It is true, I am shallow

[trinityvixen]

Explain to me what is fandom to other, normal people. I have this idea that I am insane. It's probably a correct appraisal of my behavior, but all the same, I'd like to know that I'm not alone.

[Poll #1192336]

I just needed to poll. I realize I'm currently fascinated and frustrated by fandoms for two works that really are problematic to be fannish about aside from just enjoying the canon product. One is Battlestar Galactica; the other is Iron Man. The former is hard to enjoy the fan off-shoots because NOTHING is as good as the show. Reading the scripts from the show isn't as good as the show because the show flies less on the words and plot than it does on the acting that makes it happen. The latter is problematic because, gosh darn it, it's pretty near perfect and there's hardly a thing to add or subtract from it, dramatically. (Which makes me very scared for the sequel prospects, but we'll see.)

This is really annoying, in case I haven't made that clear. Stupid fandoms. They're eating my life and giving almost nothing back. And, on top of that, I have trouble mustering interest in anything else. I have friggin' Doctor Who--AND IT'S GOOD!--that I'm not watching because I'm moping around waiting for next Friday (and the inevitable DVD release of Iron Man since I am too po' to go back to the theater again). I thought maybe I'd decompressed after a couple of days with no BSG on the horizon. Nope. I'm back to refreshing TWoP every hour in hopes of a recap update. GAAAAhHHHHH.

How do other people get un-obsessed with fandom? HELP ME!!

Comments

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Explain to me what is fandom to other, normal people. I have this idea that I am insane.

Maybe, but it's a charming insanity. :)

Nope. I'm back to refreshing TWoP every hour in hopes of a recap update.

Well, you could be like me and refresh my favorite blogs every hour. I don't think it's any more productive though!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Well, I mean, is it obsessive or is it just boredom or could it be reasonable interest? I mean, I'm refreshing a page for the ONE update they ever make a week. At least blogs have new stuff (potentially) every hour.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Speaking of keeping up with the stars of the fandom's real lives... I have a bit of BSG-related celebrity gossip that made my head explode but that I feel really sketchy relaying in a semi-public space. Get on gchat and I'll share.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Sweet. Is this going to be like the time you told me that Tyrol is really a whore in real life and then I found out his wife had just died!? BECAUSE THAT WAS AWESOME, LET ME TELL YOU.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

LOL slight exaggeration but yes and this time it's even more slut-tacular!

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I can't really help--I'm not a fandom person. I like things, but nothing obsessively. Doctor Who is probably the closest right now, and that just means I look forward to new episodes every week and sometimes discuss the episodes with friends. I don't post on message boards, I don't read or write fanfic (though that could be argued, since I write tie-in novels), and I do read related news when people send me articles or links but I never seek them out.

Hm, maybe that's my problem. Maybe I need to find a fandom or two. :)

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Wow, you write tie-in novels? That's like, one of my (sort of abandoned because I didn't know what kind of connections one had to have to do it) goals in life. *ENVY*

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

I do, yes--Star Trek, StarCraft, WarCraft, Warhammer, Exalted, and a junior novelization, thus far. Thank you for the envy. :)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I am totally obsessive. I want to ache with people when I watch something that made me wibble. I also write pages-long meta about stuff that no one reads because OMG I never shut up when I'm excited.

I understand about not reading fanfic, though. It's pretty much ruined my brain and you have possible legal consequences, so, yeah, I'd avoid it, too.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

I'm not dissing that mindset, and sometimes I'm even a little envious--I don't know that I've ever been that into any show/series/book/comic/game. Afraid I'm just not a geebler. :)

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

See, that's the thing. When I was in high school I became so obsessed with whatever it was. I felt so strongly about it. But as I got older... I don't really feel that strongly about any of my interests, fannish or otherwise. In a sense that makes me sad, like I've lost something. On the other hand, obsession to the exclusion of other things wasn't that healthy to begin with. :)

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm in gryphonrose's camp on this one. I have shows/books/movies/whatever that I like a lot, but I don't really do the obsessive thing. I think it's the same reason why I have a dozen artistic-y hobbies and am fabulous at none of them, or why I was third in my class and didn't win any of the academic awards - I don't specialize. Heck, when I'm in a RPG, I almost always end up playing a utility character, not someone really good at one thing. I get easily distracted and I don't like investing that much time and energy in any one thing.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

See, and characters are the one place I CAN be obsessive. Okay, that and stories--the ones I write/run, not the ones I watch/read. I like to develop my RPG characters completely, so I really know them. I just don't talk about them all that much outside of play.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Actually, from that perspective, so do I. But I usually have several characters - from stories I'm working on, games I'm playing, random daydreaming - in different stages of development, so I don't usually focus on one to a level of obsession. I jump around mentally.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, I may have told you this already. I'm not sure I can even say Sweeney Todd was a fandom obsession, since I knew nothing about fanfic or fandom at the time. I was all on my own. Which meant that rather than finding a release, the fannish impulses built up to crazy degrees.

I first encountered Sweeney Todd by borrowing the CD from the library (at the time I was going through their collection of Broadway cast albums alphabetically). The first listen through, I ended up staring at the stereo, completely enthralled, and I had almost no idea what was actually happening since the booklet explaining the plot had been lost. I didn't have internet, and google didn't exist, so looking up a synopsis on line was out. I listened to it obsessively, and eventually learned there was a tape of the original production (well, the touring company, but anyway). The tape was out of print. I found out my local library had a copy.

In one day, I walked the mile and a half from my dorm to the library three times to try to borrow that tape. (Because I wasn't a resident of the town, I kept running into new requirements for getting a library card.) Once I got it, I watched it immediately. Twice. Back to back. I watched it over a dozen times before I had to return it a week later.

