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Fandom, the next generation...
Dec. 16th, 2018 10:44 amSo my daughter is 12. She knows I'm a fanfic writer and has gone with me to conventions and the like since she was old enough to walk. This is not a new thing to her.
What is a new thing, though, is the experience she had Friday night. She was (very anxiously, it was cute) awaiting the start of season 8 of Voltron. (I remember the shitty cartoon version from the 80s; the fact that they rebooted it was... perplexing to me but hey, whatever.) She loved it.
Note the past-tense.
She watched the first episode and was....disappointed. Hurt, in the way of fans who trust that writers and showrunners won't totally screw up the characters and relationships she'd come to love. (Note: I don't really know all that happened, but I got the gist. No spoilers here, for those who haven't seen it.)
So I sat her down and told her I'd seen this before. (To quote BSG, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.") And I told her about being 13 in 1987 and watching my favorite series of the era kill off its lead female character because the actress who played her was pregnant and wanted to avoid another miscarriage. And how the decision of the showrunners then---how they handled the exit of the actress's character---doomed the third season of that series to an inevitable cancellation and set off a war in its fandom that split fandom into two and was so toxic that, to this day, there are folks who still won't talk to each other because of it. (We're talking 30 + years later, mind.)
And I told her how we coped then. I was 13 and mad, so I wrote a story fixing what went wrong. (And that was the start of my writing fanfic---off and on, in a few fandoms, ever since.) And I wasn't the only one. Far from it. A lot of us made the decision that our beloved show had actually ended in season two. And we made that work. Because canon, at the end of the day, is really only what you make of it.
So she said, "I could write a story?"
I told her why not. Fix what went wrong. Spackle a plot hole. Make what went wrong, go right.
She's hate-watching the remaining episodes of Season 8 (another fandom tradition LOL) But who knows, another fanfic writer might just have been born. ..
What is a new thing, though, is the experience she had Friday night. She was (very anxiously, it was cute) awaiting the start of season 8 of Voltron. (I remember the shitty cartoon version from the 80s; the fact that they rebooted it was... perplexing to me but hey, whatever.) She loved it.
Note the past-tense.
She watched the first episode and was....disappointed. Hurt, in the way of fans who trust that writers and showrunners won't totally screw up the characters and relationships she'd come to love. (Note: I don't really know all that happened, but I got the gist. No spoilers here, for those who haven't seen it.)
So I sat her down and told her I'd seen this before. (To quote BSG, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.") And I told her about being 13 in 1987 and watching my favorite series of the era kill off its lead female character because the actress who played her was pregnant and wanted to avoid another miscarriage. And how the decision of the showrunners then---how they handled the exit of the actress's character---doomed the third season of that series to an inevitable cancellation and set off a war in its fandom that split fandom into two and was so toxic that, to this day, there are folks who still won't talk to each other because of it. (We're talking 30 + years later, mind.)
And I told her how we coped then. I was 13 and mad, so I wrote a story fixing what went wrong. (And that was the start of my writing fanfic---off and on, in a few fandoms, ever since.) And I wasn't the only one. Far from it. A lot of us made the decision that our beloved show had actually ended in season two. And we made that work. Because canon, at the end of the day, is really only what you make of it.
So she said, "I could write a story?"
I told her why not. Fix what went wrong. Spackle a plot hole. Make what went wrong, go right.
She's hate-watching the remaining episodes of Season 8 (another fandom tradition LOL) But who knows, another fanfic writer might just have been born. ..
