Snowflake Challenge, Day 1
Jan. 4th, 2019 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ermingardenDay 1: Talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calm you or keep you sane.
(Jumped in on Day 2, going back and doing this now.)
My first fannish Happy Place was the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I was an odd kid and frequently teased, but when an elementary school classmate gave me a copy of Showdown at Centerpoint it was my gateway into a world that made sense, that was clearly laid out and consistent, in a way that social interactions at school didn't and weren't. When my parents got divorced and so much in my life changed, Star Wars - specifically Star Wars novels - remained a constant. The local used bookstore had a couple of shelves of Star Wars novels in the sci-fi/fantasy section, and I would go every so often and buy another beat-up paperback that I would devour in an afternoon.
This particular Happy Place I valued because of its stability, but when the sequels were greenlit and the universe rebooted, so that the Expanded Universe I knew and loved became Legends, Star Wars couldn't be for me what it had been. It had been a safe place for me because of its constancy, but that was gone. That's not to say that I think the sequels are bad, or that the change was necessarily for the worse - but the very fact that Star Wars had changed meant I couldn't rely on it in the same way anymore.
However, what Star Wars had been to me, the Lord of the Rings became, and much more besides. I had read the Lord of the Rings as a kid, but hadn't fallen in love. In high school, though, when I read it again, I fell completely head over heels into Middle-earth. Today, the feel of the paper in my edition of the Lord of the Rings - a long-ago gift from my great-aunt to my mother, who doesn't really like fantasy, and then passed on to me -, the look of the typeface, the familiar cadence of Tolkien's prose, all give me that sense of stability that has been characteristic of my fannish interactions as long as I have been a fan. Although I do engage with other fandoms, that constancy, as today's prompt put it, both calms me and brings me joy.
(Jumped in on Day 2, going back and doing this now.)
My first fannish Happy Place was the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I was an odd kid and frequently teased, but when an elementary school classmate gave me a copy of Showdown at Centerpoint it was my gateway into a world that made sense, that was clearly laid out and consistent, in a way that social interactions at school didn't and weren't. When my parents got divorced and so much in my life changed, Star Wars - specifically Star Wars novels - remained a constant. The local used bookstore had a couple of shelves of Star Wars novels in the sci-fi/fantasy section, and I would go every so often and buy another beat-up paperback that I would devour in an afternoon.
This particular Happy Place I valued because of its stability, but when the sequels were greenlit and the universe rebooted, so that the Expanded Universe I knew and loved became Legends, Star Wars couldn't be for me what it had been. It had been a safe place for me because of its constancy, but that was gone. That's not to say that I think the sequels are bad, or that the change was necessarily for the worse - but the very fact that Star Wars had changed meant I couldn't rely on it in the same way anymore.
However, what Star Wars had been to me, the Lord of the Rings became, and much more besides. I had read the Lord of the Rings as a kid, but hadn't fallen in love. In high school, though, when I read it again, I fell completely head over heels into Middle-earth. Today, the feel of the paper in my edition of the Lord of the Rings - a long-ago gift from my great-aunt to my mother, who doesn't really like fantasy, and then passed on to me -, the look of the typeface, the familiar cadence of Tolkien's prose, all give me that sense of stability that has been characteristic of my fannish interactions as long as I have been a fan. Although I do engage with other fandoms, that constancy, as today's prompt put it, both calms me and brings me joy.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-06 04:03 pm (UTC)