The Decade in Fandom (2010 - 2020)
Jan. 3rd, 2020 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakFrom sholio:
2010: First year of participating in Yuletide, and I promptly messed up when posting my story (I had spelled the recipient's name wrong), but the story - Ovid, to be specific, Arachne, the story I nicknamed "Revenge of the Spiderwoman" - was nicely received. Otherwise this was the year of Merlin for me. I had just marathoned seasons 1- 2 and was massively in love with the show, writing fanfiction like a busy beaver. Oh, and: Torchwood: Children of Earth! Which I absolutely loved, and which to this day is to me an absolute highlight of the RTD era of Whodom & asorted spin-offs. Since this was not the majority opinion, I also wrote defense posts (and fanfiction).
2011: Lots of Beatles related posts, plus Being Human's third season was awesome and settled all my issues with s1 and s2. The Borgias started and quickly became my favourite (current) historical melodrama. X-Men: First Class made me fall in love with the movieverse iteration of the X-Men again.
2012: I marathoned Breaking Bad (seasons 1 - 4, the fifth was the only one I watched in real time) and gained a new fandom. (And character to defend and write about: Skyler. Also Marie.) In terms of my perennial Shakespeare fandom, The Hollow Crown was what made me go back to Richard II, a play which I had bounced hard off as a teenager, reread it and become won over. Skyfall actually made me write James Bond meta. Elementary gave me a new iteration of Holmes & Watson whom I quickly fell in love with. And I finished the year writing Billy Wilder fanfiction (Sunset Boulevard, to be precise), which turned out to be probably my most popular Yuletide tale.
2013: Once upon a Time was charming and ridiculous and ridicilously charming, and I had a new fandom. On the completely other end of the sex and violence scale, Spartacus turned out to be trashy yet oddly captivating, with actually great character development (along with the endless slo mo gore. Breaking Bad anded in style, which was good since on the more depressing side, I fell out of love with The Borgias in its third and final season. I also tried Hannibal and didn't like it, but I did fall for a tv show based on a legendary-in-pop-culture serial killer tale which retold its story in a way that made it for me now the definite one, to wit: Bates Motel. Norma Bates as played by Vera Farmigia, I still love you, just a little less lethally than your son does.
2014: Black Sails! Watched it in real time from the pilot onwards and thus can be a hipster about loving it before it was cool. Seriously though, I did and do. This was also when I read Robert Caro's multivolume LBJ biography which immediately impressed me as one of the best political biographies I had read. With the arrival of the Twelfth Doctor and the way Clara went from generic companion to fascinating individual, I finally fell back in love with Doctor Who. (Which I had liked, but not loved during the Eleven years.) The Americans was a new discovery that enthralled me (and resulted in some fanfiction), as did Penny Dreadful's first season, while I fell out of love with Once upon a Time.
2015: Agent Carter started. Looking back, it's still my favourite Marvel based tv show, Netflix shows included. It wasn't as ambituous as them, but not as self indulgent, either. Better Call Saul became the spin-off I hadn't seen a need for which ended up enthralling me in its own right, to the point where I felt the Breaking Bad callbacks were to the show's detriment more often than not. I still feel extremely smug about having predicted the big twist/reveal of Black Sails 2.05.
2016: I marathoned The Clone Wars and loved it, which resulted in fanfiction, which after years of writing either in small fandoms or for non-popular characters/relationships suddenly meant the heady experience that is writing in a megafandom for a relationship that a lot of people are interested in. (Thanks, Ahsoka and Anakin!) Penny Dreadful ended dissatisfyingly, which only didn't hit me hard because to me the season and series finale seemed an obvious set up for a quite different wrap, and I immediately knew what I wanted to write for Yuletide. (And did.) (It's still one of my most ambitious stories.) Class was the first Moffat era DW spin off which I adored, and it promptly got cancelled after one season.
2017: Bates Motel ended perfectly, and Star Trek: Discovery started. At last, a new ST show! The two part pilot left me torn - I had liked some elements and disliked others - but the next few episodes won me over. One of my oldest fandoms with new installments: what a thrill that was!
2018: The Americans landed its ending as well, and Better Call Saul in its fourth season had reached Saul-ian territory with Jimmy. I wrote what are probably my last two Agent Carter tales, not because I fell out of love but because they say all I can imagine saying, one serious - the "Five times Peggy Carter Compromised", and one silly fun - the James Bond crossover "For Their Eyes Only". Oh, and I also spotted, while checking out my dw network, the post of someone namedcahn on Schiller's Don Carlos versus Verdi's Don Carlo (her favourite opera, and based on the Schiller play), which among other things contained the statement that not for nothing did people still love the Verdi opera whereas hardly anyone knew about the Schiller play. (Or words to that effect.) Sire, geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit! thundered just about every German actor's voice in my mind, my inner German literature PHD screamed in protest, and I inflicted an Well, actually... comment on poor cahn who took it with humor and started to chat with me about Verdi and Schiller. This was to have long term consequences...
2019: The long-term consequences happenend. Months and thousands of words in debates (and just goofing around) as well as 10 k fanfictions later, I blame Schiller. To quote him writing to Goethe about their relationship: Wie lebhaft habe ich bei dieser Gelegenheit erfahren, daß das Vortreffliche eine Macht ist, daß es auf selbstsüchtige Gemüter auch nur als eine Macht wirken kann, daß es dem Vortrefflichem gegenüber keine Freiheit gibt als die Liebe.") ( "How vividly I learned on this occasion that excellence is a power, that it can only act as a power on selfish minds, that there is no freedom towards it but love.")
sholio: 2010: First year of participating in Yuletide, and I promptly messed up when posting my story (I had spelled the recipient's name wrong), but the story - Ovid, to be specific, Arachne, the story I nicknamed "Revenge of the Spiderwoman" - was nicely received. Otherwise this was the year of Merlin for me. I had just marathoned seasons 1- 2 and was massively in love with the show, writing fanfiction like a busy beaver. Oh, and: Torchwood: Children of Earth! Which I absolutely loved, and which to this day is to me an absolute highlight of the RTD era of Whodom & asorted spin-offs. Since this was not the majority opinion, I also wrote defense posts (and fanfiction).
