(no subject)
Oct. 6th, 2006 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hathycolSo, I was thinking. I do it sometimes. And I was thinking about fandom. And I was thinking about why is so bloody odd and why I sort of despair of it a bit now.
Because, man, when I was a teenager and still in high school, fandom was the BEST PLACE EVER. It was full of the MOST AWESOME AND ERUDITE PEOPLE EVER. I devoured fanfiction and all the popular theories and I spent what felt like years of my life sifting through e-mails from Yahoo Mailing Lists about the relative merits of Jack O'Neill and Sam/Daniel (SHUT UP YOU LOT) and making some real and genuine friends. I went to conventions and I had a whale of a time and oh god, I miss it.
And, you see, now I think I know why I miss it but why I don't think I could be as involved as that ever again. Because now, you see, I'm beginning to quietly sort into some social norms. Before you all start yelling at me, just bear with me, okay?
Fandom does, indeed, have a wide and varied amount of people. Depending on how large the fandom is, I've spoken to doctors, lawyers, people who are fairly high up in various companies, stay at home mothers, the unemployed, students, schoolkids, writers, tailors, office jobs, IT technicians, teachers... you name it. And I've spoken to people of all ages. The youngest was an 11 year old, the oldest was hitting her seventies. Every continent bar Antartica is covered, too. On my flist alone, I can think of lots of lovely people from South America, North America, all over Europe, Ausatralasia. I've spoken to people from Hong Kong and from Singapore. There's a wide and varied amount of skills - singers, dancers, musicians, actors, artists, writers, listeners, talkers. Married, single, divorced, polyamorous, mongamous. Male, female. Black, white, all the bits in the middle. Gay, straight, bisexual, undecided, asexual, transgender. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Pastafarian, atheist, Hindu.
All that unites us, really, is whatever we all 'get'. We might like different parts of the fandom, we might like different ships to each other, but we sit on the internet every night - and get this - type our hearts and often our deepest secrets to total strangers. Complete and utter strangers where all we have in common is some fictional characters. Dude, we're united by Elves and Time Lords and fictional Air Force colonels and living spaceships and mutants. Just stop and think about that for a moment. I've met maybe a third of the 102 people on my friends-of list, but all of you know a fairly large amount about me, and to be honest, more than a lot of my friends might do.
And I wouldn't trade a single one of you in for any of it, but I could never, ever be as dedicated as the wee teenage version of me was.
Because, well, all of us fandom peeps? There are, of course, exceptions. You can't make gross exaggerations. I don't mean to insult anyone when I say this. However *deep breath*
We are not normal.
That is obviously for a given standard of, you know, normality. Quite apart from the obvious mildly obsessive parts of our lives, well, the general theme is that there's something a bit off.
Maybe I'm judging by my own standards here. See, I was the most massively fucked up teenager you'd ever find. I've been told I'm older than my years by maybe five years or so, and that's true. The horrible self-introspection and destructive period you're meant to really get into at about, say, 15? Where you write bad poetry and keep a diary and wonder if you have any friends? Yeah, see, I hit that at about eleven (noticeably, around the time I used to make a lot of time for Star Trek: Voyager) and it went downhill from there. I had never looked like normal kids because I had big, fluffy hair and kids are cruel if you look different. I had trouble from day one in making friends and as soon as I hit 11, well, that was about it. There are some years noticeably 12, The Year Before Fandom, and 13, The Year Of Discovery. I don't really remember having any close friends. That's quite depressing, isn't it? I had people I spoke to in school, but nearly every lunchtime was spent apart from other people, just... reading. By that point I was already heavily into fantasy literature, because it was such an escape. I can't describe it, but it was wonderful. I know why people write Mary-Sues, because I used to imagine them every waking moment. (I have entirely different viewpoints about putting them on the internet, though.) I had no real friends in dancing, no real friends in Guides, and I am under no illusion that I was a horrible person at about that point too, because I was as miserable as sin.
