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reenkadunno why i wrote the following (but do know thinking 'bout stuff was inspired by meeting everyone-- well, kind of-- in the armchair list chat). i just wanted to figure out the strangeness of... fandom-as-a-bunch-of-people-i-like. rather than fandom-as-a-bunch-of-authors-i-like. because i'm skittish about feeling attached to anything online whatsoever-- bad past karma-- and yet-- and yet i don't see why i should really fight it. theoretically one could have a balanced existence, and let things happen as they may, and just sort of have a good time & meet people & read fic & relax.
last time i liked a group of individuals this much, was on the poetry channel at irc. some of them i got to know, and some of them i got really attached to, and the ones i got attached to, i got too attached to (well, doesn't help that they were flakey bastards), and the others, i didn't connect with enough, so it was always a sort of half-way friendship that kind of makes one nostalgic over nothing. i get nostalgic and emotionally attached too easily. try to avoid it. try to find a place to belong, then run away when it seems it could almost happen-- well i mean, online-- online doesn't seem like a good place to hang your hat.
so somehow this lent itself to my so-called Fandom History (combing through the not-so-distant past to come to terms with the present). and thus we have my account of
~~
the Summer of Potter: and the Feeding of the Slash Habit
i feel weird, having posted that about falling in love with the fandom...
not sure if it's quite a good thing or a bad thing, for some reason. it's making me consider the whole "fandom history" idea, and thinking of it as a part of my life, and something that's important to me, all of a sudden, rather than just an escape, entertainment, just an obsessive phase-- like it was this past spring with anime & anime-based fanfic.
i come to hp slash with a long history of obsessively being into things-- i get quite excited about one thing or another, for somewhat brief periods of time, that is, usually a few months, and then i have a down period, and then i find something else. it's been this way since the start of my adolescence, probably-- the one constant is that it's been either books or art or music or some use and/or combination of the two. i was in a down period, this past may, having run out of interesting fics to read, or run out of capacity to be surprised, when i found what would've been interesting fics a month before. i just stopped, in the middle of my last star wars fic, and kind of... looked around, dissatisfied.
once again, i needed something new. nothing seemed to be on the horizon for a little bit, and i was slightly disappointed. nothing really appealed-- i'd run out of steam with my bout of watching anime (to return later, of course, i'm sure), and there's only so long you can retread certain themes with characters as basically uncomplex as heero and duo. i was resorting to reading voyager fanfic (*shudder*), not to mention dabbling in things i'd never read the original sources of, like `from eroica with love', or even highlander-- though thank god i never sunk so low as to actually read any sentinel fic. ok i did. *cries*. in those last days of may 2002. i think it was sometime in my heedless surfing for anything whatsoever that seemed interesting. that i discovered harry potter, on the site of some multi-fandom writer, i'm sure. not sure if it was torch or durendal, or... someone else entirely, anymore.
a little background on me & harry potter: i'd heard about the craze, and thrust up my nose of course. i didn't hear anything encouraging about it from actual reviews, and was put off by everyone suddenly "discovering" what was a long-known fact to me and scores of other YA Fantasy novel addicts: stories about boarding schools and britain and wizard boys were almost painfully cool. i did look at a copy of hp:tss that a housemate had laying around, around the winter of 2000, and was horrified at the cliche-ridden, obvious, painfully unimaginative writing. it was painful to read. now, i can read it and enjoy all the references i get, and the world which i'm already in love with (from fanfic), and the characters i'm already in love with (from fanfic). from the books, i'd have never loved any of it. the characters are flat and two-dimensional and i don't get a feel for them at all, and starting off with the dursleys, and "muggles" and horrible in-jokes about how uncool "normal" people are. ugh. cliche riding upon cliche beating another cliche to death with a cliched stick.
anyway.
actually now i kind of enjoy jkr's wittiness and her sorta-snarky!harry and her adorable draco (yes, i actually find canon!draco completely adorable, heh. yeah i have a weak spot for idiot gits, what can i say??)
