The Tradëscan Codex

 As part of the "describe 7 interests" meme, settiai assigned me, alongside 6 other interests, "Naomi Wildman." Which made me want to look up the fragments of drafts of Star Trek: Voyager--my real first fandom, long before Buffy, even if I never became enmeshed in fannish networks until much later--fanfics I still have saved. I must have been about fourteen when I wrote this.

( What is a Story without Pictures or Conversation? )

languagelog is always awesome (even if they sometimes lean a bit heavily to the positivistic side), but today's two most recent posts are particularly noteworthy and worthy of recommendation: a long, wonderfully detailed piece on who/m, and a more rambling piece on the descriptivism/prescriptivism battle that somehow ends up discussing Star Trek.

I strongly reccommend you head over and check them out.

www.languagelog.com

Fandom: Star Trek
Pairing: Kathryn Janeway/"Living Witness"!Janeway
Note: For the 4th of July femslash porn battle.

( Janeway/"Living Witness"!Janeway, leather )

soundingsea sent me the first two episodes of Veronica Mars, and OMG--where was that show when I was watching TV last Wednesday? Because there is no way in Sheol that they were the same show. The difference was light and day.

Saw RENT last night and was more or less sobbing as the credits rolled. It's not difficult for a movie to make me cry, but I haven't cried that hard at a movie in a very long time.

Now, my first fandom taught me 3 major things:

1) There is such a thing as love at first sight. I don't know if I've told you guys this story, but the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager I ever saw was "Blood Fever," a pon far episode. (From "In the Flesh": "It's pon far night at the Vulcan nightclub.") It was a bit too adult for my taste--remember this was '97, so I was 13--and I decided that Voyager wasn't for me.

Okay, that's not exactly a story about love at first sight. But bear with me.

Some indeterminate time in the future, I'm bored and there's nothing good on, so I think about giving Voyager a second chance. Only problem is, even though the TV Guide channel said it was on Channel 7 (oh, how I miss the TV Guide channel), instead there was some historical drama on about German-occupied France. It was centered in a bar or restaurant that was managed by a woman named Katrine.

I looked in Katrine's eyes, and I knew that despite the presence of Nazis and singing and whatnot, I had the right show. Because my heart told me that a woman with that kind of fire in her eyes had to be a starship captain. And of course the episode was "The Killing Game" and the woman was Captain Kathryn Janeway under some type of technobabble memory control.

And I was hooked.

2) You can do it too. I don't remember if Star Trek was the first fandom for which I wrote fanfiction. Actually, now that I think about it I know it wasn't--I remember working on a sequel to A Little Princess called Ladies-in-Waiting, and I know that that was started before I began my thesaurus phase in sixth grade and turned it into Lasses in Deferment. (I kid you not. I wish I did.) But it was the first fandom for which I wrote fanfiction qua fanfiction, and considered submitting to the web. I didn't know about FF.net then (luckily!) but I remember The Starfleet Journal, which I considered the pinnacle of prestige.

And then The Starfleet Journal experienced a steady decrease in quality and my reaction went from "If I work hard, my work could be enshrined there!" to "I can do that in my sleep!" to "I'd be ashamed to see my name next to drek like that." And I realized that things on the web are imperfect institutions run by people, that fanfic writers were not some hallowed pantheon, that if I wanted to be involved and be noticed what was necessary was a little bit a talent and a lot of enthusiasm and commitment. I didn't need to be a god to become a fanfic writer, and I wouldn't become a god by becoming a fanfic writer.

3) It’s okay to move on. I haven't seen an episode of Voyager since the series ended. I have the strongest affection for the show, but I don't particularly miss it. If someone pointed me to a Naomi Wildman ficathon I'd join it in a heartbeat, but I don't think I'll be finishing the unfinished WIPs up at FF.net or on my harddrive.