First Fandom

Not so G-yIP. Battlestar Galactica was the first television I was ever fannish about. I knew the canon, I loved the characters ... and I wrote my very first fanfiction.

So my first fanfiction was written before I knew fanfiction or fandom existed. It was a godawful 127K-word epic drawer-fic AU. Lots of names with apostrophes, noble sacrifices, honorable enemies, complicated schemes, and exclamation marks. Starbuck's colony was still destroyed by Cylons when he was a child, but he was never rescued by Colonial warriors. He hooked up with pirates and smugglers, instead, and kind of turned into ... Han Solo with an M.D-Ph.D. (I would feel shame, but I was eight.) Dialogue like this:

"You know that my people could kill you," said Jeneko. "I could be tricking you. Starbuck could be fine."
"I don’t care. I need to make sure that Starbuck will live. This is all my fault." Apollo rushed to his shuttle.

"What the hell are you doing here, Apollo?" Starbuck asked. His breath hissed, and his breathing was labored. "You can be such an idiot sometimes. You know what they can and probably will do to you. What are you doing here? You promised to stay safe. ... Just make sure that you leave here alive. I don’t care, you can use me as a scapegoat. Use me as a hostage! I don’t care! Just get the hell out of here, safe and preferably alive! Go back to your friendly Colonial warriors and Serina and live happily ever after!"

That there is damn bad writing. But at least I got my melodrama from a very good source: this was the show where Apollo confronted Satan because Satan was trying to take over the fleet (so not kidding). And then Satan killed Apollo (still not kidding). Apollo gets picked up by a deus ex machina (and I mean that literally, and I'm still not kidding). And then Starbuck gets picked up by same, sees Apollo lying dead on a bier, and immediately goes into a whole "I'll give you anything you want, just bring him back." I haven't seen the episode in ages, but I think he may even fall to his knees in front of the angels. And Apollo, naturally, is resuscitated and, naturally, remembers nothing. See? The melodrama is definitely canon.

And I wrote slash-without-the-sex, because I couldn't imagine Starbuck and Apollo not wanting to live together. There was a lot of "I'd give my life for him." I had a whole chapter where Starbuck worrying that Apollo's father wouldn't like him.

Oddly, when I wrote in my second fandom, I wrote Mary Sues up the wazoo. Star Wars was the first fandom in which I discovered that other people wrote fanfiction, and the first fandom where I read other people's fanfiction, and instead of writing proto-slash, I wrote unforgivable Mary Sues. I don't know what this says about what I first got out of fandom, but it can't be good. *g*

*pondering Photoshop 7*

Also a GIP. Anyone who knows me even a little understands why I made an icon of that clip. Because Wesley has two guns. Two. At once. And he's kicking ass. *clears throat* A-hem. Anyway.

I've been playing around with Photoshop 7 all day. I've used Photoshop before, but every release is new and different -- gotta say, the history window makes me a happy person. And it's so easy to change the opacity of a layer, which was a pain in the ass before. Oooh, and the pop-up menu for filters makes it a whole bunch easier to run through them. So, in short, eruthros=happy. (Now if I could only work out how to do animation in image ready...)

Only here's the thing. This icon doesn't really look much like Wesley. I know it's Wesley. It is, in fact, the only screenshot I could find of this bit of Lineage. The original looks a lot like "black":



I think I did a pretty good job finding a face in that image, let alone finding two guns. And getting his coat somewhere near brown, and his shirt somewhere near red. But the shadow over his face still annoys me -- if I could get rid of that it would look a lot more like Wes. But I can't -- when I lighten or color-shift the shadows, even if I just select that area, the whole image gets streaky. Any suggestions?

ETA: Hmmm. Are these any better? I did some shadow/highlight and histogram manipulation, and his face seems less orange at least. I need to remember to look at this again when it's not 1 am.