Poll: Consensus, Part One

[thefourthvine]

So. I miss talking to and hearing from y'all. But I'm suffering from a tiny problem, namely absence of any ability to finish anything. Someday I hope to be able to write actual useful sentences that connect to other sentences again, but today is not that day, so I'm going to do a themed poll series instead of meta or a themed recs post. (There are only three parts to this themed poll set, but I realize that, from me, three posts is totally massive spamming. My apologies in advance.)

The poll's theme is: consensus.

In part one, below, I'm going to try to establish my relative fannish sanity by consensus. To do so, I need to take you on a brief tour of my brain, focusing on two particular fannish things it does that I'm starting to suspect are - well, weird. (And keep in mine I'm judging myself compared to other fans; we'd already be considered insane by many of Them Folks Out There.)

We will now depart on our trip through TFV's brain. Please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Imaginary Fandoms. I have, um, imaginary fandoms. I don't mean original fiction that I tell myself - I mean original fandoms, where I come up with, for example, a long and detailed original story, and then entertain myself with considering - and sometimes, um, even writing - various types of fan fiction or kerfluffles or meta that might result from given installments of the story. Sometimes I do, like, a TV series, and cast it with imaginary actors and plan out both FPF and RPF. In my most recent imaginary fandom, I've even begun mentally vidding it.

These imaginary fandoms hit basically all my buttons, of course. I'm not actually going to describe this in any kind of detail, because, um, oh my god so embarrassing that I kind of want to die just from typing it out, but the current one involves time traveling teams (one "temporal scientist" and one assassin-ish type) from the future. The main team, at this point (in my head, we have arrived roughly at book or season three), has uncovered evidence that they are working for - and trapped by, and no, I'm not even going to elaborate on the whole legal enslavement aspect, because I do not want to die of embarrassment - an organization of extremely questionable ethics and purpose, which opposes an organization that also has extremely questionable ethics and purpose. Oh, and the timestream, which they're supposed to protect, is slowly dissolving.

I have assorted mental fan fiction for this story, all carefully tagged to various chapters or episodes. I have, as I said, mental vids. I entertained myself on one long, hideous drive to Pasadena imagining the meta resulting from the end of book or season one.

I'm pretty sure that all this is the very definition of sad and pathetic. But, hey, this is fandom - maybe we all do this. Do you?

Epics That Must Not Be Read. (Term borrowed from the only other person I know for sure has written one of these. She will not be named here - unless she just wants to be - out of mercy for her.) Another thing I do is write these long, involved pieces of FF that are only for an audience of one, and that one person is me. They're always AUs of some kind, and they always start in canon and move sharply away from it, and they always entertain the hell out of me. But only me.

I've written two. The first is a BtVS story that currently stands at 80 pages of actual story, 30 more of notes and dialog, and 5 of outline, plus 10 pages of deleted scenes. It assumes that canon remains the same up to "Once More with Feeling." (Please note that "Once More with Feeling" is the only episode of BtVS season six that I've seen - and I haven't seen any of five or four, either. No, wait - I think I've seen one episode in season four. My point is, the first clue I had to the ETMNBR status of this beast was that I was writing in canon I hadn't seen.) At that point, a single line changes, and this massively alters everything from then on. In terms of timeline, I've written up to where season nine would have been if there had been one, and I know how things will resolve in season ten.

There are only two people in the world who would be interested in this story; one is me, and the other is Best Beloved. We've both read it. I know it's an ETMNBR, so I'm not worried about finishing it. But I re-read it fairly regularly, and I still write on it from time to time, because it entertains me so damned much.

The other one is much more embarrassing because I didn't realize it was an ETMNBR until after I sent it to be beta-read. It's also rather long (and needs to be much, much longer), an AU that assumes canon up to a certain point and then sharply diverges, and entertaining only to me. (My poor, poor betas - some of them actually read the fucker, and provided really helpful, thoughtful, useful comments - in short, they helped me make a story that was interesting only to me even more interesting. To me. At the cost of a lot of their time and effort. I would send them flowers and chocolate except that I'm embarrassed to speak to them.)

