if you obsess enough, you're bound to learn something

[snick_backup]

I'm worried that this post is going to come across as ridiculously earnest. This isn't the humorous "Everything I know, I learned from fandom" post, nor the schmoopy "What fandom means to me" post, although I kind of want to write one of those, too.

This is the post wherein I confess to learning a whole lot of things from my three years in fandom that I never properly understood before. Some I feel like I should have known already - from college, maybe. Instead I learned it here, because everything is more fun with fandom. Right?

For example, I now know...

• That reality = canon. Science fiction = people writing AUs and futurefic about canon. Science/history (as disciplines) = people bickering about canon; people being extremely geeky about canon. (You would not believe how this soothes my intimidation of original fic worldbuilding. Science is just a bunch of people geeking out! Strategy: geek out myself for a little bit, fake it, and get a good beta.)
  
  
• That I do not have to agree with everything I read in print. Sometimes, people disagree about canon. Many of these disagreements come from differing personal experience and emotional background brought to the canon. Some of these disagreements are heated. Just because someone disagrees with me does not mean my opinion is invalid (and vice versa).
  
  I feel like this is maybe the most important life lesson on this list, but I’ve found it way easier to learn it here, discussing topics that we’re deeply passionate about and interested in but that aren’t loaded the way, say, modern political topics are loaded.
  
  In other words: welcome to the world of civil discussion, Snick.
  
  
• How important it is to have a group of civil, congenial, moderately like-minded people around you to discuss issues with and bounce ideas off of and disagree with and grow together with. Developing thoughts in isolation: SO MUCH HARDER.
  
  
• The value of fiction as conversation. I’ve always heard this discussed in SFF, but never really understood until I saw it in microcosm in fandom.
  
  
• Corollary: Each sizeable fandom is like a genre in miniature, developing its own tropes and quirks and blind spots even as it cross-pollinates with other genres fandoms.)
  
  
• Corollary the second: fiction as response to someone else’s thoughts. Fiction as response to a sad lack of X in fiction. Fiction as response to deep personal feeling that “This ought to exist, darn it!”
  
  
• Characterization. ALL the characterization. I came into fandom pretty much character-blind; sure, I enjoyed Jack Sparrow, but that didn’t mean I ever thought about him, speculated what happened in the margins of his life, wondered how he and Elizabeth Swann would work out as a couple. I didn’t think about him at all. By extension, I didn’t think about relationships in fiction.
  
  It wasn't that I didn't notice characters at all; I responded to them, but I didn’t analyze my responses. When I started reading Buffy fic, it didn't occur to me that there was more than one way to write Spike; people talked about this author's Spike and that author's Spike, and I couldn't fathom what they meant. I couldn't tell the different Spikes apart.
  
  But you read enough material and your brain starts noticing patterns. Reading umpteen versions of Spike (and Buffy, and Dawn, and...) and identifying how they fit with canon and how they didn't taught me characterization from the ground up.
  
  
• Figuring out what I like. Y’all know my list of things I like and don't like? It would never have existed without fandom. Fandom introduced me to the idea of having narrative kinks in the first place, and it made me think about mine.
  
  
• Feminism, full stop. I'd read some of the wankstorms over in SFF fandom on the topic - the low number of female SF authors, that sort of thing - but it's been Buffy fandom that's taught me to see gender disparities built into the narrative of a thing, to recognize the ridiculous under-representation of women in stories, to notice characterization tropes that need to stop, and to think about all those things affect the attitudes held by society at large about women and gender.
  
  I guess maybe this is a topic I just needed a way into; no surprise that stories would be that way in. Still, it'd never have happened if I hadn't been reading a bunch of folks I already respected discussing these topics on and off for years.

Some of these I really feel I was supposed to have already learned, like the "disagreeing opinions" point, which I've fiddled with for ten minutes and still don't think I've articulated properly. Some of them, like my big characterization breakthrough, might just have been a matter of time; it was bound to happen somehow, and it happened in Buffy fandom. I dunno.

TL;DR: I owe fandom a lot, you guys. It's a little bit embarrassing how much. FANDOM. *hugs*

Original entry posted at Dreamwidth. Feel free to reply here or there. ( DW replies)