lobelia321: (lobelia phallos)
[personal profile] lobelia321
Hello, everybody, whom I Friended in a frenzy of football-friending over the past 3 weeks! :-)

This is a sort of self-intro post to all of those who have not known me long! And a hello, I'm back!post to all of those who have, *g*.



Name: Lobelia
This reveals me entry fandom: Lobelia is Lobelia Sackville-Baggins of Lord of the Rings fame, relation of Bilbo Baggins of Bag End. I never used to be overly fond of my name because of the floral association until I discovered the phallic plant visible in my icon above.

Default icon:

This is a detail of the wonderful painting in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, by Sidney Nolan, part of the Ned Kelly series. (The entire pic can be adored on my userinfo page.) I made it during a brief craze within the ephemeral Ned Kelly fandom. I love the way the skyscape is visible through the visor.

Fandoms, past and present:
• Entry fandom, January 2002: Lord of the Rings
I read fps for a week, then discovered rps, wrote my first fic within days, and didn't look back for over two years. Whom I loved: Dom, Karl, Orli. Still left cliff-hanging: an unfinished boring!Orli WIP and an unfinished Desert Prince AU!WIP.
• Lotr fps (I wrote one orc!fic.)
Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (My first foray into fully-fledged fps-dom, hoho.)
• Pirates of the Caribbean (dipped a toe in, wrote one mediocre fic)
• Harry Potter (fell in love with the fanfic; the first time I liked a fandom where the fanon was better than the canon). I am still writing a fic that turned into a nightmarishly never-ending 40-thousand word opus starring Harry/Draco/Dudley. I am one of 3 1/2 people in this universe who adore Dudley Dursley. The fic has loads of plot (a first for me!) and endless dollops of angst. Will it ever be finished??
• Stargate Atlantis
SGA came along and I veered off the HP track! I read the fic for nine months before ever clapping eyes on a single minute of canon. This was my first TV-based fandom. [livejournal.com profile] sheldrake lent me her DVD set of the first series and I succumbed in a big way! SGA canon made me do two things: 1) write loads of experimental prose; 2) write het.
• Football
This hit me in the middle of SGA, in the middle of a wraith!fic no less, like an all-consuming freight train of rps lust. Suddenly, it was all back! All the rps that I'd missed for years! The droolpics, the droolposts, the late-night pic trawling, the keeping-up-with-the-latest pics, the sheer insane subversive hilarity of it all, the pretty thousandfold! Plus it combined with my already existing World Cup obsession which, bizarrely, only translated itself into slash in the year 2006.

Football history
I played soccer at school. The first World Cup I remember is 1978. I set my alarm for 4 a.m., lugged the family TV into my room and watched matches live with the sound turned down. I remember lusting over the Italians. Everyone had long hair.
But it hit me properly in 1990 when I was imprinted with Cameroon. Oh, Cameroon. Oh, Roger Milla. I was lost.
Inbetween Cups (World and Euro), I have in the past subsided into utter indifference. It remains to be seen whether that will happen this time around, what with the added alchemy of slash.


Pairing predilections
The pretty / the pretty. (e.g. D'orli, Kaká/C.Ronaldo)
The geeky / the geeky. (e.g. McKay/Eldon)
The weird, the rare, the evil and the ugly. (Dom/soft toy; orc/Billy; Kiran Shah (hobbit stand-in)/Viggo; John Sheppard/wraith; dementor/dementor, Draco/Dudley). This category seems to be the one I always end up inevitably landing in. Even in fandoms I know nothing about I tend to land in the rare. In HP, I didn't know that Dudley was rare when I glommed onto him. In SGA, the first person I wanted to slash was April Bingham; I only discovered later that half the fandom thinks she is an original character, she is that rare. *g*
The underdog love translates itself into my real life.

Real life.
I am an art historian by trade, currently employed at a crap university in England. I am writing a book on visual narrative in painting. This combines my love for narrative (I have been known to rant at length about fanfic in narratological terms, *g*) and pretty pictures. The pictures I am writing about are the rare, the weird and the ugly within the art history!verse. Here's one:

Gerome, Death of Caesar, 1867


I have two sons (t'8 and t'12) and one husband (t'h). Don't ask me why they are called t'...; this goes back to Wainthropp fandom, *g*. T'h is Australian. I am 43, hey babes, and proud of it.

