the sun and the moon and the stars

December 15: First fandom? Or first fannish thing you shared? (from st_aurafina)

This one's actually really hard for me to answer, because I'm having trouble defining "fandom". :)

I was personally fannish about stuff I loved from a young age - I remember competing with Dad on Middle-Earth trivia as a pre-teen, for example - but I didn't have many peers to be fannish with, and I didn't have the kind of aspirations that would have seen me coming up with self-insert fannish fantasies by myself (which seems to be the other common path into fandom).

[The first things I was solo-fannish about: Star Wars, LotR, Star Trek, Anne McCaffrey's various early works, and Julian May's Pliocene & Galactic Milieu series.]

And then came the internet (I'm in my late 30s, so my first access to the internet was via my father's academic staff access in my late teens, and then from my own University shortly thereafter). I found newsgroups for things I loved, of course, but for various reasons I never really got involved.

Blogging, actually, was what got me into fandom. I knew cupiscent from an Aussie blogging group, and followed her on LJ when she mentioned it, and she was writing in and talking about X-Men Movieverse fandom at the time. And, obviously, reccing the other good stuff she came across.

This was a revelation to me; I'd never encountered people who engaged with their fannish loves like this before. I was hooked. I loved the "what if?" nature of fanfic, the way you could pose interesting questions about characters and settings. I hadn't been fannish myself about the movie (although I'd enjoyed it a lot) until this point, but the fandom made me a fan.

So, honestly, I'd have to say X-Men Movieverse was my first fandom, in the mainstream sense, although I was fannish about a lot of other things before that. (Mostly sf/f books/movies/TV, unsurprisingly.)

In many ways, that set the tone for my engagement with fandom: with a few exceptions, I've generally entered a fandom because of the fandom, not because of the source material. Provided I know the source material well enough to understand what's going on, I'm much more likely to follow a fandom based on the kinds of fanworks you can find there - the popular fanons, the kinds of stories people like to tell, et cetera - rather than my own engagement with the source.

[The biggest exception: Avengers/MCU fandom, where I'm just as engaged with and excited by the source material as I am by the fandom.]

This is largely because I'm mostly a fannish consumer rather than producer, though, and in that light it feels more understandable. And, too, the fandoms in which I've produced fanworks (or in the case of vids, half-produced some which now languish unfinished on various hard drives) don't have substantial overlap with the fandoms I consume most avidly.

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List of questions/days for the talking meme; prompt away!