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

[asya_ana]

Oooh... are you creating a list of Guardian characters? I wasn't sure if that was what you mean above, but I would cheerlead very hard for that. Especially when I'm trying to get new people into the show who don't have a Chinese background, I think it can be hard for them to keep track of who is who. I would be delighted to have a post to point them toward!

(If that's not what you meant, nevermind. Carry on. lol)

[trobadora]

I wanted to check episode 1 to get one person's name, but ended up rewatching

Haha, that happens to me every time. Yay for getting a start on the cast list, though! I'm really looking forward to that.

[maggie33]

So your first fandom was a book fandom. Mine, too - The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. I never had another book fandom later. Well, I read a few Harry Potter fics back in the days, but I never felt like I was really in that fandom, my interest was very casual and random. :)

And those French covert arts are indeed wonderful.

Also, yay for the cast list. That would be super helpful for writing fics and posts.

[krait]

Ahh, Honor Harrington! One of my milSF novels, and probably the reason I like the genre as much as I do. Alas, it became one of those Fandom 180s for me; I threw At All Costs across the room at about fifty pages in and swore off the whole mess, because I Just Could Not with the sheer stupidity. But I still occasionally reread the first book.

(Have you ever read the series Weber co-wrote with Ringo? I did, back before Oh John Ringo No happened, and it was interesting how it revealed each author's strengths and weaknesses. The female characters are worse than Weber would write, but on the other hand a gay character actually exists.)

I'm jealous of the French for having much nicer HH covers! Oh, Baen, why are you so... *vague hand gestures* It's funny how after you've read ten of them you can pick out a Baen book just by the cover art style; I couldn't describe it to you, but I can say conclusively "that's a Baen cover" when I see one!