cheat sheets

[lobelia321]

You know, I love this new convention going round, where people post cheat sheets, explaining the fandom of their fic to the uninitiated and clue-less.

This new thing (or relatively new to me, anyway) seems to betoken a change in reading habits, that people aren't just reading in their own fandoms anymore but are branching out all over the place, and that people are reading for fanon rather than canon.

In fact, it seems to betoken that people are turning into me. Or, to put it the other way round, that I am totally un-unique and part of a big crest of surging fic-reader vogue.

As the crowd chanted, We are all individuals.

But yes, I love the cheat sheets! I love reading them even for fandoms about which I know a bit. Like looking in from the outside. Also, it's like a nudge-nudge to posterity. To the future people who have no clue about what happened to be showing on TV in the year 2005 or what premiere pics were making the rounds in December 2001. Insta-fandom!

Comments

[tvillingar.livejournal.com]

You should head to ship_manifesto, I've found new and shiny fandoms from there and it's always interesting to see another person's take on something I already know... though the community is more about introducing specific pairings, it also serves as a crash course to the setting.

I'm not sure if I'm making any sense. Should go to bed.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I think I may even be a member of that comm.... *goes to check custom filters*

[jayest.livejournal.com]

The other comm that's good for finding new fandoms is crack_van. There's links to an overview of all the featured fandoms in the userinfo. The DC Comics overview is how blythely sucked me into that fandom.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I have friended this now.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'm typical (well, I've never been typical, but I have a better chance in fandom than in most social groups), but when I read fanfic, what's important to me is not the source material but the fic author.

Or, to put that another way: I'm not so much a Stargate Atlantis fan as I am a fan of the slashers who are now writing Stargate Atlantis.

And if one of them is also writing stories involving a show that I can't get because I don't have cable, or a show I can't get because it was canceled in 1977, or a show that just plain irritates me -- well, I won't necessarily seek out the show, but I will give the story a try.

For instance, I think "The Apprentice" is pure evil, evidence of everything that's wrong with the human race in general and Americans in particular, and I won't watch it -- but if astolat or eliade or someone like that decided to write Apprentice slash, I would read it.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

well, I've never been typical, but I have a better chance in fandom than in most social groups
*laughs wildly*

You know, I'm not sure you're typical even in fandom because back in lotrips there were a lot of fans who cared heaps more about a pairing than about an author. Well, they might care about an author who was their friend but they didn't care about prose style just teh pretty and teh pairing. I gravitated away from them after my first bath in slash; we called them the teenie-slashers.

I am with you for nearly every word of your post. But!! And this is the big but. I don't think that ultimately you can subtract the canon from the fandom. The test case for me is origfic. Very few of us write it (you are one exception - hah, untypical again!), very few of us read it, and even if we do, it feels very different to writing in a fandom. Or to me, the one time I did it, it felt radically different. There is a certain moulding of the fandom and the canon and the fanon going on in fanfic that is simply not there in origfic. So the thing about reading the writer, not the fandom: yes, and it is true that I was lured into my first SGA fics via writers I knew from elsewhere, but before I knew it, I was sneaking peeks at ones I'd never heard of, and in other fandoms, e.g. Sentinel, I've read fics by authors previously completely unknown to me (it it is true that these fics were recced by authors whose recs I have come to trust).

So there was something in me that wanted this fandom. I wasn't following authors, I was following the blood trail of the fandom. And the fact that fantastic authors were writing in it was the reason I was following the trail, but no, let me rephrase: not so much the authors as the quality and kind of the fic. In Sentinel, I didn't even read the author name; I can't even remember their names now, I forgot them after fb'ing because they are fly-by-night to me.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Where are these cheat sheets you speak of? Because I have of late found myself reading fic by writers I admire with absolutely no sense of what the fandom is about, which can enjoyable, but ultimately confusing, as when I try to figure out what The Sentinel is all about - shamanism and anthropologists and police stations??? But I resist getting a TV so I can comprehend alien fandoms...

Happy Belated Birthday, incidentally. Am jealous of your Oxford Shorter.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I first encountered fandom cheat sheets in isiscolo's fic Clarke's Law, which, incidentally, is also a wonderful story.

And then I discovered that there is an entire crack_van community of cheat sheets out there!! A sort of cross-fandom rec fest.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the Shorter? *pets and drools*

*caresses spine*