Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Fandom hasn’t been all fun and games, awards and challenges and Sections 31, you know. Think of all the people who toss you off lists and drive you out of genres, all the people who suck you dry then tell you to go take a long walk off a short bridge, all the people who rub you the wrong way then push you over the edge - all the infinite stupidity of fandom.

I’ve appreciated all the idiocy; I’ve appreciated it very much. Why? Because on my own, I’m far too loyal a person. I don’t quit jobs. I don’t drop out of school. I don’t leave lists. So it’s a great service when someone will throw me off a list and save me no end of reading, betaing and writing. It’s a great service when people drift out of a fandom and leave me behind twiddling my thumbs - when they stop tempting me to blow up the ship or assimilate the quadrant one more time. It’s a great service when they make a new fandom so huge and unnavigable that I give up on it in despair. It’s even a fine service when they write badfic, keeping me from reading because the stories I don’t care for so far outweigh the ones I do that there’s too little hope of striking gold.

All of these are ways to gain free time. Any old reason to put down a fic is a good reason, whether that it’s misspelled, or smutty, or angst-ridden, or stereotypical, or incomplete, or part of a huge arc I don’t have time to follow.

Am I a pessimist, because I see all this bad in fandom, or am I an optimist because I turn it all to my benefit? I don’t know - I’m more curious about what it says about my muse than what it says about me.

You see, it struck me that my muse is just another one of these time-saving external factors. In and of myself, I was too loyal to J/C, but the muse was bored out of her ridged skull and she started writing C/7 instead. I was never the type for murder and mayhem, but she borrowed Liz’s black leather and took out Janeway herself, several times over. I could never move on from VOY to another show, but she hopped right over to Tuesday nights and started writing Buffy. I could never walk away from fandom in general, but what has she written for me lately?

I want to stay in fandom, I want to finish the Seven Saga and the Chip Fic, I want the feedback and the derivative nature and the in-jokes; I want it all. She’s not interested. Maybe she’s just tired, maybe she’s been burned, or maybe she feels she’s been there and done that and has the ASC awards to prove it.

I don’t understand her. I’ve never understood the sort of person who’s capable of cutting her losses - I’m there in the brass band going down with the Titanic. She’s out at sea, tossing women and children out of her lifeboat so there’ll be more fresh water for her. She’s a menace, she is, and I don’t even know what she wants.

With my luck, she’ll spend the rest of my life filking tacky seventies songs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 5th, 2002 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Muses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.