I will never rescind the opinion that fandom changed my life and significantly for the better. I was miserable and at a miserable time, I found this amazing community of Stargate fans. They didn't care that I had fuzzy hair, they didn't care that I was painfully aware that I was, um, brighter than most of my classmates (that's a little thing about fandom too; I find that they are generally all very intelligent), they didn't care that I couldn't yet pronounce the sound of 'th' when it was in words like thief and thunder, they just cared that I joined in and wrote some quite dismal fanfiction.
Even though that age was possibly the worst few years of my life (and one of the many reasons I am very much against Catholic schools in general; when I was being bullied to death and becoming worried that I was possibly the only gay person in the world the only solid action ever taken was to tell people that calling people a lesbian as an insult was bad because - get this - 'Catholics shouldn't believe in that sort of thing') it was also the happiest of my life, in terms of fandom. I was deeply outside of normal life in school, but I had a few RL fandom friends and I had e-mail correspondents who I could come home to at the end of the day and talk to and feel normal for a little bit. I got confidence. Do you have any idea how good nice feedback is about your sappy little Sam/Dan story, when people tell you all day what a freak you are?
It eve carried on through college, and then my fandom participation begin to die a little bit. I had to worry about A-Levels, and I had some friends, and I got into going out and drinking a little bit. And then I went to university.
And I am, apparently, a normal student. We have a DocSoc. I drink a lot. I have sort of become a bit hetrosexual and I'm not dealing with being judged for my sexuality on a daily basis. I'm not saying I'm happier now, but now that I have a fall-back option, where society is not constantly ridiculing me, I feel... less dependent on fandom, and I can see its faults. I never want to leave fandom, because then where will the safe place be? We come to depend on these anonymous places, where all that matters is the content of our brains and the fact that we all watch and read and appreciate the same things. And my best friends are in fandom, and still are, and will always be. I'm getting married to a fandom bod. But I've sort of become a bit normal, and I have boring normal things like cooking and cleaning and uni work and wedding planning to distract me.
I see the pattern a lot. I think LJ has highlighted it a bit, you know? I can see that people who don't necessarily fit into complete societal norms are more likely to partipate in fandom. And I am not saying anything against the people who do co-operate a lot, because if societal norms means spitting at people, and chanting 'DYKE, DYKE!' at you down the stairs of a bus, and failing your exams and getting a self-tan and a Brazillian wax, then I reckon I'm well shut of them. To be honest, if I didn't have DocSoc EATING MY BRAIN AND ALSO MY SPARE TIME I think I would participate a lot more, because hell, I am participating, I'm just not online to do it. I'm brave enough to admit my fandom to other people. I'm in the process of finishing something I promised AGES ago for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spockette and there's something quietly forming in the back of my brain that I might put down on paper on the train back home.
But I don't need that crutch quite as much. I will always need it, I think, because I think a small part of me is always going to be this incredibly insecure teenager who got spat on in the corridors and thought that Bilbo Baggins and Kathryn Janeway were some of the most amazing people in the world. I sat around tonight, though, with people I barely knew, in a house I've never been to before, and didn't feel the usual NUMBING FEAR that they were going to judge me, 'cause I didn't care any more. Fandom taught me that, and in a way, taught me how to survive without fandom.
And this might explain the in-fighting, because I think, deep at heart, a lot of us still feel the way high school, or work, or whatever other hellish judgemental thing felt like. So we panic and react with what we know and immediately think that we are BEING JUDGED AND OMFG FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT.
This isn't very coherant, and it wasn't supposed to be so much about me, but I've ended up using me as a case study. I've been pottering around in fandom for HOLY FUCK SEVEN YEARS, so I'm getting near to expert status, surely?
Well, thoughts? (Also, this is my new thinking icon. Spock agrees with me.)
ETA: This is an interesting pointy made bykts2k and I'm adding it for the point of fairness.