Even a few years later, my love hadn't waned and I spent way too much on ebay to get a copy of that tape (which is now available for $20 on DVD). I also found out there was a tape of the original original production at the New York Performing Arts library which you could only get access to if it was for research. I got a professor to assign me a fake paper so I could see it. Even then, I had to sit in the library and they'd only let me play it through once. I took copious notes on the staging so I could look them back over and picture it in my mind. The librarian let me rewatch one scene (only one!) which was such an agony to pick.

That's the most absurd lengths I've ever gone to in service of an obsession.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I match that or not for my obsession with The Matrix (and yet? not one Matrix icon on my LJ. Weird...), but I wouldn't begin to measure them the same because I already know that you beat me when it comes to the crazy involvement in fandom. I never walked across coals for my greatest obsession or anything like it, but it did play a formative role in my life, so I guess that's pretty obsessive. When the thing actually pushes you in a direction, I mean. That movie opened me up to new music, fashion, genre, filmmaking--you name it, it became important to me.

And it got me to start talking to strangers on the internet! FOR WHICH I AM FOREVER GRATEFUl, OH HAI WACHOWSKIS

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'd actually argue with you about the obsession thing. :) To use the metaphor from the other thread...I think I have a higher on-going obsession level, but when you spike, you spike way higher than me.

Without the internet, I probably would still do ridiculous things for fannishness. There's just sometimes where I get the thought in my head and I neeeeeeed to feed it right now. With the internet, I can usually find what I'm looking for, or if not, at least find something else to distract myself with so the urgency lessens. It's been awhile since something grabbed me so hard that I would go anywhere and pay any amount of money to get a fix, but I think that's mostly cause I manage my obsessiveness. (This sounds really like an addiction, but, you know, that's what it is.) I don't even get involved in fandoms where it would be hard for me to get all of the canon material--why I'm not into comics in a word. If it looks like it would be hard for me to get what I want out of a fandom, I usually don't watch/read the source material in the first place.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

So you're a steady fandom consumer and I'm a binger and a purger. That's entirely accurate. feiran is often quite terrified by how I seize on a new thing and just clamp down on it for months and then...gone. (Prison Break? WHAT THE FUCK?)

The ease of access plays a part, too. Just as you say, I had a hard time with comics for a while because things are always coming back up that I won't have heard about. It's worse than soap operas. Most soaps have only been around a couple of decades. X-Men? FORTY YEARS. DC's had characters who've been around twice that long. It's truly frightening when you wikipedia a character page and they have more offshoots than an almanac entry on a first world country. Intimidates me right off.

So I compartmentalize. I get fannish about Batman the Animated Series or Batman Begins and only dip into comics when I need a good archetype or two. Or I pick up things that cheerfully ignore their own continuity, which is how I, after being sure I would never understand its hold over geeks, got into and came to love Doctor Who.

The other problem I have with fandom is that I get bored easily. When there's no new material, I can almost begin a countdown to me dropping out of the fandom. Because fanfic just isn't new and refreshing ten years later. In fact, ten years later, people are still writing the Mary Sue-leaves-the-Matrix, falls-in-love-with-Neo stories I hated when the movie was still in theaters. This explains the spiking. I quickly am turned off by even deliciously deviant writing if it's going to hammer at the same points, start from the same period, build on the same characters. New characters have to work hard to keep my attention, so new characters don't often refresh old ideas. And then I come down and can suddenly enjoy lots of things again. I suppose I should be grateful.

[montisello.livejournal.com]

Very interesting question, of which I have TONS to say, you lucky thing, you.

I will be the first to admit that Supernatural is not the best show ever, though it does have some smart writing, good acting and a wonderful mythology, it also has an equal measure of cheese, emo-ness and dumb writing. The thing that hooked me, after watching all of season 1, was the FANDOM. I found some amazing writers who really fleshed out the characters for me, and some amazing people who did kick-ass meta, and then just all around good people who have become friends.

Then I got sucked into Veronica Mars, watched all of season 1 in night. Being hip to the ways of fandom, I started going through Veronica Mars and found.... NOTHING. Here and there were some good stories, here and there some interesting reviews, but for the most part nothing to match the level of fanishness that I had discovered in SPN.

Had other thoughts but must run. Interesting poll!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

What's interesting is that, while I'm not tempted to dip toes into the waters of fanfic and what not for Supernatural, I have been made less irreverent about it by virtue of the woman writing reviews for it at Pink Raygun. (http://www.pinkraygun.com/category/series/supernatural/) She manages to spin more out of just reporting about the show than most people get out of extended and extensive fanfic or meta. I'm really impressed with that.

Of course, since fandom is predominantly driven by women, it doesn't surprise me that a show with two "hot" guys (one is, the other looks like he was drop-kicked by his neanderthal momma on his way out of the womb) would attract more squee and seriousness than something like Veronica Mars. There's also the fact that VM is annoying as shit as a person and lives in the biggest fairy tale life this side of the Brothers Grimm and no one really enjoys writing about cardboard characters with emo problems.

Pardon, that's not entirely correct. In fact, there are some several million who like writing about that, but they are writing self-insert Mary Sue stories, of which VM is one. And, just as no one enjoys reading someone else's whacking-off angst fic, no one wants to get into VM the same way. (In my opinion, VM would be a lot more interesting if her problems were presented as being entirely unrealistic and played that way. Like the character Kristin Bell plays on Heroes who may or may not have been tortured as a child--and then brainwashed to forget it--to test her abilities. That's stuff you can angst about without really worrying about treading on reality's toes. The rape and death of a friend and mother leaving and no one liking her...biiiiiiiiiiit too close to some homes for comfort.)