My Life in Fandom

[mousme]

So sorcerer asked me to talk about my adventures in fandom. How it came to be, and all that.

It's not that interesting a story, alas. Up until 2009, fandom had always been this thing I knew about but never participated in. I knew it was out there, and I had lots of friends in various fandoms. I heard all the horror stories of ship wars and flame wars and plagiarism and scandal, and discreetly patted myself on the back for never getting involved in that sort of craziness.

Fandom was cray, y'all.

And then in 2009 I subscribed to a DVD-renting service (I forget what it's called off the top of my head). I didn't have cable, and my local video store had distressingly little by way of TV shows in stock. This seemed like a great way to watch some older TV shows I'd missed, or to catch up on ones I'd watched casually but had missed episodes. I rented all the CSIs I hadn't watched, and Criminal Minds, and Without A Trace, and all sort of other shows. I happily occupied the later summer months and September of 2009 with that. Then, in October, I thought "Hey, didn't some of my friends tell me Supernatural was a fun show?" So I put it on my list, and the first two DVDs came in the mail a couple of days later.

So... I may have watched the first two DVDs in two days. And because the service was a fast one, I received the rest of Season 1 and the first disc of Season 2 a few days later. When I finished S1 on a major cliffhanger (do we all remember how much Phnee loathes cliffhangers?) I immediately reached for the next disc so I would know what happened next OMG. And then I blitzed through Season 2 and then Season 3, and Season 3 ended on an even WORSE cliffhanger, and... Season 4 wasn't available through the service.

>_<

So I did what any self-respecting junkie would do, and went on Amazon. As it turned out, all four (then) seasons of SPN were on sale! So I bought them all. And then when they came in the mail 48 hours later (I am always impressed with Amazon's turnaround time), I came home from my night shift and thought... I'll just watch the first episode, just to resolve the cliffhanger.

I spent the next 24 hours perched on my sofa, clutching Pan-Pan to my chest (he loved the attention), mostly yelling at the TV screen. "Sam, what are you DOING?" "Oh, God, Dean, bunny, NO!" etc. It was not especially coherent, let me tell you. I think I slept about two hours that day, out of sheer exhaustion, somewhere between episodes 12 and 13. I slept properly after I was done watching the whole season.

So then, because I wasn't yet versed in the ways of the internet, I went off in search of other ways to slake my thirst for more. I found fan fiction on an unrelated writing site. I knew intellectually that fan fiction was a thing. Heck, I knew people who wrote it, like curtana, and whose writing was really awesome. But up until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I could, you know, write my own. Like, in a more serious way (I'd written one, unfinished to this day, Dresden Files story, to explore an idea I'd had). I don't know, I am often clueless about things, anyone who's known me for any length of time likely knows this.

I wrote a short thing, and posted it on that forum. There were lots of SPN fans on the forum, and they apparently liked my story and jumped all over me to write more, so I lengthened it into a full multi-chapter story. I posted it on fanfiction.net, aka The Pit of Voles, where it seemed to be equally well-received (though I was soon to learn that that website is a quagmire, and I haven't posted there in years). Then one of my friends on the forum casually mentioned she ran a fanfic community on LJ (okay, more like bugged me repeatedly until I joined), and that was the end of my non-fannish life.

Suddenly I was hip-deep in the SPN fandom. I was what's called a "gen" writer, i.e. I wrote stories that didn't involve sex at all. At the time, I had no idea that I was in the minority. Why would anyone want to write stories that were only about sex? I wondered naively. (HAH.) I wrote "casefics" (stories which mirrored the structure of the show's episodes: Sam & Dean chase down a bad guy/supernatural creature), and character studies and little one-shots based on prompts by other fans.

I accidentally befriended a couple of BNFs. I say accidentally because I had no idea what a BNF was at the time. Again, I had a vague notion of what it meant to be fandom-famous or infamous, but I only knew about it from other fandoms (like Cassie Claire and msscribe, the latter of whom I was non-fandom friends with for some time without ever knowing who she "really" was), and it hadn't yet occurred to me that the SPN fandom might have BNFs. I actually had no idea how gigantic the SPN fandom was as yet. I just found people whose writing I liked and chatted them up, and they seemed to like me and then ta-daa! LJ friends.

One of the them rec'd a story I wrote, and it was like a hurricane had hit my fandom-only LJ. Whereas I'd had a handful of friends before, suddenly I had fifty, then a hundred. I kept writing, and I discovered the miracles of cross-posting. That got me even more positive attention, and because I am an attention whore, I kept writing.