Because, man, when I was a teenager and still in high school, fandom was the BEST PLACE EVER. It was full of the MOST AWESOME AND ERUDITE PEOPLE EVER. I devoured fanfiction and all the popular theories and I spent what felt like years of my life sifting through e-mails from Yahoo Mailing Lists about the relative merits of Jack O'Neill and Sam/Daniel (SHUT UP YOU LOT) and making some real and genuine friends. I went to conventions and I had a whale of a time and oh god, I miss it.
And, you see, now I think I know why I miss it but why I don't think I could be as involved as that ever again. Because now, you see, I'm beginning to quietly sort into some social norms. Before you all start yelling at me, just bear with me, okay?
Fandom does, indeed, have a wide and varied amount of people. Depending on how large the fandom is, I've spoken to doctors, lawyers, people who are fairly high up in various companies, stay at home mothers, the unemployed, students, schoolkids, writers, tailors, office jobs, IT technicians, teachers... you name it. And I've spoken to people of all ages. The youngest was an 11 year old, the oldest was hitting her seventies. Every continent bar Antartica is covered, too. On my flist alone, I can think of lots of lovely people from South America, North America, all over Europe, Ausatralasia. I've spoken to people from Hong Kong and from Singapore. There's a wide and varied amount of skills - singers, dancers, musicians, actors, artists, writers, listeners, talkers. Married, single, divorced, polyamorous, mongamous. Male, female. Black, white, all the bits in the middle. Gay, straight, bisexual, undecided, asexual, transgender. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Pastafarian, atheist, Hindu.
All that unites us, really, is whatever we all 'get'. We might like different parts of the fandom, we might like different ships to each other, but we sit on the internet every night - and get this - type our hearts and often our deepest secrets to total strangers. Complete and utter strangers where all we have in common is some fictional characters. Dude, we're united by Elves and Time Lords and fictional Air Force colonels and living spaceships and mutants. Just stop and think about that for a moment. I've met maybe a third of the 102 people on my friends-of list, but all of you know a fairly large amount about me, and to be honest, more than a lot of my friends might do.
And I wouldn't trade a single one of you in for any of it, but I could never, ever be as dedicated as the wee teenage version of me was.
Because, well, all of us fandom peeps? There are, of course, exceptions. You can't make gross exaggerations. I don't mean to insult anyone when I say this. However *deep breath*
We are not normal.
That is obviously for a given standard of, you know, normality. Quite apart from the obvious mildly obsessive parts of our lives, well, the general theme is that there's something a bit off.
Maybe I'm judging by my own standards here. See, I was the most massively fucked up teenager you'd ever find. I've been told I'm older than my years by maybe five years or so, and that's true. The horrible self-introspection and destructive period you're meant to really get into at about, say, 15? Where you write bad poetry and keep a diary and wonder if you have any friends? Yeah, see, I hit that at about eleven (noticeably, around the time I used to make a lot of time for Star Trek: Voyager) and it went downhill from there. I had never looked like normal kids because I had big, fluffy hair and kids are cruel if you look different. I had trouble from day one in making friends and as soon as I hit 11, well, that was about it. There are some years noticeably 12, The Year Before Fandom, and 13, The Year Of Discovery. I don't really remember having any close friends. That's quite depressing, isn't it? I had people I spoke to in school, but nearly every lunchtime was spent apart from other people, just... reading. By that point I was already heavily into fantasy literature, because it was such an escape. I can't describe it, but it was wonderful. I know why people write Mary-Sues, because I used to imagine them every waking moment. (I have entirely different viewpoints about putting them on the internet, though.) I had no real friends in dancing, no real friends in Guides, and I am under no illusion that I was a horrible person at about that point too, because I was as miserable as sin.
I will never rescind the opinion that fandom changed my life and significantly for the better. I was miserable and at a miserable time, I found this amazing community of Stargate fans. They didn't care that I had fuzzy hair, they didn't care that I was painfully aware that I was, um, brighter than most of my classmates (that's a little thing about fandom too; I find that they are generally all very intelligent), they didn't care that I couldn't yet pronounce the sound of 'th' when it was in words like thief and thunder, they just cared that I joined in and wrote some quite dismal fanfiction.
