Adventures in Fandom

Or: How I Spent my Christmas Holidays, by Truepenny

You have to understand, before I start, that I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, and so--while being a passionate sf/f reader from the age of oh, say, five--my only understanding of fandom was a vague association with Trekkies. The people I met in college who went to cons did nothing to dispel this impression, and in fact convinced me that, if they liked cons, I would hate them. And, of course, the people I knew who read/wrote fanfic were exactly the kind of Mary-Sueish losers you would expect under the circumstances. So I developed this attitude--which this post is both an apology for and a retraction of--that fans and fanfic writers were freaks and weirdos, and they only wrote fanfic because they didn't have the imagination to write their own original stories. As an Aspiring Pro, I sneered at them.

(I'm sorry, okay? I said this was an apology.)

Fast forward a few years. When I got an agent, his first piece of advice to me was "You need to go to cons." I quaked in terror (introvert--freak and weirdo own self, but deal very badly with extroverted weirdness), but went.

And fell in love.

I do. I love cons. I don't go to many because, hello, graduate student, flat stony broke most of the damn time. But I love them.

But I sneered still at fanfiction (without ever having read any, mind, except some very bad stuff written by a friend of mine). Plus I was getting a little hung up on the whole ethics & copyright thing, and I wasn't sure it was Okay for an Aspiring Pro to condone the stuff. (I'm still not sure, but I've decided to get over myself and say to hell with it. Enough Real Pros have said they're okay with fanfic (including Joss Whedon and J. K. Rowling) that I don't think my opinion matters to anyone.) Fast forward again to last year, when I fell for BtVS in a big big way. BtVS is the first thing I'd say I've ever really been a fan of, in the particular way that means my correct plural is "fen." And, of course, my best-upstairs-neighbor-friend heres_luck went and got hooked on the whole vidding thing, and my exposure to people who vid and write fic started to increase exponentially. And I started to think, These are smart people. They can't all be wrong.

And so this holiday season, what with illnesses and writers block, I ventured into the Wild Woods of Fanfiction. And discovered some things.

Firstly, there are people out there writing fanfiction who I would read if they decided to put their laundry lists up on the web. I am so not kidding about this.

Secondly, I love slash. It's embarrassing how much I love slash.

Thirdly: RPS squicks me beyond the telling of it. I understand that people who write it are not being stalkerish or anything, but I am still, ineradicably, squicked.

Fourthly, interestingly, I don't need Buffy fanfic. I've read some great stuff, but the show itself is slashy enough--and, really, I'm so damn Spuffy--that I don't need fanfic.

Fifthly, my very brief foray into LotR slash convinces me that I will never be able to find LotR slash that I like. Because, for me, you can't write Tolkien fanfic unless you're writing Tolkien pastiche (except for parody), and if you're writing Tolkien pastiche, you can't write erotica, because there's no there there in Tolkien.

Sixthly: Harry Potter, on the other hand? Baby, I am there. Am disturbing MH greatly by newfound passion for HP slash.

Seventhly (is that even a word?): my OTP is Harry/Draco. Unless A. J. Hall writes a sequel to Lust Over Pendle, in which case it's Draco + Neville 4Ever.

This has been a humbling experience for me, which is why I'm posting about it, instead of letting it stay a guilty secret. Fanfic writers are doing something that I don't wish to do myself (I find it boring to write about characters who aren't mine), but what they're doing is not a waste of time and it does not lack in creativity. And some of them do it so damn well. Some of them do things with their writing that I only wish I could do in mine.

And really, if people can publish "sequels" to GWTW and Rebecca and Pride and Prejudice and somebody's publishing more Amber stories ... *froths briefly at the mouth*

So this is an apology and a confession. I can't sneer at fanfic any more. And I have a fun new obsession.

Tolkien and world-building

The comments to yesterday's post have started to drift from travel narrative to world-building (thanks, kamilaa and heres_luck), so I thought I'd hit the metaphorical carriage return and start a new paragraph.

Tolkien is one of the genre's great masters of world-building. Of course, he was also a crazy genius philologist who devoted his entire damn life to working out all the details of Middle-Earth. Not all people who write fantasy can do this, because we aren't all crazy genius philologists, and really, that's probably for the best.

The issue, then, is how well you create the illusion of that level of obsessive secondary reality. Some authors do it extraordinarily well (Gene Wolfe springs to my mind here); others not so much.

I know I tend to do it by making up weird little historical gothic curlicues; I've also gotten very interested in making my secondary world have secondary worlds of its own (tertiary worlds?), so my characters read romances (Philip Sidney sense, as in precursor of the modern novel, not Harlequins or bodice-rippers. Please!) and attend plays and devour all the poetry they can get their hands on. And I do my best to think things through--thus my moaning about theoretical thaumaturgy several posts ago.

J. K. Rowling does that very badly, btw. Once you start thinking about the Potterverse ... well, the list of inconsistencies and implausibilities and so on and so forth can go on from here to Doomsday.

But that's just my method. I don't have the first fucking clue how other people do it. And I can't tell you why sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't, why some authors' backgrounds just feel like stage scenery and others really do give the impression that you could wander beyond the borders of the page and find the rest of their secondary world waiting for you.

I think part of it, rereading that last sentence, is that the least convincing worlds are the ones that make you feel like you'd really want to live there. Since most fantasies are quasi-medieval, the truth of the matter is no, you really really wouldn't. It's like the difference between Firefly and Star Trek, to refer back to another post. Assuming you weren't Bejoran (sp? too damn long since I was watching DS9) at the wrong time, or you know, a member of one of the Bad Guy races (in which case it's your own fault, isn't it?), the ST universe would be perfectly pleasant to live in. Everything's clean and bright and they can fix most any medical problem you might have. With Firefly, on the other hand, it's pretty clear that--much like our own world--there's a lot more Have Nots than Haves, and most of the world is really pretty damn unpleasant. Same thing with Rowling. Aside from Voldemort, being a wizard is a damn good gig. Thus it's fun but monumentally unconvincing.

Or maybe that's just because I'm a cynical pessimistic bitch. I don't know.

Jackson's The Two Towers

Went to see the movie again this afternoon with heres_luck and MH. Feel insane need to babble about it, so those who abominate the movies, or still need not to be spoiled, ( avert your eyes. )