Canon experiences you can only have once

[sholio]

Kind of open-ended, I know. But I ran across a mention of the original Homestuck flash animations tonight, and that made me think about the whole experience of spending three or four solid days bingeing it back in 2010 or 2011, whenever that was - when the series was unfinished, when it was kind of a niche thing that was starting to snowball rather than overhyped to the point where there was such a thing as having a "Homestuck phase" in fandom, and basically just the whole experience of discovering it as this unfolding, non-sequential multimedia experience that wasn't quite like anything I'd ever read before.

I'm never going to do that again, for a variety of reasons. You basically can't without the Flash (though apparently there are archives that replicate the Flash animations), but also because there is no way I'm either devoting several solid consecutive days of my life to rereading a webcomic, or sustaining a reread of something that dense, convoluted, repetitive, and occasionally downright stupid over the number of weeks or months it would take to read it at a sane pace. Not to mention that half the fun of it the first time was having literally no idea what new bonkers tangent it was going to go off on, and I don't know how much enjoyment I'd actually get out of it without the element of surprise, now that I know where it's all going and how disappointing some of it was.

It's not even that Homestuck was ever influential or life-changing for me, because it wasn't. At all. I never even got into it in a fandom way, aside from watching some vids. I was just struck by the complete unrepeatability of that reading experience, which was probably the only time I'll ever read it from the beginning and might even be the only time I read it at all; I don't know if I'd even enjoy it if I read it now. But at one point in my life it fascinated me enough to spend the better part of a week doing literally nothing else but reading it.

There are probably a lot of experiences like that in most people's lives, and I know I have others - those times when you find a book or movie at exactly the right time in your life, when before or after wouldn't be the same, or the times when the actual surrounding experience of the thing is the special, unrepeatable part. You can always reread or rewatch, but you only ever get one first time with any show, book, or movie - and yet, sometimes the special, unrepeatable time isn't even the first time; it's some other aspect that makes it that way.

What are some of yours?

Comments

[naye]

Oh man Homestuck absolutely is my experience like that too - pretty sure it was summer 2011 for me. It wasn't even a fannish thing as much as a holy shit what is this even thing where reading through it was its own reward. I'm never going to finish it, and I'm never going to reread it, but I am so glad I had the chance to explore something so genius bonkers. I can't really think of anything else quite like it - though I will say I'm glad I found the original Star Wars movies as a kid and got to experience them with that sense of childlike wonder, entirely without any expectations or geek gatekeeping.

[sgac]

Playing the game Dragon Age Origins, which is a pretty big fic fandom. I'd read the wiki and spoiled myself, and I'd made my game choices for my desired outcome. But I hadn't read thoroughly enough, and I'd totally missed a critical point.

Spoilers follow.

So. 2am. Boss fight. I, and my character, believe she will sacrifice her life to defeat the boss. We get to the end of the fight. Cutscene.

Out of nowhere, our lover Alistair, who we'd romanced because I the player fell for him as a character, runs up, grabs a sword, kills the boss, and dies.

I yelled "Alistair, no!" loud enough to wake up the rest of the household.

At that moment, my character and I were united in the same reaction. It was as if Alistair had acted on his own, independent of game programming. We'd both had our plans overturned when we'd thought we were in control. We were both in shock, we both loved Alistair. Synergy.

[lunabee34]

When Emma was really little, I watched seasons one and two of Veronica Mars in like 48 hours, some ungodly pace that makes me feel nauseated to contemplate now. LOL

[grammarwoman]

I had a similar experience with VM - not 48 hours, but definitely in huge gulps that led to me unwisely staying up past my bedtime, right when my son was a toddler. That plunge led me to look for more obsessed fans and fic/vids online, and boom! I haven't left online fandom since. :)

[lunabee34]

Part of me misses those days when I could stay up past my bedtime, and the other part of me thinks I would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if I tried it now. LOL

I got into fandom when my older daughter was a toddler and it was the perfect time because of naps and going to bed early; lots of down time to be on the internet.

