jedibuttercup

Challenge #9 - In your own space, promote at least one canon that you adore (old, new, forever fandom). Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

You wouldn't think this would be the challenge that would short my brain out. But, well. How many fandoms have I written in now? :) It's hard to feature just one, or even just a few.

The fandoms I've engaged with the longest are, as mentioned earlier: Star Trek; Star Wars; Austen; and Tolkien, in that order. I was introduced to them by family, and happily consumed everything I could for years, and eventually produced fic for them all. But since I first stepped onto the Internet to participate as a writer, the fandoms I engaged with first and most consistently have been: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Angel; Stargate SG-1; Stargate Atlantis; Firefly/Serenity; Pitch Black/Riddick series; and crossovers in general. Other favorites that cropped up later and have persisted since (to the tune of 50,000 words written or more) are Fast and the Furious, the Dresden Files, Falling Skies, Eureka, the MCU, Harry Potter, Sleepy Hollow, the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, Leverage, Bayformers, and Person of Interest.

... that's a lot, and that's not even getting into some of my more popular recent movie fandoms. Suffice it to say that just about any canon I encounter with engaging characters and a genre plot with an interesting hook has a good chance of drawing me in. Teamy or us-vs-the-world setups a plus; spectacle and a sense of wonder even better.

And now that I'm thinking of that, I know exactly which fandom to feature: The Expanse.

No, I haven't written in it yet. But I'm pretty sure I will. I'd been low-key reading the book series for years, finding them interesting and fairly gritty-realistic nearish-future sci-fi with moderately engaging characters and a good mix of personal relationships and epic-scale space opera, but the low-key horror inherent in some of the worldbuilding was just squicky enough that I wasn't racing to buy every new book the moment it was published. And it had been years since I'd watched the SyFy channel, so the thought of it being filmed didn't move me much. But then last fall I heard that Amazon had picked up the series, and was going to continue it - and since I have Prime, I thought I'd finally give the show a try.

Let me tell you, The Expanse is just about everything I could possibly want in a scifi show. Complex people doing complex things in various teamy and us-vs-the-world configurations, fairly realistic science, the squicky stuff from the books (the protomolecule, mostly) was actually filmed in a really intriguing way, the cast is fab, the visuals in general are just really beautifully done, the plots are engaging on both the large and the small scale, I wanted to start the next episode immediately every time one ended ... and by the time I got to the end of Season 3 I shipped everyone with everyone. I'm going to start S4 as soon as I get the time, and plan to reread the books again armed with new visuals in mind, and then fic both versions. I really, really love this show; it's like it was laser-targeted to my id. :)