i fell in love with hp quickly. i devoured fics, in early june '02, like there was no tomorrow. i was amazed at how much more quality writing there was in this fandom than any other i've seen. i'm also biased, because some fandoms, i wouldn't touch with a 30-foot pole, but still. i really enjoyed that quality fantasy-romance-slash was so bountiful. am still amazed at the percentage of goodfic that pervades the hp fandom. i know people complain about the amount of badfic, but you know what? other fandoms, smaller fandoms, are much more mired in boring!fic and average!fic and cliched!fic-- it's not painfully bad, but it's only marginally good. i think like, only two to five writers in the gundam wing fandom could be called "really good". and i've read a lot of fic, and that's a really large fandom. in the star wars: the phantom menace fandom there aren't -any- outstanding writers (except, of course, torch, who is good at everything), really, though the quality is... ok.
i adored the soap-opera multi-chapter epics with a crazed passion. i forgot all about gw very quickly. i was overjoyed that i could audition a harry potter class in the second summer term, and kept getting more and more seduced by (of all the embarrassing things) harry potter merchandise. for some reason, having a plush harry was sounding like a rather spiffy idea-- too bad he wasn't life-sized. too bad he wasn't draco. i was thoroughly (am still, but hey) in love with draco to an embarrassing degree. whereas in the gw fandom i just disliked some pairings and avoided reading them, in hp i became a complete "true believer" and totally lost any trace of self-possession and rationality in my utter devotion to harry & draco. i didn't just "like them as a couple". they took residence in my head. i felt them, i think more than any other romantic couple, ever.
so, sometime in june, i wrote my first fanfic. i'd tried, somewhat, with gundam wing, but it wasn't really happening-- just like with every other shared world i'd ever come across, as real as the characters were to me inside my head, and in a story, i couldn't recreate them. i just... didn't see myself in them i guess. and then suddenly, with hp, it clicked. it's not that i saw myself in harry or draco. it's their interaction that i saw myself in. their love was... eye-opening. transformational. not so much ideal, as painfully true and real (to me). go figure. what i thought i enjoyed in pairings before, was only a pale shadow. that was me enjoying the characters and their interaction, and feeling that, "yes, this is right for them, and it's sexy, too".
this pairing was right for me.
unbelievingly, i started a how-they-got-together epic, in a fandom bursting with just such epics. but it didn't matter-- _i_ wanted to put my own spin on it. i wanted to re-create it. to touch it, to shape it, to get my own fingerprints all over it.. what i ended up writing were a bunch of short vignettes, sort of connected (so far). but i've not given up. the epic could still happen, heh. i was kind of doodling before, too, with gundam wing, but my attempts to draw harry and draco were much more passionate (though they only came in bursts, i still really cared about getting them "right" somehow).
anyway. it just kept building and building, but i was still basically stuck in my head, loving fic, having a grand old time, but this still isn't a "fandom history" of any sort because i wasn't in the fandom, not really. unless you could have a fandom of one. i felt i kind of knew the authors, in the usual way-- i feel the author through their writing, if i bond with the writing deeply enough. like with my other net obsessions, i was putting up a lot of fic-links on my pitas page, and strangely, was inserting little commentaries and rants about fic issues, too-- and the page was growing longer and longer, and i was feeling sillier and sillier, because after all, who cares? i was only doing the link-posting for my own reference, it's not like i needed to tell myself what i thought about it all in any depth, really.
so-- i found i wanted to speak. i wanted to actually analyze and think about and have a "relationship" with the stories, and the characters, and with all the bits of fanon bouncing around in my head and elsewhere. i knew of livejournal from my past experiences with people i grew to know on the irc poetry channel, my one other significant online community experience, and i knew![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ivyblossom had one, from her fic site. i realized i wanted to know what people thought of my takes on all these fic-related things. after all, i was pretty sure i had a potential audience. i didn't really care, then, anyway, about people reading my fics-- but rants kind of inherently live for responses. so, early july, i got a livejournal (paid, since i didn't know anyone, really, or was pretty sure they didn't know me, regardless).
