#fandom grandma

[conundrumoftime]

Fandom grandma tales: how I survived canon ruining two of the ships I liked.

(Written after a discussion with some of my TROP fan pals about how canon can break your heart re: shipping, and how fandom manages. There are spoilers here for the entire run of Babylon 5, and for one story JMS wrote after it. yes, that story. sorry.)

Babylon 5 was a sci-fi space opera show that ran from 1993 to 1998. It is sci-fi of the era of 22-episode seasons, of huge ensemble casts with characters who get their own B- and C-plots, with an effects and casting budget that doesn’t always match its ambition, and - something it was quite pioneering in, at the time - grand pre-planned story arcs. 

It’s the first fandom that I was involved with in internet spaces as it was running, or at least when its final season was (there’s Discourse and drama from earlier years that I missed). Its showrunner, J. Michael Straczynski - ‘JMS’ - was very active in (non-fanfic) fan community spaces, and you always knew exactly what he was thinking about things because he was part of the discussion around them. There was also fanfic, which he didn’t stop but didn’t go near on the grounds of legal liability for story ideas. 

Most of the fanfic in the early days as the show was airing was focused around two big ships, of which one was canon endgame (Delenn/Sheridan) and one was canon all-ends-in-despair (Marcus/Ivanova). I, as a teenager discovering a developing online fandom for the first time with all the overwhelm and excitement that causes (ask me anything about what reading fic was like before the days of tags/ratings/warnings!) got into Marcus/Ivanova and also into one of the minor ships, Delenn/Lennier.

Delenn/Lennier was never, ever going to happen in canon. This is obvious; it clashes with Delenn/Sheridan which was JMS’s baby darling OTP, the show’s big love story. Delenn is married for the later part of the show. Lennier is her diplomatic aide, is absolutely devoted to her, and they have a very intense mentor/student relationship, which it seems is kind of standard in their culture (when Delenn’s own mentor died she went briefly insane with grief and started a genocidal war over it) but is still Very Intense. He is canonically in love with her, but that’s as far as the explicit canon statements go.

However. HowEVER. Canon also gives us, for that relationship, some wonderful ship fuel. Lennier knows about every bad thing Delenn has done, including all the stuff she doesn’t/can’t tell her husband. He’s her link to her previous world and culture and stands by her even when they kick her out. She says at one point, “without him, I would stumble and fall and never get up again.” 

And then… we had Season 5, the final season.

Season 5, for various complicated production reasons, was operating a little outside of pre-planned story arcs and in this season the Delenn/Lennier stuff ramped up about three gears in one go. It was still very obviously never, ever going to be canon, and was almost certainly not intended by the creator (who wrote most of the episodes himself) to look like there was even anything there. At this point Delenn is married; any relationship with her aide would not only be going against the show’s OTP, but going against it in the sense where she’s cheating on her husband, and there is Just No Way JMS would have gone there. And yet! Season 5 gave us:

A scene where Lennier says he can’t stay, it’s too painful to be around her now she’s married, and she’s devastated and has the following conversation with her husband about it:

S: I got your message about Lennier. Is there anything I can do?

D [snapping]: Almost certainly not.

S: Is it because of me?

D: In part, I think so.

S: Yeah, I was afraid of that. Well, as we say back on Earth, three’s a crowd.

D: On Minbar, three is sacred.

S [slightly uncomfortable laugh]: Well, I don’t think I’m ready to handle that one, Delenn.

Delenn then calling Lennier back to the station to do some secret mission thing for her, which involves her sneaking out of her bed while her husband sleeps to meet Lennier in a darkened alley behind a bar, where she tenderly strokes his face and they have a whole conversation about whether her husband understands her or not.

A scene where Lennier comes back from his secret mission to meet both Delenn and Sheridan, Delenn goes to greet him with a hug, and Lennier does this very pointed step back and nod in the direction of her husband, and she pulls back and just sort of pats him on the arms instead. 

I MEAN.

But, the issue here is not what fans did about it but what canon did about it. Canon did the canon equivalent of dragging that ship outside and shooting it in the head. 

