"If You're Fated, It Doesn't Matter If You Choose or Not."

I realised I didn’t go much into the actual fandom or the books and films in my last post, I kind of just talked about my own experience. Is that the kind of thing you want to read? Or do you want more of a rounded ‘this is the fandom, this is what it does’? I talked about how big the fandom got and how that became intimidating. So this time I’m going to talk a little about the smaller fandoms.

I’m a big fan of the smaller fandoms.

It’s ‘smaller fandoms’ I’m going to talk about in this post. Firstly: a disclaimer. When I say smaller fandom I do not in any way mean to degrade the fandom and belittle it. I simply mean it’s not as well known, as big in number, or as active on social media. That is all. I’ve found a lot of the smaller fandoms I’ve been a part of have been a lot more welcoming and friendly than the big ones, but that’s not a rule of thumb. Please don’t quote me on that.

I find a lot of the time the smaller fandoms, that I’m part of anyway, tend to be of television shows. Sure, Doctor Who, Supernatural and Sherlock possibly have some of the biggest, and Star Trek is the oldest, but shows like The Umbrella Academy, Downton Abbey and Sons of Anarchy, to name a few, have a small and select fandom (I know this from personal experience of all of the above). You just don’t tend to see many cosplayers at comic cons from these. I know The Umbrella Academy fandom is growing, and I’ll do a separate post (or many!) on this show as it’s one of my top five. I don’t know if a small screen typically means a small fandom. Maybe? So in this episode I will mostly be talking about small television fandoms.

The first show I ever remember being a fan of is probably this little show called Robin Hood. It premiered on the BBC in 2006, I was twelve, and from the very first episode I was hooked. It didn’t even have anything to do with my love of the legend of Robin Hood, and the fact I grew up a stones throw from Sherwood Forest, though of course this helped. If anyone reading has never seen this BBC adaptation, I can highly recommend it.

It was the first time really that I could see myself living the adventures of the characters on the show, that I looked forward to watching every week and I actively took part in conversations and discussion groups online. I maxed out my parents printer printing endless lists of episodes and pictures from the show and quotes off of iMDB. I drew endless photos of the character that I made up to exist in the Robin Hood world, essentially creating my first documented fanfiction as opposed to just ‘child’s play’.

The show wasn’t enormous enough to have reams of merchandise, though there were action figures released and I wish to this day that I had purchased them at the time. They’d probably be worth a bit now, not that it’s about that. I do have a hoodie that I still wear that has the words ‘WE ARE ROBIN HOOD’ on it, and I made myself the wooden tags the merry men wear. It was a great show from the BBCs golden age and the best part was that my friends also loved it. We were young enough at the time to ‘play’ adventures which made the whole thing more enjoyable, and because of it’s historical context the show is timeless. I’m not sure where you can find it to watch now. I have them all on DVD, which I had to get imported. For such an underrated show, a lot of careers were launched from it: namely perhaps Harry Lloyd, who played Will Scarlett and then went on to play Son of Mine in Doctor Who, Vasyrys in Game of Thrones, and appear in films such as The Theory of Everything; and Richard Armitage, who of course brought Thorin to life as well as many, many others. If you haven’t watched Robin Hood and you crave BBC nostalgia, I highly recommend finding it somewhere - legally, of course. We’re not all merry men, we don’t steal from the rich to benefit the poor. If you have seen it, like this post.

The other thing that I have experienced with smaller fandoms is the fact they seem to either entirely flop and fade from existence, or they become like a cult. There are shows that I was really into when I was younger and I have recently found people who were barely babies when these shows aired and yet they love them. Shows like Primeval, which was an ITV show that aired in 2006 in the UK. They tried to reboot it in Canada but it only lasted one season there. Here it was five seasons and it was such a unique and amazing concept. The show was honestly like nothing else that had been on at the time, and that was what made it so good and meant that, to this day, it’s legacy lives on.

Basically the premise was this haphazard group of scientists and palaeontology students thrown together when these ‘anomalies’ appeared that were a gateway between our timeline and the prehistoric. They were unpredictable, and quite often some form of dinosaur made it’s way through and the team had to deal with it. It was such a good show, appealing to all age groups, genders and interests due to the sheer dynamics of the storylines. Sidebar: it has been said that a character on this show, Abby Maitland who was played by Hannah Spearitt of S Club 7, was many young women’s bisexual awakening. Each episode was contained, there wasn’t that many of them and they were pretty easy to follow. Sure there was an overarching plot line but it wasn’t massively complicated. Personally I think it was all of these factors that made the show so popular and meant that it stood the test of time to find new fans today. I’ve been at cons lately and seen people cosplaying Captain Becker, who was the heartthrob of the show, and it warms my heart to see that people still keep the show alive. It was one of my favourites, that’s for sure. I had the action figures and used to make stop-go animations out of them like the good little nerd I am.

I’m not sure where you can find it to watch it, short of the clips on YouTube. I have them all on DVD. BritBox perhaps, or ITV player? It was such a good show that it didn't really matter that it underwent several casting changes. A lot of shows seem to fail when they do that, when they kill off characters and introduce a whole new generation. Sometimes, with shows like Skins and Misfits, it works. Sometimes it does not.

Another small fandom from a more modern show that seems to focus on this rotating character cycle is Vikings. This one is still airing, though it finishes very soon. This show was one that I stumbled across. Unlike Primeval and Robin Hood which I watched from the very beginning after I saw it advertised on television, I stumbled across Vikings after I was looking for something to fill the gap back in 2015 after the end of a series of Game of Thrones. By this point Vikings was in its second or third season, so I went back and watched it from the beginning. Boy was I hooked, and I had no idea how I had not watched it sooner.

