What do you do if you’re alone in a fandom? If you can’t contribute anything of actual value? If nothing you have to say is ever good enough to provoke genuine spontaneous enthusiastic responses; either nothing at all or maybe forced polite ones at best? If the stuff you’re interested in isn’t what most other people, the “real” people, are interested in? If the people who are maybe the closest to your own interests are in a little circle of their own friends that they’ve been in for a decade or more and there’s no way into that because they don’t look at anything outside of it, or if they do, there’s never been any evidence, thus, nothing you did was ever enough to merit a mark of their attention?

(NB I’m not suggesting I should somehow be let inside the friendship itself. but that feeling of “foregone conclusion that you will never even be considered because you weren’t already there at a time when you barely even knew the thing existed”… where the alternative is “yes, they have looked, but it was all so worthless to them they decided to say nothing at all”… well.)

And between all these things you can never acquire that “man, that was awesome!” back and forth feedback loop that keeps things going?

I know the answer is “git gud; if you were worth paying attention to, people would pay attention to you” but being alone especially when nominally the idea of the thing is “hey let’s all play together” is seriously just one of the worst feelings ever. “No one wants to play with you.”

(I would have said that in my current fandom that “let’s all play together” is not actually the underlying assumption and it’s way more a meritocracy than I had ever experienced before in other fandoms, but as I write this, before my eyes I am seeing unfold a thing of “hang on haven’t I said something pretty much just like this? Why is this good, people saying ‘OMG LMAO THIS IS PERFECT’, and when I said it, it wasn’t?”)

The fact that this has happened to me more than once means the common factor, and thus the problem, is me, but how do you keep living with your best never being good enough?

My stocking for fandom_stocking. Off to see if there's any I can stuff...

Soo... petition to permanently delete "Serafina", "Selena", and "Serena" from the list of permitted names for OCs in fanfic?

It's interesting how setting deep roots in one fandom seems to have changed how I interact with any new media thing or narrative I pick up. After tentatively venturing out from that OTP of Me/Harry Potter fandom (vintage 2007) into Doctor Who fandom (as of not quite a year ago), it's like it's my first response now: go looking for fanworks. I haven't yet then really latched on and drunk deep of most things, but I do frequently at least go see what there is.

So far this has mostly amounted to sampling fanfic for things David Tennant was in because having started in Doctor Who I've been working through his CV for a while - Blackpool, Takin' Over the Asylum (would that there were more! ♥ Campbell Bain 5eva, see icon on Dreamwidth), Broadchurch, things like that - but other things too. Like, I've been reading Skagboys, Irvine Welsh's prequel to Trainspotting, and at about halfway through it I today decided to go looking for fanfic, even though I can barely keep straight who most of the characters are. This is probably not a way I would ever have thought to approach it had I read it ten years ago, but now it seems like the obvious thing to do. (Spoilers: such fics frequently warn for drug use; who knew? Also: Renton/Begbie NOOO AUGH WHYYYY)

Sometimes I also poke around for fic for stuff I have known for a while but never really approached in a fannish way before, like Red Dwarf, Labyrinth, Pern, ElfQuest, or Hitchhiker's Guide, though all that's more casual, sometimes limited just to seeing what each year's Yuletide has on offer. Oddly, I have never really gotten much into Tolkien fanfic (though I collect a fair amount of fanart), though it was actually dabbling in LotR slash that primed me for getting into Potter slash when I got into Potter fandom.

No real point here, I guess; just navel-gazing.

BTW, if any of the Potter folks still reading me are also into new Doctor Who, I recommend shivver's DW/Potter crossover Mistaken Identity.

It amuses the heck out of me that this is a canonical tag on AO3.

Why do people bother to follow fics on FFN that are marked "Complete"? (or equivalent on AO3, showing complete chapters like "1/1" instead of "1/?" or "1/10") Do they just not notice? Are they hoping that someday, somehow, the author might decide to continue the fic, even if it's a shortish one-shot that was written three years ago? (Actually more like pushing five, but the date actually on the fic in question on FFN is only three since I deleted and reposted a while back. It has its proper date on AO3.)

Seeing who_la_hoop mention hers reminded me to go check: I have one AO3 invite available, if anyone wants one.

I took the OTW Community Survey!

bollocksed monophthong says:
oh dear.
a "tennant chars with tennant chars" comm [eta Mar 2015: I can only assume I had just found tennantx2]
so like, barty/ten
and did i mention he also played giacomo casanova?
i think the remainder can be left as an exercise for the ... well, for some part of the body

Oolon Colluphid says:

BillCorbett: Grateful for the positive reaction to my Voldemort / Flo the Progressive Girl slashfic. #art

can you guess what the 21613523434 responses to that were?

BeelzeBLT says:
i don't know what he even means, so no

Oolon Colluphid says:
Well, Voldemort/Flo the creepy girl from the progressive commercials != slash

BeelzeBLT says:
oh, is that her name?
and actually, while it's not slash in current usage which has come to mean exclusively "male-male", of course it's simply a (American) pronunciation of the character "/" and my understanding is that older usage included what we would now think of as "het" in slash, because it meant "pairing characters together which were not paired in the source material", regardless of their sexes/genders
just think, if star trek had been a british show, we might all be calling it "stroke" fiction
*snickers*

-----

Having said that, though, I wonder, am I right? Or have I got my fandom vocabulary history wrong?

(I need an icon for "hmmm, actually, I wonder..." I have a "confused" one, but as it's Trelawney with "WTF?" on it, it's rather stronger than the confusion/curiosity here, and in fact stronger than I often need to express...)