because we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us.
So here’s a story. One Fourth of July I was walking down the street and ran into a BNF who I’d met a couple of times at a slash-centric con. It turned out she lived in the same building as one of my boyfriends at the time, which was nearby, so she invited me to stop by. She had a small group of friends there, and one of them was an older woman with short, white hair.
“How old are you?” she asked.
I told her my age, probably about 28 at the time.
“I’ve been reading fanfiction longer than you’ve been alive,” she said.
Here’s another story. A couple of years ago at GeekGirlCon they had an “elders speak” panel. It included some women who had organized Star Trek cons in the 70s and 80s. So, first off, we really have always been here, this is a kind of geekiness that has always belonged to women. Andthey talked about women doing fandom back then secretly, about having to ask their husbands for money so they could travel to meet other fans. And two of the women on this panel were a couple who’d met each other in fandom.
One of the main reasons I go to slash cons is to connect with my foremothers in fandom. A lot of them aren’t on Tumblr or Twitter, some never even really got into LiveJournal. But they’re still here, doing their thing, having Fourth of July parties and emailing with their friends about fandom. Our elders are our history, our proof that we have always been here, that “media fandom” (fandom of Western TV and movies) is our house that we built with our hands.
respect your fandom mothers and grandmothers you ungrateful little buggers
It’s just hilarious to me that kids on here think that your interests fundamentally change as you get older. Your responsibilities change and, hopefully, you start looking at things and evaluating with more life experience….which, btw, is why a lot of the over 30 people here side eye the shit out of you guys many days. Because lived experience and life experience makes you see things in a different light…even fictional stuff. But you don’t just all of a sudden turn 30 and become this boring person who has no interest anymore in all the nerd things and fandom you liked at 15 or 20 or 25. You are the same person. You still need an outlet for your interests and you still crave those safe spaces to geek out the same way you do as a kid. We’ve always been here. Other women came before us.
FYI In 1993, the most popular Superman website was run by a woman named Zoomway. She was a life long Superman fan who started the site after Lois and Clark hit the air and she had thousands of women (many of whom were older btw) who followed her site. She wasn’t some 20 year old kid. She was a grown woman with life experience decades older than most of you who was writing feminist commentary about Superman and attending fan expos before any of you were born. I was only a kid when I first starting reading her writing and she was the one who introduced me to Superman fandom. She died of cancer a few years ago and her loss was deeply felt.
Women older than you built literally every iconic fandom you post about on here.
I need the community I’ve found within my fandom more now at 43 than I ever needed it at ages 18 or 20. The more life wears on me, the more I live and love and lose, the more I treasure this space of flails and joy and analysis over episode ephemera, shared with a chorus of voices flung far and wide around the world, small sections of which have become friends, shining lights who I look for whenever I log on.
I joined fandoms when I was 18 and I’ve never looked back.
Been in fandom 20+ years and counting ❤
(also, omg ZOOMWAY)
First fandom 40 years ago. Still here. Squee is for life, not just for kids.
Fandom for 23 years, and I still smile at the memory of Zoomway and her absolute awesomeness.
Stumbled on my first Star Wars fanzine about 36-37 years ago.
I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the first time in 1978.
We’ve been here all along and we’re not going anywhere.
I wrote my first Trek fanfic just after ST:TOS premiered. I didn’t even know that fanfic was what I was doing: didn’t even know the genre had a name. Later on, when I was in nursing school, I came to know the women in New York who were in the process of organizing those first Trek conventions of the 70s. I worked some of those cons and made friendships there that last to this day. The people who ran private presses dedicated to K/S slashzines and presided over dealers’ tables piled high with them are now pro writers and editors with worldwide reputations… and they are still fans.
Which is as it should be. Fandom isn’t something you need to grow out of to prove your adulthood (or justify it to others). And it’s their own insecurities that people trying to push that position on others are running from. So fuck that noise. Long-term fannish lives are the original Slow Burn story… and it’s one we’ll still be writing for years to come.