I should note that my sudden and complete descent into fandom is not entirely surprising. I have a personality that tends towards extremes and perseveration, and these traits are generally at their worst during October-November and January-February, when my SAD tends to get bad as well. I have for a very long time tended to get sucked into whatever my latest obsession is during those times. So SPN came at a time when my subconscious was just itching for something to get compulsive about. It's therefore not out of character for me to have fallen down that particular rabbit hole. It was just a question of the right show with the right people at the right time.

I discovered that I could keep current with TV shows through torrenting/downloading, and that at the time it was still legal to do so (covered under "fair use," though since 2013 it's no longer legal, I don't think). So I got caught up on Season 5 right up to episode 10, which was the last-aired episode. I actually watched episode 11 live along with everyone else in fandom, and while the episode itself was a bit of a disappointment, it was a really cool experience to know that I was part of something that seemed so much bigger than myself.

I found a niche in fandom, writing a very specific genre of story, and the show kept me writing all through the year. After not putting pen to paper since 2006, the year of the Zombie Novel, it was a rush to be able to produce hundreds of thousands of words, and to get essentially instant feedback on it.

Moving into slash fiction was the next logical step, and that's what I did, though I did it by stepping sideways into the Hawaii Five-0 fandom, enticed there by a fellow SPN fan. I started writing fic for a few different fandoms in 2011, about 15% of which was slash. I was already reading slash by then, including the dreaded and taboo Wincest. Yes, shocking, I know. :P The slash I was writing wasn't that, but I was slowly beginning to understand the difference between fiction and exploring boundaries in fictional form, that enjoying something problematic in literature was not necessarily a bad thing so long as you understood that it was problematic and didn't actually want it to happen IRL. Sort of the way I enjoy doing terrible things to characters in my stories, but don't actually wish any of those things to happen to real people. Of course, by then I had also been reading tentacle porn (long story), and finding that it was actually quite enjoyable, under specific circumstances (i.e., not with little girls getting raped), so maybe my judgment was already a little warped. ;)

So, there you have it. That was my two-year descent into all things fandom. From naive gen writer all the way to where I am today, writing all the slash and running fan communities and challenges. I've written well over a million words of fan fiction since then, though the last couple of years I've slowed down production (and last year I barely wrote 150k all year, and nothing for 6 months, which sucks) due to RL getting crazy busy. I also have multiple randoms now, the most recent of which being the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Oh, and to address sorcerer's question: I am not by any stretch of the imagination a BNF. I am semi-infamous in a small corner of fandom, mostly due to one very long fic series I wrote in 2011-2013, known in fandom as the Fusion 'verse. So I have a modest following due to that, which is immensely gratifying. Back in the day I also "made it" into the anonymous commenting community a few times, once by accidentally getting into a Twitter argument about sexism with Jim Beaver, one of the SPN actors. Oops. We were both respectful and we agreed to disagree, but I got dogpiled by fandom for being meeeeeeeaaaaaaannnn to this man who's twice my age and fully capable of speaking for himself. It was actually pretty funny afterward, though not at the time.

And THEN someone anonymously complained that I tweeted too much about my cats. Which mostly made me scratch my head, because my Twitter is public and they could unfollow me anytime they liked. So then I created the #allthecatsallthetime hashtag and spent the next weekend spamming people with cat pictures, because it amused me to do so. The hashtag enjoyed some popularity for quite a long time, too, I am gratified to say.

Conclusion? The SPN fandom is cray, y'all. But it's been a wild ride.

The best part of being in the fandom? It let me reconnect with pdaughter, with whom I then had a standing date every week to watch SPN at her place. We started hanging out on non-SPN days too, then combining grocery shopping and other regular activities, and soon I found there were very few people with whom I wanted to spend time rather than her. And the rest, as they say, is history. <3

Comments

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Now, of course, I'll have to go check out The Pit of Voles and read some of those millions of words of excellent prose. ^_^

And go through my Supernatural DVDs, which I've somehow managed to put off for a long time - why, I don't know. [I did get all the way through SG-1 and Atlantis, though...)

[mousme.livejournal.com]

I haven't posted to fanfiction.net in years. If you really want to delve into the dark world of my fanfic, you'd be better of at AO3. :)

And yes! You should watch SPN! Though for your own sake, stop watching after S5. Seriously.