Kass

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Fan
Name: Kass
Alias(es): Kass, kassrachel
Type: fan writer, vidder, moderator
Fandoms: The Sentinel, due South, Stargate Atlantis, Firefly, House, M.D., Sports Night, Harry Potter, Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, Lost, Doctor Who
Communities: in the beginning, stilljewish
Other:
URL: http://trickster.org/kass/ (fanworks by kass)
http://kass.dreamwidth.org
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Kass is a fan writer who's been active in fandom since 1999. She writes:

I've been a part of media fandom since 1999, when Sandy Justine showed me her Sentinel stories alongside my first episodes of the show.... I wrote a few pieces of fanpoetry (Sentinel sonnets) and then took the plunge into writing fanfiction.[1]

Her first fandom was Sentinel, and she was active on Prospect-L and FCA-L in their early years. Other major fandoms have been Due South, House, and SGA. With Roga, she is a co-moderator of in the beginning; with batdina she co-moderates stilljewish in its new Dreamwidth incarnation.

In October of 2008 she released her first vid, and has since vidded in several fandoms, among them Lost, SGA, Friday Night Lights, and Doctor Who. (Her vids are available for download at her website, and can be streamed at her blip.tv page; they're also on her journal under the vids:mine tag.)

She contributes to Fanlore as User:Kass.

Interview

On Finding Fandom

In 2006 Kass wrote about her first experiences in fandom:

Back in 1997 or so, sanj made some reference to something called "fandom," which went right over my head. I'd been fannish for years (SF fandom, then watching ST:TNG with college friends) and I even knew someone in college who wrote fanfiction (TNG gen stuff) but it had never occurred to me that all of this had anything to do with me.

In early '99, I guess, I heard sanj mention fanfiction again, and this time my curiosity was piqued. I hassled her until she agreed to show me what she meant; we watched one episode of The Sentinel (the S3 premiere, wherein Indians in tevas are running all over Cascade) and then she let me read some of her fanfiction, and I was totally hooked. I asked to see more. She gave me URLs. I started reading slash voraciously, and sending LoCs to authors whose work I admired, and then getting all excited if/when they wrote back, which often as not they did! When SciFi re-aired TS that fall, I taped the whole series.

Around then I wrote my first bits of fannish stuff -- sonnets, if you can believe that, tons of rhymed and metered slash! -- and joined my first mailing lists. Then Prospect-L (the no-holds-barred TS discussion list) arose, and I joined instantly, and became an active participant. I joined FCA-L (the Fanfiction Critics' Association mailing list, founded by cereta). I wrote a few pieces for the Fanfiction Symposium. I managed somehow to finagle my way into writing my first (and to date, only) zine story, for Crossroads, a TS slash zine.

I felt very welcomed in that corner of slash fandom. I felt mentored, which was great. People were there to help me figure out how things worked, what was appropriate list behavior, and so on. And a lot of the women who brought me into fandom are still my closest fannish friends, and among my favorite people. By then I was hanging out in an IRC channel regularly, and I even got brave enough to try my first con! And then my first escapade_con. And then my first vividcon... ::happy sigh::

I entered the lj world somewhat reluctantly, but I fell in love with it pretty quickly. I love the interconnectedness of lj, and the almost automatic polyfannishness -- lj has exposed me to a ton of fannish influences I would never have encountered otherwise. Also, it's a great way to nurture new or existing friendships beyond the confines of fannish interaction. It's not necessarily the best way to meet a ton of new fans, I guess -- but that may have more to do with me, and with the limitations on my online time, than it does with lj necessarily."[2]

In early 2015, for the Snowflake Challenge, she reprised the tale with a bit more backstory:

My use of the name Kass predates my involvement with fandom, actually. I started using this pseud when I was hanging out on various BBS's in 1992... I had been deeply impacted by Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Firebrand, so when I chose the pseud Kass, I chose to spell it with a K instead of a C.

I've been proto-fannish all of my life. I've always been a geek and I've always loved stories. As an adolescent I wrote endless reams of self-insertion RPF featuring myself and, God help me, either Axl Rose or the junior high science teacher on whom I had an enormous crush. It was all written in teeny-tiny handwriting on notebook pages. (Thank God there wasn't an internet back then! and no, you will never see it, ever, so don't even ask. :-) I was also a proto-slash-fan from very early on -- I remember dog-earing all of the m/m bits in Anne Rice's The Feast of All Saints -- though I had no idea that other people liked that kind of thing.

In the late 90s, I found out that my longtime friend sanj had a second website...[3]

Fans Comment

Kass is a new TS writer and I'm really glad she's here. Many TS stories being written and posted these days have a slick or superficial feel to them -- all slash, no emotion. Kass breaks the trend with sweet, warm, human first-time stories. These make me feel like I did when I first found Sentinel fandom, lo these many moons ago -- kind of warm and fuzzy and glad to be here. Thanks, Kass! [4]

Notable Works

Fanfiction

Vids

Meta

  • On Judaism and fandom, October 2007: "Judaism is a really big tent, and Jewishness takes many forms. There's no "one true way" of being Jewish. The Jewish fannish community is home to a wide range of experiences and opinions, all of which deserve to be taken seriously as expressions of Jewishness."
  • On generous listening, August 2010: " I want us in fandom to relate to one another in good faith. I want us to assume that whatever our disagreements, however we may have misunderstood or hurt one another, we have something in common -- this enterprise of fandom which we all love. I'd like for us to cut each other some slack, to assume the best of one another instead of assuming the worst."
  • On self-care, the OTW elections, and my hopes, November 2011. "I try to regard everyone through positive eyes, and I try to use that perspective to spur me to be kind and to be a seeker of consensus and common ground. When I think about who I want at the helm of the OTW, I look for candidates whose journals and whose communication with others reflect that same basic perspective and that same desire."

References

  1. ^ User:Kass, accessed January 25, 2011
  2. ^ Source: posting to when we were newbies... , dated June 16, 2006.
  3. ^ Snowflake Challenge Day 5: Fannish Origin Story, January 5, 2015
  4. ^ Radio Free Old-Recs, 1999
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