It's the New Year, so I've got some fandom-ish and writerly thinky thoughts.
I'm reflecting on how I attach to my blorbos versus how other people glom onto theirs. As I look over my time in fandom, completely separate from my time as a fanfiction writer, I'm realizing that I differentiate blorbos into three categories.
The first category is... blorbos I enjoy strictly in my consumption of their media. I started out with The Beatles - I fell in love with them in eighth grade when I saw YELLOW SUBMARINE for the first time. Then I had a comic book phase: Vision and the Scarlet Witch [from the 1982 comics miniseries], Swamp Thing, Abigail Arcane, and John Constantine [from Alan Moore's comics run], The Phantom Stranger, Madame Xanadu, and all the other occult DC characters pre-Vertigo. My television blorbos were from DOCTOR WHO, CROSSING JORDAN, PUSHING DAISIES, and FRINGE. None of these were blorbos for whom I sought out fanfiction, but I could talk the ears off anyone who would listen.
The second category is... blorbos for whom I'll read fanfiction. I started out wanting to read only non-ship fanfics. BLAKES 7 was the first fandom that scratched that itch. I gradually moved into reading shipping fics, but was [and still am] picky. In no particular order, those blorbos came from GOOD OMENS [the television series... I'd owned the book for decades but hadn't ever finished it because it felt too derivative of Douglas Adams], THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES, OVER THE GARDEN WALL [specifically Beastnoch], and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA [specifically Pharoga].
And the third category is... blorbos for whom I'll write fanfiction. THAT has happened only twice in the last ten years. Well, technically three times, although one fandom would not exist without the presence of the first one. Anyway. I've told the story before about how seeing the movie RISE OF THE GUARDIANS on April 25, 2015 literally saved my life. It was the fourth of a series of movies my then-housemate was showing me nightly to try to cheer me up. The first three movies that week were entertaining, but not memorable to me. But then, on the fourth night....boom!!!
There was a guy who had no idea what his purpose was and felt ignored by his higher power. There was another guy who just wanted to be believed in and was shunned by his peers for just existing. BOY, WAS THAT RELATABLE TO ME. And for the very first time, a shipping flame to put these two lonely characters together was lit in my heart. I made a Tumblr and started scrolling ship tags. I devoured vast amounts of AO3 fics. And I finally latched onto an idea of my own that I could write, and posted my first-ever words of fanfiction on June 12, 2015.
In scrolling the ROTG fandom on Tumblr during the late spring and early summer of 2015, I stumbled across the ROTG subfandom known as Nightmare Dork University, which was already past its peak of creative works when I found it. It appealed to me because it was an AU that spawned other AUs, and it was a collaborative fandom effort. I posted my first NDU fic in April 2016, and have written more than fifty NDU pieces since. And I thought I'd be writing only for ROTG and for NDU for the rest of my fandom career [since I was in my fifties when I started writing].
But then lightning struck again in October 2021. I saw a DELTARUNE fanart of a small man with two-toned glasses sleeping in a dumpster, and then saw other artwork of a buff bird butler rescuing the small man from that dumpster, and that brought back memories of some of the darker times in my life when I was homeless. And what clinched my love of these two as a pair was that despite how suave and together the butler seemed, underneath the butler was just a seething mass of anxieties, and the two of them could heal one another. After reading many Swatchton fanfics, I got bitten by the bug of a human!AU [heavily influenced by Nightmare Dork University], and thus CALL SIGNS was born. My most braincell-consuming writing, and frankly what I consider my best work.
I admire people who get swept away into creating for new fandoms and adopting new blorbos at the drop of a hat. I admire people who dedicate their writing to one fandom and a limited number of blorbos.
I don't know if another bolt of lightning will hit me again in five or ten years, at which time I'll be either approaching or past the age of seventy. If it's out there, I'll welcome it. If it's not, I'm gonna play with the tuoys I have.
