Can't get my brain to focus on anything today. Ugh. Sounds like a good excuse to keep playing catch-up with the December meme!
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theladyscribe: What was your first fandom and how did that experience affect your future fandoms?
X-FILES! Fandom of my heart! OTP of my soul! All of the original fanfiction tropes! I started watching X-Files at the end of the third season, when I was...eleven, and okay, I can apparently still do X-Files math. My mom got into the show when it still aired on Friday nights, and she let me watch with her. (Props to my parents: I was never told any TV show, movie, or book was "too mature" for me -- they let me decide that for myself. If I chose to give myself nightmares watching the X-Files, that was my choice to make.) When Fox switched the airtime to Sunday nights at 9pm, it posed a dilemma, since that was still my school night bedtime. For a few months, my mom would spend the Monday morning get-child-to-school routine explaining the plot to last night's episode to appease my obsession, before finally giving up on the whole bedtime thing so that I could just stay up and watch the damn show when it aired. (My mother's life would have been a lot easier if DVR existed in 1996.)
I was totally obsessed. When the season ended, I watched all the reruns. I tracked down the VHS box sets in local video stores. I bought all the episode guide books to catch myself up on the previous seasons. At some point the FX channel came into existence, and they aired ALL the X-Files reruns, and it was awesome. Look, there was no easy way to catch up with the full run of a show back then, okay? There were a good handful of S1 and S2 episodes I never actually found until the full season DVDs came out while I was in college (and I promptly purchased S1-6, obviously). And even when the show started nosediving in season 7, I stayed loyal, and tuned in every single week right until the bitter end. Watched the "Lone Gunmen" spin-off, too, and mourned its early cancellation. (I maintain that the actual finale of the X-Files should have been the "Two Fathers"/"One Son" arc midway through season 6; that's where the mytharc reached its natural conclusion. There were good standalone episodes after that, but it became obvious very quickly that Carter et al had never expected the show to be a hit or last for this long, and had no idea where they were going anymore.)
I found the online X-Files fandom pretty early on in my personal obsession -- I was maybe twelve. There were AOL chatrooms for specific discussion topics, and there was an X-Files chatroom, and I fell in love. While I had a couple of friends at school who also watched the show -- it was super popular at the time -- no one seemed to want to dissect every second of every episode the way I did. Finding that online fannish community meant EVERYTHING to me. And, of course, someone in the chatroom must have started talking about fanfiction and linked to some site -- likely Gossamer, still the biggest XF fic archive out there -- and, well. Not only did hundreds of other people want Mulder and Scully to hook up as badly as I did, they were writing stories about it. It was super awesome. I wrote and posted my own first fanfic ever at age thirteen -- it was a character study of Agent Pendrell, of all things -- and, well. There we go.
In some ways, X-Files fic really did create all of my bulletproof trope kinks: long, plotty casefic with slow burn romance that combined drama with lots of witty banter, and tons of h/c. (It also exposed me early on to all my least favorite tropes: torture porn, kid!fic, and death!fic.) I also read slash for the first time, but it didn't do it for me then -- primarily because I didn't understand how anyone could ship Mulder or Scully with anyone but each other. Mulder/Krycek baffled me. I get the appeal now, obviously, but that did set a particular pattern for me: I'm always gonna fall in love with a fandom through an OTP, and while I may read or write outside of it, it all comes back to that one ship for me. (I feel guilty about this sometimes, and make an effort to read gen as well, but the heart wants what the heart wants, I guess. I can fall in love with a canon in which I don't particularly ship anything -- right now I'm totally loving Arrow and Agents of SHIELD, for example -- but I'll almost never get involved in the fandom without an OTP.)
Also, I will forever maintain that every single common fanfic trope can be traced back to an episode of the X-Files. (With the one possible exception being A/B/O, but even then -- "Alpha", season 6.) Seriously, all of season 6 of the X-Files is basically the writers saying fuck it, let's just give the fans what they want. Everyone else thinks they're a couple? "Rain King." Undercover married? "Arcadia." Actual fanfiction? "Milagro", jesus fucking christ.
So...yeah. X-Files! I still love that show, cheesy and outdated as some of it has become. "Pusher" is still one of the finest episodes of television ever written, dammit. And once a year or so, I'll still get a hankering for some good old-fashioned MSR casefic and go trawling for fic.
