argentum_ls | Snowflake Challenge #2: Fannish History (Reply)

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

Some of my fannish history was previously explained a few months ago for the Sunshine Challenge. In that, I talked about the origin of my user names, and how my fannish time is divided into what I, creatively, call Round 1 and Round 2.

Round 1 started circa 1992 when I found CompuServe and discovered the RPG forums. I don't recall exactly where or how it happened, but somehow I discovered that someone else had heard about my favorite TV show of all time: The Tomorrow People¹. You see, I'd been one of the lucky few to have access to cable television in the early 80s when The Tomorrow People was aired on Nickelodeon, and I also had access to a VCR. Unfortunately, I was a child at the time and tapes were expensive, so I'd only ever recorded one and a half episodes². Given this new pool of people on CompuServe who had other episodes recorded and were willing to share, naturally, I started arranging to get copies of all the episodes I didn't have.

Somehow I found my way to mailing lists, specifically the one for Forever Knight: FORKNI-L. I think it might have been the only TV show I'd heard of that had a mailing list, because I dimly recall that I didn't start watching the show until after I joined the list. Somewhere in there, I went to a convention that combined Forever Knight and Highlander. I was not a HL fan. I'd barely heard of HL, except that a lot of people on FORKNI-L were also on HIGHLA-L. But...at the convention, Rysher, the HL production company, had a booth set up to sell the newly released boxed sets of episodes. While waiting in a multi-hour long line for an autograph (whose? I don't remember), most of my time was spent near that booth. I walked away converted³. The precedent was now set, and this meant when Sliders premiered and became popular enough to get a mailing list, I joined it!

Around the same time, I also joined the British Science Fiction Club at my college because The Tomorrow People qualified and I lived in constant hope that in between the episodes of Doctor Who and Red Dwarf we mainlined, the club would make some time for the TP⁴ and maybe I could create some new fans with whom to share my love of the show. What did end up happening was that I complained to Mark, the club president and a computer nerd, about how all these other shows had mailing lists, but the TP didn't. He asked me why I didn't start one. Start one? With whom? Conveniently, he had the ability to host a mailing list. So, I did, with the three other people I'd found on the FK, HL, and SL lists who'd also heard of the TP.

Slowly, the TP lists started to grow and a real problem became obvious: While many people had grand memories of the show, they didn't have good ones. Most people hadn't seen the show since the early 80s. More than a few admitted that they were gobsmacked to learn the show had really existed and hadn't been a childhood fever dream. Being the enabler I am, I decided to rectify this and began making and distributing copies of tapes to anyone who asked. By now, the 1992 version was fully in the mix, and that also brought in new fans and led to even more tapes getting made. It also led to conventions, including the 2003 Meetup in London, fanfic, a brief attempt at trying my hand at fanvids, and professional releases of all the episodes on DVD!

Alas, life went on. I graduated college, went back to college, got married, had a kid, and slowly slipped away from fandom. Finally, I shut the TP lists down and walked away.

Several years later, a new show premiered on MTV called Teen Wolf. I scoffed at the ads, condemned the producers for daring to remake a classic comedy movie as a horror TV show, and tuned in out of sheer pissyness. I was hooked. And I immediately went online to search for fanfic⁵--and discovered that fandom had kept chugging along in my absence. Mailing lists were functionally gone, but now LJ comms existed. And so did AO3, kinkmemes, bingos, fic exchanges, prompt fests, and looooooots of new rules and etiquette. I participated in my first Yuletide⁶! And began churning out fic at a rate my Round 1 self would've called impossible.

But, while I was exploring all the new facets of fandom-in-general, Sterek took over the Teen Wolf fandom-in-particular. Suffice it to say, I'm a Scott fan. The sheer and constant nastiness of Sterek fans really started to get to me. It was bad enough having to trip over the vitriol in comms and fic--spaces where I could at least carve out a corner to do my thing--but then it crossed over into the exchanges. I started getting matched with people in supposedly general Teen Wolf exchanges who demanded Sterek in their fics, or who wrote Sterek into mine despite it being expressly DNW'd. Finally, I had enough, and went looking for a fandom exchange where people were nice, the rules would make sense and be enforced, and there was room to be a fan of more than just the juggernaut pairing. And I found it with

hlh_shortcuts.

Here I sit now with my ninth Shortcuts story posted and awaiting author reveals, marking my 138th story on AO3. Teen Wolf has ended, as essentially has my fannish involvement in it. The 2013 version of The Tomorrow People came and went, along with its fandom. I went to a Highlander convention a couple years ago and a Doctor Who convention a few weeks ago. Not too long ago, I and

tptigger, my co-mod from the TP mailing list days, started a Discord for Cranky Fandom Olds.

The initial frenticness of Round 2 has calmed down, but this time, I don't think I'm going anywhere. After all, there's talk of a Highlander reboot, and I'm already scoffing and feeling really damn pissy.

^{1. This would be the 1973 version. The 1992 version probably hadn't premiered yet; and, regardless, I wouldn't learn about it until 1993-4↩}

^{2. "The Living Skins," man. It was 1.5 episodes of the freaking "Living Skins" that I had to carry me over.↩}

^{3. A strong argument could be made that I was brainwashed into being a Highlander fan.↩}

^{4. They did agree to give it a try. Once. Everyone hated it. And I didn't even show them "Living Skins."↩}

^{5. There was one story posted on fanfiction.net. What did I expect? The premiere had barely finish airing. Incidentally, it was a Derek/Stiles story. That was the last Derek/Stiles story I truly enjoyed reading.↩}

^{6. If you were the one assigned to me, I apologize deeply. I didn't know. I've worked very hard since then to learn and do better.↩}