Small Fandoms

[lea_hazel]

What's the small fandom of your heart? Link the source material if available, and maybe say a few words about what it's about, and what you love about it.

For the last 3-4 years my main fandom has been an indie video game called Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem. The game's main website is here and it gives an overview of the plot and characters, but the most up-to-date version can be downloaded through the official forums. Look for the MediaFire link.

The game is a visual novel RPG hybrid of sorts, which centers around a fantasy world where negotiated peace treaties are sealed by diplomatic marriages, except as the player character, you can arrange your own marriage. There's a strong dating sim element (twelve romances, of which three are GxG and the rest GxB) but beyond the romantic aspect, there's a rich plot with stat-raising, challenges, and choices that affect the game's outcome.

It's been in alpha testing for years, due to difficulties the game's creator has been having, but the "demo" content is honestly more than a lot of full, published games.

My favorite thing about the game is tied between the characters, who are honestly delightful, and the worldbuilding, which represents a real challenge to me as a fic writer. And the fandom is small and friendly. We have bursts of activity, but right now everything's pretty quiet.

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

I really wish more of a fandom had developed around the Sector General novels. They have so much worldbuilding potential, a wide open universe for an imaginative fic writer to explore, and the setup of a multi-species space hospital dedicated to helping people no matter what their shape, color, or preferred atmosphere is really comforting.

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm. My main fandoms have generally been at least medium sized, but off the top of my head I think my favourite small fandom is the Korean Dating sim Nameless. I wrote a whole series of reaction posts, with the summary:

This is a very enjoyable dating sim about a lonely teenage Korean girl who relies on her dolls for companionship in her empty house...and then they come to life as cute boys! I was worried I'd find the premise too silly but once I got my head around it found the Toy Story-esque emotional arcs surprisingly affecting. It reminded me of the way Labyrinth used dolls and fairtytales coming to life as a metaphor for adolescent mixed feelings about the changes of adulthood, including sex. In the end the focus is more on the protagonist's emotional arc than the romances, and the ending, while happy, left me writing fixit fic, but I still really enjoyed it. Be warned that the plot goes to some dark places, especially in the bad endings. But it's also quite funny, with a lot of cute platonic relationships and swoony romances.

(I'm still working on the fixit fic. 87K in and I've gotten two and a half of the five love interests set up...)

[undeadrobins]

I adore the Newsflesh Series of books by Mira Grant (aka Seanan Maguire). At surface-level, they're about a zombie apocalypse, but they're really more about relationships and the importance of independent news reporting. Mira/Seanan is an amazing writer, who has created a world that is so fully developed that you feel you understand what's happening even outside the main characters.

While the topic is a little too close to home at the moment for some people, I would still very much recommend them - they are hopeful and show how the world can and will adapt to a new type of normal.

[alexseanchai]

I saw this 'cause Seanan McGuire retweeted it I'm just saying

(it's FenrisGames tagging seananmcguire in a tweet saying "Genuinely getting quite terrified with the real world, time for some escapist literature." photo: paperback of Feed…)

[polarissruler]

My small fandom is Soul Cartel, a webtoon. It has only two authors on AO3, counting me in. While the plot is quite cliched, it was one of my first webtoons, so it has a special place in my heart. Also, it has some quite interesting characters (the Archdevil Mastema is my favorite) and I always like things based on myths. (Soul Cartel is based on Goethe's version of Faust.)

[melannen]

I always come back to Daniel Pinkwater, and particularly Alan Mendelsohn and the Snarkout Boys. He writes YA/JG novels that are delightfully zany about kids who don't fit in until they encounter madcap supernatural subcultures where they do, and they are very queer-interpretation-friendly and incredibly funny while still saying important and true things about the world. I imprinted on his 70s ones but he's still writing today!

In newer fandoms I keep wanting to fall hard for Machineries of Empire, which is about a space empire that runs on strange magic. The descriptions of the magic are lyrical and liminal, and the characters and their relationships are all amazing and very fandom-feeling (and nearly all canon queer). There is a lot of whump, though!

[malurette]

Should I try to talk about LastMan?
It's a short adult animated series about a lazy boxer saddled with protecting his late coach's preteen daughter against what first looks like "only" a weird sect trying to use her in a shady ritual but soon reveals itself to be a horde of real monsters with teeth and blades and tentacles and all sorts of weird powers, oh, and with protecting the boxing club from greedy mafia guys too.
It's packed with action, has awesome music a diverse cast of endearing characters, equal-opportunity nudity, and it needs more love, the fandom has a few artists but could afford to grow bigger!

I made a couple of fan reccing posts about it:
https://malurette.dreamwidth.org/2989689.html
https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/8018391.html

here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ6CPq0H8IU

You can watch it on Modo/VRV, on Netflix if you can access their French catalog, or pirated if you know where to look for it?