Now for consensus. Feel free to judge harshly.

[Poll #851020]

Comments

[lorem_ipsum]

*cough* I have an imaginary fandom, although it isn't quite the same kind of beast as the ones you describe. My imaginary fangirls gather on the internet for imaginary squee about the awesome new (imaginary) documentary series / reality show, which involves a Mountie, a lawyer, and a couple of Rays running around Chicago fighting crime and arguing with each other.

Because. Um. It completely changes the fannish context if you reimagine them as real. Also, in my imaginary fandom, Fraser/RayK is actually canon.

At that point, a single line changes, and this massively alters everything from then on.

I am wildly curious re what line you changed, and what you changed it to :)

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

Okay, wow. That is way cool - you've done an FPF to RPF fandom conversion.

It completely changes the fannish context if you reimagine them as real.

This is such a fascinating statement to me; I can see how it might, but I'm really curious about the specific ways in which it changes things for you. Feel like elaborating at all?

I am wildly curious re what line you changed, and what you changed it to :)

This - the line change - is the epigraph of my story, but I don't have it open, so I'm going to have to do it from memory and thus may end up misquoting a bit.

In the canon (note: spoilers follow, but then, this isn't going to make a lick of sense to you if you haven't seen "Once More, with Feeling"), after the revelation that it was Xander, not Dawn, who actually activated the amulet that brought Sweet to earth, this conversation takes place:

Xander: So does this mean I have to, uh, be your queen?
Sweet: It's tempting, but no. I think we'll waive that clause just this once.

In mine, of course, it goes like this:

Xander: So does this mean I have to, uh, be your queen?
Sweet: I think I'm gonna say...yes.

[china_shop]

No to number 2, but only because I have no shame post the shameful stuff to a filter. :-)

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

Now, of course, I wish I was on that filter, because I am deeply curious about other people's ETMNBR. (Note: this is not actually a plea for you to put me on that filter, because I know exposing your ETMNBR to other eyes is a tricky, sensitive business, and those eyes have to be selected very carefully. Just - wow. You have ETMNBR. And you share them with (some) others. My curiosity-overrides-all-sense brain sector suddenly really wants to know what they are.)

But, really, filters - or, as some people have been considering, maybe a comm specifically for ETMNBR - are a great concept. You can share with just those people who already know you're crazy!

Except, hmmm. If I did that, I'm not sure I'd have the guts to put anyone on it.

*ponders*

[china_shop]

Um, I may have been misleading... My ETMNBR (well, the one I'm thinking of specifically) is not at all an epic, and is in fact a Gary-Sue (Gary-Stu?)/RPS story (*blush*). And, er, was written partially as a birthday present for someone, so may be disqualified on that ground, too.

What I really meant was: I'll post pretty much anything (unless a beta says, "Abort!"), but some stuff only to a restricted filter, and with some squirming.

If you're still interested after all those qualifiers, I'll happily give you access, but feel free not to be. :-)

[chalcopyrite.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have any imaginary fandoms, but I may have auto-redacted them. I do that sometimes . . . as for the ETMNBR, I'm not even sure I could lay hands on them if I went looking. They're somewhere, though -- I'm pretty sure they even got saved off the last computer's HD whent he logic board went crispy. I have doubts about my own fannish sanity, so I'm not sure how much good I am as a yardstick -- but I say sane.

[derien.livejournal.com]

I chose "Something Else" and my diagnosis is that you have a brilliant imagination and should probably take the stops off and let people read the Epics That Must Not Be Read if they want to, because hell, they might entertain a few more people than just yourself. After all, there's rarely a person who's buttons are all completely unique.

Imaginary Fandom? You betcha.

[archangelbeth]

Self-insert magical Mary Sue into books that never existed. In first person!

