![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fandom-related tl;dr
I have a really bad feeling that I'm not going to get much sleep tonight, because it's 12:30 and I'm still wide awake. Possibly the tea had something to do with it. Or the fact that it's not dark yet. (Ah, life in the Arctic.)
So I'm sitting here thinking about fandom, as one does.
I'm mildly boggled at how much I've learned about myself and my fannish tastes since I got into SGA fandom. I'm not sure if they've really changed all that much, but I've become much more aware of myself, and aware that some of the things I'd generally believed true of myself (that I'm a gen fan, for example, or that I'm an h/c fan) are either not as true as I'd thought, or not true in quite the same way that I'd thought.
I think it was around 1998 when I became aware of fanfic for the first time, mostly in anime fandoms. (Ranma 1/2 is the first fandom in which I remember reading fairly extensively.) SG1 fandom was the big fandom that made me aware that fanfic had genres that regular fiction didn't -- slash and gen (I don't recall being specifically aware of het as a separate category), h/c, and so forth. And then I got into Trigun fandom and got to know more anime fandom terms (like yaoi).![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xparrot introduced me to more of the Western fannish terminology later on, like smarm and "fen". ^^
But I think I was much more of a fandom of one than I realized. I interacted with other fans; I ran a Trigun mailing list and over the years I was on a number of different mailing lists for shows ranging from All My Children to Invisible Man. Looking back on it now, though, I think it's interesting how I didn't really form relationships. I didn't make friends. This is not to say that I didn't have friends, because I did, or even that I didn't make friends online -- I did! Just not in fandom. I'm really not sure why, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say it's probably that you can't really juggle too many main areas of online interaction at once, and I already had my online "social center", so to speak. When I was in college, it was a sci-fi writers' mailing list; and during the time I was particularly active on the small press comics scene, it was the Sequential Tart message boards. I've been spending a lot of time engaged in online social interaction since 1995, when I signed up for my first mailing lists and tumbled head over heels into it, but those were really the main ones, the places where I spent the vast majority of my time and built up my primary social networks. Around 2004/2005, the Tart message boards started to fragment and drift apart, and I got an LJ. I never expect this to become my new social hub, but that's exactly what's happened, and just like I stumbled into a new world in 1995 (writers) and 2000 (indy comics and zine-makers), so I stumbled into a new fannish world in 2006 when I dipped my toe into SGA waters and started building up a slow fannish circle and engaging with mainstream media fandom for the first time.
Each one of those different online experiences was heady and exciting in a different way. I could probably do a whole long post on each of them, and the way it challenged me and changed me and pointed my life in a slightly different direction than it had been going before. From a fannish point of view, the interesting thing about SGA fandom is how I began to really refine and quantify my tastes as a fan, and also became a much more aware and reflective fanfic writer (and thus, a better writer in general -- I'm really astounded at the change in my writing between pre-2006 and now, much bigger, to my eyes at least, than any comparable period before). Pre-SGA fandom, I'd pretty much been wandering from fandom to fandom as the whim struck me, writing fanfic when I was inspired and dropping it when I wasn't. I never participated in ficathons and the like; I remember having a general awareness of the existence of fanfic challenges but never being tempted to play. I read what I liked, and liked what I read, and left a fandom when my initial flush of fannish love began to fade. I think the longest I stayed active in a fandom prior to SGA was probably Trigun, which was at least a year, and that was mostly because I was engaged in a big fanfic project (Sand and Light, my epic fanfic turned multimedia extravaganza).
SGA's been different, though. For one thing, it's the first fandom in which there's been so much fic that I actually got to be choosy about what I read. I think the last time that happened was SG1 fandom in the late '90s. Most of my other fandoms had been mini fandoms, or anime fandoms that really didn't cater to my gen-ish tastes. In SGA, there was not just a ton of fic, but a ton of fic that happened to hit my particular fic kinks ... which meant I finally began to nail down what my kinks actually are. I had always thought, in a vague way, that I must be a hurt/comfort fan, ever since I found out what hurt/comfort was -- I'd known in a vague sort of way that I liked that sort of thing from a very young age, and I discovered that I wasn't the only one through (ha) the letters pages of the Elfquest comics when I was a kid, though I didn't know the accepted fannish term for it 'til much later. And while I certainly do still think that's true, it's only in SGA fandom that I've realized I'm not actually enough of a hurt/comfort fan to really be comfortable in h/c fannish subculture. I'm sure it goes both ways; I know I make some of you h/c people nervous with my tendency to wander around in other parts of the fandom, too. :D But ... it's not that I don't like h/c; it's just that I feel way less hardcore about it than most of the people I talk to about it. I like writing (and reading) a variety of characters in a variety of situations, and that's always been true of me; my most favorite stories, the ones that "ping!" me on a very deep and satisfying level, are h/c, but generally I like my h/c as part of a longer story. I think I'm less specifically id-driven than a lot of fandom.