My language
I am German by birth and primary schooling. Then I moved to Australia and went to an Australian high school in Sydney. Back I came to Germany for uni in Heidelberg and Berlin. All these years, I wrote origfic in German but never finished anything. I also lived in Berkeley, California, for a year.

When I moved to England, I was sad to lose my mother tongue and my fic writing. Henceforth, I wrote only academic non-fic. My German rusted. But then, oh joy, came January 2002, slash and feedback, and lo and happiness, I found that yes, I could write fic, and yes, I could write it in English, and hooray, I could even finish it and post it! It is perhaps the one thing for that I am most grateful to fandom.

Obsessions
I tend to lurch into obsessions and be 150 per cent enthusiastic. Until I lurch out again.

Published literature
Unlike many fanfic fans on my Flist, I tend not to read a lot of generic fiction, i.e. sci-fi, fantasy etc. I prefer general literature, and especially world literature. I do read a lot of that, though. Most recent reads: Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad; Homer, The Odyssey; Adam Thorpe, Ulverton (which I LOVED); Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret.

Screen preferences
I prefer the interactive screen to the televisual screen. Since t'h gave me my ibook in January, I watch even less TV than I did before. Football is about the only thing I couldn't give up my TV for. And the Olympics.

Sexual preferences
• Wanking.
• Men. I discovered that I was heterosexual when I was about five and fell in lust with Hanuman, the white hero ape of Ramayana fame (we lived in Indonesia when I was little).
• When wanking, strangely, I like to peruse porny pictures of naked women. Every ten years or so, I fall in lust with a woman. But I fall in lust with men every few months.

Ethical preferences
I believe in an LJ etiquette. Wipe your feet when you enter someone else's LJ. Look around but don't trample anything. I've been metafandommed by raving banshees and I didn't like it. :-(
I believe in the humanitarian ethos of fic. As I said to someone earlier today, the epiphanous moment came when I decided to write Viggo Mortensen for the first time. I did not like Viggo; I was going to mock Viggo relentlessly; I was going to humiliate him by pairing him with Person of Small Stature Kiran Shah. But then I wrote him and to do that, I had to crawl inside his head, and there I discovered an intriguing thing: Once you're inside someone's head, you empathise, and you can't torment that person as planned. I also realised how Wrong to 'humiliate' someone by pairing him with Kiran Shah, and that led me to research dwarfs and midgets, and turned the whole fic into something else. Since then, I believe that although fiction cannot change the world in any direct way, it actually can change the world. It is the one medium that allows us to perceive the reality of another.
Most of the fics I love in fandoms are ethical in this sense. Certainly, nearly all HP fics turn the unethical JKR into something responsible and thoughtful.

Canon
Canon shmanon.
That is my official line. *g*
But I am also an anal pedant (those who have seen my ringbinders with print-outs of fic filed away in alphabetical order know this, *g*) so I do delve into canon.
But my canon is not necessarily other people's canon. :-)
I also love fanon.
I also love the Mary Sue.
I have takes and theories on all of this and tend to post on these intermittently. They're somewhere in my Memories but, ack, this post has got way out of hand (who knew it was so much fun to navel-gaze and self-reveal?)!!

Depression
I used to be Depressed. My oldbie friends remember this (*hugs you all*). I got through it and out of it. Before depression, I talked very little about myself. I think I didn't know myself well, and I felt guilty about the parts I did know. Two things helped me:
• counselling
Flylady, whee! Wot i discovered due to [livejournal.com profile] brightest_blue, *g*.

Um. So now that you know all, what will I post??? I feel squozen dry, liek a dry lemon.

Oh yes, and I will type 'liek' and '111'. This goes way back to tinhattery. ;-p



Look, mummy, self-revelation and no hands and no Flock!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-07-11 10:04 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lobelia321.livejournal.com
How about FIC?
You tell me this. [livejournal.com profile] sheldrake told me this. I tell myself this.

So what do I do? Download pictures obsessively! *holds head*

T'h knows I write the fic. He's read all of two of them. It's not really him. *g* Fine by me. There's a limit to sharing. :-)

*injects you with new juice*
omg, this sounds so RUDE!!

(no subject)

Date: 2006-07-12 03:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] travelingcarrot.livejournal.com
What, me, rude? Surely never!

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Lobelia the adverbially eclectic

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