With, good gods, all the AU versions of what might happen if this went that way, or he did this, or if she said that, or...

Bedtime stories in my mind for over a year. Fluff! Angst! Both at once!

Heck, sometimes I still dust them off late at night.

[sbluerazchoccie.livejournal.com]

Hello! You don't know me, but I followed this here via daegaer's drabble and fell in love with the concept immediately. Imaginary or ETMNBR, you have my support. Because the world needs more time-travelling assassins, whether or not one gets to read about them oneself.
~
song
birdy

THIS ICON EXISTS FOR A REASON, AND THAT REASON IS THIS COMMENT.

[deconcentrate.livejournal.com]

I missed this post the first time, but randomly browsing daegaer's LJ, which I do mostly because I have "La Femme Sakura" bookmarked, and occasionally like to reread the twisty mindfucking of that particularly twisty mindfuck and maybe hopefully see something new posted about it and that invaraibly leads me to reading the rest of her LJ, and . . . well, that means I have to click whenever I see entries with comments on them, and sometimes even entries with no comments but a very enticing lj-cut.

I had, and still have, at last count, seven (well, six if you don't want to count the one I only ever discuss using Power Rangers action figures I am not kidding, don't laugh) of what I suppose qualify as "imaginary fandoms," although it makes me exceedingly uncomfortable to use that phrase, as I keep meaning to actually write them someday, and so they more qualify as "unwritten series/comics/shows" than "imaginary fandoms." Plus, I am fairly certain only I find them entertaining, though I do occasionally post about them in places like the sadly inactive originalfic100 and the under-construction vh17, of which the userinfo of the last may or may not be false advertising, as it may just be an excuse to worldbuild the fuck out of something for no reason other than because I can.

And my personal ETMNBR is still sitting on my old, misbegotten laptop, a slightly genderbending self-insert briefly-crossovery AU of the last season of Sailor Moon, and I won't tell about yours if you won't tell about mine. I say that it's something else because . . . well, it's really just horrible, awful fanfic written when I was 14 and really very confused about my gender identity, and it's only 80 pages because I didn't know when to shut up, and it's not even done. But it has some lovely moments that I do love unabashedly, and I do occasionally attempt to rework it sometimes, or at least make the horrible lack of canon knowledge in it (owing to the fact that, well, it's set in the last season of Sailor Moon, an arc that I've never read in the manga, much less seen in the anime) stop making me cry with its awful ignorance, and because I just had to go to the let's-add-more-Senshi! place, which always deserves a good facepalm.

But I adore it for some perverse reason nonetheless, and now I can rest content that nobody besides me will ever want to read it, because after that unexpectedly thorough summary of all the really big events in the story, I'm quite sure everyone else is utterly horrified that such a thing exists and that someone who is ostensibly smart enough to avoid the Pit of Voles when he wants to stay sane not only wrote it, but actually has a special place in his heart for it.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

Squee! There's other people out there who have imaginary fandoms. My girlfriend and I have this big one we sometimes chat about which assumes our lives are the Truman Show. Then we sit and talk for hours about what our show's fandom would be like.

There would be these people who would write this sort of unrequited-love fic for the pairing of the two of us and most of it would really suck but every once in a while there'd be a real gem. Then there's be this whole other group who would like this other pairing and would write 'ninjas vs aliens AUs which are totally canon!' And there's be weird incest shippers of her and her brother. Then there'd be a whole sub-genre of 'fic in which we take over the world' after some really good author wrote this one epic that everyone and their brother's read, and some of it would be really angsty and in others of it we would be evil and just taking over/ruling the world for the lols and all of it would be WIPs and there would be awesome fanart. And then there would be people who would ship two of our other friends, who would be major minor characters, together, and there would be a bunch of James Bond AUs that one summer. And...

We like to think that it's less about the narcissism about it being about us so much as an expression of our love of fandom, just as an entity and culture in and of itself.