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Entry tags:
Sunshine Challenge #2
potofsoup
I created my tumblr account in... January of 2014? Anyway, that week, I was chatting with a coworker, and I am notoriously bad with colloquialisms, so I was trying to say that something wasn't my cup of tea, but I forgot the phrase, so I said that it wasn't my pot of soup instead. (It's a container of liquid!) And after some gentle teasing by Coworker, I decided to lean into it -- after all, I really like soup! So when I created my tumblr account, I called it potofsoup. :)
Most people call me Soup, which bears a certain resemblance to my real name, so I like that. It's mostly worked well for me, except now I'm potofsoup2 on tumblr.
icon
I'm not an icon person -- I pick one and I'm done. My personal tumblr used to have 生煎包 because they're my favorite soupy dumplings. My personal DW just has a face. My fandom icon is just me holding a pillow, overcome with feels. This was after a spring break spent reading Captain America fanfics in 2014.
language
I speak and write Chinese, although it's as a heritage language. My family is actually in the heritage language business, so I kind of grew up with this assumption that Chinese culture is transmitted through the Chinese language. It's only recently that I'm trying to get out of that mindset. My own Chinese -- my reading comprehension is great, I can translate classic Chinese texts with relative ease. My writing takes more effort to start, and sometimes phrasing gets a bit weird. My speaking is the worst -- I sound half like a 4th grader and the other half like a 40 year old man.
fannish identity
Fannish identity is something that I think a lot about.
On the spectrum from Creative Fandom to Curative Fandom, I'm definitely on the creative side. At the heart of it, I want to tell stories and share headcanons, and comics happen to be the medium that comes most easily to me. The downsides, of course, are that (a) it takes fucking forever, and (b) AO3 is really not fanart-friendly. This is why I sometimes try to write fic, but writing doesn't come as naturally to me. But anyway, creating is fun! I love it when I see that my work has affected someone, whether it's an AO3 comment, or reblog tag flailing.
But creating stuff can be incredibly lonely. It's especially true in my attempts to do original work. (Wow, I just counted it up, and surprisingly, my original comics and my fan comics are about equal in total pagecount (270 pages original vs. 240 pages fandom*). There's definitely a difference between drawing something that will be seen by 20 people vs. something that has 100+ notes on it. More importantly, sometimes I just want to talk to people about comicking and feels.
Thus -- fandom participation. Fandom is kind of ... daunting.** But after I figured stuff out -- I'm obviously not a curator like the people making rec lists or running fyeah blogs, and I don't really do research or provide helpful references. I really love spreadsheeting and data entry, so I've tried my hand at modding things. I've since stepped back from modding because I was expending managerial energy on fandom instead of on my job and family. And now, with Rutabaga at age 3 and demanding constant play, plus my normal teaching job, my weekend teaching job, and all of the creative projects I want to pursue -- it turns out that I don't really have the energy to maintain a social media presence, or to spend time in large Discord chatrooms. I've kind of reconciled myself to the fact that I seem to do best with the "make something, post it, and respond to people who comment" model, but I also want to connect with people more spontaneously. I'm... not really sure how to do that? Do people still have meandering email conversations? Maybe I should create a chatroom with just a few people? Maybe I should just be more public with all my ornery opinions? I'm still trying to figure out what will work for my present needs.
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* Original: 49 for CGU + 23 for Sixteen + 24 for China Comics + 90 for Tisquantum + 45 for Rutabaga + 18 for anthology comics + 20 for miscellaneous other stuff. On the fandom side: 36 for AskWSBucky + 40 for 4F + 40 for Stucky + 24 for Lady Friends + 60 for Birthday + 40 more misc comic pages that didn't make it into any of the collections, excluding all of the other fanart...
** I left fandom in 2002, when everyone was on mailing lists and individual geocities sites with the occasional fandom archive. Anipike. Webrings. Shrines to characters. I basically missed the entire LJ period of fandom, and when I came back in 2014, it was tumblr and first-five-tags and kinkmemes and bangs. Every kinkmeme that I visited assumed that I knew what a kinkmeme was and how it operated. Every fest/exchange/bingo/bang assumed that I knew the difference between all of those. (Yes, Fanlore exists but so few people link to it that I didn't know it existed for the first 2 years.) One of my least positive experiences on DW was when people came into my posts to tell me that they're a fandom old and I'm not, and that, as a result, I know nothing and should leave. I really dislike fandom gatekeeping, and nowadays I think a lot about younger fans entering a fandom community at age 15 and not knowing how to figure out any of this. [/rant]
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<3 <3 <3
Yeah. You know that pic of Peggy as "makeup goals" and Bucky with the smudged eye shadow as "makeup reality"? That's me with fandom participation. Me: "let me get onto all these discords and join all these events and create all these social media spaces" Me, 15 minutes later: ".... I'm just going to hide in a blanket now"
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Anyhow, thanks for providing a space for me to rant! <3
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Yeah, twitter moves so fast that I can't even bring myself to even start there. So bravo to you for actually dipping your toe in that space! TBH what I've enjoyed the most is whenever I get a chance to lure someone into a private one-on-one email convo ahahahaha