(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

ethrosdemon is hosting Sunday meta to encourage people who don't write meta much but want to, as a way to create a safe place for, um, first time meta-ers, I guess. I read more meta than I let on and I often sort of want to comment and splurge, and this was going to be for that, but it actually doesn't fit as the kind of pan-fannish experience thing they've got going over there, so, uh... it's not. Anyway, that's where this came from, it's totally a brainfart about me and my favourite fandom and why I am the way I am about it. caveat lector.


Awhile ago, thefourthvine did a series of polls on what she described as "fannish archetypes", trying to define how much time fen spend in different fandoms, and how many we have going at a time. Maybe she was planning on doing some meta to follow it up, or maybe she already did so and I missed it, or perhaps it was just for her own amusement, and we all danced like little monkeys in a cage. Anyway, they were pretty entertaining and a lot of people got to being thinky in her comments, which can be very entertaining: part one, part two and part three (although the latter part's only really interesting if you read TFV regularly.)

The fun part, of course, was the animal metaphors for fannish 'archetypes' - from the baaaaaby animal who's brand-new to fandom, to the camels - we all know one - who wander from fannish oasis to oasis with looong hiatuses (hiati? what's that root, anyway?). It's fun to speculate about why, for example, the magpie - constantly picking up new fandoms, but still considering themselves part of their former fandoms - and the gorilla, who maintains a small group of 3-6 fandoms - were significantly the most popular. It might relate to the context - TFV is a multi-fandom reccer. But it might also be considered a fairly reasonable sample. However, I don't wanna speculate about that - I want to talk about the behaviour of the teeny-tiny, 2.2% of poll takers who described themselves as a "lone wolf" - one teeny tiny fandom that is too small to support their reading and/or writing habits, so they read/write in others.

I consider myself a lone wolf, which won't shock any of you. Young Wizards is the fandom of my heart. It's not the first fandom I ever wrote a fic in, but it's the first fandom I ever needed to write a fic in. It's not the first fandom I ever read in, but it's the first fandom I ever left concrit in. It's the first fandom I ever read a fic that had multiple spelling or grammar errors in the header - and I'm glad I did. It's the first fandom I created a community for. It's the only fandom in which I have ever run a fic challenge, let alone run it twice, let alone modded two communities for, let alone begged and bribed people into writing fic for, let alone looked at fanart for.

But it's small. A month where one fic is posted on LJ is a really busy month for this fandom. Icons are few and far between. Approximately 95% of all fannish discussion takes place off-LJ on a messageboard run by the author herself, Diane Duane. For obvious reasons, fanfic does not happen in those boards. On the other hand, fan chats with DD do. But there's only so much this kind of fannish activity can do for me. At the end of the day, we all just wanna read some porn, you know? And to my knowledge there has never been a piece of NC-17 rated fanfiction written in this fandom. Nope, never. So I do what, I guess, many people in my position do - I look around. In the past three or so years, especially since Harry Potter fandom imploded, (previously a reliable source of porn in a storm) I've read voraciously in Smallville and in SGA; more recently, and with more commitment, in the DCU and, of course, Supernatural, which is definitely my most passionate extramarital affair.

In their non-dominant fandoms, lone wolves like me - I guess; I have nothing really to go on - can be truly parasitic fans. I don't like to think of myself as a leech, but let's face it - I read, and read, and read, and read. I probably spend about three hours a day reading fanfiction in fandoms I will never write fanfiction in, I will probably never write meta about, I rarely if ever review in and quite often I don't even bother to talk about the source (although Supernatural has changed that.) I'm not invested in them. I couldn't care less about Smallville, I only watched a bit of SGA because I wanted to be able to read the fic. I'm about to investigate SG1 because one person on my flist, and another person very dear to me IRL, have just gone through it like a hot knife through butter and are being very convincing about how much fun it is. I don't expect to be any more invested in it, though.

That was all a very long introduction to my real question: where does a lone wolf fan come from and what does a very small fandom do when it rains?

