fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2520 ]

[ SECRET POST #2520 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2520 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 039 secrets from Secret Submission Post #360.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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For example: if the first episode you watched of a show you now love was a really weird, off-the-wall, out-of-the-ordinary episode, were you weirded out when the rest of the episodes were very different from that first impression/does that episode have a disproportionate impact on the general tone of the show for you?

If you first read the book for a college lit class, did that influence your opinion of the book in a way very different from that of most people who read it?

If you were exposed to a fanvid, or fanfic, or general fandom for a work long before you actually watched/read the canon, did the fandom interpretations color your impression of the work very strongly?

If you knew spoilers for a big twist or reveal long before you read/watched it at a time when you weren't familiar with the characters, did that make your reaction to the situation more mild than most of the audience?

Discuss, with specific examples!

General fandom for Teen Wolf...it is not in fact about Stiles and Derek. And I was sorely disappointed.

Fandom completely hyped up the Weeping Angels and the Doctor Who episode Blink. It was TERRIBLY BORING. I hated it. Was not scared at all. Probably one of my least favorite episodes to be honest.

This is only sort of answering. I watched SPN in a weird order. I started watching when Season 6 started. I went back and watched Season 4 and 5. Then 1-3. I LOVED Jo in Season 4/5. But when I went back to watch earlier episodes, I ended up hating her. She was sooooo stupid. Agh. I wish I had never watched that episode.

I like Blink, and think it's well-crafted, but agree that the Weeping Angels are the most overhyped unscary monsters ever. Except maybe the Daleks, for which I can at least accept that there's a history there.

When I first watched Rear Window I had seen so many parodies that in a way it was even more effective because part of me was still expecting it to all be a misunderstanding like in the parodies.

When I finally watched the Folgers Incest Commercial, it wasn't nearly as incestuous as the jokes and hype and the fact that there is an actual fandom had me expecting.

I judge books by their covers. I am not a terribly visual person when I read, and tend not to see scenes in my head unless the writing is unusually vivid, but the colors of a book's cover art inform my reading of it. I first read The Last Unicorn in a borrowed edition with a silver cover, and then bought it several years later with a watercolor-y green cover. Obviously the text was identical, but there was a subtle something in the back of my head that said "This is not quite the same book." A couple years ago I found the original edition I'd read in a secondhand store and immediately snapped it up, and now it feels like the "right" book again.

On a similar note, the general opinion is that Prisoner of Azkaban is where the tone of the Harry Potter books started getting darker. In my mind, it didn't happen until Goblet of Firex because that was the first book where the cover wasn't mostly oranges, reds, and pinks.

I was in, like, second grade when the first Harry Potter book reached the States. I dismissed it as kidlit, because it was popular and I was a huge literature snob even then. I didn't give it a chance until, I think, fifth grade. Then I felt guilty for not giving it a try earlier, and was soon president of the schools Muggles for Harry Potter club.

I heard so much about Romeo and Juliet that I thought it must be a comedy when we read it freshman year (lol, stupid teenagers). It wasn't until later I realised it was a tragedy, but not a romantic tragedy, rather a city failing at community and parents letting their feuds destroy the very people they mean to protect. I have a lot more respect for Shakespeare now.

I still say Romeo and Juliet is a black comedy.

I'm sure Mercutio would agree.

Harry Potter, the book series.

I first heard about this series back in 1997/8 in elementary school (meaning virtually nothing was widely known about it, especially not in our little corner of the world, even though I was an avid reader of children and teenage lit). We had to do a project where we had to present our favorite book to the class and read a bit out loud. Some boy choose Harry Potter 1 and through his summary and the tidbit he showed us I got this weird notion that it was more of an Enyd Blyton style mistery with some magical boarding school stuff thrown in and maybe a little bit of magicians of caprona.

Wasn't until over a year later when a friend lend me the Chamber of Secrets and I subsequently fell in love with the book series and realized after reading the first book that I had actually heard of it before.

To this day I get a slight disconnect when I think about that first version/feeling and the actual book series (which was a very different animal).
While I wouldn't say that my first experience had any longterm consequences on my enjoyment or interpretation while reading the books it did actually keep me from picking it up at first.

My first exposure to Doctor Who was a fanvid, and something of the tone and the sense of inexplicable and utterly bewitching, breath-taking fantastical imagery and clips and the fact that it was made with a strong context of something important that fans obviously understood but which I knew nothing of at the time just grabbed me really hard and I think little bits of that tragedy and beauty and wonder seeped into my brain and colored all my subsequent perceptions of the show.

