Why I Joined OTW: Beth's tl;dr version
I'm an academic.
Heh.
Okay, I'm an academic technically speaking.
I teach at a university and I love my students, but...okay, when I started grad school, it was in the midst of the second wave of critical theory, and wow, nothing could have bored me more. I fought tooth and nail against having to take any course that even hinted at focusing on what I then saw as alienating and off-putting academic jargon. Why couldn't people just talk...like people? Why was it all "transgressive this" and "liminal that" and post-colonialist whatever?" Wasn't I allowed to just say "Shakespeare: SQUEE!"
And then I discovered Fandom. Oh, I'd been on the periphery of fandom for most of my life, making one of my sisters perform ST:TOS scenarios in the back yard, passing notes to friends using Tolkien-esque Dwarf runes in junior high, attending (i.e., sneaking into) Minicon in 1975, joining the Darkover Society (briefly) in the late seventies, etc., but I'd never been involved in fandom in any organized way until 1995 when one of the IT guys at my school spent an hour explaining to me that, yes, I really would find a use for my university email account and oh, by the way, did I want to take a look at the newsreader that would let me participate in newsgroups.
Oh! My! God!
There were people out there! All over the world! And they were talking about the books I loved and the movies I loved and the t.v. shows I loved...and they were taking it seriously. There were essays about the ethics surrounding immortality in Highlander and Vampirism as a Metaphor for AIDS in Forever Knight and gender issues relating to Odo (on DS9) who had no stable physical form...and these essays/discussions were butting up against episode summaries and filking and giddy squeeing about the color of Peter Wingfield's eyes (and whether he could be cloned) and all of a sudden I knew I had found my people.
And then I thought back to my time in grad school and it became clear that all those people with the "transgressive this" and "liminal that" and post-colonialist whatever" were fans, but that their fandom was academia. They were excited about what they were reading and watching and discovering and they went to conventions (conferences) and they had a shared vocabulary, no different from the way one corner of fandom talks about "Lemons and Limes" and another talks about "Bot Fodder" and some fans understand the term "hentai" and still other fans casually refer to "Snarry." Because, okay, if you're in a fandom, you have a shared fannish vocabulary - and yeah, sometimes you don't understand what the folks "over there" are talking about or, more to the point, why they're using those weird off-putting words, but maybe you just have to accept that you're just not going to get that vocabulary until / unless you join that corner of fandom, too. And if you never want to be in that part of fandom? That's cool too...because you can still hang out with the people who are into those fandoms in multi-fannish gathering places.
[Okay, that was a digression. Let me just add, though, that since those long ago days, I have picked up the shiny decoder ring that lets me translate aca-talk and I know just how cool some of those theory-laden conversations are, but despite being in academia, academia is still not my fandom. Which, you know, nobody seems to mind at all.]
Anyway. To get back to the point (which was "discovering fandom," for those of you following at home), I loved the fannish world I'd discovered. It was so cool to find all those discussions and stories and works of art and newsgroups and organized meet-ups and conventions and all of it was run by, well...me. Or people like me, at any rate. I hadn't contributed any serious time yet, but I was testing the waters and posting to the newsgroups a little and getting to know people and going to cons and when I was finally pimped into The Sentinel (on the basis of the fic, I hasten to note), I offered my services as a beta.
Over the next few years, I beta'd for 27 different authors, some of whom were writing their first stories in any fandom and some of whom were already absurdly well known, and...I loved it. Helping to make things better fannishly - even helping to make a single story better - felt great. And even when I finally started writing fic of my own (in Due South), I continued to beta (and still do).
And then I got into HP and I was beta'ing and writing and I set up a multi-fandom recs page (which, man, other people have talked about how hard it is to keep a recs page current when archives and websites have a habit of disappearing at the drop of a TOS'ed hat, and I am really looking forward to the opening of the Archive of Our Own ) and I started getting involved in pieces of the fannish infrastructure, like Fic/Art Fests and newsletters (snapenews) and challenge communities (snape100) because...that's what fans do. Fandom exists because of all of us. We're the ones who build the infrastructure that supports the various corners of fandom. I'm a fan...and I want to help with the things that shape my fannish world.
Which is all to say that when the Archive Of Our Own project discussion first arose - and then, a little later, when the OTW grew out of that early discussion (in part, because it soon became clear that a massive undertaking like this needed to be supported in a variety of ways - including by legal, historical, and theoretical means). - well, how could I not want to help?
And that's how I ended up on the Community Relations committee, helping out with otw_news (Plus...femmequixotic, who's the Chair of the Community Relations Committee, made me, but don't tell her I said that because she already thinks she's the boss of me.)
