Meta Month 6: My First Fandom
Dec. 7th, 2011 01:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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personalapocalypseI'd meant to mention this during my intro post! But that's okay, because this is getting to be a bit long anyway. (Also, I always seem to be writing these when I should be doing something else! But I'll get to read new comments tomorrow, on my day off.)
So my first fandom was a PSX game called Brigandine. I'd played games before, and I'd even written a few (unfinished) fics, but Brigandine was the first fandom I ever really got into, the first time I really started interacting with a community of fans in a significant way.
The game itself was pretty simple. It was an SRPG (not, in all honesty, a genre that I'm usually very good at) published by Altus, about a fairly traditional subject - a great and powerful kingdom is taken over violently and becomes an empire that wants to take over the entire continent that it rests upon. It's a simple plot, but it had a lot of quirky characters that I particularly enjoyed, and the gameplay itself was quite fun, even when I utterly failed at it. It's a fun game if you can find a copy; unfortunately I think it's fairly hard to find these days. (And I'd still love to find a copy of the Grand Edition, but unfortunately, it was never released outside of Japan. Sigh.)
This was definitely what you'd call a microfandom, since I think the most people we ever had as active participants were ten or twelve, and out of us there were maybe four or five people active at any given time. It was essentially the result of one or two people who really loved the game and convinced a few others to find it, play it and participate in their own fannish projects. It had a ML, a couple of fansites, and a lot of ICQ and similar conversations going on at any given time. Not a huge fandom, but fairly active for quite a while.
How fannish was I? Well. This game spawned a couple of huge AU ideas among that little circle, one real-world AU and one reincarnation fic (I still kind of want to poke at the reincarnation fic.) It gave me my first huge fandom "crush." (Well, okay, that's debatable; it might've been the second.) It inspired me to write, oh, thousands of words, a combination of both posted and unposted fic and of backstory for a fansite project I wanted to do at the time. The computerized stuff has mostly been lost, sadly, but I'm pretty sure I still have quite a few character profiles and castle profiles for Esgares in a notebook somewhere.
It spawned at least one fic that I despise now and want wiped off of the entire internet. I'd thought I'd succeeded, but it still comes up on searches... I'm debating whether or not to e-mail the curator of [site] and have it deleted from their archives. (I'd thought I already had.) I know that there's an entire argument that could be made over whether or not it's appropriate for an author to ever delete their own fanfiction, and I normally don't think it's a good idea because there's always someone out there who would miss it... I'm tempted to make an exception. (Then again, it's a tiny fandom, I've written better stuff for it, and it's pretty much impossible to find unless you look for it. I might leave it be and just write a better version.)
And yes, there were things that the internet would call Mary Sues, but y'know, we didn't really notice. Or care. My cohorts were really amazing writers, and they said similar things about me, and so reading about the OCs was just as entertaining as reading about the game's characters for us. It probably helps that it was a fairly small fandom, and so we really didn't get a lot of outside observers pointing and laughing. (I do remember the Mary Sue argument coming up? But it's been a long time; I forget the details. I do seem to remember that I might've been the one to bring it up, and I wish I hadn't. We were having more fun before I did.)
...so, basically, we did a lot of things that would've been called "wrong" by hard-core fans, by people who were familiar with larger fandoms. And we did them anyway, and we had fun, by golly. And I think that made a big difference in how I saw fandom in general; it was a fun thing, not a stressful rules-heavy super-serious issue that had to be handled exactly right. Of course, some of that would creep in later as I started participating in larger fandoms and ran afoul of rants and issues, but at first it just wasn't an issue.
It fizzled out eventually, though. People moved on, ended up getting distracted by other things. It happens. At this point I haven't played the game in ages, and I'm not sure I would have time now to do it justice, so I haven't tried lately. I keep thinking about it, when I have free time, which is relatively rare. But even if I did replay the game and start, y'know, writing fic or whatever, things would probably never be the way they were before, or even close. I don't think I have the energy to start the fandom up again the way that the woman who introduced me to it did before.
I'll always have fond memories of it, though. It was a lot of fun.
So my first fandom was a PSX game called Brigandine. I'd played games before, and I'd even written a few (unfinished) fics, but Brigandine was the first fandom I ever really got into, the first time I really started interacting with a community of fans in a significant way.
