Hey! Love the show. I find fandom super interesting as a thing to talk about. There seems to be a way to get into a new fandom that you haven't covered really (might not be in your personal experience but is oh so definitely in mine) which is through reading fic. As in, not starting with the source material at all. For example, my image of Teen Wolf is probably so skewed, I have never seen even a minute of it, but super love the fic and learned the Canon second hand. Does that make sense?
MAGGIE: Thank you! I actually don't think I've ever done this, just because I want to be able to picture everyone and everything, and be able to tell if it's in character, but I totally understand your point. And I've probably started watching something just so that I could get a good enough idea that I could go read the fic for it. I... think I did that with Merlin, briefly. And that's probably also what I did for Teen Wolf.
V: Thank you so much! I’ve definitely done this, so I feel like we’ll talk about it a bit when it comes up because of the fandoms we’re discussing -- usually if I do this, it’s because there’s a specific writer whose fics I read regardless of fandom or because I want to read a fic to support a writer-friend who doesn’t share my fandom. (For example, I’ve never seen a minute of The Punisher but I still beta Maggie’s fics, and I enjoy them! But I also don’t seek out other Punisher fics.)
I started my fangirling of Percy Jackson, though, by reading @kaikamahine/antistar_e’s Percy Jackson fics and those by people who interacted with them a lot, and then after a few months I actually bought and read the books. I might have even written PJO fic before I read the books? I can’t remember now! But it’s definitely a thing. :) I’d consider PJO one of my bigger fandoms (and my AO3 stats agree), and that definitely started out of a love of the fic and not the canon.
I also think that I’m very likely to start shipping something because of the fics, rather than because I actually got a shippy sense the first time I watched or read the canon, and then it reshapes how I interact with the material. Like with The Old Guard, the amazing Booker/Nile fics have changed how I watch scenes of the movie when I go back to it, etc.
