I'm home for the weekend, and my sister happened to turn to Fox Family running a marathon of the first two Ninja Turtles movies today while I was sitting in the living room websurfing... oh nostalgia. I was a giant Turtles fan as a kid, so of course I couldn't help stopping to watch. Then I realized I never had gotten around to watching the new CG movie so I went and downloaded it, and aside from the incredibly cheesy intro, it wasn't half bad really... The Raph/Leo fight (in the Dramatic Rain
tm no less!) made my fangirl bits happy. >.> I'm sure it will surprise no one to know that Raph, being the angsty one, was always my favorite Turtle ;)
Anyway, then I went looking for fanfic. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me to find there's a burgeoning TMNT fandom on Livejournal! Everything has slashers for it these days... (
but I can't picture slash of the Turtles. Much as I love the relationship between Raph and Leo, it's best left a platonic one; if you pair them off it separates them from their brothers, and that's just not cool. plus um.... ew turtle sex o_o) Of course, most of the fansites I remember from when I was a kid back in the early 90s are long gone, sadly. All that fanfic lost to the ether D: though some of it was better off lost perhaps, lol, but I still miss the fannish sites from when I was young. TMNT, old Pokemon fandom pre-Johto, all that sort of thing. There was a sense of adventure and the unknown to the whole thing that it doesn't quite have anymore... It's probably a lot easier and more convenient to be in online fandom in the age of Livejournal and Web 2.0, but back then it was like a treasure hunt -- hopping from page to page, seeing the collections and presentations each webmaster had painstakingly put together with their own HTML knowledge, poking through nooks and crannies in hopes of finding that one special niche where you could get more of your pairing or your character or the genre you liked. Actually... I guess it's not that different, lol. But I kind of miss homepages. They still have them in Japanese fandom; a space completely decorated by the author, completely their own. I'm too lazy for it myself these days, but... I like them. It's kinda like, um. The difference between a homepage and a Livejournal (or Insanejournal) feels kinda like the difference between a house of your own and an apartment, I guess. With a journal (especially on Livejournal-based sites), you're inside a framework, part of a whole, and it's entirely possible that outside that whole, no one really knows you're there. With a homepage... you're just out there, you in the whole wide world. People don't find you by coming to LJ or IJ and doing an interest search, they find you off Google. You're independent. I guess what I'm saying is... I miss the days when fandom online felt more like going over to check out other people's houses, instead of walking down the hall to a different apartment. I mean -- recently I got out of Naruto and then not long after that got into D.Gray-man; you could say I switched fandoms. But what I actually
do is the same as what I've always done since the majority of girly!fandom first moved to Livejournal-based sites. I joined the major comms for my fandom, I check them every little while. People post basically the exact same things -- fic and art, of course; occasional vids; cosplay pics; icons; RP ads, many multi-fandom. There's a strange sameness to it. I haven't left the building, I've only moved down the hall a little. It's a very different experience than what I used to have moving fandoms -- Pokemon to Harry Potter, Harry Potter to Yuugiou. Those involved going to entirely different sites, changing forums, mailing lists, learning new terms and new traditions. Nowadays, though, I don't know. It's not bad. I'm still having fun here. But it's definitely not the same.
Perhaps this is what it means to be a veteran, lol. It all starts feeling 'been there, done that' after a while.
I try to hang onto the experiences I've had online. People like me who've been around for a few years are the closest we'll probably ever have to really keeping track of a fandom history; and being a fan has shaped who I am in a lot of ways. It's something important to me, something I want to remember, to preserve. I hope there comes a time when ours comes to be regarded as a legitimate hobby, because fandom has always been such a huge part of my life -- I can't even remember a time when I wasn't a fan of something, in a sense I think our Livejournal-based fandom would recognize. Some of my earliest memories of a child are, guess what, those aforementioned Ninja Turtles. You know what I did with them as a kid? I made up stories in my head. My favorite thing, and I hope you know me well enough not to be surprised :) -- my favorite thing was to make them angst. As a child, I didn't quite get Man vs. Himself yet, but I very much liked to make up scenarios where the bad guys beat up Raphael (it was usually Raphael, him being my favorite) and the other Turtles, especially Leo, had to look after him. I think I was a natural for fandom, really. :) Anyway. I hope someday there comes a time when people stop looking at media fans as being such weirdos, when we can put up our fanfic online and not ever have to worry about being sued. Because... I'd like to be able to tell people, even here in my conservative part of the country, what I like to do most in my spare time. It's a bit of a sad thing to have such a wonderful hobby, one that fulfills me in so many ways, and not be able to tell anyone about it because they a) would be weirded out, or if not that, b) wouldn't care at all.
But it's comforting to think there's a generation of grown-ups now (oh god, I'm a grown-up!) who spent their teenage years doing exactly what I did -- being fannish. It's comforting to think there are people my age who are sitting around Livejournal making icons and writing fanfic about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, just because they love it so much. There are people my age who get it, and there are people younger than us right now who get it, and we're the people that are going to be inheriting this country and so-- maybe, eventually, we'll get there. It would sure be nice.
in other pie-in-the-sky wishes, I'd love to open up a dialogue between yaoi and slash fans...
irritated
bored
SQUEEEEEEEE![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
wasurenaikara: Kind of like how I'm pretty sure Hoshino-sensei's been reading Naruto, huh? 8D
geeky
good lord how did we do that
distressed
surprised
bouncy
なぜか分からないけど疲れている。
amused
OHNOES
cheerful
HELLOOOO NURSE
