Fandom as Time Capsule
Mar. 1st, 2007 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feliciakwSo 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.
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.
