Pocky Squirrel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pockysquirrel) wrote2014-01-04 01:24 pm
pockysquirrel) wrote2014-01-04 01:24 pm
Topic Meme: Day 4
I really should be finishing my Alpha fic right now, seeing as how it's due in less than 12 hours and I still have to write TWO fight scenes, FML. But at any rate, here's a meme post.
tsukino_akume requested that I talk about how I got into fandom, particularly PR fandom.
So really, there are two different stories here that kind of intertwine with one another. The story of my involvement with fandom in general begins and ends with PR, but there is also a long section of my life in fandom during which I had nothing to do with PR whatsoever.
To begin at the beginning, I first laid eyes on the Power Rangers when my subscription to Disney Adventures Magazine came in and they were on the cover. Intrigued by the article, I started watching the show and immediately became something of a Ranger zealot - collecting merch, memorizing trivia, taping all the episodes. I also had a Category 5 fangirl crush on Billy, which is really deserving of (and will end up receiving) a post of its own. If it is possible to breathe a TV show the way one breathes air, I was constantly absorbing all things PR.
It's worth noting that this is around the point in my life that I was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder, although I was not actually told this until I got older. While I don't like to think of my interest in fandom as being symptomatic of anything, I would say it's likely that PR was both a fandom and an ASD-fueled obsession for me at that age. But that's neither here nor there.
And probably all of you have heard the story of how MMPR:TM was released on my 11th birthday and how awesome that was, so I won't go any further into that either.
It was, I think, right around the time that MMPR was giving way to MMAR and Zeo that I discovered the internet. We didn't have a connection at home yet, but my father, who works for a university, had one in his office. An office I was often allowed to hang out in after school until it was time to go home for dinner. And as I sat at my dad's desk and opened up Netscape Navigator, guess what the first thing was that I searched for?
So that's how I discovered PR fan sites, and I ate them like candy. This was also my first introduction to fanfiction, and I printed out pages and pages of stories - mostly Billy-centric fic by Kittie - so I could re-read them later. I first wrote my own fanfic at this point in time. I never posted it and that's probably for the best, since I was all of 12 years old, but that's how my life in fanfiction started.
After PRiS ended, I kind of lost interest in the Power Rangers. I kind of feel badly about this, because on later review the only fault I can find with Lost Galaxy is that it isn't PRiS. Which is really not fair at all to LG, which is a lovely season in its own right. But at the time, it didn't draw me in the way the Zordon Era did, and I drifted away from my first fandom love for quite a long time.
In the absence of PR, I spent a very long time in the anime fandom. Sailor Moon caught my attention, but Dragonball Z drew me in wholesale. Believe it or not, it was in the DBZ fandom that I was first exposed to shipping and pornographic fanfic. That's...a little scary in retrospect. ^^a And then of course, as was the case with so many of us who came of age in fandom in the late '90s and early 2000s, Gundam Wing taught me the wonders of slash and yaoi. And, indirectly, sparked my love of rare pairings, as I got so damned tired of the 1x2x1 shipping wars that I started reading and writing fic that paired Heero with Trowa instead. Oops. Even as a young squirrel, I was still something of a contrarian. I got into Ronin Warriors/Yoroiden Samurai Troopers around the same time, which still stands as my great love in anime fandom, and Cowboy Bebop, which I never really participated in the community for, but which is still one of the best things I've ever watched.
The anime fandom was also important to me because it afforded me the chance to be "out" as a fan for the first time. Even when PR first aired, I was already slightly older than the show's target demographic, and really, people picked on me enough without my copping to liking a show made for younger kids. So I wasn't open with my peers IRL about my like for the show. But there were kids my age who liked anime. A lot of them. I could walk around in a DBZ shirt without shame, or put pictures of anime characters in my locker at school. The first guy I ever dated was an anime fan. I first started talking to Buggy - still my best friend in the world over a decade later - after I spotted her wearing a Gundam Wing shirt at camp. I put anime posters in my college dorm room, which resulted in my roommate rounding up a couple of fanboys and bringing them over do meet me...one of which I wound up dating for four years. And although it was ultimately a shitty relationship, it was an important one. My first cons were anime cons. My first cosplays were anime cosplays. My first online roleplays - thus leading to my first experiences with meeting internet friends in person - were anime-related. I went to Japan for my 25th birthday, largely because anime.
While I in general disagree with the idea of getting too old for fandom, I do think I outgrew the anime fandom. Or more accurately, I got older while the anime fandom stayed the same age. I had no interest in the newer series the community was gravitating to, and I got kind of sick of going to cons like Anime Boston only to find them populated almost entirely by derpy high school and college students. So while there was definitely some overlap, I largely let the anime fandom fall by the wayside, instead getting really into Transformers (thanks to Buggy and TFA), and enjoying the resurgence of the Star Trek fandom, a show on which I had been raised, in light of the 2009 reboot.
And it was at that point that the PR fandom came back into my life with a vengeance.
In June of 2009, I saw an ad for a PR-themed RPG on InsaneJournal, in which all the Rangers were original characters. Delighted, I joined. The game itself was drama-ridden and ultimately short-lived, but the important part was that I metrivulet027 , who led me back into the fandom. I met thesecondbatgirl through her, and by extension pretty much everyone else who's likely to be reading this now. And thus, I came full circle. As much as PR meant to me in my childhood, it means even more to me now, because getting back into it over the past few years has allowed me to meet the people who have become some of my closest friends, to experience Morphicon, to finally meet and thank (and hug!) my childhood role model, and to share experiences I wouldn't trade for the world.
...TL;DR, I owe you big time, Riv. And if I haven't thanked you yet, then let me thank you now. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me back.
