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brightknightie) wrote2016-02-20 12:23 pm
brightknightie) wrote2016-02-20 12:23 pm
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Fandom Snowflake Challenge 2016 #12
#12. Discuss what makes you fannish.
I love stories, and media fandom is story-love shared. It's the black-sheep, back-alley cousin of humanities academia. We tell and retell stories, and deconstruct and reassemble what stories mean for us as individuals and our culture as a whole, with certain broadly common values of enthusiasm, loyalty, creativity and compassion.
That probably covers "fannish" as an intrinsic inclination. :-) But I'll say a few more words about what makes the inclination manifest in different ways in my life.
With most stories — including dearly loved, highly respected stories — I'm content as a reader or viewer. I don't cross from devoted audience to fan-creator. I'm always happy to discuss them, but I rarely seek out discussions about them. Because I live in fandom, I'll enjoy fanfiction or fanart for them when a friend recommends it, and I may even create fannishly in them for someone else, but the engagement is different. I may own every version ever released, and may rush to the bookstore, comics shop, movie theater or broadcast network for each new installment, but that's enough. That's all I need.
The key difference between two otherwise similar stories that I cherish, where one drives me to full, interactive fannish engagement and one doesn't, seems to be... incompleteness. Something missing or mistaken. Ending too soon, or ending wrong. Not answering its own questions, or answering them wrongly. A story discovered out of sequence, with no access to the other components for a very long time, maybe ever, enough time for bridges to build across my imagination.
What inspires me to my own deepest fannish engagements isn't specific genres or tropes, actors or writers.
I think that it's something about the feeling that the story needs us.
I love stories, and media fandom is story-love shared. It's the black-sheep, back-alley cousin of humanities academia. We tell and retell stories, and deconstruct and reassemble what stories mean for us as individuals and our culture as a whole, with certain broadly common values of enthusiasm, loyalty, creativity and compassion.
That probably covers "fannish" as an intrinsic inclination. :-) But I'll say a few more words about what makes the inclination manifest in different ways in my life.
With most stories — including dearly loved, highly respected stories — I'm content as a reader or viewer. I don't cross from devoted audience to fan-creator. I'm always happy to discuss them, but I rarely seek out discussions about them. Because I live in fandom, I'll enjoy fanfiction or fanart for them when a friend recommends it, and I may even create fannishly in them for someone else, but the engagement is different. I may own every version ever released, and may rush to the bookstore, comics shop, movie theater or broadcast network for each new installment, but that's enough. That's all I need.
The key difference between two otherwise similar stories that I cherish, where one drives me to full, interactive fannish engagement and one doesn't, seems to be... incompleteness. Something missing or mistaken. Ending too soon, or ending wrong. Not answering its own questions, or answering them wrongly. A story discovered out of sequence, with no access to the other components for a very long time, maybe ever, enough time for bridges to build across my imagination.
What inspires me to my own deepest fannish engagements isn't specific genres or tropes, actors or writers.
I think that it's something about the feeling that the story needs us.
no subject
Like many of us attracted to sci-fi/fantasy type shows, I find that "my shows" are often the ones canceled abruptly or before their stories have been told. I also find that I'm most usually attracted to the secondary characters, or even background, characters of a show--the ones whose stories are limited by structural necessity or who get the short shrift because the story's focus is on the hero.
Third, for me, is that I need a sense that the world is bigger than "our characters." I remember finishing the first season of Buffy and wondering what the writers could possibly do for a second season since the story was over.
While I am attracted to genres and tropes, I need them in combination with the above to make me fannish.
I like your idea that the story needs us: to fix it where it went wrong, to explore complexities that were hinted at/glossed over, to finish telling it.
no subject
:D
I like this description.
I'm very much the same way as you when it comes to what drives me to full interactive fannish engagement: incomplete stories, bad/wrong endings, unanswered questions, lack of canon continuity that's just begging to be fixed, etc. etc. You summed it up perfectly as 'the feeling that the story needs us.' Yep.
no subject
"Ending too soon": yes, I think that has a lot to do with it. (Certainly for Forever Knight!) Or some possibility that was never explored. I think of things that I was fannish about as a kid, long before I ever heard of Fandom (let alone went on line); and a lot of the stories I told myself as I lay in bed or walked to school were based on exploring/expanding aspects of the world that the author barely touched on.