and so that's how i joined my first actual fandom. i'd been a fan for ages-- i'm always a fan of anything i come across, and adore. but i'm a solitary person, partly by inclination, partly by inability to figure out what exactly i need to be doing differently, to attract attention. at first, i was just reading ivy's friends page and slightly commenting on her journal, trying not to seem like a stalker, too much. i added my two favorite (and easily findable) slash authors to my friends list, sat back, and let my rants and squees come as they may. i'm always surprised at how talkative i am, considering how embarrassing i find it to have any attention drawn to the fact that i'm speaking, in public at least. regardless, i started spamming people's lj's with commentary (not too much, i don't think... just... at all). i also joined several livejournal communities, fandom related, though none that were very active or inspired me to be active in them, at least. so i guess... after some weeks... people began to know who i am, slightly. and to comment back...! too amazing.
for the longest time-- even into august-- i was still assuming that this'll just burn out, when i run out of fics to read. i was patiently waiting to just finish with all the goodfic, so this crazed manic fangirl feeling would finally fade. usually i want to stretch it out, and enjoy the good vibrations, but this was just a little too intense. especially since it was summer and not much else was going on. i truly worshipped some of the writers in the fandom-- a number of them, in fact. and i wasn't disillusioned by following their ljs or anything. i was vicariously basking in this newfound sense of community-- and that's definitely a new thing for me. as much fic as i've read elsewhere, as as much as i knew loads of fans existed, and i even joined some mailing lists to prove it-- it just wasn't clicking, before. i was still mostly watching from afar, somewhat curiously, but not investigating to much below the surface.
i'd joined a number of mailing lists on yahoo, not just with harry potter, but with several of my fandoms. the difference here was, i actually put several of them on the "send email" option-- and i found it worthwhile and interesting. it only took a week or two, and i wasn't even a lurker (another embarrassing thing). i'm so much of a lurker, i barely even read most of the lists i'd ever been on. it's just-- i usually speak up when i have something to say, and also when i feel comfortable, like i'm among like-minded people, friends even. and i was definitely getting that impression... more and more, i was getting about as interested in the people populating the hp slash community as in their fics, which is pretty much unheard of for me.
people in the fandom whom i didn't know were adding me to their friends list-- not like, a lot-- but a tiny, steady trickle. people were commenting on the extremely t00by things i said with more and more regularity. it used to be, just a month ago, that i was shocked if someone replied to a post i made-- now it's just a really pleasant surprise, but not really something to make me stand back in total amazement. the focus, towards the end of august, was still reading fics, though, and more than half of my posts were sort of roundabout fic-reviews. initially i was going to post cookies or snippets from the fics i was working on, but i realized i probably get equal or greater chance of a response if i sent them to ff.net or fiction alley.
i did get a small but pleasant trickle of reviews, moreso at fiction alley, but not enough to motivate me to write gobs and gobs or anything. of course if i needed reviews to motivate me i'd never have written at all, because even my own mother pretty much has very little interest in reading my stories.
i was now worried that i was running out of goodfic to read, and my honeymoon was over, because it's not like i could imagine myself hanging around (what would i do, if wasn't in love with reading fic?). thankfully, i then expanded my horizon and saw the gobs of fic i've left out of my lists, enough to last me for months to come. all this, acclaimed, good fics by well-known writers in the fandom, too. i didn't know whether to be happy or afraid. mostly happy, though.
around the end of august or maybe the beginning of september, having an excuse to talk to ivy because of her post saying to message her if anyone wanted a link to her original fic, i got a new "fandom" account on aim. i'm still pretty traumatized from previous chatting experiences eating up my life, so i didn't exactly jump head-first into chatting or anything, but it's a weird experience, it changes something, it seems, after you've actually -talked- to people in real time. having posted this new handle in livejournal, i was pretty surprised that anyone noticed, and in fact wanted to talk to me. it was showing signs of becoming more of a circle of people i admire and enjoy talking to and enjoy the words of, in general, of course-- than a "fandom", that vague entity whose behavior and quirks i'd analyzed from afar. those quirks were quietly mingling with my own quirks, and i didn't even see it happen. i actually began to care and think about such things as "image" and "fame". i realized i wanted to mingle, a completely alien and scary concept. but it was true-- i was so enjoying the small bits of contact i was beginning to expect.
