Lyrical Titles

Challenge #7

The Ferris Wheel
Journaling: Life in fandom goes through ups and downs. Reminisce about the "wild ride" of your time in fandom or in other online communities.
Creative: Create an image or a photo with the theme "let's go for a ride".

If you've known me a while, you probably know a lot of this, so you can feel free to skip. But for those who haven't, here's a long boring waffle. I was first aware of the existence of fandom round about 2002, when I was in my second year at St Andrews and my then-boyfriend had some friends who were active in the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fandoms. I wasn't really active at that point, especially once I went no contact with this friendship group (this was an "ex kept the friends" situation) and if anything I avoided it a bit so as not to bump into The Piss Artist Formerly Known as Xander (one of my ex's friends posted her fics under that name and went along with it for ages when people assumed Xander was her real name, then started a relationship with this woman in Australia letting her think she was this Xander dude as well)...yeah, there were reasons I remained no contact with that lot.

Flash forward to a couple of years after my graduation, at which point I started getting into Lost, which is the first fandom I was really active in, and is still my top one. (I'll get to my all time top five later, the other four are more recent.) I found myself wanting to expand on the backstories, especially for those characters where canon barely touched them. If you've known me a while, you probably know my "I Think This Flashback's Mostly Filler" pet peeve where it's always bugged me when too much focus is placed on the same old characters while others are pushed aside (yes, Jack's tattoos, I'm looking at you, although Once Upon a Time did flog Regina vs Snow to death a bit as well. I've had this pet peeve since I was about 13, was reading this series about a group of teens on an island off the coast of Maine, and got seriously annoyed at the amount of focus on this one character who I grew to find really irritating). And I wanted to correct certain canon cockups, such as certain character deaths. So that was how I started out in fandom.

Over time, I was active in more fandoms, Fringe, Doctor Who, Vampire Diaries-verse, Arrowverse, Supernatural, Once Upon a Time, How To Get Away with Murder, Roswell New Mexico, Riverdale-verse, Lucifer, Buffyverse, Harper's Island, Cruel Summer, The Wilds, Hunger Games, Pretty Little Liars, Teen Wolf, iZombie, Game of Thrones-verse. At this point in time, my ultimate top five are Lost, Dark, From, Yellowjackets and School Spirits (the last four being shows I got into in the last couple of years, but the ones I'm most active in right now.)

I've had my peaks and my troughs - 2013 is what I refer to as the zombie year after having basically gone through it on autopilot (bit of context for anyone who doesn't know, since Dad wasn't in my life as much after about the early 1990s, my grandad effectively took over as my father figure, and that was the year he died after a short illness), while 2019 was the year I briefly lost confidence after getting trolled. I now know this troll was someone calling themself 0 who was trolling lots of people in the Arrowverse fandom at the time, asking for very specific requests and then leaving repeated rude comments and "corrections" for anyone who didn't write them. (Corrections in inverted commas because for me, what 0 was trying to correct weren't mistakes - a character changing her name in an alternate timeline that was going to be fully explained in a later chapter, a character's reaction to something that was written and posted before that character found out about it in canon so I didn't have that to work with, but the troll was reading after it aired, did have that context, didn't spot that date and decided I was wrong - but if I was being more generous to 0 than I really felt, I could see how they wrongly assumed they were mistakes. Apart from the other one which was just a difference of opinion rather than anything being wrong in the first place.) And 2020 is pretty self explanatory.