In the final few episodes of the entire series, Lennier tries to kill Sheridan, runs away in shame, and then someone finds his diary in which he’d been writing for ages about what a bad decision he thought Delenn had made and how her whole marriage was an awful idea. Even to this day, it’s fun/awful watching people go through a first-time watch when they get to season 5 and hit that. ‘Character assassination in the form of a diary’ was a whole thing for a while. It’s been 20+ years and the actor who played Lennier is stilll mad about it (not because of shippy stuff, but because he - correctly! - thinks Lennier absolutely would not have done that). 

What *fandom* did, on the other hand, was Fixed The Problem.

Delenn/Lennier was not at all a big ship when the series was airing, and for a few years after. Then the fandom dynamics started to change. With less pressure on what canon was going to do, it felt like fandom had more space to play around with things it didn’t do. Fanfic got less interested in trying to fit within the overall story being told and started spinning off in all its own directions. And *this* ship started getting bigger and bigger. People did really interesting things with it, canon divergence went in all directions, everyone wrote a fix-it story of some variety, some authors did a great series of connected stories based on an idea that Minbari have three genders, the quality of the writing has been brilliant. And I think without that absolute whiplash feeling of what happened in canon, there would never have been this feeling of “well I’m not having THAT” which led to all this.

We did not need canon! Canon had done its thing. And canon had broken our hearts enough ways with many of the other stories it told (entirely on purpose) and we weren’t just going to sit back and let it ruin us forever.

By comparison, the other ship I was into was Marcus/Ivanova. This is entirely doomed. Susan Ivanova’s love life is just perpetually doomed. The first partner of hers we meet is an ex who’s interested in getting back together, but then it turns out he’s just using her to infiltrate the station for the fascist terrorist group he’s secretly joined. Then she falls for an archrival of hers, Talia, who works for Psi Corps, the organisation she loathes most of all things - but it’s okay because it turns out Talia is starting to question them too! Maybe these crazy kids can make it work! They have one night together and then OOPS turns out Talia was being secretly controlled by a sleeper personality implanted in her by Psi Corps the whole time. Ivanova’s love life is doomed. 

So for two seasons, she has this sort-of-flirty, sort-of-bickery, sort-of-friendship going with Marcus, who is on the surface of it very much “why not fall in love at first sight like a true romantic, YOLO!” but it turns out is actually deeply messed up himself and full of survivor’s guilt and pain and, you get the clear impression, would have died of shock if she’d actually called his bluff on the OTT flirting and said “yeah, let’s go for it”. And then he sacrifices himself to save her life. It is a very tragic ending, it is absolutely the way he would have wanted to go, she wakes up both furious and absolutely distraught, says that the last thing she heard was him saying “I love you”, says she wishes she’d at least slept with him once, and says that in a way all love is unrequited. PAIN. 

So, lots of fix-it fanfic, lots of ‘Marcus comes back to life’, lots of canon divergence AUs where he doesn’t die and they live happily ever after and both get over their huge levels of unresolved pain. Pretty standard for that kind of pairing. And as a pairing it doesn’t get in the way of any big canon pairings, it doesn’t imply anything icky like mentor/student power imbalances or adultery. And JMS clearly quite liked it. So that’s better, right?

NO. It was WORSE.

JMS wrote an Marcus/Ivanova story himself, published in one of the sci-fi magazines, to try to give them a happy ending. This happy ending involves Marcus, many many years in the future, waking up from the cryogenic suspension he’s in (it’s sci-fi, keep up, keep up). Ivanova is long dead, but he isn’t about to let this get in the way, so what he does is to *create a new Ivanova* by getting some kind of DNA + computerised memory/personality bank thing, finding a doctor who will clone her, putting himself back into animated sleep until the clone reaches the age Ivanova was when she died, then - THEN, I’M STILL GOING - takes her to a distant planet where, with her memories wiped and their spaceship having deliberately been crashed BY HIM so there’s no way back, they live out their lives in peace.

WHAT.