Mostly, I believe, small fandoms endure. They get written in Yuletide year after patient year - although the thing about Yuletide is that it attracts a lot of people who aren't in the fandom, and consequently the fic generated there is somehow divorced from the fandom. You get a lot of Nita/Kit and Tom/Carl, perennial fandom favourites, but you don't see much Nita/LP, a favoured pairing only within active fandom. (To give context: think of Nita/Kit as Ron/Hermione (or Harry/Hermione, if that's your slice); Tom/Carl as Remus/Sirius; and Nita/LP as, um, Harry/Voldemort, only more like Harry/Draco.) But, at least on livejournal, YW is a fandom made up entirely of people who also see other fandoms. We're quiet - but we stick around and we keep coming back, because we're either magpies or we're lone wolves and we know how to keep multiple fandoms on the go. Another example of this kind of fandom is, say, Gordon Korman fandom, which is possibly even more teensy-tiny than YW. There are a couple of authors who keep coming back, even though they're writing and reading in other fandoms probably a whole lot more - and the fun thing about this is that, even as those other fandoms change, they keep coming back to the smaller fandoms.

Is it because there's still more to say in the smaller fandoms? Maybe - I think the bigger a fandom is, while you do get a lot of recycling, you also get more to say because you can say a lot in the context of the fandom rather than in the context of just the canon. For example, were YW just a tiny bit smaller, I don't think we'd see any Nita/LP because I think it's very divorced from the text - I think the genesis for Nita/LP comes from conversations fen have on Livejournal and even at fanfiction.net - I can't get away from ffn.net when I'm bringing this up because the "seminal" (cough cough) Nita/LP work is on ffn.net - yes, its quality is uneven, nevertheless, IMO it was groundbreaking and I'm glad it's out there. But smaller fandoms do have less to work from from this perspective - the obvious counterexample is Harry Potter, which I'm going to continue to use as an example even though it breaks all kinds of rules because I know the fandom - but in HP everything is written, absolutely everything, and in a way there's nothing left to say. So it sort of stagnates and we have that advantage too - I think smaller fandoms can be very fertile in that sense.

But mostly I just think smaller fandoms command more loyalty and more love because if you're here, you're here all the way - even if you wouldn't describe yourself as a lone wolf, just being in the small fandom says that you love it, because you're willing to wait months for a fic, you're willing to read fic that's maybe of a slightly lower quality than what you might get elsewhere just because you love it - and also, I believe in smaller fandoms a higher proportion of fans are really active. More of us are writing fanfic, more of us are making icons, more of us are participating. Maybe that's an illusion I have because that's true for me, that I am most active in this one fandom; but I don't think so.

In a week or so I think I might write something about Nita/Kit, Tom/Carl, Nita/Ronan, Nita/LP and Dairine/Roshaun and Why They Get Written - especially the Tom/Carl phenomenon which I really think is interesting. I may actually post that one to myriadwords and use that to get another round of YW meta started up - I remember we did one about canonical het pairings and one about ratings (er, why fic in this fandom tends towards the lower ratings, not the whole oral-rates-r-penetration-is-NC-17 insanity) and they were both kind of fun. Um. Okay. Goodnight now.

Comments

[kheha.livejournal.com]

Kit/Tom -- I'd absolutely love to write this. But then as soon as I think a bit more and realize it must necessarily be teh chan, *is creeped out*. I think I could manage it if Tom were an abuser, except that seems rather out-of-character... (Or, perhaps, not. Ergh, now I'm cogitating. :-p)

In any case -- here's another meta topic. Did you see the post from melannen on slash goggles (http://melannen.livejournal.com/185788.html)? I am trying to apply it to YW, and I'm thinking that part of the reason YW slash doesn't work so well is because of what she's talking about -- there isn't a slasher's gaze in the books (naturally, because um, maybe they're kids books?), which leaves only Tom/Carl. Which, again, is practically canon and so doesn't really count fannishly. Or something.

(Well, I've come to the decision that she must google herself, and thus that if I stay away from using her full name or linking to her site and stop having my entries indexed by Google, then I can go under the radar screen. Though I haven't tested this theory yet. Also, I think she necessarily avoids the communities because of the possibility of fic, so those might be a bit "safer". Though the metaphors I am using betray something intriguing on their own... Hmm.)