#fandom is...

My younger housemates (5 and 3 years old) were playing with a bouquet of wilting dahlias and cooing to each other, in these pitying, mournful voices, “Poor little flower...poor little flower...”

When I came over, I found that this was because they were stripping every last petal off the dahlias and putting them in a bowl -- “to remember them!” I was informed. And I was laughing at the irony of being so sympathetic about the havoc they themselves were wreaking...

...when it occurred to me that their “Poor little flower” sounds exactly like my own mental voice when I’m cooing over the sad state of whatever poor character I’m torturing in my fic.

So, the wonderful and prolific multi-fandom artist @dakotaliar posted a request for birthday postcards and I thought it’d be totally inappropriate to send a postcard with ether their or another artist’s work on it, but it should be fandom-y, and then I thought “Fandom is...” and looked something up to find someone else’s answer.

Fandom is... my happy place

Which actually love.  Now, my forte is not cute one-liners, or succinct thoughts at all (as you can tell from the way I churn out sloooow novels rather than short stories or poetry).  But I know y’all are great at it, and I thought it’d be an amazing thing to see what people fill-in-the-blank with.  So.  My next post will be “Fandom is...” and y’all need to reblog with your thing.

I’ve seen it argued that “good” doesn’t have to mean “deep” or “meaningful”; nor does “good” have to be “perfect.” That a work of fiction that is light or silly or flawed can still be “good” or “great” -- and this is totally true; I completely agree with this. (And “good” and “great” are subjective anyway, of course; anyone can argue them of anything.)

But sometimes I love things that I think are not good. I love works of fiction that I also think are trash -- and that’s part of why I love them.

When something is good, I want to appreciate it for what it is. The parts that make me depressed or uncomfortable or angry, I have to find ways to explain, to accept, to excuse.

But something I think is trash, that’s the stuff I’m willing to -- joyfully, without hesitation -- to rip apart, to shred into pieces and pull out the parts that I love. To bend and break and melt down and reshape into what I want.

This ship I love came to a terrible end? Oh, that ending sucked -- here, let me write a better one.

That character I love did something awful? Well, that plot twist was stupid -- listen up, I’ll tell you what they should’ve done.

Loki was worse, but...Loki! He's a trickster! And I mostly avoided writing from his POV -- for that reason! Now I’m just finishing a fic entirely from Zhao Yunlan's POV and there is a biggish reveal near the end that was as much a surprise to me as it (hopefully) will be to the readers, because I had no idea what was going on until it happened, despite being in Yunlan’s head for all of it.

Like, Zhao Yunlan isn’t even that complicated a character, his motivations are, in order:

Shen Wei

Doing the right thing

Daddy issues

Shen Wei

Lollipops

Shen Wei

Also Shen Wei, only with fewer clothes on

I love this trope sooo much! @xparrot What is 'winning someone over' one-sided pining? I mean mutual pining is pretty much one-sided pining from each POV, by definition?

One-sided pining, at least how I meant it, is when you have a guy (it's almost always a guy) who has a crush on a friend who has made it clear they only see him as a friend, only he persists in the crush and the mooning and being all angsty that it's not returned. And sometimes the object of his desires eventually gets worn down/”won over” and gives in, making it the "nice guy" fantasy. (The last example I’ve seen of one-sided pining that didn’t end in a ship that comes to mind was in s1 of Supergirl and was actually handled quite well, with Kara's best friend Winn having a not-well-concealed crush that he eventually manned up, confessed, she told him she loved him as a friend but not more, he was briefly depressed and asked for a little time apart, and then he actually let go and came back as her friend, sincerely, and I actually started liking his character quite a lot. But the nice-guy "being friends with a girl who thinks you're just friends but actually you're pining" is a trope I detest.)

Though I think there are some pairings that people disagree on based on whether it comes across as one-sided or mutual? Like, a pairing that one side does deny their feelings but then later recants, sometimes it's somewhat up to interpretation, whether it's that they were worn down, or whether they were repressing their feelings for some reason. Which is often dependent on how you interpret a character, how plausible denial is for them, etc.