That pairing still does okay in fandom but it’s not really taken on a post-show world of headcanons and riffing on other people’s ideas and tropes in the way that Delenn/Lennier has (and we all just pretend that story never existed). 

So! This has been my experiences in the field of What We Do When The Show Has Thoughts On That Non-Endgame Ship We’re Into. Fandom manages. Fandom will see you through. And in the words of Susan Ivanova:

Babylon Five was the last of the Babylon stations; there would never be another. It changed the future, and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, for if we don’t, who will? And that true strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely places. Mostly though, I think it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings - even for people like us.

#fandom grandma #fandom history #non-endgame ships #shipping #canon and non-canon ships #babylon 5 #delenn x lennier #marcus x ivanova #that story's not canon if I say it's not canon #b5 #what in the actual hell was that diary anyway #snarky bill mumy interview forever in our hearts #never have I seen a more perfect ot3 setup and YET

[renthebarbarian]

old ladies who made up the original Star Trek fandom interacting with the current young queer Star Trek fandom be like:

#fandom grandma #we love y’all so much #star trek

[motherofallromans]

Finding Nemo people my age in fandoms

#fandom grandma #ofmd #yellowjackets #our flag means death #loki #the locked tomb #wwdits #nandermo #sylki #lokius #lottienat #lottielee #inneffable husbands #gentlebeard #harrow the ninth #gideon the ninth #good omens

[stoplookingup]

Today in Fandom Is Not Just for the Young:

I love this show:

And I've eaten at one of these:

#loki #automats #fandom is not just for the young #fandom grandma

[fearlessjones]

‘November 5th’ this, ‘EVERY’ that… Back in my day we had to walk 9 miles uphill both ways in the snow just to ascertain a HINT of acknowledged homoeroticism in any tv show that wasn’t cable! In 1999, UPN’s The Sentinel (of Sentinel/Guide trope fame) had their lead partner characters literally merge souls while liplocked in CPR mode and they ‘no homo’ queerbaited the fans so hard that they spring-boarded us into a new century of online slash fic sharing. 😂 Amidst all the current fandom drama, be grateful for this beautiful era of openness, is all this Fandom Old is saying lol.

#good omens spoilers #november 5th #fandom old #old lady yells at sky #fandom history #fandom discourse #fandom disk horse #fandom grandma #queerbaiting #dont even get me started on the good ladies of the star trek fandom with their fanfic binders #the sentinel #the sentinel upn #jim x blair #sentinels and guides

[crisisoninfinitenerds]

Living online has got me thinking thoughts, and I’m here to make it everyone’s problem.

#lateinlifecartoonist #save warrior nun #warrior nun #fandoms united #representation matters #fandom grandma

[conversationswiththemoon]

Learn to scroll, pls k thx

Thoughts from a fandom old: jesus christ do the young just not know how to fucking scroll, anymore or...? This week I’ve seen a whole lotta entitlement tantrums where people tried, with various degrees of subtlety, to dissuade other fans from producing certain types of artistic content based on the aggrieved’s personal preferences. Guilt trips about “diversity of stories.” Attempts to transfer the moral failings of totally fictional characters onto the author. And of course, the ever present purity wank.

So, children, listen to granny. If you come across a fic and the main character / pairing / rating / whatthefuckever is your “nope!” thing?

Take the pointer finger on your dominant hand. And use that fuckin’ thing to scroll past it instead of clicking on it. Stop looking for a pretext for being an asshole.

Yes, an asshole. So many of these posts use obsequious and embarrassingly transparent humility as a cover for what is, at its very core, unhinged expectation and jerkbaggery. So I said what I said. That fic is entirely opt-in and you have free will. Curating your internet experience to your liking is no one’s responsibility but your own. 

If you can’t manage the simple act of scrolling past something you’re not interested in, you’re too young to be using the internet and probably shouldn’t be reading fic anyway. 