Even though that age was possibly the worst few years of my life (and one of the many reasons I am very much against Catholic schools in general; when I was being bullied to death and becoming worried that I was possibly the only gay person in the world the only solid action ever taken was to tell people that calling people a lesbian as an insult was bad because - get this - 'Catholics shouldn't believe in that sort of thing') it was also the happiest of my life, in terms of fandom. I was deeply outside of normal life in school, but I had a few RL fandom friends and I had e-mail correspondents who I could come home to at the end of the day and talk to and feel normal for a little bit. I got confidence. Do you have any idea how good nice feedback is about your sappy little Sam/Dan story, when people tell you all day what a freak you are?
It eve carried on through college, and then my fandom participation begin to die a little bit. I had to worry about A-Levels, and I had some friends, and I got into going out and drinking a little bit. And then I went to university.
And I am, apparently, a normal student. We have a DocSoc. I drink a lot. I have sort of become a bit hetrosexual and I'm not dealing with being judged for my sexuality on a daily basis. I'm not saying I'm happier now, but now that I have a fall-back option, where society is not constantly ridiculing me, I feel... less dependent on fandom, and I can see its faults. I never want to leave fandom, because then where will the safe place be? We come to depend on these anonymous places, where all that matters is the content of our brains and the fact that we all watch and read and appreciate the same things. And my best friends are in fandom, and still are, and will always be. I'm getting married to a fandom bod. But I've sort of become a bit normal, and I have boring normal things like cooking and cleaning and uni work and wedding planning to distract me.
I see the pattern a lot. I think LJ has highlighted it a bit, you know? I can see that people who don't necessarily fit into complete societal norms are more likely to partipate in fandom. And I am not saying anything against the people who do co-operate a lot, because if societal norms means spitting at people, and chanting 'DYKE, DYKE!' at you down the stairs of a bus, and failing your exams and getting a self-tan and a Brazillian wax, then I reckon I'm well shut of them. To be honest, if I didn't have DocSoc EATING MY BRAIN AND ALSO MY SPARE TIME I think I would participate a lot more, because hell, I am participating, I'm just not online to do it. I'm brave enough to admit my fandom to other people. I'm in the process of finishing something I promised AGES ago for
spockette and there's something quietly forming in the back of my brain that I might put down on paper on the train back home.But I don't need that crutch quite as much. I will always need it, I think, because I think a small part of me is always going to be this incredibly insecure teenager who got spat on in the corridors and thought that Bilbo Baggins and Kathryn Janeway were some of the most amazing people in the world. I sat around tonight, though, with people I barely knew, in a house I've never been to before, and didn't feel the usual NUMBING FEAR that they were going to judge me, 'cause I didn't care any more. Fandom taught me that, and in a way, taught me how to survive without fandom.
And this might explain the in-fighting, because I think, deep at heart, a lot of us still feel the way high school, or work, or whatever other hellish judgemental thing felt like. So we panic and react with what we know and immediately think that we are BEING JUDGED AND OMFG FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT.
This isn't very coherant, and it wasn't supposed to be so much about me, but I've ended up using me as a case study. I've been pottering around in fandom for HOLY FUCK SEVEN YEARS, so I'm getting near to expert status, surely?
Well, thoughts? (Also, this is my new thinking icon. Spock agrees with me.)
ETA: This is an interesting pointy made by
kts2k and I'm adding it for the point of fairness.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-06 08:57 pm (UTC)One bit you wrote really resonated with me -
"I had trouble from day one in making friends and as soon as I hit 11, well, that was about it.........I don't really remember having any close friends. That's quite depressing, isn't it? I had people I spoke to in school, but nearly every lunchtime was spent apart from other people, just... reading"
For me, that lasted until I was almost 17. In my case it was Scissor Sisters and Star Wars fandom that helped me get confidence and self-esteem.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-06 09:17 pm (UTC)It worked for six months, and then he didn't see her for a few years. Afraid she'd finally killed herself, he wrote to her and recieved a reply, that simply said 'Your caring kept me alive, and now I'm strong enough to go on."