... which leads into one of the other big things that's changed about me since I've been in SGA fandom, which ties into the above and basically has to do with getting more in touch with my reptilian hindbrain.cupidsbow had a discussion about this just recently, and like I wrote over there, I used to flinch away from hitting those moments of emotional resonance. It felt too indulgent, too exposing, too un-literary. The more fanfic I read, though, and the more that I see people around me being unconcerned (or seemingly unconcerned) about writing self-indulgent stories with no redeeming literary value whatsoever, the more I'm engaging with the idea of writing just to poke at the happy buttons in my brain -- and, paradoxically, the better I seem to write.
For some reason I always thought I was doing this in fanfic, but I don't really think so, because I remember very clearly how utterly embarrassed I was when I wrote Candle in the Dark -- squirmingly embarrassed, uncomfortably on display for the world to see. I wrote the story for a prompt at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sheppard_hc and I had never written a story whose sole purpose was h/c before ... a story that was basically an excuse to tickle the pleasure buttons in my brain. My previous fanfic, I guess, was more along the lines of exploring a cool idea or trying to develop the characters; it wasn't that it didn't have elements that made me melt and squee, or I wouldn't have written it, but that wasn't really its reason for existing. But I wasn't very analytical about it in those days. I would have an idea that I liked, and then I'd write it, but I wasn't really trying to achieve a conscious effect, except maybe "figure out what makes this character tick".
I'm currently working on taking this new awareness of my own squee-points, and how to trigger them, and rolling it back into my original fiction. I've realized that one of the main reasons why I've tended to put down my original works before I finish them is because they don't really engage me emotionally. I adore world-building and playing with ideas and characters, but generally speaking I haven't written original stories that pushed my happy buttons since I was a teenager (when I wrote a ton of self-indulgent and ridiculously emo h/c with my original characters -- there was one story in which I think the main character tried to commit suicide and had to be rescued by the others at least three times; I am so glad I did not have the Internet back then). I think my teenage self might have been smarter than my older self who tried to write Srs Literary Fiction and ended up with dry and dull epics that never really said anything. Ever since I first started writing fanfic, I've found it awfully easy to be distracted from my original novels onto my novel-length fanfic, and I think a big part of that is because I haven't learned to love my original characters properly, and to use them to make my id stand up and beg for more.
That's the current plan, and I am happy to report that my id is enjoying the present novel-in-progress quite a bit. :D
So ... there's that. There's also been the realizing that my writing isn't as gen as I thought it was, either. Like I said earlier, the initial and probably-erroneous view of fanfic that I received (unless definitions have changed) is that there was slash and gen, but not much else. I wasn't writing slash, so I must be writing gen, and I continued to believe that I was writing gen despite the fact that it sometimes turned out to be oh, say, future!kidfic (which I did in at least two different fandoms). Admittedly, different fandoms have different definitions of gen, and SGA has a pretty strict one -- which is what made me, eventually, look back on my early fanfic and go "Oh, hey, so that's why people got so bent out of shape when I wrote that Cowboy Bebop fic where Faye had Spike's baby and was married to Jet and I called it gen ..." (Actual story. I was quite baffled at the reaction to that story. Not so much anymore.)
