Well, okay.
May. 2nd, 2009 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaSo, I could babble self-indulgently about fandom for a really, really long time. Like, pages' worth of nattering, no lie, especially since I've been thinking about it off-and-on since last night (well, okay, early this morning, but).
But I'll just leave it at what I hope will be a relatively short paragraph. More recent events than just yesterday have been making me think about the effect fandom has had on my life, and overall? I am really, really grateful for it. Yeah, there are crazies, and sometimes there is pretty massive suck to be had, but fandom has done remarkable things for my ability to engage with the world on a number of levels. Some are relatively superficial. One of the things I'm grateful for is the insight that just lurking in fandom has given me into writing, into the structure of a story and the way in which all the parts fit together. Another, weirdly, is Fandom_Wank; I used to be really, really terrible at laughing at myself, but I've learned to loosen up, and take a step back before I try to decide whether something's srs business. And, on that note, some aren't superficial in the least: I have learned more than I could ever possibly express about issues surrounding gender and race from fandom. I remember being the kind of person who didn't necessarily notice even massive fail in those arenas; I know people IRL who still don't, and I know that without fandom, I most likely still wouldn't.
tl;dr: fandom has made me way less of an idiot than I used to be in about twenty different ways. \o/ And none of it would have happened if I hadn't gotten sucked into trying to find myself good stories about hot people. Go figure.
Aside from musing on the results of my wacky love of all things fannish, I've done ... practically nothing, today. Which is bad - I should totally have been working on revising my thesis proposal for the Monday resubmission - but was also really relaxing. :D I read a crazy man's 80,000-word manifesto on What's Wrong With Harry Potter (NB: link points to a PDF); I think maybe there were a couple of decent points buried under all the pretentiousness and entitlement, but it's hard to say, I was distracted by his continual use of the royal "we". (No, really, he literally wrote the words "Maybe we've come off as a ... git". ??!?!??!)
So. Thesis proposal. And maybe when I've done a little work on that, I'll pop Age of Mythology in again.
But I'll just leave it at what I hope will be a relatively short paragraph. More recent events than just yesterday have been making me think about the effect fandom has had on my life, and overall? I am really, really grateful for it. Yeah, there are crazies, and sometimes there is pretty massive suck to be had, but fandom has done remarkable things for my ability to engage with the world on a number of levels. Some are relatively superficial. One of the things I'm grateful for is the insight that just lurking in fandom has given me into writing, into the structure of a story and the way in which all the parts fit together. Another, weirdly, is Fandom_Wank; I used to be really, really terrible at laughing at myself, but I've learned to loosen up, and take a step back before I try to decide whether something's srs business. And, on that note, some aren't superficial in the least: I have learned more than I could ever possibly express about issues surrounding gender and race from fandom. I remember being the kind of person who didn't necessarily notice even massive fail in those arenas; I know people IRL who still don't, and I know that without fandom, I most likely still wouldn't.
tl;dr: fandom has made me way less of an idiot than I used to be in about twenty different ways. \o/ And none of it would have happened if I hadn't gotten sucked into trying to find myself good stories about hot people. Go figure.
Aside from musing on the results of my wacky love of all things fannish, I've done ... practically nothing, today. Which is bad - I should totally have been working on revising my thesis proposal for the Monday resubmission - but was also really relaxing. :D I read a crazy man's 80,000-word manifesto on What's Wrong With Harry Potter (NB: link points to a PDF); I think maybe there were a couple of decent points buried under all the pretentiousness and entitlement, but it's hard to say, I was distracted by his continual use of the royal "we". (No, really, he literally wrote the words "Maybe we've come off as a ... git". ??!?!??!)
So. Thesis proposal. And maybe when I've done a little work on that, I'll pop Age of Mythology in again.