Vikings aired in 2013 on the History channel and from the very first scene with the cryptic raven and the instantly interesting acting from Travis Fimmel (of Warcraft fame) there was no chance it wasn’t going to be my thing. Plus, one of the main actors: Clive Standen: was in Robin Hood. I’m a massive history nerd anyway (surprise!), I love dates and facts and I have half a Scandinavian family, so the whole culture is so important to me. Of course Vikings is dramatised and not entirely historically accurate, or culturally for that matter, but it’s pretty darn close and it comes with a captivating story and really in depth characters.

It’s a great show, and the fandom seems to be mighty, though small. I feel like Vikings is more of a passive fandom, ones who casually view but don’t so much throw themselves into everything and anything. It seems to be mature in that regard, and maturity isn’t always a bad thing. Nor is it good. Vikings is just a really good show cinematography wise and though people had issues when they, spoiler alert, killed off a major character and replaced his storyline with the next generation, personally I think this worked. There was a long period of time when I was adamant Vikings was a better show than Game of Thrones, don’t come for me, they are both very good for different reasons. I will do a post on Game of Thrones in the future as it’s most certainly not a small fandom, and I’m a massive fan of that show. But Vikings is something else and I’m sad to see it go. It’s like a warm blanket… a warm blanket filled with sex and violence and some questionable accents. If you haven’t watched Vikings, I highly recommend it and you can find it on Amazon Prime, at least in the UK.

Another show that went the same way as Vikings for me, i.e. It’s a warm comfort blanket that I didn’t realise was one of my favourite shows until it hit me like a ton of bricks: I will shout it from the rooftops, is Black Sails. Black Sails aired for the first time in 2014, and though it only aired for four seasons those four seasons consumed my sad little nerd life.

Fun fact about me: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is one of my favourite books of all time. Did you know it was originally written for boys? I found that out and from that moment on I was like screw that, I identify as a girl and I’m going to prove them wrong. I’ve loved pirates since I first discovered Peter Pan, my all time favourite book, as a young child. It never so much irked me that they were an almost exclusively ‘boys club’, that didn’t bother me. I was a tomboy as a kid and now I just love pirates. I don’t know what it is about them, maybe it’s the rebellious attitude. In case you hadn’t noticed, I tend to throw myself in at full force when I realise I like something. That’s how I’m a nerd in the first place, that’s why I have this blog.

Anyway. To this day I have not found anyone outside of my family who is in the Black Sails fandom, and that shocks me. The show, stylised as a prequel to Treasure Island, focuses on Captain Flint and Long John Silver, with a handful of other characters from the book such as Billy Bones and Ben Gunn appearing alongside real-life pirates from the past: Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Jack Rackham and, my babe, Anne Bonny. From the very first scene I was hooked, and this was a show I discovered in the first season. At the time I was looking to stage a play of Treasure Island with my youth theatre and I was looking for inspiration. Safe to say that went by the wayside and, though I staged the play, it would not be influenced by the tumultuous masterpiece that is Black Sails. I have already written my ode to Black Sails in another post.

Since I became hooked on the show I have tried my hardest to make people watch it so that I can have friends to discuss it with. I got my parents obsessed when I lived with them, maybe not to my level, but it meant I could discuss theories. That was a show that ended too soon. I threw myself head first into the world of Black Sails, from it’s stunning cinematography (honestly, how did it never win awards? Every frame looked like a painting!), it’s complex, layered characters, simple to follow storylines and, the best selling point of all, gay pirates. Yhup. You heard me. Gay pirates, and it’s glorious. I’m also going to do a post on LGBTQ+ representation in fandom and in fan-led shows in the future, so I’ll talk a bit more about gay pirates then, but basically a lot of shows tend to throw in ‘the gay’ in inverted commas in an attempt to get views. Not Black Sails. The way Black Sails handled the same-sex romance between pirates was nothing short of beautiful. If you haven’t watched it already, I suggest you do so. It’s available on Amazon Prime or Starz. It will consume your every thought until you, too, are shipping Flint/Silver and writing fanfiction about strong female pirates into the wee hours of the morning…

This brings me to my next tangent: how do you know you’re a fan and not just a casual viewer? For me knowing you’re a fan comes from the moment you realise this show or film has literally consumed you. In my intro to this episode I mentioned the fandoms of Downton Abbey and Sons of Anarchy. Now, I haven’t expanded because I have future posts planned for these, but these two had that effect on me for two different reasons. With both of these shows, and all of those that I have mentioned in this small fandoms episode, I very quickly knew that I was a fan. For all of the above I would lie awake at night planning what I now recognise as fanfiction, I would not be able to put down episodes and would neglect my real life responsibilities to watch episode after episode, the joys of binge culture. Maybe not so much Downton Abbey, that one I had to wait painfully for each episode, but the principle was the same. I would discuss the plot lines with my parents at great length throughout the week and eagerly await Sunday nights. Sons of Anarchy I put off for a really long time, thinking it would not be my thing, and twenty minutes into the first episode I was already googling where I could get myself a Sons of Anarchy leather kutte and creating an original character fic in my mind. I don’t think I have the ability to be a casual viewer. No show that I have ever watched has ended that way, and it’s a character trait that I acknowledge about myself and I embrace like an old friend. I don’t start new shows because I know it’s going to end in a lot of money spent, many journeys all over the country for comic cons, hours spent writing fanfiction, and a piece of my soul consumed in the show or film franchise like a horcrux. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Which brings me to my next post: when Sam and Dean showed up at my door and told me Dad had been on a hunting trip and hadn’t been home in a few days, the day I sold my soul to Supernatural.