[impala_chick]

TURN: Washington's Spies! It is a show about the Culper Spy ring that helped turn the tide of the American Revolution. It's available for streaming on NETFLIX. There are some really fun characters, great shipping opportunities, and really fabulous portrayals of Washington, Lafayette, and other historical figures. I love all of the 1770s spy details, like secret writing hidden inside eggs and codes in newspaper ads.

The costumes are gorgeous, the scenery is gorgeous, and there are some strong female leads that stay with the entire series. Plus, so many favorite tropes. Especially found family, morality wins the day, HIMBO heroes, smart women pulling the strings... and plenty of eye candy. The fandom has a pretty active but small discord, too.

(TW for some blood, death, torture, and light gore)

[lea_hazel]

Oh, I love historical code breaking. Maybe I'll add it to my list.

[impala_chick]

I hope you enjoy :)

[doranwen]

*THE* small fandom of my heart? I love so many small fandoms, lol. Most of my fannish loves are tiny. Yuletide is the best exchange ever, lol, and most years I have five or six fandom requests, all of which I am equally excited about.

Recent ones:

Rookie Blue (see icon) - which is on the larger side of small, it's too big for Yuletide but the fandom is *dead*, practically, very few fics posted these days (since the show ended in 2014…) - it's like Grey's Anatomy with cops, I'm told (never watched Grey's Anatomy) but the chemistry between the main two, the shipping possibilities between some of the other chars, the *heart* in the show, some of the more emotional moments… yeahhhh, so good. If you're a romantic shipper at heart Rookie Blue is definitely for you. It's got some great discussions, and so much AU potential. (About 3k fics, of which I've saved around half, and highly recommend about 180. I've got a post with all of those recs linked somewhere on my DW, not gonna dig it up now but if someone wants, just ask.)

Alphas - try X-Men meets Heroes, only better; superheroes with downsides, diverse ethnicities (black FBI agent, Iranian-American woman) and the best portrayal of a character on the autism spectrum that I've ever seen (seconded by many), who is a valid and important team member - and lots of interesting moral quandaries and difficult issues wrestled with. Plus quite a few great AU possibilities. (But warning, they ended with the worst cliffhanger ever. Totally need someone to write a continuation!) All of the fics I felt were worth saving in some way can be found in a list here (I have all of my saved Alphas fics in my fanfic database).

Cybergeddon - basically The Fugitive with hacking, starring my favorite actress Missy Peregrym (she makes her characters really come to life), in a webseries format with about 90 min total screen time - I think I may still have a working link to where it was uploaded in full on Vimeo, too. (I think the only fic existing was a Yuletide treat for me year before this last one. Amazing fic, though!)

Worldweavers by Alma Alexander - quartet of books that mixes magic in our world with Native American mythology with Nikola Tesla and time travel - and it all *works*. Plus its sheer inventiveness (e.g. elevators that act like four-year-olds when the library went feral because they were across from the children's section) is a major plus. I re-read these every few years because I enjoy them so much (but there's basically no fic at all).

Earth Girl series by Janet Edwards - fantastic sci-fi trilogy + novellas & short stories that mixes sci-fi with archaeology and a really fun heroine that makes for a delightful read. I've found myself re-reading these more than once. (Probably less than 10 fics total, though maybe it's reached double digits by now. Maybe.)

I could keep going. But those are probably the highest on my mind at the moment. (I love The Matrix too, but yeah, lol. Still getting those fics added to the fanfic database.)

[megpie71]

Mine's not so much a small fandom, as an oldie that's been dropping off over the years. Blake's 7. (Look, Paul Darrow as Avon was a formative influence on me - I wound up with a taste for dark, snarky IT types, and I've never yet shaken off my fascination with anti-heroes rather than heroes).

If I ever wind up having to self-isolate (so far my job is being declared as "yeah, you have to keep working until we get to the other end of this" and I've obtained an exemption from working at home) I'll probably go digging through the boxes and pull out the B7 boxed sets for a re-watch.

[primeideal]

Every so often I go through phases of being really into the videogame FTL: Faster Than Light. (link to steam) And this is one of those times.

It's a "roguelike" game, which means once you die, you can't go back and reload from before you got to that enemy--you just have to start over. And you will die a lot. However, along the way, you will stumble upon quests and unlock new spaceships, so you might be better off the second (or tenth or hundredth) time around than you were the first. I should say I have yet to win this game. That's...part of...the charm.

I like it because even though it has some real-time components (in the fights), you don't actually need hand-eye coordination; you can pause, decide where to aim, unpause as often as needed. So it has a "puzzly" feel overall.

It is deliberately janky, with "8-bit" feeling to the animations and music. I find it to be not too overwhelming and sort of abstract--there's a clear sense of where everything is.

Anyway, I just unlocked yet another ship (one that was pretty difficult, as I never got it in my longer stints), so we'll see what kind of success that brings!