Fandom as Time Capsule

[feliciakw]

So I was crashing around my old fandom, The Sentinel, today--seeing what of my fic is still on-line, stumbling across a list in the Cascade Library of everyone's first posted fics (mine was way back in May 2001), get getting sort of nostalgic about the whole thing.


And I've been thinking recently about how TS is something of a pop culture/fandom time capsule. It was pre-9/11, so a lot of stuff happened on the show and in fic that couldn't happen today. Jim's cell phone is the size of a brick. Jim drives a large truck or a large SUV for much of the series. There's a very "fantasy" feel to a lot of it, whether it be the crime, or the mysticism, or whatever. And Y2K was the BIG event that shows up in a lot of the fic. War on terror? Wha??? No, we were worried about the Y2K bug and all the civilized world's computers crashing.

Contrast this with something like Numb3rs, where the hook isn't something "fantasy," it's the universal language of math. Contrast the Eppes's little flip-open cell phones to Jim's brick. Contrast Charlie's enviro-friendly Prius (and the bike he rode in Season 1) to Blair's Corvair and Volvo. Contrast the types of criminals . . . okay, the criminals are kinda similar in some cases--serial killers, for example. But everything in N3 is post-9/11. Homeland Security. Domestic terrorism. International terrorism. Stolen nuclear waste.

TS has "Cypher" (David Lash; Blair poisoned)
N3 has "Hot Shot" (Chandler Yates; Don poisoned)

TS has "Red Dust" (selling plutonium to North Korea)
N3 has "Dirty Bomb" (stealing nuclear waste)

TS has "Crossroads" (mysterious contagion let loose in small town)
N3 has "Vector" (Spanish flu virus escapes) and "Undercurrents" (possible bird flu contamination)

The nature of the shows are different. TS is more action/adventure; N3 is more crime drama/cop show. And I love them both for what they are.

It just seems that TS is from a simpler, more "innocent" time, I guess. I watch it, or read favorite fics, and go, "Oh, yeah. That was when . . . "

Just makes me wax nostalgic, that's all.

Comments

[izhilzha.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting. I was barely into TS fandom when 9/11 hit...I didn't get really involved till quite a while later. So I guess I almost see the older part of the fandom, the older fics, etc, as partly fictional themselves. A time capsule, yeah, but not one I helped put together.

[feliciakw.livejournal.com]

Well . . . I joined Cascade Times in August 2000. I posted my first fic there, a haiku, in October 2000. I didn't get around to submitting to CL until May 2001, apparently. So, yeah, I was way into it when 9/11 hit.

In fact, I gave up fic for several days after. It just seemed too frivolous. Then I wrote "No Turning Back" as a way to express, through fic, the stuff that was going on in my head (and that one *isn't* on-line anymore).

It's just really interesting to me to look back and see the perceptions and plot devices that were the norm. Lots of Y2K fic.

Perceptions and plot devices . . . like, in the 1980s, all the movie bad guys were Russians or renegade Communists, or sometimes Latin American militants. (MacGyver is a really interesting pop cult time capsule for the 80s TV action/adventure). X-Files has the same sort of "from a more innocent time" feel of the 90s that TS has, only in a more space aliens/sci-fi way. They weren't worried with international terrorists; they were worried about intergalactic terrorists. *snerk*

I'm not explaining this very well, probably.

And CSI is amost a bridge between the two types, first airing, when? 2000? New crime drama for the new century. You've got the action/adventure of TS in the '90s, the more cutting edge, science-oriented crime drama of CSI for the new millenium (and since their crimes stay PD-local, 9/11 wasn't soooo huge an issue), and N3, FBI-centric, post-9/11 terrorist elements, in addition to the usual robbery/murders and serial murders and art thefts and artifact thefts (all with a side of murder).

Oh! I'll also add that "Contender" is to N3 what "Sweet Science" was to TS. Heh. That would actually be a kind of interesting parallel to go through--go ep by ep and see the correlations. You wouldn't have the sentinel-mystic ep equivalents in N3, though there is the ep with the psychic . . . oh, which would be "Private Eyes" for TS.

And don't even get me started on the potential fic parallels between Liz Warner and Alex Barnes. I will not allow Liz to drown Charlie. Or Don. Just . . . no. *snerk* (*breath in* . . . I will learn to tolerate Liz . . . I will learn to tolerate Liz . . . I will continue to hope for Robin's return, but I will learn to tolerate Liz . . . )

Okay, I'm rambling now.