Today's question from
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sholio : If you had been in fandom when you were a kid, what shows would you have been fanning on, and what kinds of things would you have looked up for them?
I used to actually write stories, sometimes on paper, sometimes just in my head, for my favorite shows and movies when I was little. The first thing like this I know of I wrote when I was five--a little Hound of the Baskervilles remix, I suppose you could call it, of the Mickey Mouse and Goofy version. We found it when we were going through my mom's things after she died, and I laughed my ass off because…wow, even though I didn't know about this kind of fandom till I was in my twenties, apparently I was a little fanfic writing fangirl as a child.
I also still have the record albums my sister and I wrote all over with ballpoint pen--the first two Monkees albums; we put hearts and stars and shit all around the names of the guys we liked best (she was a Davey Jones girl, I went for Mike and Mickey). I was fucking obsessed with that series, and their music, I really was. I still love it, unironically, unashamedly. If we'd had internet then, I would absolutely have been following them on social media, and buying all the weird merch, and going to shows, and whatever else was out there. As it was all we had was Tiger Beat and 16 magazines, so I had to get my fixes there.
I also would have been writing fanfic and vidding, I'm sure, for this incredibly obscure western called Laredo. No one knows about it, but for some reason my sister and I were obsessed with it, which was difficult because my mother pretty much banned westerns from our television--my sister and I wanted to watch Bonanza and the Rifleman and stuff like that, but my mom had this deepseated antipathy toward any show where anyone used the words "ma" or "pa" and so it was rare for us to be able to watch those things. There was very little written about it, and I think we found it after it had gone off the air and was being shown in reruns on a Saturday afternoon or something--that was the one time Mom wasn't dictating what we could watch, so I think that was how we found it.
It was a strange show, in that it was tonally different from anything else you'd find on TV then--not quite a dramedy, but definitely a comedic hour-long series. The two main characters were complete hotasses, and even my young self was wide-eyed at William Smith's pecs and biceps and traps, and he wore pants that rivaled Jim West's in tightness, BUCKSKIN pants that were deliciously tight, and he had that Chris Evans Dorito shoulder to waist ration. So much of the series makes me cringe now, the racism and the sexism and all of that '60s era shit, but man, little me loved it, and I'd have been all over fan sites if I could have.
There were a lot of things I was actively fannish about without even knowing that a thing like fandom existed--my walls were littered with the pullout posters from Tiger Beat (sigh, David Cassidy), I'd write in for giant posters of actors like Paul Newman, and I collected clippings in scrapbooks and stuff. I was a budding film buff as young as ten, so I was starting to research movies and collect things about them, and the movie stars, and the musicians I liked. I think that's why I know I'm never going to be able to fully disinvest from fandom--I've been this way my whole damn life, without even knowing that such a life existed.
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ETA: Did anyone else get a kudos email today from AO3? Man, I finally have some kudos and I still don't get an email even when I have some! I'm used to going days and days without any kudos, but it would have been a nice thing today except that there's been no sign of one, it's almost midnight, and I can't find anything about it on the twitter feed so I assume everything's fine.
