Fopinions February: First Fandom

[extrapenguin]

Today's Fopinions February is for maggie33! I was asked to talk about my first fandom. But first, two things:

1. space_swap sign-ups have started! They'll be ongoing until next week's Sunday, but please sign-up early if you can.
2. That Guardian post on the cast list is ... started. I wanted to check episode 1 to get one person's name, but ended up rewatching + screencapping alot, oops.

Now, without further ado: My first fandom qua fandom was David Weber's Honor Harrington series, a very loyalty kink-y MilSF book series where the author holds some hilarious/terrible opinions that seep through into the writing but writes an engaging battle scene nonetheless. While he is surprisingly okay with remembering that black people exist and putting women in his space military, there are zero queer people. However! There was one place where he specifically compared two dudes to an actual canon (het) couple, and those two dudes were pretty shippy in any case, so I went and googled.

Lo and behold, I found philomytha's A Commissioner's Duty, which was shipfic for the pair I'd been googling about. As I'd had some brushes with fandom beforehand*, I wasn't completely lost, and eventually ended up diving into AO3 and then DW and then diversifying my fandom portfolio. The rest is history.

(This post's icon from the French cover art for Flag in Exile, which is an amazing piece of art. The French cover arts are in general awesome, eg this one for Honor Among Enemies. Especially compared with the typical Baen cover art, lol.)

* Starting with writing fanfic of Walking With Dinosaurs at the age of 5-ish, and including squeeing over some now-forgotten animes together with friends in high school.

Comments

[extrapenguin]

I was young/uncritical enough that I read up to ... A Rising Thunder? (IDK. One of the ones where they go to war against the Sollies.) before running out of books and only later realizing it was dodgy (and also just finding the later installments increasingly dumb). Nevertheless, the first books were good, and hit me at exactly the right time, when I really needed someone like Honor Harrington as a protagonist. Flag in Exile, despite the Graysons, is a nice comfort read.

I haven't read the co-written series! Huh, I didn't know John Ringo had less problems with gay people.

Baen covers are legendary for a reason! I just wish they could maybe get the French covers for reprints/other translations, but alas.

[krait]

That title doesn't even sound familiar to me, so it must be some ways after my stopping point. You have (or had) greater fortitude than I. :D The first books are still good and I sometimes reread them, with a sigh and a 'pity he never finished this series, huh?' after the seventh book. :D My favourites are probably the first one (because intro to the character and fun space battles!), the one where Tankersley becomes a thing (because yay, a boyfriend for Honor whom I like!), and the two that comprise the prison-planet escape (because I love survivalist narratives and revenge narratives!)

I don't know that John Ringo has fewer problems with gay people, but at least he doesn't forget they exist. (We find out one of the space marines is gay because someone zooms in on his reading material and it's gay erotica.) He's not a major character, but we come to know him a little, and I appreciate that he's just... there, being gay while doing his duty as a space marine same as everyone else in the group. I grant you, he dies before the end - but so does pretty much everyone so I really don't think of that as a mark against.

On the other hand, 'every red-blooded man loves big tits' is also among Ringo's contributions to the narrative. D:<

Haha, Baen covers really are... I think "notorious" might be a better term, but yes, they are certainly A Thing in and of themselves! Knowing that other countries get better covers makes me wonder anew at why the original covers are so... typical.

[extrapenguin]

It's actually book #5, the one just after Paul died and was avenged! I did like the first book, but it's got some early-episode weirdness re: sexism existing in Manticore. Paul Tankersley is shrug, in that I wasn't that into the get-together but at least he's better than White Haven in retrospect. The prison planet narrative was very nice! I liked the bits that weren't focusing on White Haven's sadfeels.

Yeah, that is a decent way to include a gay space marine. Even if Ringo has ... other problems to "compensate" for the fact that he recalled that gay people exist.

I have no idea why Baen covers are like they are, but perhaps it's simply the house style that was established at the start, when they ... only ever hired one illustrator to do them, who had A Style? IDK.

[krait]

Ahhh, that's probably why I didn't remember it, then; I am sad when I encounter Tankersley's death, and try to avoid it. (All the more when I remember who he's eventually replaced with. Ugh. I like a fair number of age-gap and commander-subordinate ships, but NOT that one! They have all the chemistry of a tank of xenon gas.)

Ringo has many, many problems, but yeah, at least that's (presumably) not one of them. Kinda ironic when Mr Redblooded Men Love Tits appears to be the reason Mr Strong Female Characters remembered gay men are a thing.

Heh, you know what, "we're on a shoestring budget and thus have This One Cover Guy" makes a whole lot of sense, considering Baen's history. They either got the One Cover Guy to train a couple of apprentices (or algorithms) to make covers, perpetuating the style, or they still haven't hired anyone else and it's been the same guy for the last twenty years. :D