Welcome to the Fan Corner

Fan culture is a great and glorious thing. Whether you like video games, sports, or obscure 16th century Welsh poetry, you’ll always be able to find someone with your interests. We fans celebrate things, respond to them, form our own cultures and subcultures regarding our interpretation of things, and even create things based on our love for other things.

And we change the world. Just look at all the cool scientific inventions, which wouldn’t have existed without Star Trek.

Star-Trek1I’ve always been fascinated by how just absorbing a piece of media can change you as a person. The experiences of fictional characters became my own. Their lives shaped my life. I want to create a story that can do that as well, but it turns out that making your own things is much harder than looking at other people’s things. In the meantime, I’m going to write about stuff that I like for your entertainment.

My challenge as a blogger is to be interesting and accessible to a larger, more diverse audience than I’m used to. The Baltimore Post-Examiner is sadly lacking in nerd culture, and I have come to fill the void.

31890I generally don’t like to talk too much about myself, but I should at least let you know a little bit about who I am and why I’m writing this. Let it be known that I was born with the propensity for nerdery. My parents were nerdy. By the time I could raid the contents of my parents’ bookshelves, I was reading everything I could get my hands on, but my real pleasure lay in my dad’s sci-fi collection – McCaffrey, LeGuin, Heinlein and Turtledove. I was too young to understand everything they were writing about, but the worlds of those authors captivated me.

As I grew older I discovered Tolkien, cementing my true literary love: fantasy. Then I discovered video games, and the internet, and I think things spiraled out of control a little bit.

My senior thesis in college was an analysis of the fantasy genre and the categories it could be separated into. This is what gave me my B.A. I hope you understand a bit more about me now.

I’ll be writing about things that I’m a fan of. A straight-up review describing its good points and bad points is a possibility, but I’m more about the analysis. I’ll examine works of media entertainment in the context of their time, the context of their genre, and how they can affect your life.

My goal is to be a thought-provoking, and accessible source of fan criticism and analysis. It’s OK if you don’t like everything I write. Please feel free to sound off in the comment section below and let me know what you think or suggest something for me to check out.

In fact, you don’t have to be a fan of what I like at all. I know next to nothing about 16th century Welsh poetry, but reading about it on Wikipedia was pretty cool. I hope my readers can feel the same thing when I want to talk about my love for Japanese role-playing game series.