Nothing new under the sun

[selenak]

kathyh reminisces about the fannish events of yesteryear, which made me hunt down one of my oldest lj posts about whow fans would react if Lord of the Rings had been published in the age of the internet. From 2003. Not much has changed, huh?

To get back to kathyh's entry, in which she quotes and creates a meme:

What is the big fannish event you wish you could have seen? (Seen the live reaction to, anyway.) But even more important - what are the big fannish events you'll never forget? What were they like to live through?

Let's see. What did I witness, from afar or close-up, or not:



Star Wars: "Luke, I am your father": yes, I heard that unspoiled in the cinemas. I actually wasn't an SW fan back then, but this made my young self go OH YES OF COURSE WOW and ensured I would be in the cinema fours years later, too. But I didn't know SW fans, and so I missed out on all discussions and the like. I just remember the feeling in the cinema, and everyone taking a collective gasp when that sentence was spoken. There is no way Lucas could have kept that under wraps these days...

Star Trek: "I was, and always will be, your friend." Spock dies in Wrath of Khan. I was in tears, but I don't remember whether or not I thought it would be permanent. That coffin landing on Genesis was a rather obvious hint and I think even at that age I recognized it as such.

Star Trek (again): "Mr. Worf, fire", aka the TNG Best of Both Worlds cliffhanger after Picard got assimilated. This was pre-internet for me, but at that point I did know other fans and we begged and begged the Americans, who were half a year ahead of us, to tell us if Patrick Stewart would be back. In letters. (Remember those, before the emails.) One fellow-fan had an American father (from the army) and with much profitting converted an American tape into a VHS one for German fans.

Highlander: the Horsemen episodes. I got spoiled via a magazine, thanks. Got online shortly after it happened, when everybody and their dog was writing fanfiction and got caught up in the fervour when no one was writing anything but Methos fanfiction. And just a short time later, Richie lost his head and fandom went into meltdown. As I hadn't liked Richie much (btw, rewatching has changed that to a certain degree, I now like him and appreciate what he brought to the show, though he's still far from bein my favourite character), I wasn't in mourning myself; I just heartlessly thought we got some nifty fanfic out of it, mostly MacGeorge's.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy kills Angel in Becoming. I wasn't a fan yet when this was first broadcast, though I would soon become one, but I do remember the wailing on the internet because many a Highlander fan was already a BtVS fan at that point.

BtVS: the Spike Wars. Do I ever remember. From David Fury getting into an argument with Spike fen post-Crush at the Bronze website to Evilistas versus Redemptionistas to the point where I stopped reading the forums because a) I wanted to talk about something other than Spike re: BTVS once in a while, and b) I was pretty sure I'd get to hate the character not due to his detractors or any on screen activities but due to his fans if I hung around much longer. And then finding my sense of humour about it again in the hiatus between the end of BTVS and the fifth season of AtS when the wars continued, only now with additional munition from fen who swore Spike would ruin AtS, ruin, I tell you, from one side, and from Spike-only fen who had never bothered to watch Angel before on the other. That's when I wrote the Educated Fangirl's 'Guide To the Spike Wars and more or less reached a zen state about it all, with some fallbacks now and then.

Angel: Doyle dies mid-first season, and gets replaced by Wesley. Young AtS fandom is inconsolable and writes essays after essays about how Doyle is irreplacable and no one would ever love that annoying Wesley Wyndham-Pryce. Me, I had felt sorry for Wes in s3 of BTVS and had already written a story about him with bimo (in a way; she wrote Giles' pov, I wrote Wesley's). I was thrilled to see him back and while I had liked Doyle, I hadn't loved him, so my empathy for the mourners was practically non-existant. Do we sense a theme yet?

Farscape: Aeryn Sun dies in the s2 cliffhanger Die Me Dichotymy, and John Crichton is literally under the knife while Scorpius has won the day. Wasn't a Farscape watcher then, again, that came later and when I caught up, I had all of s3 available, but I had Scapers as friends and oh, I remember the excitement and screams of waiting agony from them. (Mind you, back then I was already jaded and thought, this Aeryn person sounds like she's the female lead to Crichton's male lead, no way are they going to leave her dead, so chilll out, friends.)

Doctor Who: Nine regenerates into Ten. New Who fans who somehow miraculously managed to miss that Eccleston had said he'd only do one season after the pilot was broadcast, something that was consequently all over the British media, and/or who are blissfully ignorant of 40 years of show history and eight previous incarnations of the character are inconsolable, swearing there can be only one Doctor and this Tennant guy will never ever win them over. I had no opinion on DT, one way or the other, based on the few seconds from Parting of the Ways, but the Children in Need post regeneration scene made me like him very much, and look forward to his Doctor. I think the point where I knew I was sold and loved him were three scenes from School Reunion - the one where he first reencounters Sarah Jane Smith, the "I am so old now; I used to have so much mercy" scene with ASH and the "my Sarah Jane" hug at the end. Aaaanyway, as Ten would say, I found all the fannish regeneration angst pretty amusing, all in all. Talk about a case of not having read the fine print (i.e. this is a show were the basic concept includes the lead changing into a different actor every few years) for signing up to a fandom.

