Story time

[jedi_of_urth]

I found this week's fannish5 inspiring me to answer it.

What are your top five personal moments in fandom?

I decided to interpret this as five of my fondest, most game changing times in my fannish life.


1) Absence makes the heart grow fonder

I think most of you know about my seemingly life long love for Babylon 5, if you don’t then well, I have loved this show for over half my life and still consider it one of the best shows ever and if you haven’t watched it you should.

But you know what made me realize how much I loved this show? Missing some of the most important episodes EVER. In the middle of season 3 there are episodes that change everything about the show, and the first time through, I missed them. B5 was shown in first run syndication and a problem with this was that it got moved around in time slots fairly often. And this was the mid-90s, before I could just go find anything I wanted online when I missed episodes either because of changes in my routine or changes to the shows location in the schedule. After Messages From Earth I didn’t see an episode again until Sic Transit Vir.

Fortunately one of my teachers also watched the show (long story short I hung out with my teachers a fair bit during middle school because I had very few friends) and she kept me up to speed, but still. I missed SEVERED DREAMS people , this was not the the time to be missing episode.

After that I watched the show pretty damned religiously because I didn’t want to run the risk of missing something that important again.

2) A decision that I should probably regret but don’t

Fast forward a bit to my freshman year of college and a windfall of things happen. I had access to TV stations I never had before (we got a satellite middle of my high school years but there were still things I was missing) and I didn’t have my parents looking over my shoulder at whatever I chose to watch on TV. My roommate at the time spent weekends and Tuesday nights away from the dorm room so I had the space to myself not having to deal with her at all particularly when it came to TV.

Well, what should I find flipping through the channels one Tuesday night but Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This was Buffy season 6 and I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening, but I was pretty instantly hooked and then they said the next episode would be a musical. No way was I missing seeing that happen.

As you might imagine, catching up on Buffy and suddenly being free to explore this thing of “fandom” with my dorm service internet line rather than my parents’ dial-up I did a lot of things that weren’t studying my freshman year. And it showed. I didn’t actually fail anything, but I should have managed the year a lot better than I did and I spent the rest of my college days trying to overcome GPA wise those first couple bad semesters.

Now I wouldn’t blame it wholly on Buffy, but the show definitely shares in the blame for all this.

But I don’t regret it, at least not much. Even though it hurt my schooling I met lots of fun people through the fandom, both online and in real life. One of my best friends (for a while) and I spent a fair bit of our early friendship talking about Buffy. Even though we had different ideas on the show it was something we had in common and it brought us closer

3) “I could save the world but lose you.”

This story I know I’ve told before.

So I was pumped to see Doctor Who on TV when it started showing on the Sci-Fi channel (before they changed their name to stupid). I didn’t care if it was old episodes, a reimagining, or what it turned out to be, a continuation I was just happy to see this show that I had missed out on growing up.

I liked the first few episodes just fine, I was steadily falling in love with the characters and then came the line that changed everything: “I could save the world but lose you.” In an instant my love for the show multiplied many fold. One of the things that was holding me back from embracing the show was the perception I had that the Doctor/Rose relationship was just there to tease the audience and I wasn’t in the mood for that. Then RTD had the characters show that this wasn’t like, well pretty much every other ship on TV it seemed, this was going to be in your face canon shipping.

And I fell in love along with them. And with them. And it hasn’t stopped.

4) And then they made out

Back when most, of my fandom activity was still on TWoP the Doctor/Rose board started a trend that spread far and wide. Bits of the show (often in motivator form) then tagged with “And then they made out.” We had so much fun with this on our own (we didn’t completely limit ourselves to Doctor/Rose but it was mostly them). It really brought our thread regulars together, several of us have since moved over to livejournal and are still friends.

So some you probably remember that even.

5) “Wait, self, that’s not canon.”

So between Doctor Who seasons 3 & 4 I finally decided to watch Stargate and instantly fell in love with Daniel Jackson. But it also sparked something else, I wanted post-Doomsday Rose to be able to join in with the SGC and go on all kinds of adventures that way. From that it was easy to imagine that Rose and Daniel would become friends and start bonding.

Somewhere along the way this morphed into shipping them. I knew that and I was having fun imagining how Rose and her growing relationship with Daniel might affect things on the show. I haven’t lost track of what canon was though, imagining my AU just added another layer of enjoyment to it.

But then there came the episode 'Past and Present', which is, to be honest, not a very good episode. So many it’s no surprise that my mind was wandering to my AU so much through it. But here’s essentially how it went on for me:

Show: Daniel flirts with what’s her name.
Me: Seriously Daniel, your wife just dies.
Show: Some Sha’re angst but mostly more inappropriate pseudo-relationship.
Me: Well we know Daniel has a thing for blonds.
...
Me. Wait, what? Um…I really don’t think that tracks with canon.
(Thanks back on canon)
Nope, unless you count Sam (which to be fair you kind of do), Daniel does not have a thing for blonds. You’re just thinking of Rose.

After that the line between canon and head-canon kept blurring and blurring. Basically my enjoyment of the show is really tied up with my head canon, and has been since I realized and accepted it in this episode.

Comments

[misssara11.livejournal.com]

ATTMO!!!!

[jedi_of_urth]

Well they totally did. I have said so.