no, i lie. not just, "expect". very very quickly i became completely obsessed with the whole "yeay, people notice me!" thing and the more i got, the more i wanted, until it seemed like my day just wasn't complete if i didn't get feedback from some direction-- either a new review or a comment, or maybe someone added me to their friends list. it was really becoming a definite buzz, not just from the my own reading but also from others reading me, which was-- new & different.
i was no longer "just" a fangirl. oh, i still largely am, but i think i advanced to the next level of quasi-maturity-- if there such a thing, in a fandom, which is just inherently immature by nature (fandom? yeech. i avoid mass obsessions like the plague-- soon i'll be visiting cons and wearing plastic ears and using words like t00b and ship and squick... oh, wait....) i still was moving slowly, a barely-there blip on the radar, if such a thing existed, but i was moving, and it was mostly deeper into the fandom. i was getting more and more comfortable-- almost familiar with some of the regulars, and not even all that shocked by it. it came gradually but surely. i wanted to be a "member" so to speak. and of what, even? but there was definitely an established community, and i was definitely still starry-eyed with admiration and with the thought that i was even remotely being accepted and/or noticed therein. and even more suprising, i just wanted to get to know the people better, not really be a "part" of some mass project-- the fandom was really just a bunch of individuals, the great majority of whom i found (and find) brilliant and fascinating to watch & talk to. i was almost certainly getting further and further away from imagining my predictable half-life kicking in, where i watch and lurk and get bored, having read all the goodfic, and fade away. lurking is no fun, because after all, then you wouldn't be able to do more than gawk at all the brilliant people. feedback... more and more, i found i liked giving feedback, and that alone was kicking me out of complete obscurity in lurkerdom.
i suppose another turning point came the last week of august, after there was a complaint on the veela-inc mailing list about the lack of reviews this one person got, and how it made them want to quit, and how only the well-known authors got any reviews on ff.net. so without even thinking twice, i volunteered my suggestion about a livejournal community where everyone would get reviewed by everyone else. ah, utopianists strike again. i was completely dumbfounded when people actually joined. two weeks, and by the end of them, thirty people, even if they only five of them really participate, and i myself didn't exactly set the best example. still, i felt semi-useful now, and several of the people there started calling me `boss' just to tease me. i suppose this could be viewed as "giving back to the fandom" if i was inclined to think in those kinds of ridiculous terms. but it was definitely an indicator that the feedback and communal aspect of the fandom was becoming as important as that stuff you don't need the fandom for, like reading and writing. i have noticed that i now review every story i enjoy reading (outside of the community that is), unless i'm a bit shy about commenting because it's a new person.
lately, real life has become more noticeable. it was really brought home to me, by the real-time chat that went on today, the 8th of september, on the armchair slash mailing list. i have quite a bit of experience with chatting in an irc-type setting. i'm well aware of the sense of fun and community that could be created. still, i was surprised at the level of intelligence yet light-heartedness that existed. especially getting to hear people's voices-- gives one completely ridiculous ideas about actually talking to people or meeting them or getting to know them. ridiculous, because i've pretty much gotten disillusioned with online relationships, of the normal friendly kind that is. for someone who is severely lacking in like-minded companionship in real life, that sort of thing can be addictive, and ultimately painful.
finally got to the point where i'd become worried that maybe the fandom is too alluring, too easy to see as a substitute for some sort of real-life sense of community. it's an illusive thing, since, while you get the feeling of like-mindedness and comraderie, and the possibilities of real connections, i'd known better than to think net-based communities and relationships actually brought the fulfillment of real-life ones for years now. i now find it somewhat alarming that i should want to get to know people with such in sincere, excited sort of way, all the people i most admire especially. where can i be really coming from? when did my quiet (though often fangirlish) enjoyment of peoples' fic turn into this tentative, but pleased, seeing of them as actual semi-normal people, who, while god-like in the fic-writing aspect, weren't all that different from me otherwise?
it's really a wonder what hearing peoples' voices will do towards one's perception of them as real human beings-- and that is to say, it really goes a long way.
even as i heard them, i couldn't help thinking how it could very well be the first and only time, and that made me sad. i would miss the (admittedly, kind of remote) possibility of getting to know all my objects of worship, if it was gone.