My friend is heavily into the Star Wars fandom and we had a drunken moment where she was admitted in her twenties she was terrified that she was going to lose that passion, that thing that so defined her, and the resolution a bottle of absinthe brought her was she was still the same person she was at 15 – she just had more spending money
then she cackled like a witch in a disney movie and dropped a few hundred on merch on cafepress
she’s a mom with two kids who are being indoctrinated in the ways of the force, and she’s glad that her eldest is now old enough to sit through the movies at the cinema – because her parents wouldn’t take her to the Ewok movie when it aired [she dodged a bullet, have you seen that?]
you don’t grow up, you just get more money to spend, sure she might justify buying that animatronic porg for her little girls, but she’s the same woman who bought the official barbie wonder woman dolls in their boxes for her little girls that she will never let them touch.
Can we just talk about Dave saying “one of us needs to die” and John automatically volunteering himself, and then trying to convince Dave to leave time frozen and go on adventures with him because he would rather live in a world with nobody but his best friend than in a world where Dave is dead
i gotta say, figuring out this wasn’t about homestuck threw me for a goddamn loop
The monosyllabic
adjectives of the Lord of the Rings:
fair, fell, grim, high, hard, clear, cold, clean, long, swift, dark, great,
deep, tall, grey, keen, etc.They’re
common words, almost simple ones (with a few archaicisms thrown in), but look
at how often they’re used, and of how many things. Any of them might be used to
describe the way things look, or the way they sound, or even the way they feel.
This can occasionally misfire (I believe it was @sumeriasmith who pointed out that
Arwen’s eyes are described as being “grey as a cloudless night”, a color most
people would probably call black) and
the way in which everyone of any note in the Silmarillion is tall does border on the ridiculous
(unless you reason that ‘tall’ is simply a mistranslation for ‘striking’, or,
as @emilyenrose put it, ‘hot’.) But on the whole, the effect is to create a
sort of underlying chromatic rhythm. The words are used so often that they
cease to give the reader information about the things they’re used to describe.
Instead, the things they modify become attributes of them: grey is Gandalf and the Havens and old trees and things at night
and in the distance and in the early morning, dawns and hilltops and eyes and
ashes and shelter in the wasteland and the wasteland itself.
DAMMIT TOLKIEN YOU DID IT AGAIN. I should have known better than to come at you in the realm of words! Because that’s it, that’s it exactly. The night itself, not just the sky. A darkness that does not wholly conceal, a light that does not wholly reveal. And it’s that middleness that I think is what grey means in Tolkien, going beyond color into a certain position in the world. A position that is neither pure darkness nor pure light. Middle-Earth is a grey world – it is darkened, but not entirely; it is colored by loss but it is more than the losing. Not wholly lost or wholly changed, as he says of mankind’s creative capacity in Mythopoeia.
(Here’s a question: what’s the difference between middleness and bothness?)
Another thing that’s cool about this is that, intentionally or not on Tolkien’s part (and I would suspect a degree of intentionality given who we’re talking about here), these are all very Germanic English words – they have their origins in Old and Middle English, rather than coming from Latin and/or French or Greek or whatnot. (This is a common distinction among at least certain classes of words with Germanic derivation versus Romance, Greek, etc. lineage – whether they’re monosyllabic (and often monomorphemic) or polysyllabic.)
And I think that speaks both to Tolkien’s background as a scholar, and the sort of language in English that’s going to be familiar and natural-sounding to him in this kind of mythological context; and it also forms another dimension of how Arda is an English mythology, down to the very words used to construct it. Very, very cool.
What’s also good is Completely Forgetting to tell visiting relatives about bluecifer, picking them up from the airport and hearing them SHRIEK and going “oh yeah, that”
For the Non-Coloradoans:
Bluecifer, Our local elder god. Absolutely nothing in that pic is photoshop.