Like my LJ name (and my fanfic) implies, I've always been primarily interested in writing about platonic relationships -- friendships, family relationships, comrades-in-arms and such. It's partly burnout on romance because there's just so much of it, but mainly, it's simply what pushes my buttons. But that's not the only thing I want to write about. And, actually, three years in SGA fandom, writing a ton of fic that conforms to the pretty strict SGA definition of gen, left me feeling a bit stifled and yearning to write about different kinds of relationships -- lovers and married people and people who occupy the weird and complicated borderlines between friendship and romance. This is something that pinged me in another of Cupidsbow's recent posts in which she talks about getting tired of writing first time stories and wanting to play with the dynamics of an established relationship. That's more or less what's happened to me, except I skipped the first-time because it's never been that interesting to me. Of all the stories one can tell about human sexuality, I think the tale of "boy/girl meets girl/boy and falls in love" is one of the ones that interests me least -- not that it can't draw me in (and SGA fandom itself is full of counter-example first-time stories that really made me quiver) but it's just so overdone, so ubiquitous, and it doesn't speak to me strongly as a writer. But I really like writing about families, and weird complicated lovers who defy easy categorization (which was why I loved Bulma and Vegeta so much on DBZ; they're probably the couple that I wrote about most, aside from those in my original work), and I really feel the absence in SGA of a couple who draws me strongly.
But this dovetails nicely into yet another change that's come about through my time in SGA fandom -- I'm much more open to fanficcish what-ifs, and much more inclined to explore them myself. I used to be a total canon snob. In some ways, I still am, especially when I first get into a fandom, but it's a lot less pronounced than it used to be. I never used to be interested in AUs; I never used to think "What if she went with her instead of him?" I guess that for me, canon used to be written in stone, and I'd spin fanfic off of that, but never take it too far away.
... or so I thought.
[OH DEAR GOD IT'S 1:30 A.M. WHAT AM I DOING TO MYSELF]
In reality, I think there were two things I failed to realize.
#1 is that I had no idea how subjective my impressions of canon, and what I believed was canon, really were. This, I guess, is one of the major side effects of fanning in a social vacuum -- you have no idea if what you believe to be canon actually is accepted by the fandom or not. That was the biggest problem with the Cowboy Bebop story mentioned above -- in my head, the Spike/Faye and Faye/Jet subtext was totally canon, and I didn't realize that this was my subjective interpretation of the show. Some things are clearly canon, of course. John's last name is Sheppard. Ronon was a Runner for seven years. But when it gets to the fuzzier stuff -- this probably sounds completely obvious, but I don't think I ever realized, until I started discussing canon with a wide group of people rather than just interpreting it happily in my own head, that what I had seen as stone-solid boundaries of canon are actually very fuzzy and shifting, and that it's possible to slot a lot of not-exactly-canon possibilities into canon as it stands.
#2 is that I was already doing far more canon-shifting and sidestepping than I realized. I had always thought of myself as writing in perfect adherence to canon -- which is completely ridiculous and illogical considering some of the stories I've written (like Sand & Light, my primary Trigun story, which bends canon into a pretzel trying to justify the bizarre and complicated backstory I cooked up for the main characters). The weird thing is how thoroughly I used to believe that there was some line in the sand between canon and not-canon, and that I hadn't stepped across it.
I still tend to adhere pretty firmly to canon in most fandoms as I see it; I don't think that canon is nearly as fluid in my head as it is for some writers. But I think the increased awareness of the fuzziness and subjectiveness of canon has made me more consciously aware of where I'm stepping outside it, more deliberate about those choices, less likely to condemn or try to pigeonhole other writers for their -- and more likely to be interested in a what-if to see what happens if, say, Rodney's a border guard in Texas, or Ronon has wings ...
Okay, it's almost 2 a.m. now, and this is getting very, very ridiculously long and I'm not sure if it makes sense anymore, so I think I'm going to wrap it up now and stagger off to bed. If you made it through all of that, I'm very impressed. :D Comments and reciprocal rambling is welcome, should you have anything to say!
So I'm sitting here thinking about fandom, as one does.
I'm mildly boggled at how much I've learned about myself and my fannish tastes since I got into SGA fandom. I'm not sure if they've really changed all that much, but I've become much more aware of myself, and aware that some of the things I'd generally believed true of myself (that I'm a gen fan, for example, or that I'm an h/c fan) are either not as true as I'd thought, or not true in quite the same way that I'd thought.