in the end, i realize that my mind kind of hurts thinking about the pros and cons of it all (or it could be just that i'm sleepy), and so i decide to go read irresistible poison and snitch! (again). yeah, that's it.
last time i liked a group of individuals this much, was on the poetry channel at irc. some of them i got to know, and some of them i got really attached to, and the ones i got attached to, i got too attached to (well, doesn't help that they were flakey bastards), and the others, i didn't connect with enough, so it was always a sort of half-way friendship that kind of makes one nostalgic over nothing. i get nostalgic and emotionally attached too easily. try to avoid it. try to find a place to belong, then run away when it seems it could almost happen-- well i mean, online-- online doesn't seem like a good place to hang your hat.
so somehow this lent itself to my so-called Fandom History (combing through the not-so-distant past to come to terms with the present). and thus we have my account of
~~
the Summer of Potter: and the Feeding of the Slash Habit
i feel weird, having posted that about falling in love with the fandom...
not sure if it's quite a good thing or a bad thing, for some reason. it's making me consider the whole "fandom history" idea, and thinking of it as a part of my life, and something that's important to me, all of a sudden, rather than just an escape, entertainment, just an obsessive phase-- like it was this past spring with anime & anime-based fanfic.
i come to hp slash with a long history of obsessively being into things-- i get quite excited about one thing or another, for somewhat brief periods of time, that is, usually a few months, and then i have a down period, and then i find something else. it's been this way since the start of my adolescence, probably-- the one constant is that it's been either books or art or music or some use and/or combination of the two. i was in a down period, this past may, having run out of interesting fics to read, or run out of capacity to be surprised, when i found what would've been interesting fics a month before. i just stopped, in the middle of my last star wars fic, and kind of... looked around, dissatisfied.
once again, i needed something new. nothing seemed to be on the horizon for a little bit, and i was slightly disappointed. nothing really appealed-- i'd run out of steam with my bout of watching anime (to return later, of course, i'm sure), and there's only so long you can retread certain themes with characters as basically uncomplex as heero and duo. i was resorting to reading voyager fanfic (*shudder*), not to mention dabbling in things i'd never read the original sources of, like `from eroica with love', or even highlander-- though thank god i never sunk so low as to actually read any sentinel fic. ok i did. *cries*. in those last days of may 2002. i think it was sometime in my heedless surfing for anything whatsoever that seemed interesting. that i discovered harry potter, on the site of some multi-fandom writer, i'm sure. not sure if it was torch or durendal, or... someone else entirely, anymore.
a little background on me & harry potter: i'd heard about the craze, and thrust up my nose of course. i didn't hear anything encouraging about it from actual reviews, and was put off by everyone suddenly "discovering" what was a long-known fact to me and scores of other YA Fantasy novel addicts: stories about boarding schools and britain and wizard boys were almost painfully cool. i did look at a copy of hp:tss that a housemate had laying around, around the winter of 2000, and was horrified at the cliche-ridden, obvious, painfully unimaginative writing. it was painful to read. now, i can read it and enjoy all the references i get, and the world which i'm already in love with (from fanfic), and the characters i'm already in love with (from fanfic). from the books, i'd have never loved any of it. the characters are flat and two-dimensional and i don't get a feel for them at all, and starting off with the dursleys, and "muggles" and horrible in-jokes about how uncool "normal" people are. ugh. cliche riding upon cliche beating another cliche to death with a cliched stick.
anyway.
actually now i kind of enjoy jkr's wittiness and her sorta-snarky!harry and her adorable draco (yes, i actually find canon!draco completely adorable, heh. yeah i have a weak spot for idiot gits, what can i say??)
