It’s funny how even spiralling into a new obsession I can tell - this isn’t one of the big ones, probably. Not unless it pulls out a whole lot more ~something~ in the last seven eps I have left.
Because when I look back at the fandoms I’ve been in here on tumblr over the last decade, there seems to be a sharp dichotomy.
[this got way too long? have a cut.]
There’s fandoms I think back on as ‘damn I love/d that. For so many reasons. Even if, for other reasons, good reasons, I am not in the fandom anymore - or not currently.’ Glee, Hamilton, Check, Please!, (where I never liked the canon much at all! but I loved my corner of fandom so much, I kept coming back to it for years.)
The Untamed. (Which I hope I may still come back to? In some form, if it’s still going, like, next year? I never quite managed to find myself a cozy corner, and wore myself out trying and failing, but I also never managed to really exorcise the feelings I wanted to there, so, I’m still like - I love it? I love a lot of things about it. But I cannot currently ~engage.)
Nirvana in Fire, which I am fully planning to watch for the third time, and hoping to create content for this next time round, … whenever I get tired of Word of Honor, probably in a few months from now.
And then there’s the fandoms where I just kinda needed - a fandom. To be in. Which does not mean I didn’t love them at the time! Hockey RPF (where I pretty much only read fic - and also wrote in my head a good handful of fic. based on fic. but I never cared much for the ‘canon’, lol.) Yuri!!! on Ice; Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812; Good Omens. There are things I remember with fondness about all those canons (… rpf fic, the way I look at it, is the canon) - but - like. They’re not *so* much, to me. Obviously, to other people, some of these fandoms are their very favorites!
There’s more or less stuff that I love in each fandom. Or, maybe, more accurately, if I think about the things that draw me to each - they mean more to me, or less.
I was fully immersed in Glee fandom for … almost four years. I’ve never had another experience like that, because for almost all of that time Glee was actively, um, happening to us ;). I joined in the middle of season three, I left the fall after season six ended - in part because I fell head over heels for Hamilton, but mostly just because. I’d spent almost four years reacting to the unfolding story (and spoilers for it etc.), writing fic and meta and so forth, having my enthusiasm refreshed every few months (at least) by injections of new canon. Of course half the time I was reacting against new canon info instead of in favor of it, lol, but in any case - I was kept interested! And so by five or six months after canon ended… I felt like I’d chewed it over enough. I still loved Glee, and I will always love Glee, but I’d had most of the thoughts I’ll ever have about it. I was ready to find something else to have new thoughts and fresh feelings about.
(I was in Hamilton fandom for about a year and my experience there ended because of the aftermath of a pile of pan-fandom-famous wank. Fuck Israa, I say, from the bottom of my heart. Although what got me to leave ultimately wasn’t the flames or dogpilers, but the fact that so much of the fandom at least passively agreed with and supported them, meaning that I never knew which of my fellow shippers I could try to befriend or interact with.) (And then, after Trump was elected, I became far less interested in writing any fic about any Founding Fathers than I was in 2015. Which was after I left the fandom, but not irrelevant to why I never went back.) (seriously tho, I will remember ‘i would hope that it is clear who i do and do not associate with’ 4ever.)
And then! I was obsessed with a fandom built out of a few strips out of a webcomic that I don’t even really like… on and off over four years!? Goddamn. When I needed something else cause I was frustrated with Hamilton, I fell into Check, Please! and Jack/Parse (<3 <3 <3), and, because (that segment of the) fandom was tiny, and (relevant to my interests) canon updates virtually nonexistent… I ran out of interest/excitement/engagement repeatedly, and took up - one after another - Hockey RPF, Yuri on Ice, Great Comet, and Good Omens - each for just two to six months, iirc. And then I boomeranged back to Jack/Parse.
(at some point I will finish the post in my drafts about why Jack/Parse had such a hold on me, ‘living in the wreckage of what you thought your life was going to be.’ But that is not this post.)
And THEN I fell in love the with The Untamed, (thanks, stulti! For turning me on to *two* of my all-time favorite fandoms), and it was just, like, amazing, for a while. I hadn’t loved a canon that much since Hamilton, which had been five or six years ago? Even though I’d been in a number of fandoms between the two. It was so nice to love something so very much!!! And I ended up kind of overdosing, I think, cause I was eating from the fandom buffet more-or-less indiscriminately… there were so many riches in that fandom! And so many that weren’t quite to my taste, lol, because there was (and is) SO MUCH STUFF in that canon for its fans to love. (there’s another post in my mental drafts about that.)
Anyway. My point is. I guess. That I hope to come back to The Untamed, sometime. I fully expect to come back to Nirvana In Fire. (It is, actually, so good? As a canon as well as a fandom.)
I don’t expect to come back to Check, Please! ever again, because, weirdly, I don’t think I need to. Of course my understanding of what it means to ~reconcile with one’s past~ etc. has changed in the last mumble-years, but more than that… I have Nirvana in Fire, now, to deal with almost the same issues. I don’t think I fully got the Extent of Mei Changsu’s (Lin Shu) identity issues until the end of the show? But in retrospect - now that I have -
Nirvana in Fire is a pretty perfect fandom/canon for coming back to with gaps between, lol. It’s small enough that I can read through all of my favorite AO3 tags and be left wanting more; it has enough of a strong but slowly-spreading appeal that new people do come and go between say, last summer when I consumed the canon for the first time, and this spring when I watched it again.
And maybe I won’t need to come back and back! Maybe a third watch will be enough for me to say the things in that I want to say. I certainly cannot guess ahead of time!
But - yeah. There are those fandoms I love ~forever,~ some of which I may not be done with…
And then there’s Word of Honor. Which I love right now. Even if it’s not as deep, or ~intense, or… whatever… as some of my other fandom loves; I still love it! Even if I can see ahead to six months from now when I bet I won’t, anymore. I still can’t believe that I spent the past hour-plus writing this post rather than dashing on to watch episode 30, which is what I was intending to do when I sat down.
It’s just - funny. That sort of double vision. How I know this fandom is Mx. Right Now, but that doesn’t make me squee any less.
tfw you have the tv on and aren't paying attention and all of a sudden one of the endless stream of procedurals that hotel TVs seem to have on at all hours is showing a scene where the cops are talking to an auction house person who is selling Alexander Hamilton's penis.
She says it's not worth as much as Napoleon's, but i looked up the episode and it predates Hamilton the musical so I bet Hamilton the guy's junk would be worth a lot more now if it were actually for sale. I don't even know if that's even a thing.
#project hail mary
#lana del rey
#photography
