[babybaby, that's what love is for...]

[reenka]

I dunno if any of you actually know this about me, but, uh, GW was my very first fandom, not HP. I actually don't know what an officially claimable 'fandom' is, though, like, whether you have to participate in it and if you do, do you have to publish publically ('cause I did write some horrid AU fic that I never put up anywhere, way back in '02). Man.

I keep reading little tidbits like granate's latest and just getting my love for it back full-force; even though I flirt with other fandoms and still read the occasional Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan and Buffy/Spike and K/S fic, it's just-- nothing makes me happy in quite the same way 1x2 does. It's just so uncomplicated yet spicy! It's a bit like Sirius/Remus in that way, except without the, um, you know, eventual death and Tonks. ><;;; Just snark, war, comraderie and a sort of complicated-yet-not friendship I just love to sink my teeth into. Mmmm.

I don't think I could like, read angsty conflict-ridden inner-angst pairings all the time without coming home to my beautiful friendship pairings (well, basically just 1x2, 'cause ain't no one writing those novella-length S/R AUs, are they) with those long meaty fics full of slow build-up and teamwork and adventure and smut. Ahhhhh.

I keep seeing people saying they're apathetic about their main fandom (HP, generally) after a year or two or even more, and it makes me feel sort of funny 'cause I get these long periods where I don't read a single fic or write a single word, and with GW the periods are even longer 'cause that's how long it takes for the slow trickle of good 1x2 fic to build up, but-- I always come back to all my favorite universes. I mean, they're my favorites, why would I leave them for good? I'll always love a story or 5, though my standards do rise exponentially the longer I spend reading fic for that 'verse. I just can't read as much GW or HP crackfic as I used to, and the very idea of reading anything less than absolutely stellar Star Trek fic makes me laugh.

But yeah. I've heard people talk of being fandom monogamists or fandom serial monogamists or bigamists or basically fandom butterflies-- and I'm none of those, I guess. Because like, what's the label for someone who loves many different things to different extents at different times? What's the term for being unable to stop being enthusiastic about anything you've loved before, even if you take breaks that last months and even years (which I have)?
    I dunno, it just seems normal to me. I don't need to have anything 'new' left to explore about Heero and Duo, I guess-- I don't need to discuss them, and I don't need to read fic to show me anything I hadn't seen a million times, but. That's not why I read it anyway. I read it to see old friends, to remember how it felt to love them, to hold their hand along the way to them loving each other one more time and wish them well.

One more time into the breach, Duo. And then another, and another, stretching into the horizon. Let your story never end.

Itsudemo. Zutto. Always.
~~

EDIT - Browsing through the outer_hogsmeade lj for HP fanartists doing nonfannish stuff, I've just found fushiafishes's Delirium!Luna fanart and it's all sorts of EUREKA! and WHY DIDN'T I SEE THIS BEFORE??! etc. Now I know why I like her. D'oh!
    Also, her painting of the Trio is So Good. Sort of the way earthworms crawling over the skin of a beautiful corpse is good.

Comments

[toujourspret.livejournal.com]

Haha, GW was my first fandom, too. I made a half-assed attempt at Sailor Moon before that, but it was GW was really the place where I first cut my teeth on the whole concept of fandom. I wrote a whole bunch of crappy songfics and was generally pleased with myself. Some of it's still up, even, through I'd never send people to read it. I eventually moved on to a different anime fandom with the same initials (Here is Greenwood or Koko wa Greenwood, shortened to just "Greenwood" because that was the only part of the title the dubbies and purists could agree on). I was very active there--at any given point, there were perhaps two of us writing, with maybe four writers being a good month. I still remember being horribly flattered when the BNF of that fandom--you see, it could only sustain one at a time--called me her rival. Some of the best fic I've ever read was in that fandom, but it's dead now. The canon is twenty years old now, and though the manga recently came out in English and the OAV was recently put on DVD, it's just not the kind of story modern anime fandom wants to watch anymore (Kazuya falls in love with Sumire, who marries his older brother Kazuhiro. Kazuya gets stress-related ulcers because of trying to hide his love for her, misses the first month of class, almost gets hit by a bus, and finds out that his new roommate at the all-male academy Ryokuto Gakuen is a girl pretending to be a guy pretending to be a girl pretending to be a guy. Well, actually, this is all a joke being put on by his mishievous upperclassmen neighbors who are running a betting pool over how long it will tke Kazuya to find out that his roommate really is male...). It's still one of my favorite manga ever written, though. It's right up there with Tokyo Babylon.

It was right around here that I left anime behind and got involved with Harry Potter fandom. It didn't stick, mostly because I was used to small fandoms where the concept of BNF was out of the question, but also perhaps because LJ hadn't yet become as vital a part of fandom yet and I was too lazy to actually look up all of those sites for fic.

But yes, you should try Greenwood. We'd love you forever, and the fic that there is is good, even if the grand sum of it is about what HP fandom produces in, um, four hours. There's something to be said for the familiarity of a fandom with five people in it ;)

[toujourspret.livejournal.com]

Also? I was totally all for the 3x4. We were all so vanilla back then, appalled by the (in)famous Quatre and the Camel fic, whereas now we don't bat an eye at Dobby/Giant Squid. And remember when people refused to touch 3xCathy because of the barest possibility of incest? Bwah! GW was the perfect fandom to cut your teeth on as a preteen (as long as you never got too close to Madam Hydra, whose stuff still hits all my kinks): sweet, loving sex; romantic relationships; practically canon pairings (you know that surrender scene was a euphemism!); and loads of interesting themes discussed without the need to tempt in the dramallama.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Well, I also read some uh, Fruits Basket & even het Hana Yori Dango fics (ahahah, there were actually a few good ones! all by like, one author), but GW was the first time I found quantity and quality, and got sucked in making link-lists (on pitas.com!) and trying my hand at fanfic and having some awareness of 'fanon', etc, though I wasn't aware of anything about 'fandom' (like, this was before lj fandom for me-- or for most people, so I basically knew nothing about the 'dramallama', ahahah).

I really loved Here is Greenwood like, what, ten years ago when it first came out in the US on tape?? Haha. For me it's just those two really cool tapes I once got. It sort of shocks me to hear it mentioned by people every few months, but it's true I really liked it (ages ago). Hahaha, omg, I totally started out with the dark and dirty of GW (vampire!Heero, S&M!priest!Duo, pretty much the works), but then I was already 24, sad to say -.- Omg I AM SO OLD :(( I don't think I ever really 'got over' anime, I just started reading yaoi manga more than watching... pretty much anything at all ^^;;

[skrawl.livejournal.com]

my first GW fic was "Dangerous Liasons" by Christine (it's on gwaddiction.) So, then I was all like "Wait, 13x2 is squicky? But, nooo..." Though DL isn't that dark, just all her other stuff.