Or, in other words: Fandom, Yay! OTW, Yay!
Heh.
Okay, I'm an academic technically speaking.
I teach at a university and I love my students, but...okay, when I started grad school, it was in the midst of the second wave of critical theory, and wow, nothing could have bored me more. I fought tooth and nail against having to take any course that even hinted at focusing on what I then saw as alienating and off-putting academic jargon. Why couldn't people just talk...like people? Why was it all "transgressive this" and "liminal that" and post-colonialist whatever?" Wasn't I allowed to just say "Shakespeare: SQUEE!"
And then I discovered Fandom. Oh, I'd been on the periphery of fandom for most of my life, making one of my sisters perform ST:TOS scenarios in the back yard, passing notes to friends using Tolkien-esque Dwarf runes in junior high, attending (i.e., sneaking into) Minicon in 1975, joining the Darkover Society (briefly) in the late seventies, etc., but I'd never been involved in fandom in any organized way until 1995 when one of the IT guys at my school spent an hour explaining to me that, yes, I really would find a use for my university email account and oh, by the way, did I want to take a look at the newsreader that would let me participate in newsgroups.
Oh! My! God!
There were people out there! All over the world! And they were talking about the books I loved and the movies I loved and the t.v. shows I loved...and they were taking it seriously. There were essays about the ethics surrounding immortality in Highlander and Vampirism as a Metaphor for AIDS in Forever Knight and gender issues relating to Odo (on DS9) who had no stable physical form...and these essays/discussions were butting up against episode summaries and filking and giddy squeeing about the color of Peter Wingfield's eyes (and whether he could be cloned) and all of a sudden I knew I had found my people.
And then I thought back to my time in grad school and it became clear that all those people with the "transgressive this" and "liminal that" and post-colonialist whatever" were fans, but that their fandom was academia. They were excited about what they were reading and watching and discovering and they went to conventions (conferences) and they had a shared vocabulary, no different from the way one corner of fandom talks about "Lemons and Limes" and another talks about "Bot Fodder" and some fans understand the term "hentai" and still other fans casually refer to "Snarry." Because, okay, if you're in a fandom, you have a shared fannish vocabulary - and yeah, sometimes you don't understand what the folks "over there" are talking about or, more to the point, why they're using those weird off-putting words, but maybe you just have to accept that you're just not going to get that vocabulary until / unless you join that corner of fandom, too. And if you never want to be in that part of fandom? That's cool too...because you can still hang out with the people who are into those fandoms in multi-fannish gathering places.
[Okay, that was a digression. Let me just add, though, that since those long ago days, I have picked up the shiny decoder ring that lets me translate aca-talk and I know just how cool some of those theory-laden conversations are, but despite being in academia, academia is still not my fandom. Which, you know, nobody seems to mind at all.]
Anyway. To get back to the point (which was "discovering fandom," for those of you following at home), I loved the fannish world I'd discovered. It was so cool to find all those discussions and stories and works of art and newsgroups and organized meet-ups and conventions and all of it was run by, well...me. Or people like me, at any rate. I hadn't contributed any serious time yet, but I was testing the waters and posting to the newsgroups a little and getting to know people and going to cons and when I was finally pimped into The Sentinel (on the basis of the fic, I hasten to note), I offered my services as a beta.
Over the next few years, I beta'd for 27 different authors, some of whom were writing their first stories in any fandom and some of whom were already absurdly well known, and...I loved it. Helping to make things better fannishly - even helping to make a single story better - felt great. And even when I finally started writing fic of my own (in Due South), I continued to beta (and still do).
And then I got into HP and I was beta'ing and writing and I set up a multi-fandom recs page (which, man, other people have talked about how hard it is to keep a recs page current when archives and websites have a habit of disappearing at the drop of a TOS'ed hat, and I am really looking forward to the opening of the Archive of Our Own ) and I started getting involved in pieces of the fannish infrastructure, like Fic/Art Fests and newsletters (snapenews) and challenge communities (snape100) because...that's what fans do. Fandom exists because of all of us. We're the ones who build the infrastructure that supports the various corners of fandom. I'm a fan...and I want to help with the things that shape my fannish world.
Which is all to say that when the Archive Of Our Own project discussion first arose - and then, a little later, when the OTW grew out of that early discussion (in part, because it soon became clear that a massive undertaking like this needed to be supported in a variety of ways - including by legal, historical, and theoretical means). - well, how could I not want to help?
And that's how I ended up on the Community Relations committee, helping out with otw_news (Plus...femmequixotic, who's the Chair of the Community Relations Committee, made me, but don't tell her I said that because she already thinks she's the boss of me.)
Or, in other words: Fandom, Yay! OTW, Yay!