How fandom changed the way I enjoy visual media

[skogsraa]

Written for month_of_meta

The first time I saw Torchwood was when I stumbled upon the middle of the episode Cyberwoman and my reaction was to laugh hysterically. The bad specialeffects! The over-acting! The mockable cyberwoman costune! I promply turned of the tv and want to bed.



A year or so later someone put up a rec for the Torchwood fic Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive and I was quickly sucked into fandom. When I sat down to watch the actual show from the beginning I enjoyed it greatly, because I already liked the characters.

With Stargate:Atlantis, another sci fi show I watched after I got addicted to fic, much of my enjoyment came from the complex 3D characters that came from watching the show through the lens of fanon. Fanon gave the characters more dimensions, filled in plotholes and made full use of the potential the show itself rarely made use of.

In many ways fandom have completely changed how I enjoy movies and tv shows. The penultimate episode of SGA would have pissed me of before I discovered fandom, but now my first thought was all the amazing fic that it would bring. The main character in Wanted (2008) is much more likeable when you are predisposed to him by the fact that he is played by James McAvoy. I came out of Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy entertained but surprised by how much I cared about Peter Guilliam and his future happiness, a transfer from BBC Sherlock.

The small downside to all this is that fandom as a whole cares more about creators and actors than I ever have, which means I sometimes find out more about them than I want, and I was perfectly happy not knowing one of my favourite authors is a islamophobe.

Thoughts? Comments? Have you experienced anything similar?

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Completely! This is the way I got into my last two fandoms, more through the fic than the series. In the first case I tried the show three times before hitting an episode that made me grasp what the fandom was seeing. What's more the fandom was rich in excellent writers, vidders, and artists and the fanworks are the only thing that keep me connected to it now that the canon just seems irredeemable.

The same is true of Merlin. I hit a couple of well written stories that looked at what underlay the series in terms of the ideas and the characters and I was able to watch it again after being nothing but irritated and diappointed with the early episodes. In fact, given that the series is itself just a riff on the legends, I have an easier time watching it now by thinking of it as being a piece of fan fiction itself.

[skogsraa]

I gave up on Merlin early, but I still occasionally read fic.

It's nice to see I'm not the only one doing this. I watched so little tv the last year that if not for fandom I would have no clue of continuing/new shows.

[bonspiel]

I kind of did this with Supernatural - I think I'd seen an episode or two, and then checked out the fic, and then was much more interested in watching the series, because in my head it gave some backstory to the characters that I felt was lacking on screen (this was in the early seasons, season 2 perhaps).

I also *watched* a lot of things that I wouldn't have watched otherwise, because of what actors were in it - a lot of Canadian C6D - Paul Gross and Callum Rennie, primarily - and before that stuff with Colin Firth. C6D especially seems to be a fandom where there is/was a lot of catching up on back catalog stuff.