Fandom Snowflake Challenge #10

[aadler]

Taking on the meme/challenge here.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge #10

Make a “Five Things” list, your choice as to what kind of five things. Leave a comment here saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Okay. I’m going to go for —

Five Fandoms I Could Have Gone All-in On the Way I Did With Buffy the Vampire Slayer, If Buffy Hadn’t Got Me First.

Seriously, once I got started on Buffy — which was what actually pulled me into fanfiction in the first place — it took me over and there wasn’t a lot of room for anything else. In nearly 25 years, I’ve written in only six non-BtVS fandoms (not counting crossovers) … which shows I can do other stuff, I just haven’t had anything else grab me the same way. So, if I hadn’t been hooked by BtVS, what else might have drawn me in? maybe not to the same extent, but in something like the same way?

1. Smallville. That’s an easy one, because I had already noted the appeal, and several times mentioned it. One of the things that made Buffy so fruitful for me was the supernatural element: stories could go in pretty much any direction, all kinds of things could happen while remaining consistent with the basic setup as established. The sci-fi foundation of Smallville (particularly the multiplicity of ways in which kryptonite could be utilized to produce various effects/mutations) offered essentially the same range of opportunities, plus the interrelationships among the main characters provided a solid field within which to operate, PLUS the rich history on which Smallville was built opened all kinds of possibilities.
   
   Even with Buffy claiming primacy of my attention, I still might have done one thing or another in Smallville. What most worked against it was timing: the show’s second season concluded while I was at Fort Bragg getting ready for departure to Iraq, and subsequent deployments and preparations for deployment prevented me from catching up and keeping up with the episodes on any kind of sustained basis. (It was actually just a few years ago that I was finally able to finish watching all ten seasons.) So, yes, if a few things had been different, I might have been able to do the same with Smallville as I did with Buffy … but things weren’t different, so I never did.
    
2. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the movie, not the graphic novel series). As far as the reasons go, I can’t give the same level of detail as I did for Smallville, I can only say that I felt the appeal immediately. I definitely could have gone that way if I hadn’t been so busy around that time — again, deployments and preparations for deployment — or if there had been follow-up movies. As it was, I can still remember being aware that things could have been done with this (I just never did).
    
3. MCU Avengers. This one is a bit of a gray area, because I actually did a Buffy/Avengers crossover (here), which wound up incorporating a number of ideas I’d had for the fandom before it turned into a crossover. Really, though, that just emphasizes the basic point: the Avengers franchise was so attractive to me, I did wind up working with it, just not as far as I ever did with Buffy alone.
    
4. the Walking Dead (the TV series). I don’t think I need to explain this one, it’s been monstrously (pun not intended) popular, and really grabs the imagination. Again, this manifested in a Buffy story set in that world (here), which actually could have been set in a generic zombie apocalypse venue since it didn’t include any WD characters. Still, if I hadn’t already been caught up in Buffy itself, it’s easy enough to see me diving further into that other world.
    
5. the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Yeah. I was captivated by the original Terminator movie, and Linda Hamilton nailed it down solid with the sequel (subsequent movies did not live up to that). Her portrayal simply can’t be topped — I’ve previously described her Sarah Connor as “driven, ferocious, indomitable, deeply messed-up, and utterly unforgettable” — and that’s just the way it is. Even so, Lena Heady turned out something that could be accepted as a legitimate alternate-universe version of Sarah Connor, and the story design of the TV series, built on top of the monumental backstory of the original (two) movies, offered a lot of opportunity for exploration.

All of this is speculative. Something about Buffy just grabbed me, in a way nothing else ever did before or afterward, and it may be that it was a lightning-in-a-bottle thing that happened the only way it ever could have happened. Still, those are areas where I might have gone … and if I had, I wouldn’t have followed out Buffy as I did, and I can’t be sorry about all those fanfic years I DIDN’T lose.

Comments

[tellshannon815]

My one of those is Lost, although I definitely loved Buffy and Smallville!

[aadler]

I actually considered putting Lost on the list. The truth is, though, while the show definitely captured my interest as a fan, I was never really inspired to try fic in it. (Part of that, I suppose, is that it kept going in such weird directions, I wouldn’t have been able to figure out just how to approach writing in that fandom.) Clearly, that didn’t stop other people.

[switchbladeeyes]

I was totally bummed with the Sarah Connor Chronicles was cancelled. Never was "fannish" about it, but really enjoyed it!

[aadler]

Getting fannish about something seems to be helped by exposure to some good fic in that fandom. As far as seeing SCC canceled (and on a cliffhanger, at that), LithiumDoll’s “Out on the Wire” followed that ‘last’ episode with a very nice conclusion/summation. (The same author did my most favorite ever Burn Notice fic, with “Those Five First Times”.)

[switchbladeeyes]

Thanks for the recs!

[freevistas]

This is a really fascinating post to me. I'm new to writing and reading fanfiction, and I like it, but I don't think I've ever felt the way you describe yourself feeling about Buffy or the other fandoms you mentioned. I keep waiting for it to happen, to find something that really grabs me like that...but I'm not sure if it's going to. This post has given me some things to think about!

[aadler]

It didn’t happen all at once. I started watching Buffy as something to share with my kids; I was newly-divorced, and taped the episodes — starting with the series premiere — as something we could do together during visitation weekends. It didn’t seize me (or them) immediately, but it was good enough that we kept watching. It wasn’t till halfway through Season 3 that I discovered this thing called ‘fanfiction’ … and that was when I likewise discovered that I really had become a serious fan.

When I say Buffy took me over, I don’t mean to the exclusion of anything else; I kept watching (or reading) and enjoying many other fandoms. Any notion I had of writing fic elsewhere, however, continuously got pushed to the side by all the ideas for Buffy stories that kept coming to me. (Which probably had something to do with the fact that over 99% of the fanfiction I was reading was Buffyfic.) So, did the immersion spur the dedication, or did the dedication lead to the immersion? No telling, the two reinforced each other in a self-perpetuating cycle. So in a way it was something that happened to me, and in a way it happened because it was something I chose to do.

If you want to get what I got — in Buffy or, more likely, somewhere else — just dive in and do it. Depending on how excessive you get about it (and I gave myself willingly and happily), you’ll get there.

[svgurl]

This is such a cool idea for a list! I was very mono fandom too for the longest time, except mine was Smallville, so it is interesting to think of what you would've gotten into if the timing had been different and something else had grabbed you first. :D

[aadler]

I’ve known for some time — and said so, more than once — that Smallville might very well have had much of the draw for me that Buffy did if BtVS hadn’t got there first. And I’d been aware, also, that the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and MCU Avengers were likewise possibilities (though to a considerably lesser extent). It was this list, though, that had me give it more thought, and I did genuinely find that two more fandoms could have done the job.

Except MAYBE Smallville, though, I can’t imagine anything else seizing me the way Buffy did. You never forget your first.