purplecat

Q30. Name three things you wish you saw more of in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

Errr... I'm interested, in a way, that my mind is immediately blank when asked "what do you want to see more of in Doctor Who fandom?". Possibly it is because the fandom is such a juggernaut that it already contains everything, but a I suspect it has more to do with the fact I have so little time, that there is plenty of things I'm interested in consuming, sufficiently plenty that I wouldn't want any more of them. However, best attempt:

1. More target style novelisations of the new series would be nice - if only to assuage my completist gene.
2. More general interest articles in DWM - easier said than done at this stage of the fandom, but I find myself increasingly dissatisfied that DWM contains a mixture of what seem to be essentially puff pieces about the current show (previews, gushing reviews, quick interviews), or agonisingly detailed articles about, for instance, a lemonade commercial that Tom Baker once made. It's not devoid of good stuff - its articles on the costumes and special effects for Flux were about the right level for me. I get that all the obvious articles about the classic series (at any rate) were written at least five times by the turn of the century but I think that the podcast eco-system shows you can still generate entertaining content revisiting stories, or common themes like monsters or costumes.
3. Toby Hadoke should revisit the 1980s Doctor Who cookbook in a far more thorough fashion than he did in the VAM for the season 23 box set and get every surviving celebrity who contributed a recipe to cook every recipe they contributed. Possibly random associates should be forced to cook the recipes provided by celebrities who no longer survive!

Someone should also persuade Apple to provide a decent blu-ray player for Macs so I can watch (and screen cap) the blu-rays on my laptop without going through various contortions and downloading jailbroken codes of the internet. This isn't really a fandom wish, but more of my generic bemusement that Apple, while getting so many things right, has some weird things it apparently won't do in principle that just make life difficult for no apparently good reason.

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So. Done. It only took me 9 months to do a one month meme!!!

Q28. How did you first get into fanfic, and what was the first fandom you wrote fic for?

I'm pretty sure the first fanfic I wrote was Chewbacca's Diary. My sister had bought a notebook with Chewbacca on the cover and somehow I ended up writing instalments from Chewbacca in it at night and leaving it outside her door. I don't remember much about it, beyond I think I was largely stuck in just endlessly rewriting Star Wars - there were a lot of Death Stars that got destroyed, I believe.


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Q26. A trope which you are virtually certain to love in any fandom.

I feel like these questions are getting harder. I never search on the trope tags in AO3, nor use them to refine search and when I look at the prompt lists I used for genpromptbingo and ladiesbingo none of them are leaping out at me in a "I'd definitely read that" kind of way. trope_bingo lists "case fic" as a trope and I do often seek those out in my fandoms, particularly since there tend to be comparatively few of them compared to other sorts of stories. I like times-wimey stuff if done well but it's in the writing, I'm not guaranteed to love it because it's there. Quite fond of road trip fics if they don't get too navel-gazy. Quite fond of friendship stories. Dunno. Tropes are tools, they need to be used well to work.

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Q24: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

Umm?? OK, so there is stuff I don't read as much as I once did. I had a phase when I read a lot of MCU fanfic and I don't so much now, and although I watch the movies I'm not dashing out to see them as soon as they come out any more. But I'm not sure I'd say I've abandoned it. There are still authors in the fandom I subscribe to and read their stuff when it comes out.

Sherlock, maybe? I don't think I read any Sherlock stuff any more, but I was never that involved with the fandom in the first place.

I don't play Urban Dead any more and I certainly don't write fanfic for it. I don't interact with the players much. The game is much quieter than it was in its hey-day and the state of it has become quite entrenched - the zombie hordes hold one part of the map. They don't need many characters to keep an eye on their territory and if a survivor group tries to move back in then they mobilise en masse via the Something Awful forums (I think) to quash them. There are a bunch of survivors in other parts of the map but I've no idea what they do because the zombies have lost interest in those bits. So playing it felt increasingly pointless, like there wasn't much to achieve beyond irritating trolls from Something Awful, and you know, they weren't fun to irritate, it didn't feel like a friendly rivalry but like they really wanted to make sure you got as little enjoyment out of the game as possible. I'm technically a member of a survivor group that is trying out a different set of tactics (which involves being dead a lot - honestly in game terms this makes a kind of sense) but I took a break about a year ago when teaching heated up and I've not gone back. I might go back, but I do mostly feel like its run its course.

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Q22: Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

Nyssa from Doctor Who.

She'd be interesting and sensible and not too much like hard work.

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I had almost forgotten the meme! Almost, but not quite.

Q20: What fandom broke your heart?

Tricky one this one. Plenty of shows/stories have made me cry by thwarting my hopes for happy endings of various descriptions, but I'm not sure any has broken my heart. Buffy/Angel was/is probably the worst in terms steadfastly refusing to deliver the happy endings it vaguely suggested might be possible.

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Q18: How many fandoms have you written for? How many have you been in, and how many are you still in?

I was tempted to say How should I know? but then I recalled that AO3 was a thing. It tells me I have written in 47 fandoms, but there is a lot of double-accounting going on there - I reckon at least 10 of them are sub-fandoms of Doctor Who. This of course raises the tricky question of a) what counts as a fandom for the purposes of this question and b) what is meant by being "in" a fandom.

However, in my mental reckoning, I figure I'm "in" three fandoms (Doctor Who, Primeval, Sapphire and Steel) - do not ask me what I mean by "in" a fandom because then I'd have to try to figure out why I consider myself "in" Sapphire and Steel fandom and not in "MCU" fandom, for instance, when I read fanfic from both in roughly equal quantities and have written for both. Maybe its just that there is an awful lot of the MCU I've never engaged with at all.

I refuse to answer how many I've been in, because the mental effort involved in figuring out what I mean by "in" and how that has varied over time would be too much. Probably around 10...

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Q16: Do you remember your first OTP? Who was in it?

Hard to be certain, looking back that far, but I suspect it was Leia and Luke from Star Wars. Not that the pairing survived the appearance of The Empire Strikes Back (let alone Return of the Jedi) one of the many ways that film was disconcerting to a nine year old. I did not approve of Leia/Han or unresolved endings.

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Q14: A pairing – platonic, romantic or sexual – that you initially didn’t consider, but someone changed your mind.

I'm struggling a bit here. As noted, I don't in general have strong feelings about pairings so I don't really recall "moments of revelation" for slightly non-standard ones (e.g., Claudia/Ryan from Primeval) that I'm fond of. I think Claudia/Ryan is fififolle's fault, for her Time after Time story but it slowly gained traction in the fandom anyway as a nice side pairing.

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Q12: A ship you have never liked and probably never will.

Probably Nick/Connor from Primeval. I guess because I'm a university lecturer I find it really hard to get behind ships that involve lecturers/professors and students.

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