Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan

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Title:	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan
Creator:	Kass
Date(s):	March 4, 2003
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Fanfiction
External Links:	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan, Archived version
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan is an essay by Kass.

It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.

Excerpts

I'm a navel-gazer a few times over -- a writer, a livejournaler, and in therapy to boot -- so I think a lot about my own experiences.Including my experiences of media fandom, and my trajectory as a media fan.

I came into fandom, in 1999, via Sentinel. Until then, although I knew that fanfiction existed, I'd never found it especially interesting. (Of course, I didn't know where to look, or what I was looking for.) But I read the excellent Sentinel stories of a woman who was already one of my best friends, and bam! I was hooked.

So I read more people's stuff. I trawled her recs pages and the archive. And eventually I made my first stabs at writing -- fanpoetry, first, then fanfiction. And then I joined some lists. And then I started taping episodes as they re-aired. And by that point, I was a diehard Sentinel fan. (More accurately, a Sentinel slash fan. I read gen now and again, but not often. Mostly only if it was Merry Lynne's.)

I wasn't watching anything else, I wasn't reading anything else, and I wasn't interested in anything else. I was mono-fannish, baby, and that wasn't gonna change. When friends tried to pimp me on other shows or new obsessions, I stuck out my tongue or flounced out of irc or shook my head. I wasn't interested in anything else. I had Sentinel and that was enough.

Almost two years later, as many of my closest friends in fandom shrugged and went on to due South, I grudgingly followed. And hey: it turned out that I enjoyed the adventures of Fraser and Ray about as much as those of Jim and Blair. I got a set of tapes. I read voraciously. I wrote, some. I was still sort of enaging with Sentinel fandom, but a lot of my attention was elsewhere.

I expected that due South would be my next One True Fandom. That I'd spend a few years immersed in nothing but that, writing story after story, reading and writing endless list posts, dissecting episodes and fannish trends, and generally luxuriating in the world of Fraser and Ray.

I assumed I was what Lorelei classified as a type 2 fan, a serial monogamist. My first love had faded somewhat, but clearly I was only capable of one fannish obsession at a time, so it seemed logical that due South would be next.

I was wrong.

Maybe because the critical mass wasn't there. Maybe because I arrived too late, well after the famed Ray Wars, when the fandom seemed to be lying low in bunkers I couldn't necessarily find. Maybe because I couldn't find the Prospect-L of due South fandom, although I tried