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theladyscribe: What was your first fandom and how did that experience affect your future fandoms?X-FILES! Fandom of my heart! OTP of my soul! All of the original fanfiction tropes! I started watching X-Files at the end of the third season, when I was...eleven, and okay, I can apparently still do X-Files math. My mom got into the show when it still aired on Friday nights, and she let me watch with her. (Props to my parents: I was never told any TV show, movie, or book was "too mature" for me -- they let me decide that for myself. If I chose to give myself nightmares watching the X-Files, that was my choice to make.) When Fox switched the airtime to Sunday nights at 9pm, it posed a dilemma, since that was still my school night bedtime. For a few months, my mom would spend the Monday morning get-child-to-school routine explaining the plot to last night's episode to appease my obsession, before finally giving up on the whole bedtime thing so that I could just stay up and watch the damn show when it aired. (My mother's life would have been a lot easier if DVR existed in 1996.)
I was totally obsessed. When the season ended, I watched all the reruns. I tracked down the VHS box sets in local video stores. I bought all the episode guide books to catch myself up on the previous seasons. At some point the FX channel came into existence, and they aired ALL the X-Files reruns, and it was awesome. Look, there was no easy way to catch up with the full run of a show back then, okay? There were a good handful of S1 and S2 episodes I never actually found until the full season DVDs came out while I was in college (and I promptly purchased S1-6, obviously). And even when the show started nosediving in season 7, I stayed loyal, and tuned in every single week right until the bitter end. Watched the "Lone Gunmen" spin-off, too, and mourned its early cancellation. (I maintain that the actual finale of the X-Files should have been the "Two Fathers"/"One Son" arc midway through season 6; that's where the mytharc reached its natural conclusion. There were good standalone episodes after that, but it became obvious very quickly that Carter et al had never expected the show to be a hit or last for this long, and had no idea where they were going anymore.)
I found the online X-Files fandom pretty early on in my personal obsession -- I was maybe twelve. There were AOL chatrooms for specific discussion topics, and there was an X-Files chatroom, and I fell in love. While I had a couple of friends at school who also watched the show -- it was super popular at the time -- no one seemed to want to dissect every second of every episode the way I did. Finding that online fannish community meant EVERYTHING to me. And, of course, someone in the chatroom must have started talking about fanfiction and linked to some site -- likely Gossamer, still the biggest XF fic archive out there -- and, well. Not only did hundreds of other people want Mulder and Scully to hook up as badly as I did, they were writing stories about it. It was super awesome. I wrote and posted my own first fanfic ever at age thirteen -- it was a character study of Agent Pendrell, of all things -- and, well. There we go.
In some ways, X-Files fic really did create all of my bulletproof trope kinks: long, plotty casefic with slow burn romance that combined drama with lots of witty banter, and tons of h/c. (It also exposed me early on to all my least favorite tropes: torture porn, kid!fic, and death!fic.) I also read slash for the first time, but it didn't do it for me then -- primarily because I didn't understand how anyone could ship Mulder or Scully with anyone but each other. Mulder/Krycek baffled me. I get the appeal now, obviously, but that did set a particular pattern for me: I'm always gonna fall in love with a fandom through an OTP, and while I may read or write outside of it, it all comes back to that one ship for me. (I feel guilty about this sometimes, and make an effort to read gen as well, but the heart wants what the heart wants, I guess. I can fall in love with a canon in which I don't particularly ship anything -- right now I'm totally loving Arrow and Agents of SHIELD, for example -- but I'll almost never get involved in the fandom without an OTP.)
Also, I will forever maintain that every single common fanfic trope can be traced back to an episode of the X-Files. (With the one possible exception being A/B/O, but even then -- "Alpha", season 6.) Seriously, all of season 6 of the X-Files is basically the writers saying fuck it, let's just give the fans what they want. Everyone else thinks they're a couple? "Rain King." Undercover married? "Arcadia." Actual fanfiction? "Milagro", jesus fucking christ.
So...yeah. X-Files! I still love that show, cheesy and outdated as some of it has become. "Pusher" is still one of the finest episodes of television ever written, dammit. And once a year or so, I'll still get a hankering for some good old-fashioned MSR casefic and go trawling for fic.