#fandom grandma #just scroll #I'm only 40 but I am probably old enough to be your mother #no really please just scroll #fandom old

[kink-tomato]

Guess who never had the heart to delete aim. Every now and then I come across one of these old handles that makes me :leonardopointinggif:

#aim #old internet #fandom grandma #vintage fandom #aol

[scjacka]

This will probably just end up being a draft because no one wants to hear me ramble. But tumblr is the only place where I can go full hyperfixation on the SC franchise specifically and I really need to get this crap out of my head because I’m an idiot.

It took me like 90 minutes to get through the first two episodes because I kept pausing to scream at thing. Bless my husband for dealing with me

My first pause/scream happened at the Sara scene because I called it from the trailer which I yelled several times. Also Sara’s deal, relatable.

Actually that’s a lie, I paused after the friggin 20 minute pointless donut scene.

Why when there are flashbacks does the aspect ratio change?

Noel confused me and I don’t get his deal. Idk the try hard thing felt like an even more annoying Curtis to me.

Also, I’m confused on the hierarchy of the Pole now. Like I’m under the assumption Betty is the head elf. But then there’s also that other elf that’s there to greet Scott when he arrives (I think her name is Edie but idk cause we didn’t stay with anyone long enough to understand their roles and names) and idk who she is except another hyper exuberant werido, lol

I like that there is an elf named Crouton. Idk why but I like it

Speaking of Crouton, the scenes in the comm center felt very Prep and Landing to me. Like even down to the revised machines and the way Betty feels like Magee.

The elves danced... there was a cake... that is not every what I pictured the end of the season at the pole like but you do you

All the stuff with Carol not remembering her name really freaked me out. Like, literally between 2 and 3 they said that they weren’t going to make Carol the traditional Mrs Claus because they wanted her to be herself and the old makeup and stuff looked weird.

IDK something about all the elves and the way they portrayed the Claus family really weirded me out. the part where they were all like “MUST MAKE TOYS NOW” felt like a cult and just like a little too far. Give them a sec to breathe. The kids are a mess, especially Buddy (which again, why you callin him Cal especially Cal Calvin). But I think the daughter bugs me most cause I can’t get over the nepotism of it all. Also just like the  “there hasn’t been a human kid here in 84 years” warning was also ominous and weird.

Obviously there was the “you can’t even say Merry Christmas” line which like, ok boomer. I’m real scared for how the Christ in Christmas shit he was spouting is gonna factor in.

So is Cider actually alcoholic in this universe now, cause they were acting much more like it was booze than they ever did with cocoa.

Shocked they mentioned Jack at all. Assume that will be it and we won’t see any of the Council at all

Also in one of the those dumb Allen interviews he said one version had lots of other mythical creatures but he thought that was weird and not in the spirit of the movies which like, ok fine if you’re only acting like 1 happened, but clearly you picked and chose what you wanted from 2 & 3 and then everyone is screaming about Gnomes! like what?

Jumping back I guess cause none of this is in order but when he went to the doctor I was like “where is Dr. Histmas” because idgaf about that character but that name is always funny to say. I like the new doctor elf though. Her name is Doc Martin though which is dumb

Except that she basically was referring to his magic going like it was ED and I was like, nope, no thanks!

idk how I feel about all the Kal Penn stuff. Like you’re sorta setting his story as a parallel to Scott’s but he seems to actually care about his kid and when you get to the Charlie scene (I’ll get there next) the line is that the pole is a bad place to raise kids so what does that do to his daughter if he becomes Santa

Charlie... oh Charlie Charlie Charlie. I like in theory what they did with him. Like he’s a good dad now and doesn’t need to learn the lesson his dad did so he’s like, no thanks. But the way they made his wife seem overbearing and crazy felt like it was more of that boomer crap and just kind of ruined the whole scene.

