine (rather than the specific things they are fannish about).

If I could wave a magic wand and ask for three things in fandom as a whole, they would be these:

An abandonment of the idea of shipping as activism. In general what I'd like to see is an assumption of earnest good faith on the part of other fans. Being interested in different characters, ships, fandoms, tropes or fanworks to you should not be taken as a personal attack or a deliberate attempt to deprive you of the content you want to see. Likewise, if content is tagged appropriately, the responsibility to curate their own experience should be that of individual fans, not the creators of content that those fans would prefer not to see.

For fans to stop reaching out to actors, writers, showrunners etc to rope them into shipwars and other fannish arguments or make them aware of fanworks. If those people deliberately seek out fanworks and fan spaces, fine, but seeing fans tag actors into their shipping arguments on Twitter fills me with secondhand embarrassment.

A return to Dreamwidth and other asynchronous, text-based platforms as the primary fandom spaces.

None of these things are going to happen, because all of them go against the direction that fandom has been heading for the past ten or so years, but nothing in today's prompt said that my three wishes had to be realistic!

( The other days )

I'm at the halfway point of the fandom meme, Day Thirteen, and the subject is:

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

While I've lost almost all of my goodwill towards Joss Whedon over the years, and view his shows with a lot less uncritical adoration than I did when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I still have a huge amount of affection for Buffy in particular. While I wouldn't rush to be part of the central friendship of Buffy, Willow and Xander (which I think tips over into codependency at some points, and is also awful to Buffy at various points in the series), I would love to be friends with Tara Maclay. She's kind, a good listener, very perceptive, and, over the course of the series, develops a spine and stops letting her friends walk all over her. She often seems to be the only character willing to tell people truths they don't want to hear. I feel that as a friend she'd be the right mix of compassionate and steely.

For similar reasons, I'd love to be friends with Emily Fields from Pretty Little Liars, who is a similar kind of character.

( The other days )

Everyone who requested letters with recipes from me a while back should either have received, or will receive their letters soon — I posted the last of the batch today. I enjoyed writing them and have more stationery and stamps, so at some point I'll put up another post asking for recipients.

I'm at the point where I've finally caved and admitted that the only fiction I feel mentally capable of engaging with is historical mysteries with heavy h/c elements, which means Benjamin January, Roma Sub Rosa, and Ovidia Yu's series set in 1930s Singapore. I took a look at the 500-page 'literary' novel that I'd been planning on reading next, and just went nope and retreated back to the cosy, comforting and mildly formulaic.

The prompt for Day Twelve of the fandom meme is as follows:

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

I'm struggling a bit with this one, because I don't spend a lot of time in fandom thinking about characters who aren't my favourites.

I'll talk about Jaxon Hall from Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. He's not really the type of character that I warm to, although he seems to be the favourite for most of the fandom. However, I love (and find hilarious) his unwavering commitment to doing things for The Aesthetic™. Going about dressed in full on 2050s Victoriana? Absolutely. Writing the definitive guide to clandestine, illegal supernatural abilities solely so that he can rank his own ability highest in the hierarchy, and then funding an illegal printing press to distribute it, deliberately styling it as an underground Victorian pamphlet? Of course. He's completely ridiculous and over the top, especially given he runs an illegal syndicate of petty criminals with superpowers and should be trying to stay under the radar.

( The other days )

It's fandom meme time, and we're up to Day Eleven:

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

The obvious answer would be any of the main characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Honestly, I often want to sit all writers of serialised fiction down and make them watch the series from beginning to end, because I remain staggered at how good its characterisation and character development was.

But instead I'm going to talk about Mai, my favourite character from Kate Elliott's Crossroads trilogy.

( Some spoilers )

Which character arcs do you like the best?

( The other days )

I missed a post yesterday because I was completely physically and mentally exhausted, and could do little more than lie on the couch. I'm not really sure why — I'm not sick, just really, really tired.

In any case, I'm back with the fandom meme, Day 10:

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

I generally don't get into things solely on the basis of 'the internet,' although I use my Twitter feed mainly as a source of book recommendations, and used to watch a lot of TV shows based on the recommendation of

thelxiepia.

One instance when I did discover a new-to-me fandom which became one of my favourites on the basis of the internet was in 2012, with Pretty Little Liars. At that point I was following Whedonesque, the fan news website for all Joss Whedon shows. It was mainly a news aggregator, gathering links to any article, interview, or blog post about Whedon, Whedon shows and films, or actors who had been involved with his shows in the past. Generally I didn't pay it much attention, but for some reason, a link to an interview with Bianca Lawson caught my eye, and I was curious enough to click through. Lawson was playing one of the love interests of the main four girls in the show (yes, she was in her thirties and playing a character in high school, because Bianca Lawson does not age), and was being interviewed about the fact that this was a teen show that treated the f/f relationship as no different to the other three girls' relationships with boys. (As the show progressed, that became debatable, but at least in it early days it got a lot of hype for supposedly having good representation of lesbian and bi girls.)

The way the interview described the show caught my interest — I've always loved shows about insular, claustrophobic small towns/communities where a child is murdered or goes missing, and it exposes everyone's secrets and shows how every other person is, to a certain extent, responsible. I immediately began watching, and watched through to the bitter end, although my love of the show had diminished a lot by the final few seasons and it felt more like grimly hanging on rather than watching out of genuine love or enthusiasm. But in the early seasons, it really was excellent, and I'm glad I was curious enough to click on that link to the Bianca Lawson interview!

( The other days )

It's time for Day Nine of the fandom meme, and this one's a bit contentious:

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

I assume that this means 'have other fans on the internet caused you to stop liking any fandoms?' These days, the answer is an emphatic no, as I try to adopt a more live and let live attitude to fandom in general, a decision made easier by my choice to leave Tumblr over a year ago. I haven't missed it, and in particular I haven't missed its lack of boundaries, hostility, and assumption of bad faith on the part of strangers.

( Cut as this got long )

( The other days )

Day Eight of the fandom meme is:

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

I think it's fairly obvious that, with two notable exceptions (Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Daria), my TV preferences lie in live action TV. There's not any real reason for this, and I do watch the odd animated TV series, but I'm not naturally drawn to them, and I seem to take more chances on new-to-me live action TV shows than I do with animated ones.

Those of you who do lean more towards animated TV shows, what do you like most about the medium?

( The other days )

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?

( The other days )

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Beyond Selidor

A song with a mission

Entries tagged with meme: fandom alphabet

Tell them stories, the stories tell us

Fandom from afar

My kinds of stories

More narrative dealbreakers

Me, maybe?

Apparently I have a whole lot of feelings

Home is other people

Of joy and sorrow so extreme

Fictional friendships

Abandoned visioncloths*

And bring it all right back to you

Hiding in the dark they're waiting for us to fall

Wishful thinking

Steel and softness

Brief life update, and another meme response

'Women's work'

Got a secret, can you keep it?

A fannish reset

A quick meme response

Fannish origin stories