A reversal: I had never ever ever seen a single Sherlock Holmes adaptation of any sort before I first started reading the stories (which was when I was about twelve or thirteen), and so I never had any "pop-cultural image" of the characters to taint my experience, which is a rarity for most people. Also, the first story I remember reading was Charles Augustus Milverton, which was not exactly typical Holmes fare. So, a lurid, highly sexual cover-up plot, Holmes ranting at length about about how shitty Victorian mores were and breaking the law for the greater good while talking about how he'd make a good criminal, and Watson almost beating up a guy with a chair, bluntly strong-arming Holmes into letting him help him, and then unabashedly fangasming about how much more fun it was to break the law than to uphold it. And both of them the type of guys who cared a great deal about each other's safety, joked about spending the rest of their life in jail together, whip up a burglary plan off the cuff, and lie to the police. And sprint long distances and scale six-foot walls. Yup. (I think that impression is a lot better than the reverse one that comes through osmosis, FWIW.)

I was spoiled for pretty much every single major plot twist (except "Becoming") in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly via TvTropes before I watched a single episode of the shows. This definitely altered my impression of several characters, mainly the ones that eventually died, quite a bit. Tara and Wash had me pretty much interpreting everything they did through the lens of "they get killed off", and Willow through the lens of "she goes evil and nuts".

I wish I knew how to answer this. Because I know my very first experience with Firefly and The West Wing were just instant hate. I can't even tell you for sure what episodes they were, just that they weren't the pilot (or in Firefly's case, the first that aired) and I didn't even make it through the whole episode.

But then I tried watching them again years later and was like "What the hell did I watch before? Because...I don't even see what I saw then in this. It's like, a totally different show than I remember?"

And I know, that's not helpful at all.

It didn't exactly influence my impression of the show very much, but I was introduced to Ouran High School Host Club via an AMV at Yaoi-con, set to "If you were gay" from Avenue Q.

So I started watching it thinking Haruhi was a guy, and it was a shonen-ai series. I was actually pleasantly surprised to find it was a reverse harem anime, but with a main character I actually liked and fantastic humor. Had I not been "mislead", I may never have watched the show, since I typically hate harem and reverse harem shows.

I first started watching Doctor Who a month after ATLA finished airing. I'd been super hardcore into that fandom for several years, and it's finale was I giant "what do I do on the internet/watch now?"

And then as a double-whammy, I'd just graduated high school and had moved cross-country to a new school in a new city in a new state. So not only was my online life a giant thread that'd been snipped short, but real life was too.

I watched the first episode of the new series my first week of college, and I ended up rather throwing my whole heart and soul into it. Looking back, it was slightly unhealthy. I think a part of me died with Doomsday as far as fictional media is concerned.

I heard, years before I saw an episode of TOS, about "the infamous 'Spock jamming with space hippies' episode", which was allegedly so terrible that you could piss off a Trekkie by mentioning it. One night I was looking at TV listings, thought "Oh hey, I really liked Next Gen and DS9 and what I got to see of Voyager, and the first few movies. I should watch the original show!"

Guess which episode they happened to be showing that night? XD

At any rate, it was so goofy and terrible and campy that I just laughed the whole way through, and at the end was like "Well okay, if that was the worst episode, and it was so bad it was FUNNY, then we can only go up from here, right?"*

Next episode I saw was "Amok Time", shortly after followed by "The Trouble With Tribbles", and I was good. Even with the ... less than stellar stuff like the unicorn dog and guys in rubber suits. Because darnit, it was just FUNNY.

* However, I was wrong that we could only go up from there. *points to icon*

Mass Effect fandom had me all primed and ready to barely tolerate Ashley as a prejudiced conservative and worship the ground Kaidan walked on as an adorable nerdy idealist...and then I played the game. I made it five minutes before I wanted to shunt Kaidan out the nearest airlock, he had all the common sense of a turkey drowning in the rain, while I desperately wanted to gay romance Ashley and her down-to-earth practicality. Fandom gave me some seriously jacked-up ideas about how they actually behaved in-game.

I expected Twilight to be a lot worse, to the point that I was pleasantly surprised by how average it was. People go on and on about how it's such objectively atrocious writing and I'm just like...you people haven't read very many romance novels, have you. Compared to what saturates the market, Twilight is middle-class writing at worst. I've read some awful shit, man.

I had a fire going in in the fireplace and was channel flipping in the living room. Caught 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' from 1927. It was singularly startling to watch that movie all the way through with a FIRE burning next to me for added effect, I tell ya

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[ SECRET POST #2520 ]

How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?

Re: How did your first impression of [insert work here] influence your perception of it in odd ways?