He’s 32 feet tall, and most unfortunately, his head fell off while he was being assembled and killed his creator. Bluecifer gets struck by lightning on a semi-regular basis which should melt fiberglass but his Dark And Unholy powers have prevented any damage. He’s got glowing red eyes:
(Once again, none of that is photoshop.) And disturbingly detailed human-sized genitals, which I’ll let y’all google for yourselves.
He sits in a not-legally acessible bit of roadway just outside DIA, the most Conspiracy-Riddled of airports, and people run across the highway to get to him to bring him offerings and praise.
Charlie Kirk: alright guys we need a new idea on how to protest all this liberal nonsense like “caring” and “feelings”
guy with a diaper fetish: glad you asked!
What bothers me about all this nonsense, is that it is entirely part of the patriarchal attempts to erase or glorify certain aspects of history. Let me explain.
In the past, it was exceedingly common, indeed expected for men to have safe spaces. They were sometimes even called this. A man had a study at home, or an office. Even in the poorer houses, during the growth of the middle class, circa 1700′s, men had a library, or a study, or a dressing room. They had social clubs that did not allow women. They were allowed multiple locations that were entirely theirs to do with as they pleased, including abandoning their wives to whatever it was they were doing, ignoring the world, shooting billiards, drinking, smoking and so forth. Even before the creation of the middle class after the plague, there were male-only groups, meeting halls, schools, and pubs. Men had plenty of safe spaces reserved for themselves that were unrelated to work and entirely focused on leisure. At universities, which were male only for the longest time, there were also common rooms, study rooms, rooms for leisure activities, pubs, mess halls and so forth.
Men have always had their male-only spaces. They have kept women from them, they have used them to escape from “the strictures of family life” specifically. They used them to avoid the things that men found overtly objectionable. They have used them to write letters, or converse with other women who were not their wives, or experience companionship with other men. They have even made rules about what could and could not be discussed.
Great historical partnerships, arrangements, bargains, treaties and on and on were founded in these male-only safe spaces. Lloyd’s of London, one of the largest financial institutions of the world? Founded in Lloyd’s coffee shop – a typically male-oriented space full of cronies sitting around chatting about their insurances on ships and trade. Publishing? Founded in pubs and churchyards. Property? governed through public houses and in male clubs. Law? An entire group existed at Temple Bar and the Inns of court to allow male lawyers to have freedom from the regulations of the city, to the point that they often fought with the crown. These men had an entire culture entirely to themselves, with additional safe spaces within that were the foundations of many of the longer standing legal and trade organizations. The British East India trading company? You guessed it. Put together by blokes sitting at a pub on the North Bank.
Safe spaces for men have always existed, while women were either kept from them or eventually had safe female spaces delegated for them by men, usually a solarium or parlor, or drawing room specifically. They were allowed to take the air or promenade in the park, but that was all.
And that says nothing about racial organizations that provided safe spaces from the poor, the immigrant, the slave, from which, all of these groups were banned or forced to act as servants or slaves within these safe spaces, seeing the white males go about their safe leisure, with no regard that it is being facilitated by the oppressed.
To now see grown men in children’s clothes, acting as if the entire foundation of everything they hold dear and propagate as the heights of achievement wasn’t built in male safe spaces, by men escaping their families, or their jobs, or their obligations, or the people they didn’t see as “fit”, for a moment, is both appalling to me and uniquely ignorant. The history of male leisure and its critical impact on how the world works is being overwritten. This new history is a palimpsest that obliterates the intrinsic hierarchies at play in western culture.
These men are stupid bastards, and someone ought to give them a good walloping.
i just think it’s hilarious that they’re dressing up as babies in order to act like children
“waaaah it’s not fair that i get in trouble for being an asshole in public”
huh, usually you guys do this on the internet in your undies, but ok
yeah what these kinds of men are really freaking out about is other people trying to be safe from THEM. bullies will always scream about the injustice of their victims figuring out how to escape.
just moving along like everyone else 