i fell in love with hp quickly. i devoured fics, in early june '02, like there was no tomorrow. i was amazed at how much more quality writing there was in this fandom than any other i've seen. i'm also biased, because some fandoms, i wouldn't touch with a 30-foot pole, but still. i really enjoyed that quality fantasy-romance-slash was so bountiful. am still amazed at the percentage of goodfic that pervades the hp fandom. i know people complain about the amount of badfic, but you know what? other fandoms, smaller fandoms, are much more mired in boring!fic and average!fic and cliched!fic-- it's not painfully bad, but it's only marginally good. i think like, only two to five writers in the gundam wing fandom could be called "really good". and i've read a lot of fic, and that's a really large fandom. in the star wars: the phantom menace fandom there aren't -any- outstanding writers (except, of course, torch, who is good at everything), really, though the quality is... ok.
i adored the soap-opera multi-chapter epics with a crazed passion. i forgot all about gw very quickly. i was overjoyed that i could audition a harry potter class in the second summer term, and kept getting more and more seduced by (of all the embarrassing things) harry potter merchandise. for some reason, having a plush harry was sounding like a rather spiffy idea-- too bad he wasn't life-sized. too bad he wasn't draco. i was thoroughly (am still, but hey) in love with draco to an embarrassing degree. whereas in the gw fandom i just disliked some pairings and avoided reading them, in hp i became a complete "true believer" and totally lost any trace of self-possession and rationality in my utter devotion to harry & draco. i didn't just "like them as a couple". they took residence in my head. i felt them, i think more than any other romantic couple, ever.
so, sometime in june, i wrote my first fanfic. i'd tried, somewhat, with gundam wing, but it wasn't really happening-- just like with every other shared world i'd ever come across, as real as the characters were to me inside my head, and in a story, i couldn't recreate them. i just... didn't see myself in them i guess. and then suddenly, with hp, it clicked. it's not that i saw myself in harry or draco. it's their interaction that i saw myself in. their love was... eye-opening. transformational. not so much ideal, as painfully true and real (to me). go figure. what i thought i enjoyed in pairings before, was only a pale shadow. that was me enjoying the characters and their interaction, and feeling that, "yes, this is right for them, and it's sexy, too".
this pairing was right for me.
unbelievingly, i started a how-they-got-together epic, in a fandom bursting with just such epics. but it didn't matter-- _i_ wanted to put my own spin on it. i wanted to re-create it. to touch it, to shape it, to get my own fingerprints all over it.. what i ended up writing were a bunch of short vignettes, sort of connected (so far). but i've not given up. the epic could still happen, heh. i was kind of doodling before, too, with gundam wing, but my attempts to draw harry and draco were much more passionate (though they only came in bursts, i still really cared about getting them "right" somehow).
anyway. it just kept building and building, but i was still basically stuck in my head, loving fic, having a grand old time, but this still isn't a "fandom history" of any sort because i wasn't in the fandom, not really. unless you could have a fandom of one. i felt i kind of knew the authors, in the usual way-- i feel the author through their writing, if i bond with the writing deeply enough. like with my other net obsessions, i was putting up a lot of fic-links on my pitas page, and strangely, was inserting little commentaries and rants about fic issues, too-- and the page was growing longer and longer, and i was feeling sillier and sillier, because after all, who cares? i was only doing the link-posting for my own reference, it's not like i needed to tell myself what i thought about it all in any depth, really.
so-- i found i wanted to speak. i wanted to actually analyze and think about and have a "relationship" with the stories, and the characters, and with all the bits of fanon bouncing around in my head and elsewhere. i knew of livejournal from my past experiences with people i grew to know on the irc poetry channel, my one other significant online community experience, and i knew
ivyblossom had one, from her fic site. i realized i wanted to know what people thought of my takes on all these fic-related things. after all, i was pretty sure i had a potential audience. i didn't really care, then, anyway, about people reading my fics-- but rants kind of inherently live for responses. so, early july, i got a livejournal (paid, since i didn't know anyone, really, or was pretty sure they didn't know me, regardless).and so that's how i joined my first actual fandom. i'd been a fan for ages-- i'm always a fan of anything i come across, and adore. but i'm a solitary person, partly by inclination, partly by inability to figure out what exactly i need to be doing differently, to attract attention. at first, i was just reading ivy's friends page and slightly commenting on her journal, trying not to seem like a stalker, too much. i added my two favorite (and easily findable) slash authors to my friends list, sat back, and let my rants and squees come as they may. i'm always surprised at how talkative i am, considering how embarrassing i find it to have any attention drawn to the fact that i'm speaking, in public at least. regardless, i started spamming people's lj's with commentary (not too much, i don't think... just... at all). i also joined several livejournal communities, fandom related, though none that were very active or inspired me to be active in them, at least. so i guess... after some weeks... people began to know who i am, slightly. and to comment back...! too amazing.
