Keep Hoping Machine Running (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thefourthvine) wrote2006-10-22 06:47 pm
thefourthvine) wrote2006-10-22 06:47 pm
Entry tags:
Poll: Consensus, Part One
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]
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]
no subject
So. Um. Do you have any imaginary fandoms?
I replied:
Well, maybe. Sort of. I mean, I've got something similar.
Okay. So this is embarrassing. But hello, we're in fandom here. It's like taking all the most embarrassing aspects of your personality and throwing a frewking parade for them.
So. I wrote this play. About Joan of Arc. More specifically, about her relationship with the Bishop Pierre Cauchon... a fictional account of their interaction in the period immediately after her capture up until her execution, and the play was all about faith and patriotism and desire, and the character of Joan was really complicated and angsty and noble but also egotistical, and the character of Cauchon was very deeply flawed and repressed and had this past history of abuse and there's all this sexual tension between them and blahblahblah you get the point.
So, this turns into an actual play that got performed, and directed by me. And it was this horrific thing whereby I fell utterly in love with the character of Cauchon. And then I started to fall for the actor portaying him (who just so happened to understand the character scarily well). So the two got all mixed together in my head. I mean, I never Mary Sue'd myself as Joan or anything, but I started to mentally write fanfiction whereby Cauchon, showing characteristics of the actor, redeems himself at the last moment and then they run away together or something. (You know, just casually AU'ing the part where she gets burned at the stake.)
And then I started to mentally write meta about the fact that I had written a play that was essentially fanfiction for historical events, which by some freak of nature made it into the real world, and I had then created an elaborate fanfiction-y alternate universe for it in my head. And in the process, fallen for both character and actor. And I'm still not entirely sure how well I seperate the two. Which is probably bad, because the actor is now my boyfriend, but there are some things he never needs to know.
But, you know, as long as I'm not alone in Teh Crazy, I think I'm doing all right...
no subject
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1. My god, if you ever write meta based on this (or fiction, for that matter), I will so totally read it. Hell, if you write a book about it, I will buy it. In hardcover.
2. I think that's not so much an imaginary fandom as it is life in the entertainment industry.
(Okay, plus a secret third reaction, which I will share in the spirit of telling all: OMG that's awesome and fascinating and wow and - my god, you win. You wrote historical RPF, and then you wrote RPF based on the historical RPF, and then you started dating the actor in RPF the first. You win at fandom and meta, and I love you beyond words.)