Meta: Teeny Tiny Fandoms

[catwalksalone]

Teeny Tiny Fandoms: The Hows, Whys and Wherefores of Promoting and Enjoying Your Obscure Obsession
Modded at MJ by: lamardeuse




Part One: How The Madness Starts

Where does your obsession begin? Is it in the source or in a single story or vid or artwork that you find on the Net? Did you go through a period of being convinced you were the only freak out there who liked this show/source, or slashed the characters?



Part Two: Finding Other Freaks Like You

Ideas on how to find others who share your love, including:
- doing effective searches (how?)
- zines (older fandoms)
- LJ (many multifandom fans who may be interested in a "new" fandom)
- what else???

Side discussion: the pitfalls of careening madly through the Internet (one that comes to mind: you can't assume everyone you meet who enjoys the show is friendly to slash, e.g. in more "old school" fandoms like I Spy or in new ones that are geared to a youth audience).



Part Three: Creating A (Small, Highly-Trained, Dedicated and Skilled) Army of Like-Minded Freaks

Ideas for promoting the fandom, including:

- recs (if there are any)
- starting a community or group or pimping on an existing comm (ship_manifesto, crack_van)
- setting up a fic challenge or exchange (usually would have to be multifandom) or participating in one (Yuletide, Blast from the Past)
- artwork, icons, fics, vids, knit goods
- creating articles for sale (cafépress?)
- pimping the source (uploads, sending DVDs, sharing links, sharing times when source is airing)
- screencap galleries
- what else???



Part Four: Staying Zen

Ideas on dealing with the frustration of knowing that your boys are never going to be the queen and queen of the prom, including:

- meditation
- yoga
- banding together with other teeny tiny fandom people (there's strength in numbers)

Side discussion on risks of alienation of more popular fandom members - pitfalls to avoid when plugging your teeny tinyness



Part Five: Tell Us About It

Tell the world (well, okay, everyone here) about your teeny tiny fandom! Share the love!

""Totally unacceptable! Full of holes!""

-Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

Comments

Re: Real Genius!

[ana-grrl.livejournal.com]

And one more link - sorry, I forgot to include this. There is an LJ community for RG fic, real_genius_fic and there are a couple of stories up there. If anyone has ever seen any other stories anywhere, I'd love to know about them!