Tomorrow's post is on my favorite fictional therapists, as requested bythesecondbatgirl . And Day 6's post will be on ROBOTS and why I love them, as requested by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fly_buggy_fly .
tsukino_akume requested that I talk about how I got into fandom, particularly PR fandom.So really, there are two different stories here that kind of intertwine with one another. The story of my involvement with fandom in general begins and ends with PR, but there is also a long section of my life in fandom during which I had nothing to do with PR whatsoever.
To begin at the beginning, I first laid eyes on the Power Rangers when my subscription to Disney Adventures Magazine came in and they were on the cover. Intrigued by the article, I started watching the show and immediately became something of a Ranger zealot - collecting merch, memorizing trivia, taping all the episodes. I also had a Category 5 fangirl crush on Billy, which is really deserving of (and will end up receiving) a post of its own. If it is possible to breathe a TV show the way one breathes air, I was constantly absorbing all things PR.
It's worth noting that this is around the point in my life that I was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder, although I was not actually told this until I got older. While I don't like to think of my interest in fandom as being symptomatic of anything, I would say it's likely that PR was both a fandom and an ASD-fueled obsession for me at that age. But that's neither here nor there.
And probably all of you have heard the story of how MMPR:TM was released on my 11th birthday and how awesome that was, so I won't go any further into that either.
It was, I think, right around the time that MMPR was giving way to MMAR and Zeo that I discovered the internet. We didn't have a connection at home yet, but my father, who works for a university, had one in his office. An office I was often allowed to hang out in after school until it was time to go home for dinner. And as I sat at my dad's desk and opened up Netscape Navigator, guess what the first thing was that I searched for?
So that's how I discovered PR fan sites, and I ate them like candy. This was also my first introduction to fanfiction, and I printed out pages and pages of stories - mostly Billy-centric fic by Kittie - so I could re-read them later. I first wrote my own fanfic at this point in time. I never posted it and that's probably for the best, since I was all of 12 years old, but that's how my life in fanfiction started.
After PRiS ended, I kind of lost interest in the Power Rangers. I kind of feel badly about this, because on later review the only fault I can find with Lost Galaxy is that it isn't PRiS. Which is really not fair at all to LG, which is a lovely season in its own right. But at the time, it didn't draw me in the way the Zordon Era did, and I drifted away from my first fandom love for quite a long time.
In the absence of PR, I spent a very long time in the anime fandom. Sailor Moon caught my attention, but Dragonball Z drew me in wholesale. Believe it or not, it was in the DBZ fandom that I was first exposed to shipping and pornographic fanfic. That's...a little scary in retrospect. ^^a And then of course, as was the case with so many of us who came of age in fandom in the late '90s and early 2000s, Gundam Wing taught me the wonders of slash and yaoi. And, indirectly, sparked my love of rare pairings, as I got so damned tired of the 1x2x1 shipping wars that I started reading and writing fic that paired Heero with Trowa instead. Oops. Even as a young squirrel, I was still something of a contrarian. I got into Ronin Warriors/Yoroiden Samurai Troopers around the same time, which still stands as my great love in anime fandom, and Cowboy Bebop, which I never really participated in the community for, but which is still one of the best things I've ever watched.
The anime fandom was also important to me because it afforded me the chance to be "out" as a fan for the first time. Even when PR first aired, I was already slightly older than the show's target demographic, and really, people picked on me enough without my copping to liking a show made for younger kids. So I wasn't open with my peers IRL about my like for the show. But there were kids my age who liked anime. A lot of them. I could walk around in a DBZ shirt without shame, or put pictures of anime characters in my locker at school. The first guy I ever dated was an anime fan. I first started talking to Buggy - still my best friend in the world over a decade later - after I spotted her wearing a Gundam Wing shirt at camp. I put anime posters in my college dorm room, which resulted in my roommate rounding up a couple of fanboys and bringing them over do meet me...one of which I wound up dating for four years. And although it was ultimately a shitty relationship, it was an important one. My first cons were anime cons. My first cosplays were anime cosplays. My first online roleplays - thus leading to my first experiences with meeting internet friends in person - were anime-related. I went to Japan for my 25th birthday, largely because anime.
While I in general disagree with the idea of getting too old for fandom, I do think I outgrew the anime fandom. Or more accurately, I got older while the anime fandom stayed the same age. I had no interest in the newer series the community was gravitating to, and I got kind of sick of going to cons like Anime Boston only to find them populated almost entirely by derpy high school and college students. So while there was definitely some overlap, I largely let the anime fandom fall by the wayside, instead getting really into Transformers (thanks to Buggy and TFA), and enjoying the resurgence of the Star Trek fandom, a show on which I had been raised, in light of the 2009 reboot.
And it was at that point that the PR fandom came back into my life with a vengeance.
In June of 2009, I saw an ad for a PR-themed RPG on InsaneJournal, in which all the Rangers were original characters. Delighted, I joined. The game itself was drama-ridden and ultimately short-lived, but the important part was that I met
rivulet027 , who led me back into the fandom. I met thesecondbatgirl through her, and by extension pretty much everyone else who's likely to be reading this now. And thus, I came full circle. As much as PR meant to me in my childhood, it means even more to me now, because getting back into it over the past few years has allowed me to meet the people who have become some of my closest friends, to experience Morphicon, to finally meet and thank (and hug!) my childhood role model, and to share experiences I wouldn't trade for the world. ...TL;DR, I owe you big time, Riv. And if I haven't thanked you yet, then let me thank you now. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me back.
Tomorrow's post is on my favorite fictional therapists, as requested by
thesecondbatgirl . And Day 6's post will be on ROBOTS and why I love them, as requested by fly_buggy_fly .
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It's PR it would've brought you back sooner or later. :)
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