for the longest time-- even into august-- i was still assuming that this'll just burn out, when i run out of fics to read. i was patiently waiting to just finish with all the goodfic, so this crazed manic fangirl feeling would finally fade. usually i want to stretch it out, and enjoy the good vibrations, but this was just a little too intense. especially since it was summer and not much else was going on. i truly worshipped some of the writers in the fandom-- a number of them, in fact. and i wasn't disillusioned by following their ljs or anything. i was vicariously basking in this newfound sense of community-- and that's definitely a new thing for me. as much fic as i've read elsewhere, as as much as i knew loads of fans existed, and i even joined some mailing lists to prove it-- it just wasn't clicking, before. i was still mostly watching from afar, somewhat curiously, but not investigating to much below the surface.
i'd joined a number of mailing lists on yahoo, not just with harry potter, but with several of my fandoms. the difference here was, i actually put several of them on the "send email" option-- and i found it worthwhile and interesting. it only took a week or two, and i wasn't even a lurker (another embarrassing thing). i'm so much of a lurker, i barely even read most of the lists i'd ever been on. it's just-- i usually speak up when i have something to say, and also when i feel comfortable, like i'm among like-minded people, friends even. and i was definitely getting that impression... more and more, i was getting about as interested in the people populating the hp slash community as in their fics, which is pretty much unheard of for me.
people in the fandom whom i didn't know were adding me to their friends list-- not like, a lot-- but a tiny, steady trickle. people were commenting on the extremely t00by things i said with more and more regularity. it used to be, just a month ago, that i was shocked if someone replied to a post i made-- now it's just a really pleasant surprise, but not really something to make me stand back in total amazement. the focus, towards the end of august, was still reading fics, though, and more than half of my posts were sort of roundabout fic-reviews. initially i was going to post cookies or snippets from the fics i was working on, but i realized i probably get equal or greater chance of a response if i sent them to ff.net or fiction alley.
i did get a small but pleasant trickle of reviews, moreso at fiction alley, but not enough to motivate me to write gobs and gobs or anything. of course if i needed reviews to motivate me i'd never have written at all, because even my own mother pretty much has very little interest in reading my stories.
i was now worried that i was running out of goodfic to read, and my honeymoon was over, because it's not like i could imagine myself hanging around (what would i do, if wasn't in love with reading fic?). thankfully, i then expanded my horizon and saw the gobs of fic i've left out of my lists, enough to last me for months to come. all this, acclaimed, good fics by well-known writers in the fandom, too. i didn't know whether to be happy or afraid. mostly happy, though.
around the end of august or maybe the beginning of september, having an excuse to talk to ivy because of her post saying to message her if anyone wanted a link to her original fic, i got a new "fandom" account on aim. i'm still pretty traumatized from previous chatting experiences eating up my life, so i didn't exactly jump head-first into chatting or anything, but it's a weird experience, it changes something, it seems, after you've actually -talked- to people in real time. having posted this new handle in livejournal, i was pretty surprised that anyone noticed, and in fact wanted to talk to me. it was showing signs of becoming more of a circle of people i admire and enjoy talking to and enjoy the words of, in general, of course-- than a "fandom", that vague entity whose behavior and quirks i'd analyzed from afar. those quirks were quietly mingling with my own quirks, and i didn't even see it happen. i actually began to care and think about such things as "image" and "fame". i realized i wanted to mingle, a completely alien and scary concept. but it was true-- i was so enjoying the small bits of contact i was beginning to expect.
no, i lie. not just, "expect". very very quickly i became completely obsessed with the whole "yeay, people notice me!" thing and the more i got, the more i wanted, until it seemed like my day just wasn't complete if i didn't get feedback from some direction-- either a new review or a comment, or maybe someone added me to their friends list. it was really becoming a definite buzz, not just from the my own reading but also from others reading me, which was-- new & different.