I think it was around 1998 when I became aware of fanfic for the first time, mostly in anime fandoms. (Ranma 1/2 is the first fandom in which I remember reading fairly extensively.) SG1 fandom was the big fandom that made me aware that fanfic had genres that regular fiction didn't -- slash and gen (I don't recall being specifically aware of het as a separate category), h/c, and so forth. And then I got into Trigun fandom and got to know more anime fandom terms (like yaoi).
xparrot introduced me to more of the Western fannish terminology later on, like smarm and "fen". ^^But I think I was much more of a fandom of one than I realized. I interacted with other fans; I ran a Trigun mailing list and over the years I was on a number of different mailing lists for shows ranging from All My Children to Invisible Man. Looking back on it now, though, I think it's interesting how I didn't really form relationships. I didn't make friends. This is not to say that I didn't have friends, because I did, or even that I didn't make friends online -- I did! Just not in fandom. I'm really not sure why, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say it's probably that you can't really juggle too many main areas of online interaction at once, and I already had my online "social center", so to speak. When I was in college, it was a sci-fi writers' mailing list; and during the time I was particularly active on the small press comics scene, it was the Sequential Tart message boards. I've been spending a lot of time engaged in online social interaction since 1995, when I signed up for my first mailing lists and tumbled head over heels into it, but those were really the main ones, the places where I spent the vast majority of my time and built up my primary social networks. Around 2004/2005, the Tart message boards started to fragment and drift apart, and I got an LJ. I never expect this to become my new social hub, but that's exactly what's happened, and just like I stumbled into a new world in 1995 (writers) and 2000 (indy comics and zine-makers), so I stumbled into a new fannish world in 2006 when I dipped my toe into SGA waters and started building up a slow fannish circle and engaging with mainstream media fandom for the first time.
Each one of those different online experiences was heady and exciting in a different way. I could probably do a whole long post on each of them, and the way it challenged me and changed me and pointed my life in a slightly different direction than it had been going before. From a fannish point of view, the interesting thing about SGA fandom is how I began to really refine and quantify my tastes as a fan, and also became a much more aware and reflective fanfic writer (and thus, a better writer in general -- I'm really astounded at the change in my writing between pre-2006 and now, much bigger, to my eyes at least, than any comparable period before). Pre-SGA fandom, I'd pretty much been wandering from fandom to fandom as the whim struck me, writing fanfic when I was inspired and dropping it when I wasn't. I never participated in ficathons and the like; I remember having a general awareness of the existence of fanfic challenges but never being tempted to play. I read what I liked, and liked what I read, and left a fandom when my initial flush of fannish love began to fade. I think the longest I stayed active in a fandom prior to SGA was probably Trigun, which was at least a year, and that was mostly because I was engaged in a big fanfic project (Sand and Light, my epic fanfic turned multimedia extravaganza).
SGA's been different, though. For one thing, it's the first fandom in which there's been so much fic that I actually got to be choosy about what I read. I think the last time that happened was SG1 fandom in the late '90s. Most of my other fandoms had been mini fandoms, or anime fandoms that really didn't cater to my gen-ish tastes. In SGA, there was not just a ton of fic, but a ton of fic that happened to hit my particular fic kinks ... which meant I finally began to nail down what my kinks actually are. I had always thought, in a vague way, that I must be a hurt/comfort fan, ever since I found out what hurt/comfort was -- I'd known in a vague sort of way that I liked that sort of thing from a very young age, and I discovered that I wasn't the only one through (ha) the letters pages of the Elfquest comics when I was a kid, though I didn't know the accepted fannish term for it 'til much later. And while I certainly do still think that's true, it's only in SGA fandom that I've realized I'm not actually enough of a hurt/comfort fan to really be comfortable in h/c fannish subculture. I'm sure it goes both ways; I know I make some of you h/c people nervous with my tendency to wander around in other parts of the fandom, too. :D But ... it's not that I don't like h/c; it's just that I feel way less hardcore about it than most of the people I talk to about it. I like writing (and reading) a variety of characters in a variety of situations, and that's always been true of me; my most favorite stories, the ones that "ping!" me on a very deep and satisfying level, are h/c, but generally I like my h/c as part of a longer story. I think I'm less specifically id-driven than a lot of fandom.