I think I have other things to say but they’re not coming to me now. I will say that my current prediction is, much like Daredevil in She-Hulk, Bernard won’t show up until the second to last or the last episode despite being in all of the ads. Like they’re teasing us cause they know we want to see him so they’ll save him for the very end. I’ve also joked that much like Daredevil in She-Hulk, Jenn’s gonna “smash” him 

#the santa clause #the santa clauses #christmas #rambling #ranting about dumb things #just ignore this #tsc #the santa clause 2 #the santa clause 3 #ok boomer #bernard the head elf #elf #bernard #why am I gonna do this to myself for the next few weeks #I'm annoyed enough about this I'm thinking about finally working on my VE sequel after like 12 yrs #fandom grandma #whoops I posted it

[brightlotusmoon]

The old internet sounds like so much fun. Especially old fandom. I'm tired of the way it is today. I just want people to stay in their lane and leave folks be. What was it like?

Oh, my child. *settles into chair, adjusts blanket*

The Old Internet really was The Wild Wild West, not for kids except the designated kids places. Lawless save for those we made ourselves. Also, made mostly by autistic, femme, and trans folks.

We had Geocities and Angelfire Web Rings. We had LOLCats. Message forums and chat rooms and clumsy attempts at audio and video. We had Yahoo. Hamsterdance. Alta Vista. Ask Jeeves. LiveJournal.

We created and curated and built and wrote until our cyber fingers bled HTML into the ether. We hosted each other's fanfiction and fan art, hidden whispers down deliberately darkened corridors. Only for us, we agreed, for those who would understand. Erotica was always part of it. We created Don't Like Don't Read.

And then, pockets of fandom, niche corners, began to cautiously open to accept more. The unwanted. The unloved. The strange, the weird, the odd, the cryptids, the outsiders, the others. The divergent. The queer. The neither and the all and the in between.

Within fandom we planted ourselves like trees next to the river of truth, and we faced the typical average norm of society, and we affirmed that these spaces were ours.

We're still fighting, and it's somehow that much harder. When did it get so much harder, when it was supposed to get so much easier?

This got away from me. I should pass it to another Fandom Elder.

Mikey here represents what I'm feeling right now as I keep gathering my thoughts, cautiously optimistic, getting ready to flight or fight.

#fandom grandma #fandom history #remember when fanfiction was frowned upon #remember when fans got along #this is why fandom bullying today confuses me

[liminal-zone]

This is me being a fandom old, but how many of you see this and go “but I already love you and despair”?????????

#she who shall not be named here #but the olds know #lotr #Galadriel #fellowship of the ring #fandom grandma #i cannot tell you how often I quote that fic

[mllebleue]

Hello new KiSCon friends and mutuals!

#star trek #tos #fandom grandma #so old #so effing old

[zenish]

How do I block x reader fic from the TL

Just do what everyone else did 10 years ago and write Mary Sue fic for god sakes at least try.

#fandom grandma #get off my lawn #wavin my cane

[knowledgevariabledarcy]

#fandom games #fandom gift exchange #fandom goes on strike #fandom grandma #fandom gatekeeping #Youtube

[stoplookingup]

Kids these days...

Lately I've been watching TOS reaction videos, like these guys. 

There's a fair bit of commentary on stuff that didn't age well: the unconvincing special effects (even though  inevitably they're watching the enhanced version); the obvious use of stunt doubles (obvious on giant HD TVs, anyway); the mixed messages (Racism is bad but all Klingons are evil! Women are equal but also sex objects! Don't interfere in other cultures unless they're doing it wrong!); the clunky tag scenes capping off tragic events with a good laugh on the bridge; etc. And there's a lot of cluelessness about the cultural environment of the 1960s (Why is Chekov wearing that crazy wig and always saying stuff was invented in Russia?). But what stands out to me is how certain storytelling conventions that we didn't question in the 1960s and '70s really bother younger viewers. The most obvious example is the total reset, where events in previous episodes are rarely if ever mentioned again and don't seem to have any lasting impact on the characters. Also, the instant love interest, where a character forms a deep romantic attachment in just a few minutes of screen time. ...

(Read the rest on It Started With Trek)

#star trek tos #it started with trek #generational differences #fandom grandma

[st6riieluckz]

You all really be like "this is my comfort character " and they're idealized version of yourself

#comfort character #anime #fandom #fandom grandma #starrieluckzthings #fandom things #fanatic