The game itself was pretty simple. It was an SRPG (not, in all honesty, a genre that I'm usually very good at) published by Altus, about a fairly traditional subject - a great and powerful kingdom is taken over violently and becomes an empire that wants to take over the entire continent that it rests upon. It's a simple plot, but it had a lot of quirky characters that I particularly enjoyed, and the gameplay itself was quite fun, even when I utterly failed at it. It's a fun game if you can find a copy; unfortunately I think it's fairly hard to find these days. (And I'd still love to find a copy of the Grand Edition, but unfortunately, it was never released outside of Japan. Sigh.)
This was definitely what you'd call a microfandom, since I think the most people we ever had as active participants were ten or twelve, and out of us there were maybe four or five people active at any given time. It was essentially the result of one or two people who really loved the game and convinced a few others to find it, play it and participate in their own fannish projects. It had a ML, a couple of fansites, and a lot of ICQ and similar conversations going on at any given time. Not a huge fandom, but fairly active for quite a while.
How fannish was I? Well. This game spawned a couple of huge AU ideas among that little circle, one real-world AU and one reincarnation fic (I still kind of want to poke at the reincarnation fic.) It gave me my first huge fandom "crush." (Well, okay, that's debatable; it might've been the second.) It inspired me to write, oh, thousands of words, a combination of both posted and unposted fic and of backstory for a fansite project I wanted to do at the time. The computerized stuff has mostly been lost, sadly, but I'm pretty sure I still have quite a few character profiles and castle profiles for Esgares in a notebook somewhere.
It spawned at least one fic that I despise now and want wiped off of the entire internet. I'd thought I'd succeeded, but it still comes up on searches... I'm debating whether or not to e-mail the curator of [site] and have it deleted from their archives. (I'd thought I already had.) I know that there's an entire argument that could be made over whether or not it's appropriate for an author to ever delete their own fanfiction, and I normally don't think it's a good idea because there's always someone out there who would miss it... I'm tempted to make an exception. (Then again, it's a tiny fandom, I've written better stuff for it, and it's pretty much impossible to find unless you look for it. I might leave it be and just write a better version.)
And yes, there were things that the internet would call Mary Sues, but y'know, we didn't really notice. Or care. My cohorts were really amazing writers, and they said similar things about me, and so reading about the OCs was just as entertaining as reading about the game's characters for us. It probably helps that it was a fairly small fandom, and so we really didn't get a lot of outside observers pointing and laughing. (I do remember the Mary Sue argument coming up? But it's been a long time; I forget the details. I do seem to remember that I might've been the one to bring it up, and I wish I hadn't. We were having more fun before I did.)
...so, basically, we did a lot of things that would've been called "wrong" by hard-core fans, by people who were familiar with larger fandoms. And we did them anyway, and we had fun, by golly. And I think that made a big difference in how I saw fandom in general; it was a fun thing, not a stressful rules-heavy super-serious issue that had to be handled exactly right. Of course, some of that would creep in later as I started participating in larger fandoms and ran afoul of rants and issues, but at first it just wasn't an issue.
It fizzled out eventually, though. People moved on, ended up getting distracted by other things. It happens. At this point I haven't played the game in ages, and I'm not sure I would have time now to do it justice, so I haven't tried lately. I keep thinking about it, when I have free time, which is relatively rare. But even if I did replay the game and start, y'know, writing fic or whatever, things would probably never be the way they were before, or even close. I don't think I have the energy to start the fandom up again the way that the woman who introduced me to it did before.
I'll always have fond memories of it, though. It was a lot of fun.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 11:33 pm (UTC)I LOVED Brigandine. It was an expected love too. :) I won't easily forget how I got that game. I still have some fanfic for that game, but it's with Almekian and Norgard characters.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 11:54 pm (UTC)Talking about this kind of makes me want to play it again, but I just don't have time. ^^;
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 12:22 am (UTC)(damn it firefox spellcheck, "brigandine" is a real word)
As for the issue of deleting fic, as a reader it's never fun when it happens, but on the other hand, you don't owe people you've been providing with free entertainment anything. If there's something you don't want to be associated with any more, take it down. What you write belongs to you, and you're well within your rights to delete it.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 12:56 am (UTC)My first online fandom space was the Nintendo Loudhouse BBS (not the dial-in sort of BBS, but they used the term for their forum) back in... 1997, I think? I spent a whole summer, my last before high school, there, talking RPGs and abusing emoticons, until the forum went down for "maintenance" and never came back.
I wrote and posted (on Geocities, oh man) cheerfully inane Squaresoft crossovers with nonsensical OCs and loved every minute of it.