Tolkienish birthday post thing

[huinare]

Soon I shall hopefully be remembering to make the 9pm toast to the Professor, on his birthday. This being so close to the new year, it seems a good occasion for reflection upon some fannish stuff.

- I have not been very good about supporting my fellow tertiary-world writers this past year. Some people probably know I had a sort of fannish meltdown closer to the start of 2014, right around the time I was also a B2MeM mod, didn't fulfill my B2MeM writing prompt and pulled only minimal moderatorly duties, etc. This general trend largely persisted throughout the year, due to a comination of RL and discovering what my limits are as far as attempting to participate in fandom outside of LJ and the SWG. It's too late to go back and amend that, but I hope to do a bit better in 2015.

- For almost as long as I can remember, I've had characters living in my head. Sometimes they have almost literally been all I had. They used to be my own characters invented from scratch. Since 2007, they've been my versions of Tolkien's (usually minor) characters. Though in a way these are still my own, my precious, and I'm sure I have used them in ways he would not always have condoned, I owe their existence to this now-deceased pipe-smoking philologist. Even though I haven't written much this year, they are always there, having adventures and mishaps I've yet to put down in words, grudingly channeling my interests and emotions in appropriate symbolic ways that help me to maintain my outward sanity, and sometimes offering instructive thoughts on how to better myself (or serving as unhappy exemplars of what not to do).

- I'm not precisely the hugest Jackson!film fan these days, but I have Peter Jackson's particular brand of fannishness and its results to even thank for the fact that I'm thanking the Professor now. I saw all three of the first trilogy in the theatres with an esrtwhile boyfriend. Thankfully, that philanderer is long gone from my life, but technically, the films are not, since they first prompted me to read the books (which I admittedly found to be very slow going the first time around). Due to Sir Lee's portrayal, the subtleties of which did not escape me, I was a Saruman sympathizer before I even read the books; to be perfectly frank, I'd found out about the character's pre-wizard history via the interwebs well before I even read up to the point where he actually appears in The Two Towers (I think I read TTT in 2005 or so). This probably explains, well, a lot, come to think of it.

Comments

[zdenka]

I know what you mean about having characters living in your head. I do the same thing. (I occasionally wish that I could take the characters in my head and the characters in my friends' heads and put them all in one place for a while. The results would be fascinating and possibly catastrophic.)

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Probably not quite what you mean, but your parenthetical reminds me how many years ago, I had these people I hung out with online; we had a bunch of characters we tended to randomly throw together in really ridiculous part-chat, part-RP things. Somehow they all ended up living in some house in the boondocks. There were OCs, literary characters, movie and TV characters, and everyone was pretty much always at everyone else's throat and having a nervous breakdown [the characters, that is, although the RL group also fell apart with little glory]. =P

[zdenka]

When I was in college, I used to be part of a group which wrote a just-for-fun collaborative story together in a shared world, and when we were bored we would improvise scenes with our characters or de-age them to children or silly things like that. And I've also done online roleplaying in what are called "dressing rooms," where you take a bunch of characters and throw them into a room together and see what happens. That sort of thing has mostly died out with the decline of LJ, unfortunately.

[huinare.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize there was actually a term for that sort of RP (which is really the only kind I ever did...could never seem to find a serious RP which suited my interests and where I felt confident my characters would not be ignored)! That should totally be a thing, still.

[zdenka]

It should! I only know one which is still going, and it's not very active. I haven't posted there in a long time.

There were both single-fandom and multi-fandom dressing rooms. The single-fandom ones had the entertaining thing where you'd often have multiple versions of the same character wandering around, and they'd have to deal with each other.

[independence1776]

Well said!

I hear you about having characters in your head even when you're not able to write them.

[huinare.livejournal.com]

I seriously do not know what I'd do without characters living in my head! I suspect life would seem very dull and empty.