So it's been formulating ever since that, I think.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-06 09:10 pm (UTC)It's interesting - very recently two friends of mine left the Billy Boyd fandom after it essentially being their life for a few years. They gave up the website (I tried not to cry...) that had been home to many in that fandom for awhile. In both cases this seemed the result of personal growth in RL (making more friends etc). So I definitely agree with you.
But to be honest, I don't even quite think I'm there yet (unhealthy as it may or may not be). In terms of school, work, and the future, and hobbies - yes. I'm pretty active in RL. But I still feel so much more comfortable meeting people online than in RL. Maybe I've got a phobia of nervous laughter and awkward silences, who knows. Anyway, I've decided time will tell! It may be a bit cavalier of me to take that attitude - perhaps my hero-worshipping tendencies are something I should just quit cold-turkey or something - but as for now I figure let things take their course.
This was interesting, thanks. I've been questioning myself about this for awhile, it's good that this seems to be somewhat of a phenomena on my flist.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-06 09:19 pm (UTC)It's weird to think about.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 01:28 am (UTC)Oooh! *is excited*
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 04:09 am (UTC)I don't really mind being abnormal, though. Fandom is a nice way to connect with other people who share my deeper brain (the one behind the scary hair). But it isn't the end-all, and it's okay to develop some normalish pursuits and personality quirks. Hell, I've had kids and sold out a bit. Nothin to be ashamed of. (Yes, I still think dwarves need nookie, but moving on...)
Hugs.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 12:29 pm (UTC)Seriously, I should do an essay on How Hair Affects Fandom.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 06:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 12:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 11:35 am (UTC)Oh yes. Completely and utterly yes. Or maybe we're normal enough; there are so many of us that perhaps we define our own normality; but we all are/have been very unhappy. But generally oh goodness I agree so much. I think, for me, it's not been so much fandom as LJ itself perhaps. I don't feel quite right about saying I'm in fandom exactly because really all I do is lurk and read; I don't write, I icon very occasionally but never get round to posting them, and I don't vid. But having said that, it is through fandom that I've met such lovely friends; if it hadn't been for DW fandom I'd never have stumbled upon LJ in the first place.
I feel such a fandom n00b, having only really been around just over a year! And I rather wish I'd found it earlier, because I think it would have helped.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 12:31 pm (UTC)I do so love that icon of yours.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 12:58 pm (UTC)Hehe, I hit the bad poetry phase at 9... have been a grumpy old git since lol! Whoah,just realised that's half of my life now!
Also am loving Tau_Sigma's icon <3
Hrmm yeah, we all have our varying coping mechanisms. Crappy poetry and music have been mine since I was a diddy kiddy! Again with the lack of RL friends until say the age of 12; til I could shed all the primary school narks and find a few
like-mindedequally as insane people! But yeah, my closest friends now are the ones I met all of 2months ago - Andy (the bf) and Ben who is now considered as a brother! Without them I'd most likely be going nuts and actually studying :S Anyway, I've gone off on enough of a tangent now to quit babbling!Laters hunny, and thanks for all the years of fandom since Hautbois!!!
xXxXx
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-10 08:01 pm (UTC)As such, what I don't put down here is how much I enjoyed Year 10 and 11 because I had such a good group of friends, and I sort of attribute fandom to managing to do this. I saw you as one of my best friends too! But the brain has a terrible habit of only picking out the crappy stuff and leaving out the fact that for those two years I had a brilliant, solid group of friends that I knew I could rely on and didn't care that I was a weirdo.
I'm going to edit the post to say the above because you're right; I'm not being fair to all the good people I went to high school with.