i was no longer "just" a fangirl. oh, i still largely am, but i think i advanced to the next level of quasi-maturity-- if there such a thing, in a fandom, which is just inherently immature by nature (fandom? yeech. i avoid mass obsessions like the plague-- soon i'll be visiting cons and wearing plastic ears and using words like t00b and ship and squick... oh, wait....) i still was moving slowly, a barely-there blip on the radar, if such a thing existed, but i was moving, and it was mostly deeper into the fandom. i was getting more and more comfortable-- almost familiar with some of the regulars, and not even all that shocked by it. it came gradually but surely. i wanted to be a "member" so to speak. and of what, even? but there was definitely an established community, and i was definitely still starry-eyed with admiration and with the thought that i was even remotely being accepted and/or noticed therein. and even more suprising, i just wanted to get to know the people better, not really be a "part" of some mass project-- the fandom was really just a bunch of individuals, the great majority of whom i found (and find) brilliant and fascinating to watch & talk to. i was almost certainly getting further and further away from imagining my predictable half-life kicking in, where i watch and lurk and get bored, having read all the goodfic, and fade away. lurking is no fun, because after all, then you wouldn't be able to do more than gawk at all the brilliant people. feedback... more and more, i found i liked giving feedback, and that alone was kicking me out of complete obscurity in lurkerdom.
i suppose another turning point came the last week of august, after there was a complaint on the veela-inc mailing list about the lack of reviews this one person got, and how it made them want to quit, and how only the well-known authors got any reviews on ff.net. so without even thinking twice, i volunteered my suggestion about a livejournal community where everyone would get reviewed by everyone else. ah, utopianists strike again. i was completely dumbfounded when people actually joined. two weeks, and by the end of them, thirty people, even if they only five of them really participate, and i myself didn't exactly set the best example. still, i felt semi-useful now, and several of the people there started calling me `boss' just to tease me. i suppose this could be viewed as "giving back to the fandom" if i was inclined to think in those kinds of ridiculous terms. but it was definitely an indicator that the feedback and communal aspect of the fandom was becoming as important as that stuff you don't need the fandom for, like reading and writing. i have noticed that i now review every story i enjoy reading (outside of the community that is), unless i'm a bit shy about commenting because it's a new person.
lately, real life has become more noticeable. it was really brought home to me, by the real-time chat that went on today, the 8th of september, on the armchair slash mailing list. i have quite a bit of experience with chatting in an irc-type setting. i'm well aware of the sense of fun and community that could be created. still, i was surprised at the level of intelligence yet light-heartedness that existed. especially getting to hear people's voices-- gives one completely ridiculous ideas about actually talking to people or meeting them or getting to know them. ridiculous, because i've pretty much gotten disillusioned with online relationships, of the normal friendly kind that is. for someone who is severely lacking in like-minded companionship in real life, that sort of thing can be addictive, and ultimately painful.
finally got to the point where i'd become worried that maybe the fandom is too alluring, too easy to see as a substitute for some sort of real-life sense of community. it's an illusive thing, since, while you get the feeling of like-mindedness and comraderie, and the possibilities of real connections, i'd known better than to think net-based communities and relationships actually brought the fulfillment of real-life ones for years now. i now find it somewhat alarming that i should want to get to know people with such in sincere, excited sort of way, all the people i most admire especially. where can i be really coming from? when did my quiet (though often fangirlish) enjoyment of peoples' fic turn into this tentative, but pleased, seeing of them as actual semi-normal people, who, while god-like in the fic-writing aspect, weren't all that different from me otherwise?
it's really a wonder what hearing peoples' voices will do towards one's perception of them as real human beings-- and that is to say, it really goes a long way.
even as i heard them, i couldn't help thinking how it could very well be the first and only time, and that made me sad. i would miss the (admittedly, kind of remote) possibility of getting to know all my objects of worship, if it was gone.
in the end, i realize that my mind kind of hurts thinking about the pros and cons of it all (or it could be just that i'm sleepy), and so i decide to go read irresistible poison and snitch! (again). yeah, that's it.