2011: Lots of Beatles related posts, plus Being Human's third season was awesome and settled all my issues with s1 and s2. The Borgias started and quickly became my favourite (current) historical melodrama. X-Men: First Class made me fall in love with the movieverse iteration of the X-Men again.
2012: I marathoned Breaking Bad (seasons 1 - 4, the fifth was the only one I watched in real time) and gained a new fandom. (And character to defend and write about: Skyler. Also Marie.) In terms of my perennial Shakespeare fandom, The Hollow Crown was what made me go back to Richard II, a play which I had bounced hard off as a teenager, reread it and become won over. Skyfall actually made me write James Bond meta. Elementary gave me a new iteration of Holmes & Watson whom I quickly fell in love with. And I finished the year writing Billy Wilder fanfiction (Sunset Boulevard, to be precise), which turned out to be probably my most popular Yuletide tale.
2013: Once upon a Time was charming and ridiculous and ridicilously charming, and I had a new fandom. On the completely other end of the sex and violence scale, Spartacus turned out to be trashy yet oddly captivating, with actually great character development (along with the endless slo mo gore. Breaking Bad anded in style, which was good since on the more depressing side, I fell out of love with The Borgias in its third and final season. I also tried Hannibal and didn't like it, but I did fall for a tv show based on a legendary-in-pop-culture serial killer tale which retold its story in a way that made it for me now the definite one, to wit: Bates Motel. Norma Bates as played by Vera Farmigia, I still love you, just a little less lethally than your son does.
2014: Black Sails! Watched it in real time from the pilot onwards and thus can be a hipster about loving it before it was cool. Seriously though, I did and do. This was also when I read Robert Caro's multivolume LBJ biography which immediately impressed me as one of the best political biographies I had read. With the arrival of the Twelfth Doctor and the way Clara went from generic companion to fascinating individual, I finally fell back in love with Doctor Who. (Which I had liked, but not loved during the Eleven years.) The Americans was a new discovery that enthralled me (and resulted in some fanfiction), as did Penny Dreadful's first season, while I fell out of love with Once upon a Time.
2015: Agent Carter started. Looking back, it's still my favourite Marvel based tv show, Netflix shows included. It wasn't as ambituous as them, but not as self indulgent, either. Better Call Saul became the spin-off I hadn't seen a need for which ended up enthralling me in its own right, to the point where I felt the Breaking Bad callbacks were to the show's detriment more often than not. I still feel extremely smug about having predicted the big twist/reveal of Black Sails 2.05.
2016: I marathoned The Clone Wars and loved it, which resulted in fanfiction, which after years of writing either in small fandoms or for non-popular characters/relationships suddenly meant the heady experience that is writing in a megafandom for a relationship that a lot of people are interested in. (Thanks, Ahsoka and Anakin!) Penny Dreadful ended dissatisfyingly, which only didn't hit me hard because to me the season and series finale seemed an obvious set up for a quite different wrap, and I immediately knew what I wanted to write for Yuletide. (And did.) (It's still one of my most ambitious stories.) Class was the first Moffat era DW spin off which I adored, and it promptly got cancelled after one season.
2017: Bates Motel ended perfectly, and Star Trek: Discovery started. At last, a new ST show! The two part pilot left me torn - I had liked some elements and disliked others - but the next few episodes won me over. One of my oldest fandoms with new installments: what a thrill that was!
2018: The Americans landed its ending as well, and Better Call Saul in its fourth season had reached Saul-ian territory with Jimmy. I wrote what are probably my last two Agent Carter tales, not because I fell out of love but because they say all I can imagine saying, one serious - the "Five times Peggy Carter Compromised", and one silly fun - the James Bond crossover "For Their Eyes Only". Oh, and I also spotted, while checking out my dw network, the post of someone named
cahn on Schiller's Don Carlos versus Verdi's Don Carlo (her favourite opera, and based on the Schiller play), which among other things contained the statement that not for nothing did people still love the Verdi opera whereas hardly anyone knew about the Schiller play. (Or words to that effect.) Sire, geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit! thundered just about every German actor's voice in my mind, my inner German literature PHD screamed in protest, and I inflicted an Well, actually... comment on poor cahn who took it with humor and started to chat with me about Verdi and Schiller. This was to have long term consequences... 2019: The long-term consequences happenend. Months and thousands of words in debates (and just goofing around) as well as 10 k fanfictions later, I blame Schiller. To quote him writing to Goethe about their relationship: Wie lebhaft habe ich bei dieser Gelegenheit erfahren, daß das Vortreffliche eine Macht ist, daß es auf selbstsüchtige Gemüter auch nur als eine Macht wirken kann, daß es dem Vortrefflichem gegenüber keine Freiheit gibt als die Liebe.") ( "How vividly I learned on this occasion that excellence is a power, that it can only act as a power on selfish minds, that there is no freedom towards it but love.")
no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 08:35 pm (UTC)That reminds me! Did you ever watch the last season of the show? You stopped doing reviews at some point and I always wondered why.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 03:16 am (UTC)Same with Penny Dreadful - s2 ended not quite, and s3 was very unsatisfying.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 05:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 10:04 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'm very happy about the long-term consequences :D
(Also: OUaT! I loved the first season, but bailed shortly into the second season.)
no subject
Date: 2020-01-08 05:33 pm (UTC)