Fandoms, Filks and Frilly Knickers

As I have mentioned before, I am a person of rather intense and often rapid-changing obsessions. Once something catches my fancy, I latch on to it like a pit-bull with lockjaw. It is as if I can’t enjoy something properly until I have turned it upside down, inside out, broken it down to all its individual components, put it back together again in reverse order and then swallowed it whole. I can’t decide whether or not I like a song until I can sing each line of the harmonies individually; I couldn’t tell you whether or not I liked New York before I could find my way from MoMA to the Barnes and Noble on Union Square without a map (which, in fact, turned out to be rather straightforward. Ergo, I like New York); and I really can’t properly appreciate a book until I can tell you exactly why the main protagonist’s sister’s high school sweetheart prefers poached eggs over scrambled ones. (Also, I didn’t know the heights at which the supreme beauty that is House could be appreciated until I knew the colour of Dr Cuddy’s knickers… turns out, sometimes they’re red, sometimes they’re white and frilly! Now I can die in peace.)

You can probably imagine that for a person like me, the Internet is an extremely dangerous place. Think about it: there’s fandoms for everything! Vast realms in which one can get lost and never come out of. Huge dominions where people gather to share in a mutual passion, fuelling each other’s obsession. Places that people go to every day, places like Leaky, but for topics you and I may never even have heard of! In the mid-1980s there was this Robin Hood series on British TV called Robin of Sherwood (which I loved back then¦ and recorded every episode of on my VCR¦ and watched over and over and over until I could recite the words by heart, obviously)… and they have an active Internet fandom, with fanfic, fanart, timelines and sewing patterns! People have decoded the runes on the swords that were used, drawn detailed maps of Sherwood Forest and still have yearly gatherings where they all dress up like Friar Tuck and Maid Marion! Stephen Fry’s personal website has a forum on which there are people with 5,000 posts; there’s chatrooms about snooker, virtual Ender’s Game battle schools and Multi-User Dungeons with ominous names like The Void and Shades that have been around since before the World Wide Web! And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg; it’s an electron in a hydrogen atom of a water molecule in a snowflake on top of the tip of the iceberg! It is one enormous, treacherous, uncharted minefield! A huge Acromantula, waiting, biding its time, hoping for me to make one false move, take one wrong turn, so it can strike and drag me deep into the bowels of its lair until I am bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived and vitamin D deficient. I can’t even begin to tell you how much this freaks me out.

I have allowed myself one fandom, and one fandom only. Actually, for a long time I didn’t even really allow myself that one fandom either, but it was just too big to stop. Before I could even say “flibbertigibbet”, I had strayed way past the point of no return (which exactly proves my point¦ I didn’t even like Harry Potter when I first read Philosopher’s Stone, and now look at me!). No, I need to tread the Internet carefully, because I can’t possibly cope with another obsession of this magnitude! When I stumbled across the Robin of Sherwood fansite, the Virtual Battle School or Stephen Fry’s forum, I ran like hell, never to return again (as for the snooker chatroom, Shades and The Void… been there, done that, bought a house in New Zealand with one of the members, I’m afraid…). And that’s just the fandoms of things I already know and love. I also need to watch out for any new things that might suck me in. I haven’t even touched the Twilight books, for example. I keep giving some half-baked, cock and bull explanation that I don’t think they’re my cup of tea (which might still be true, mind…), but in reality, I am far more afraid that they will be!

(This sprawling epistle will be bent back to the topic of filking at some point, I promise!)

There’s one fandom in particular that I give a very, very wide berth¦ If the FBI would ever take possession of my computer, one thing they would not be able to find on it would be any covert Google searches for House. (OK, yes, fine, so I do have more pictures of Hugh and Lisa than can be considered strictly healthy, but that’s all. Honest.) Not that I don’t like House¦ quite, quite on the contrary. I passionately, obsessively, ardently, zealously, fanatically adore House, and that is an understatement. The characters, the storylines, the writing, the insanely rude jokes¦ I worship Wilson, I could (and, admittedly, already did) draw a floor plan of Princeton Plainsboro (in 3D), Cuddy has turned this straight girl decidedly 13 and Hugh¦ oy, Madre de Dios, sálva me. But the idea alone of a vast group of people discussing, dissecting and disputing House characters, House storylines, House actors or Cuddy’s frilly knickers instils me with a mortal terror. My poor, hyper-excitable INFJ heart would never be able to handle it! (Also, I have to admit, I get a bit territorial when it comes to Hugh. It’s a bit hard for me to stomach the thought of large numbers of females gushing over the man I have wanted to marry since well before it was legal.) No, I need to focus. Stay away. Keep a clear mind. Be strong. And most of all, I must never ever write a filk on anything but Harry Potter (see! I told you I’d come back to it somehow), because I know I will have gone over the edge once I start making up songs about something.

Earlier this week I listened to the September edition of Filkcast: Potter Style, and Delana and Michael, the Filkcasters, announced that the Filky Awards will be coming up again soon (and you will all go and vote for my filks, won’t you!). Wow, the year is going by fast. If the Filkies are coming up soon, it means Christmas won’t be too much further away, either! (Seriously, you think “oh, it’s only September’ but you’ll just wait and see, before you can say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” there’ll be baubles in the stores and fake snow on the windows.) I love Christmas filks, but find they are really hard to write. First of all, there aren’t all that many good Christmas songs¦ I mean, compared to the range of song choice for regular filks, that is. And then you need to come up with a topic that is both Christmassy and Harry Pottery¦ I like to start thinking about my Christmas filks well in advance (cuz you gots to have one every year, really). So ever since I listened to filkcast, my mind has been wandering to suitable Christmas songs. I decided that I really like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” and that it has good filking potential¦ But why oh why oh why is all that I can come up with:

PS: I am so sorry. I do sincerely apologise. I actually had no topic for this week. I thought this would be over and done with in a few words. I did warn you I would be verbose…
PS2: More apologies – I had accidentally disabled the comments feature. You should be able to leave comments again now!