Fanmusic Friday - "Royals" Fandom Cover

Fanmusic Friday - I'm In A Fandom

How to depend on Tumblr for your TV and fandom news

Because getting online and keeping up on TV is hard wen your net access is unreliable and your cable is cut, I'm living off Tumblr on my phone. Here's how you can, too!

1. Get a Tumblr account.
2. Go to that search bar up top, and find blogs that post about the shows you watch and the fandoms you follow.
3. Scroll scroll scroll though your feed.
4. Don't hide from spoilers--that's literally news.
5. Fact check anything that sounds too crazy.
6. Read all the fan-theories about every aspect of every scene, and compare it to the actual thing when you actually see it--and then argue interpretations with someone else.
7. Remember that Tumblr as a whole is biased in favor of relationships, social justice, and representing the underrepresented, which is fantastic and one of the reasons to be on Tumblr, but also means sometimes tiny things in shows become much bigger than they need to, and don't actually have any inherent meaning.
8. Understand that using Tumblr to keep up on shows will give you a slightly skewed idea of what is actually going on--including some characters disappearing, some storypoints that were never actually in the show, and about half the time, the actual show is sort of a letdown after the careful thought that goes into the fan theories.
9. Understand also that things will be different now--being a fan on your own is different than being a fan in an active fan community.
10. Make wonderful new friends.

I can't keep up with the geekery OR The best problem for a fangirl to have

I have a confession to make: Despite all the many (many) fandoms I currently have and participate in*, I'm behind on the newest wave of new fandoms. I feel like I'm missing out, and I fully intend to catch up at some point, but here's the thing: this is the best thing that can happen to a fangirl. It means, in no particular order, that:

• There will always be more awesome shows to get into.
• TV right now is super-great in a way that it didn't used to be.
• There's all these new 'ships I don't even know about yet.

In interest of full disclosure, I haven't yet managed to see:

• Resurrection
• Believe
• Under the Dome
• Mad Men
• Breaking Bad (and I'm not sure I want to with this one)
• Ripper Street
• Copper
• Call the Midwife
• Three Musketeers (is this even on yet?)
• Teen Wolf

And I'm behind on:

• Downton Abbey
• Game of Thrones
• Continuum
• Once Upon A Time (what even is going on with that?)
• Grimm (did it ever get as good as it felt like it should be?)
• Misfits (which I think is over now)

Sometimes I feel bad. But then Tumblr tells me basically (with much skewing) what's going on and I feel less behind than ever AND I feel like I have something awesome to look forward to. In an ideal world, where I didn't have stories to tell and didn't need to do anything but watch TV, I'd be caught up on everything that interests me, and I'd be super-active in ALL THE FANDOMS, but that's not the way of things. The way of things is that I liveblog about ten shows and don't have a lot of time to catch up on ones not currently airing because I have Other Interests like writing and eating and reviewing books and sleeping.

So I look forward to when I can get to those other ones and arrive to the party late, but enthusiastic.

Now it's your turn. Fess up! Which fandom shows are you woefully behind on and which have you not managed to catch at all?

And related, what do you feel about spoilers? Personally, I don't much avoid them--they give me something to extrapolate from when I want to know what's going to happen, and they're always different in context. 

NOTES:
*Current: Sleepy Hollow, Almost Human, Agents of SHIELD / MCU, Castle, Bones, The Mentalist, Walking Dead, Hell on Wheels, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Cosmos (old and new), Game of Thrones, Intelligence, and the continuing / vintage fandoms of 80s Fantasy Movies, Firefly, Farscape, Star Trek, Star Wars, 80s Cartoons, Primeval, and a handful of Forgotten Fandoms I'm slowly working my way through here on the blog.