... which leads into one of the other big things that's changed about me since I've been in SGA fandom, which ties into the above and basically has to do with getting more in touch with my reptilian hindbrain.
cupidsbow had a discussion about this just recently, and like I wrote over there, I used to flinch away from hitting those moments of emotional resonance. It felt too indulgent, too exposing, too un-literary. The more fanfic I read, though, and the more that I see people around me being unconcerned (or seemingly unconcerned) about writing self-indulgent stories with no redeeming literary value whatsoever, the more I'm engaging with the idea of writing just to poke at the happy buttons in my brain -- and, paradoxically, the better I seem to write.For some reason I always thought I was doing this in fanfic, but I don't really think so, because I remember very clearly how utterly embarrassed I was when I wrote Candle in the Dark -- squirmingly embarrassed, uncomfortably on display for the world to see. I wrote the story for a prompt at
sheppard_hc and I had never written a story whose sole purpose was h/c before ... a story that was basically an excuse to tickle the pleasure buttons in my brain. My previous fanfic, I guess, was more along the lines of exploring a cool idea or trying to develop the characters; it wasn't that it didn't have elements that made me melt and squee, or I wouldn't have written it, but that wasn't really its reason for existing. But I wasn't very analytical about it in those days. I would have an idea that I liked, and then I'd write it, but I wasn't really trying to achieve a conscious effect, except maybe "figure out what makes this character tick".I'm currently working on taking this new awareness of my own squee-points, and how to trigger them, and rolling it back into my original fiction. I've realized that one of the main reasons why I've tended to put down my original works before I finish them is because they don't really engage me emotionally. I adore world-building and playing with ideas and characters, but generally speaking I haven't written original stories that pushed my happy buttons since I was a teenager (when I wrote a ton of self-indulgent and ridiculously emo h/c with my original characters -- there was one story in which I think the main character tried to commit suicide and had to be rescued by the others at least three times; I am so glad I did not have the Internet back then). I think my teenage self might have been smarter than my older self who tried to write Srs Literary Fiction and ended up with dry and dull epics that never really said anything. Ever since I first started writing fanfic, I've found it awfully easy to be distracted from my original novels onto my novel-length fanfic, and I think a big part of that is because I haven't learned to love my original characters properly, and to use them to make my id stand up and beg for more.
That's the current plan, and I am happy to report that my id is enjoying the present novel-in-progress quite a bit. :D
So ... there's that. There's also been the realizing that my writing isn't as gen as I thought it was, either. Like I said earlier, the initial and probably-erroneous view of fanfic that I received (unless definitions have changed) is that there was slash and gen, but not much else. I wasn't writing slash, so I must be writing gen, and I continued to believe that I was writing gen despite the fact that it sometimes turned out to be oh, say, future!kidfic (which I did in at least two different fandoms). Admittedly, different fandoms have different definitions of gen, and SGA has a pretty strict one -- which is what made me, eventually, look back on my early fanfic and go "Oh, hey, so that's why people got so bent out of shape when I wrote that Cowboy Bebop fic where Faye had Spike's baby and was married to Jet and I called it gen ..." (Actual story. I was quite baffled at the reaction to that story. Not so much anymore.)
Like my LJ name (and my fanfic) implies, I've always been primarily interested in writing about platonic relationships -- friendships, family relationships, comrades-in-arms and such. It's partly burnout on romance because there's just so much of it, but mainly, it's simply what pushes my buttons. But that's not the only thing I want to write about. And, actually, three years in SGA fandom, writing a ton of fic that conforms to the pretty strict SGA definition of gen, left me feeling a bit stifled and yearning to write about different kinds of relationships -- lovers and married people and people who occupy the weird and complicated borderlines between friendship and romance. This is something that pinged me in another of Cupidsbow's recent posts in which she talks about getting tired of writing first time stories and wanting to play with the dynamics of an established relationship. That's more or less what's happened to me, except I skipped the first-time because it's never been that interesting to me. Of all the stories one can tell about human sexuality, I think the tale of "boy/girl meets girl/boy and falls in love" is one of the ones that interests me least -- not that it can't draw me in (and SGA fandom itself is full of counter-example first-time stories that really made me quiver) but it's just so overdone, so ubiquitous, and it doesn't speak to me strongly as a writer. But I really like writing about families, and weird complicated lovers who defy easy categorization (which was why I loved Bulma and Vegeta so much on DBZ; they're probably the couple that I wrote about most, aside from those in my original work), and I really feel the absence in SGA of a couple who draws me strongly.