[yalumesse]

I know I've had some of these - your description of the feeling, it's ringing loud bells - but I can't for the life of me remember what stories caused it when :( I'll have a think!

[liz_mo]

Sherlock (tv) after S1. Never ever had anything like that. Could only be experienced *then*. Would not work the same if you watched it now.

[makamu]

I mean, I knew it was coming then, and I still get teary-eyed every time I watch it now, but the ending of The Fellowship of the Ring is that, for me. Largely because of what Philippa Boyens and Sean Bean did with Boromir, but just everything

[helen_keeble]

I can’t remember whether it was Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers (movies), but I have a strong memory of walking out of the cinema with my brother, looking at each other, and turning around to go straight back into the cinema for the next showing.

I watched the entirety of Downton Abbey between the hours of 10pm and 5am, while breastfeeding my sleepless newborn over the course of the first four weeks or so. I remember being gripped, and also I now have NO IDEA what happened in any of it.

Also: first listening to Hamilton, again in the dark at 3am, on headphones, while baby slept on my shoulder.

[aurumcalendula]

Reading Shadow Unit as installments were being posted, maybe? (especially since the message board and wiki are down, last I checked)

iirc that was my first fandom where I interacted with people rather than just lurking.

[sovay]

What are some of yours?

I watched Babylon 5 while it was airing: I discovered it just at the end of the first season. Genre-historically, this means I experienced the show before it was established as a calling card of long-form TV or even an early model for the direct interaction of creators with their fans and nobody knew if it would pull off its planned five-year arc or get cratered by network interference or what. Personally-historically, it was the first TV show I ever followed in my life, so in addition to leaving me with strong emotions to this day, it gave me a terrifically inaccurate idea of the landscape of American television in the 1990's and provided some of my first impetus to spend time on the internet. I lurked classically on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated. I actually made a friend through their fansite on Geocities and we kept in touch over e-mail for a couple of years. I am not sure I have ever gotten in on the ground floor of pop culture like that again. It was by total accident that I discovered I, Claudius—novel, then miniseries—just in time for Season Four, but I couldn't have timed it better if I'd meant to. That alone was unrepeatable and great.

[rachelmanija]

So this was a long time ago, when I was an undergraduate in theatre arts at UC Santa Cruz. I was flipping TV channels, and a TV show I'd never seen before (though I'd vaguely heard of it) caught my eye. It had cinematography that looked nothing like anything I'd seen on TV before. It looked like a movie, with fine attention paid to lighting, camera angles, mood, and just an overall astonishingly good look.

Still watching, I picked up the phone and called my friend Nora, who was also in theatre arts and also a film fan. I said, "Nora, Nora, you have to turn on your TV right now! There's this show on, I'm watching it now--"

"I was just going to call you to tell you to turn on your TV!" she said. "I'm watching it too! It looks just like a movie, doesn't it?"

"It does!" I said. "I've never seen a TV show that looks like this!"

The show? The X-Files.

[sushiflop]

Abroad with my parents on a hiking trip in New Zealand, staying in a hut and finding the book Imagining Argentina abandoned there for other readers to pick up. I was theoretically too young for the book but hooked in on the spot - it was my first exposure to Argentinean history and magical realism. I eventually studied abroad in Argentina partly because of reading it. I would say it holds up as a great book too.

[rabid_bookwyrm]

First time I saw Mad Max Fury Road. My mother and I walked out of the theater and just said "wow" to each other for about five minutes.

[yhlee]

Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time on DVDs from Netflix. I came to the show about a decade after it had ended, and because of my weird background of not really watching TV, I came to it as basically a Buffy virgin - I was almost completely unspoiled. Random Buffy fans showed up for my LJ reports because they enjoyed seeing a complete unspoiled n00b react to the show in real time (well, as fast as I could go through the DVDs and get them in the mail). I made some great friends through that fandom.

