December Posting Meme: how I ended up in Glee

for stultiloquentia
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In order to understand how I ended up in Glee, you have to understand where I was before I was in Glee.

I know it can be hard to see sometimes from inside a fandom, but there's always this sort of consensus that forms around popular pairings, who these people are and how they interact with one another. I was sort of thinking about it earlier, calling it the Ur-Fic that people build their stories off of.

So there's X-Men: First Class fandom. What I wanted out of the Charles/Erik fic was a meeting of equals, an unstoppable force crashing headlong into an unmovable rock. That is my XMFC Ur-Fic. That is not the XMFC fandom's Ur-Fic, which is all about a brutish, domineering Erik meeting being soothed into civilization by the gentle, sweet, frequently-innocent Charles (on occasion, accompanied by Orientalized racism and/or ABO tropes). I loathed it. I wanted to set it on fire dump the ashes into the ocean.

And it made it frustrating to be in that fandom, where there was all this fic in the pairing that I wanted and that I ended up reading and hating, no matter what the objective quality of it was. Kind of like King Midas, surrounded by gold that he can't actually find nourishment in. (Yes, I'm being melodramatic. Fandom is srs bsnss.)

So. Yeah. That didn't last very long, a few months or so. I tried to be the change I wanted to see in fandom, but it felt like I was swimming upstream. Caring is difficult and draining. And most of the fandom was on Tumblr anyway. So I was especially clueless on how to do anything. It was easier to wander off than to stick around.

And then I kind of I left my job, and was super stressed for a while, and then I got a new job, so I was less stressed. I finally got my job offer over Thanksgiving vacation, which was great, and that Thanksgiving, they aired an episode of Glee.

When I am at my parents' house, I watch a lot of TV. It was a silly-looking superhero episode, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

It was terrible, of course, because it's Glee, but it was also centered around Kurt and Blaine's relationship woes, and I was charmed enough by it that I figured I'd go find out what the fic was like. I had a week off before my new job started, so I had plenty of time to just sit around and read whatever I could get my hands on. The fic was pretty good, lots of stuff that was long and meaty and full of drama.

The beautiful thing about Glee fandom was my absolute lack of giving a shit. I could read all of it, and I didn't care. Being a TV fandom, the characterizations tended to be more nuanced, had more depth, and 'being better than canon' is such a low bar to clear for this show that most fic clears it pretty easily. Plus, the power dynamics were allowed to shift and change. There are definitely people who lean one way or the other, but it was never so overwhelmingly homogeneous as it was in XMFC fandom. There was badfic in every color of the rainbow, and there was more every day.

So I stuck around.

And that's how I ended up in Glee.

Okay, back to my pinch hit now.