But this dovetails nicely into yet another change that's come about through my time in SGA fandom -- I'm much more open to fanficcish what-ifs, and much more inclined to explore them myself. I used to be a total canon snob. In some ways, I still am, especially when I first get into a fandom, but it's a lot less pronounced than it used to be. I never used to be interested in AUs; I never used to think "What if she went with her instead of him?" I guess that for me, canon used to be written in stone, and I'd spin fanfic off of that, but never take it too far away.
... or so I thought.
[OH DEAR GOD IT'S 1:30 A.M. WHAT AM I DOING TO MYSELF]
In reality, I think there were two things I failed to realize.
#1 is that I had no idea how subjective my impressions of canon, and what I believed was canon, really were. This, I guess, is one of the major side effects of fanning in a social vacuum -- you have no idea if what you believe to be canon actually is accepted by the fandom or not. That was the biggest problem with the Cowboy Bebop story mentioned above -- in my head, the Spike/Faye and Faye/Jet subtext was totally canon, and I didn't realize that this was my subjective interpretation of the show. Some things are clearly canon, of course. John's last name is Sheppard. Ronon was a Runner for seven years. But when it gets to the fuzzier stuff -- this probably sounds completely obvious, but I don't think I ever realized, until I started discussing canon with a wide group of people rather than just interpreting it happily in my own head, that what I had seen as stone-solid boundaries of canon are actually very fuzzy and shifting, and that it's possible to slot a lot of not-exactly-canon possibilities into canon as it stands.
#2 is that I was already doing far more canon-shifting and sidestepping than I realized. I had always thought of myself as writing in perfect adherence to canon -- which is completely ridiculous and illogical considering some of the stories I've written (like Sand & Light, my primary Trigun story, which bends canon into a pretzel trying to justify the bizarre and complicated backstory I cooked up for the main characters). The weird thing is how thoroughly I used to believe that there was some line in the sand between canon and not-canon, and that I hadn't stepped across it.
I still tend to adhere pretty firmly to canon in most fandoms as I see it; I don't think that canon is nearly as fluid in my head as it is for some writers. But I think the increased awareness of the fuzziness and subjectiveness of canon has made me more consciously aware of where I'm stepping outside it, more deliberate about those choices, less likely to condemn or try to pigeonhole other writers for their -- and more likely to be interested in a what-if to see what happens if, say, Rodney's a border guard in Texas, or Ronon has wings ...
Okay, it's almost 2 a.m. now, and this is getting very, very ridiculously long and I'm not sure if it makes sense anymore, so I think I'm going to wrap it up now and stagger off to bed. If you made it through all of that, I'm very impressed. :D Comments and reciprocal rambling is welcome, should you have anything to say!
no subject
My tastes definitely evolve and change as I move through a fandom; I'd never thought about just completely burning out on something that used to be a strong button-pushing thing, however.
Oh, I've never completely burned out - the same basic scenarios that got me excited when I first started reading fic still stir me now. But I'm a *lot* pickier than I was (a lot of the fic I loved when I first got into fanfic I can barely read now, because of issues with the writing and such...) But more than that, I think my buttons are harder to push...and I think it's not burnout so much as familiarity. Some scenarios are cookie-cutter, I've read enough to know how they'll go, so while once it was only the scenario that got to me, now its execution is as important...
--and completely OT here, but just was thinking about this:
(Pern + forced sex + me going DDDDDDD: OH ANNE MCCAFFREY NO as an adult)
which I'd kind of forgotten about, since I haven't read Pern for years...(and I don't know how much it would bother me anyway, since mutual dubcon for the most part doesn't bother me as much as it probably should...) But I wonder if one of the reasons Pern appeals to teenagers is because of that very aspect - does that kind of drug/telepathic-forced sex resonate better with teens? Considering teenagers (well. er. most teenagers ^^;) are struggling with their own developing sexualities, which probably feel pretty forced in themselves - all these strange emotions and desires coming from nowhere and hard to understand...to have an *excuse* for overpowering crazy lust, like telepathic dragons - in some ways it's maybe more comforting than just dealing with one's own hormones?
In conclusion: everyone should read Pern when they're 14, but no later. Because it is a marvelous fantasy if you're the right age for it...