fandom snowflake challenge day 15

[kaixo]

Day 15

In your own space, write a love letter to Fandom in general, to a particular fandom, to a trope, a relationship, a character, or to your flist/circle/followers. Share your love and squee as loud as you want to. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so

For me this is kind of similar to number 2, so I held off on doing this until now.



Once a year, every year, I take a few days out of the calendar and disappear for a couple of days around my birthday. I don't share the day with anyone, save myself and my partner (and I have to be convinced to have him celebrate it with me). Last year, we decided to go to Scotland; and not the more accessible places like Glasgow or Edinburgh either, but further out. We rock around the areas where King Bruce of Scotland raged many a war against the English, we coo at mini Stonehedges and impressive castles, we sidled up to lighthouses so far off the path, my phone network welcomed me to Ireland on one side of the country and Denmark on the other (we were racking up miles ). We flattened ourselves against the seaside cliffs whilst walking because the gusts of winds can and will yank you away.


^{Map of Scotland! Scandinavia to the East, and Ireland to the West}

One afternoon, the third day of our wee sojourn, our vehicle broke down somewhere in Dumfries.

We were a good six kilometres from the nearest outpost with a phone (and somewhere safe where we could be picked up), so we had to lock up and walk from our vehicle to said outpost. I was listening to this podfic all this time. I had itsadrizzit's voice in my ear, and strangely, Christian Eriksen going through all his attendant dramas (LOL) made mine not seem too taxing. Never mind that I did walk the six km to this bloody outpost, waited for the mechanic for another two hours and walked the six km back (because the mechanic's car only had room for two and that wasn't me). On top of that, we got towed to an abandoned car park where we had to stay the night in another part of Scotland that I had never been to before, but the voice in my ear kept me in great spirits.

It's really difficult to actually verbalise how intimate someone's voice in your ear can be. Before this, I'd listened to podfics playing on my laptop whilst doing accounts and other things. Oh I had a nano, and I uploaded some podfic to get my head around it... eventually, but I didn't really have the whole voice in my ear experience until my vehicle broke down. That's the time I actually grokked what podfic could do to words, how individual voices can be, with their different textures and intonations.

I do remember being moved enough after the experience to send a message of thanks to itsadrizzit. Something along the lines of, "Hello, thank you so much for this podfic. It's the only thing keeping me from going spare in the middle of a dodgy carpark on the outskirts of a small Scottish village where I understand no one."

Honestly, this entry is all sorts of clumsy, because it is a love letter to fandom for creating a venue where someone in Britain (me) can be stranded somewhere else in Britain (Scotland), listening to a podfic being recorded by someone who lives in the continental USA. I guess this post is probably a love letter to fandom, podfic, and the art of storytelling and how it can live across forms and mediums. It's also the answer to day 2 of the snowflake challenge when it asks you to share a memory about fandom that sticks out in the past year, and that was mine.



^{I love lighthouses! We spent a night camping near here}

Comments

[jadesfire]

What a wonderful story. Having someone else's voice in your head can be incredibly intimate, and like when you throw a fic out into the world, there's just no way of knowing how it's going to impact people. Thank you so much for sharing this - really made my day!

[vaysh]

What a beautiful post. Your last paragraph - that is exactly what fandom is to me. This: a love letter to fandom, podfic, and the art of storytelling and how it can live across forms and mediums. And I am so with you about the intimacy of listening to podfics with headphones. There are places in Berlin where I will remember a certain scene, feeling and even line from a podfic, because I listened to it there, :)

[spikedluv]

What a wonderful story! I'm glad you had that piece of fandom to keep you company on your (long) walk. ♥