Vaguely wondering what to do next

[beccaelizabeth]

I think part of my current blah is that I'm almost effectively between fandoms.

There's still shows I'm a fan of - Legends of Tomorrow is so much fun - but the characters / pairings I liked best are... not around. So the fanfic is not exactly flooding in for them. And because I watch like a year behind on DVD I'm not there for the meta and speculation parts of the year.

Doctor Who fandom is forever, but sort of diffuse, since I'm mostly dipping in to Big Finish and more than a year behind on that. New episodes time was exciting but not where my fanfic interests have been at for some time. Canon is always giving me new stuff and I don't currently ship anyone hard enough I have to go looking for it elsewhere.

Other fandoms have just sort of... worn off. I mean Marvel movies did the thing a while ago now, where they went where many of us did not follow. Whichever corner I was interested in was not the one they followed up on. And I haven't watched Infinity War or Ant Man & The Wasp, because they haven't fixed it yet. Don't know if I'll like how they do.
Agents of SHIELD has long since proven its politics does not overlap much with my own, and even the interesting bits didn't keep me.
I am very much looking forwards to Captain Marvel
but with this track record I am... apprehensive.

I still have a stack of Marked to Read fanfic for Stargate Atlantis that I intend to read eventually. Still have some for Stargate SG1, though less of it seems to turn up. There's old fandoms and old pairings I can go looking for.

But I've also been following random recs. Reading book fandoms. Reading book fandoms for books I have not in fact read, having filtered it to post canon where they're actual adults, and quite a lot of varying degrees of AU. At that point it's pretty near original fiction but with characteristic concerns? And I've read fic for Teen Wolf when I have not watched a single episode. It was an AU fusion but it left me wondering what the good stuff is considered to be there. Plus I just spent a long weekend reading Pride and Prejudice fanfic, and am currently on the alternate endings, and it's interesting.

So I'm looking for stuff I'm not getting in my main fanfic reading, as well as looking for more of stuff people aren't writing, partly because some of my favourite pairings are from comics twenty or more years old and at some point people are just not going to go there any more. *sigh*

If I could figure out what I was looking for I'd have more success finding it.

I mean some of it is revisiting old friends and their emotional attachments and hoping that at some point in the last twenty years things worked out for them, which you'd think would be a weird reason to read fanfic, but sometimes I find fic written by someone who obviously had that exact same set of feelings and it's like, twenty years later they meet up and everything still matters but they're different people now, and then there's Story.

There's characters I still miss after twenty years. Characters who got such a bad ending I still get sad of it. Fanfic is a balm for that.




But some of what I'm feeling about platforms fading is probably that thing where that particular corner of fandom, or that fandom as a whole, is fading, and there's never much to be done about that.

Still, the state of tumblr is not encouraging, since I can't keep my queue full lately.




I don't know, don't know why it's useful to write this, don't know what's to be done about it.
Find a new fandom?
Talk more about the ones I have?



Shall see.

Comments

[raine]

How about both? It's your journal, after all, and people reading it will either connect or not.

As for what are you looking for: are there things in a show that are absolute Do Not Wants (DNW)? Do things like "found family" or "must have strong characterization without being macho" or (fill in the blank) make or break a show for you? If I had a show to pimp to you, what would you want me to tell you about it that make you want to watch it, other than it's me recommending it? Like, I loved American Gods, but if I'd known how visceral and lovingly painted the gore in it was, I probably would've never watched it. As it is, I'll probably never rewatch it except in snippets. But it's the same type of gore that makes me not want to watch Hannibal. Does that help?

[beccaelizabeth]

I think a lot of things are Do Not Wants but I haven't made a list in my head.
I do not want to watch sexual violence, and gore, and horror. Or the kind of thing where a woman dies every week.
When I read fanfic I basically stick with No Archive Warnings Apply. I can live with character death in original stuff but it's what I go to fanfic to avoid and read fixits of.
I don't think I want to watch teenagers any more. I mean Buffy is great and I rewatch that, but newer shows with high school hells are just... not my sort of thing.
There are a lot of stories that seem to think by my age people aren't having story happen to them. It is not encouraging.

I watch F&SF, including superheroes, with very rare visits out of genre, mostly to things with sword fights.
I seem to be happiest in my 12 rated superhero corner where everything works out in the end.
I like team as family, and in theory I like solving problems by means other than hitting them real hard, but in practice I have a lot of shelves of problems getting hit.

I haven't watched American Gods because I read the book before and don't think it's my sort of thing. Same with Preacher, read some of the comics when they were first out, do not want to watch even when I like the cast. Do not want to watch Hannibal. Gave up on The Magicians because nasty. Stopped watching Defiance.


I guess one thing I'm looking for in stories is the idea that you can be kind and good and it works out well. I mean, there are stories that actively punish kindness? And there are others where people go through all kinds of hell but being kind and helping each other is what gets them through. The former is nasty worlds I don't know why people visit, and the latter is how humans manage the world, by kindness and making connections.



I am now thinking about what I'm looking for and avoiding but this is what I've thought of so far.

[raine]

Once I realized what I did want, it narrowed things down for me considerably. Like, if I want to unwind after work, I don't need massive amounts of angst and drama, so I'll go watch something like "Chopped" where I can zone out for ten minutes and I'll still find out who wins. Does that sometimes mean I'm not in a fandom that is attracting everyone else I know? Sure, but I'm okay with that.

Good luck on finding what you want. If I come across something I think fits what you've listed here, I'll let you know. :-) Oh! Have you watched Leverage?

[lokifan]

That is a difficult thing, when you're kinda lost between fandoms! I normally end up reading a bunch more original stuff/people talking about original stuff online, but that doesn't have the benefit fandom can have where it's less effort cos you know things already.