[silverflight8]

For me it's some of the books I read as a kid which definitely made an impact on who I became, I think, or shaped my taste. Well, it's hard to separate "this book was so influential, it shaped who I was" or "nascent interest in X within me meant I loved the book so much". I think because I've read so many books - there were years I would read over a hundred a year - of course you can't help but get used to repetition and remember that this other book did it better or whatnot. But when you're a kid just starting to read, everything is novel (lol). A good novel can be mindblowing. This does still happen to me as an adult, but much much more rarely. Lord of the Rings, Susan Cooper, Ursula K LeGuin, etc.

I wouldn't say there were individual books that made outsize impacts necessarily on jobs or where I lived (yet, anyway) - I work in a professional industry that has no connection to the arts history etc, because I'm good at certain things and it pays well. But this interest in medieval European history didn't come out of nowhere, and I also think - because I also watched almost zero TV/movies as a kid - a lot of what I think of as western culture came from books (my parents are immigrants). The people who write books are a little bit different from those who write for stage, show, or silver screen, I think, and maybe a little more self-conscious about not being as mainstream as others. (Also so many twee books about libraries but I digress, lol)

[booksarelife]

This doesn’t feel big enough but probably counts: watching the finale of season 5 of Leverage for the first time, I think with the friend who introduced me to the show, or at least texting her my reactions, where I didn’t think almost everyone was actually dead but since it was the series finale I wasn’t entirely sure and I was just a whirling ball of emotions.

Also, I would super love to be able to watch Pacific Rim and the LOTR trilogy for the first time again

[starwatcher]

 
When I discovered Dr. Who -- somewhere around '85, via PBS, first Jon Pertwee then Tom Baker -- I fell hard. After just a few weeks, I walked into the local bookstore (we still had bookstores; fancy that!) and bought a copy of every single Dr. Who paperback they had, which at the time were novelizations of the TV stories. But that wasn't enough -- I put in an order for all the books they didn't have in stock; I literally spent 3 or 4 months' book budget on only Dr. Who books. Never regretted it.


Just remembered another. I was 17ish, summer break, curled up in the old stuffed chair in my bedroom with an Andre Norton book -- I think Moon of Three Rings. Regardless, the book was narrated in first person by two different people, one male, one female. One POV would hold for a couple of chapters, then the other for a couple of chapters. The narrator's name would be at the top of the chapter when a switch occurred.

I was so deep in the story that I wasn't reading the words; I was hearing the characters' narration as they told their tale. I don't know how long that went on; I only noticed it was happening when I started a next chapter and the voice in my head changed to the other character. That shocked me out of it; I looked up at the chapter heading to confirm that, yes, the narrator had switched. I hadn't consciously noted that, although obviously my subconscious did, to make the change.

I don't think I've ever been that deep into a story, either before or since. Wish I could recreate it -- it was kind of spooky, but a marvelous way to experience a story.
 

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I'm not sure if this counts, but: Brilliant Husband and I are usually pretty hard core about watching things from the start. We have been known to skip a show entirely because we missed the first episode. (CBS botched the airing of Instinct with Alan Cumming: sports ran late and pushed the premiere back, so we found we had TiVo'd less than half. We could get their streaming service to see it, or start with episode 2. We simply never began.)

But when Farscape was on, we missed the first season and a half or two seasons; I can't remember now exactly where we started or why we missed so much. At the time, we had no way to go back. The videos either weren't out or were outrageously expensive. So we started with whatever was airing. And it made no sense whatsoever, but we got hooked. We loved it. I think we finally got to see the first couple of seasons after we'd watched the last season but before Peacekeeper Wars.

And you know what? We'd told ourselves for two years or more that it would all make sense when we got back to the episodes we'd missed. I suppose it made more sense. But we also found that Farscape eludes rational understanding anyway, and we hadn't missed a lot by starting at the beginning!