Doctor Who: Rose leaves. Or do we call it the early period of the Rose Wars? Because Rose = Spike, or nearly so for me, in that I actually had liked the character on screen but the endless, endless fannish obsession, both negative and positive - and I really think Rose haters are as culpable as Rose fanatics - was a big turn-off, and made me inwardly plead "can we please, please talk about something other than Rose for a change?"

Life on Mars: Sam jumps of a roof and returns permanently to 1973. The fannish majority loves it; a minority, including yours truly, is less than thrilled. Yes, I was very ticked off, but I hadn't been passionate enough about the show to really agonize about it the way poor hmpf did.

Harry Potter: hmm, which of the HP meltdowns to pick? My own position was and is that I enjoyed the books, not that I thought them flawless, but I enjoyed them all. I read fanfic now and every then, but not much. So I only ever was on the outskirts of fandom. Which made for a sometimes amused, sometimes appalled view on fannish reaction. Here's what I recall most vividly:

- Sirius Dies: I read Order of the Phoenix while visiting London the day it got published, and met rozk in the late afternoon, and about an hour into our chit chat she asked me "so, who dies?". As basically outsiders and insiders alike knew there would be A Death, and not one from a third or fourth line character like Cedric in the previous novel. I myself was neutral on Sirius, but I knew he was a big, big fan favourite, and yes, big fannish meltdown of grief on the internet came as expected.

- Cassie Claire Plagiarism Scandal: never having read any of the Draco stories she wrote myself, I have no idea how good or bad they were, but even an outsider like myself knew they supposedly invented fanon!Draco, complete with leather trousers and endless snark, a characterisation the novels stubbornly refused to follow. The other thing a non-reader found out about those stories if you paid any attention to HP fandom at all was that supposedly a lot of the lines turned out to be lifted from elsewhere, mostly from Joss Whedon shows. This could have made for an interesting debate as to what is and what isn't plagiarism in fanfiction, but what mostly happened instead were, as I recall, pro and anti CC people yelling at each other.

- Snape kills Dumbledore: oh, the fannish tidal waves after HBB! I wasn't completely immune from the excitement - I think there's an lj post somewhere about why the novel if you pay attention gives big clues Snape acted on Dumbledore's orders (the "you expect too much" conversation which Hagrid overheard, and the fact Dumpledore's last words are "Severus, please", which out be entirely ooc if Dumbledore were pleading for his life, but entirely ic if it means "please fulfill your promise") - and remember how gleeful I felt when JKR after a New York reading answered "yes" to whether Snape had done this (in reply to Salman Rushdie begging to know, no less, with kid in tow), even before DH came out.

Lord of the Rings - movies related: Tinhats go wild. (And after Ian McKellen.) You might or might not recall that back after the first film of the trilogy had been released (and especially after the DVD version) and during the following years, there was a part of fandom utterly convinced that Dominic Monaghan and Elijah Wood were shagging each other like bunnies. Which is all very harmless, except then some of them started to take it very seriously indeed and checked out every public appearance for secret signals of the grand affair. Now, in the audio commentary for Fellowship of the Ring, Ian McKellen at one point makes a casual reference to Elijah Wood and Sean Astin as "two young heterosexual actors". (I think it was during the "Frodo wakes up at Rivendell" scene, and he was explaining he advised the two of them to go for a handclasp-embrace, which had not been their natural instinct.) Cue uproar: what did he mean with HETEROSEXUAL? Elijah W.? Never! Clearly, it was part of the New Line publicity conspiracy, which cruelly forced Elijah and Dominic to hide their passion from the public, only not from their true fans, whom they signalled the truth to. Except this was Sir Ian, the very out and very gay Sir Ian. Could he really be part of this evil homophobic cover-up? As the man has a website and at that point gamely answered questions from fans, one of the tinhats wrote to him demanding to know WHAT DID HE MEAN BY CALLING ELIJAH WOOD HETEROSEXUAL? Quoth the man: Well, I meant "heterosexual". Clearly, he had sold out and had internalized homophobia. Uproar, uproar, uproar. See, Supernatural fans, there is nothing new under the sun.

Comments

[wychwood]

Except this was Sir Ian, the very out and very gay Sir Ian. Could he really be part of this evil homophobic cover-up?

*dies*

I totally missed this! Although I saw just enough of the tinhattery to be unsurprised by the fan reactions.

[selenak]

It was... special. Very, VERY special. *veg*