The Circles of the World

I have a couple of hobbies,* but mostly I have fandoms. When I was a kid, outside of sports, adults didn't really have fandoms, or at least not any they would talk about. There was definitely a delineation at the time, a point in your life (any day now!) where you were supposed to put away childish things like Star Wars and He-Man and become a grown up and think about grown up things, like drinking and being drunk and talking about other times you had been drunk and finding new ways to hide alcohol in containers with labels for nonalcoholic things. If the V-8 can grandma is carrying around is only full of vodka, I'm not sure you can call it a Bloody Mary anymore. It's possible my formative environment was a little too specific for this general point.

The wars between youth culture and the "real world" of mortgages and cholesterol was a real thing, starting with complaints about television and that damned rock music, then boys with hair longer than a buzz cut and next thing you know, the office of the draft board is on fire. I'm not sure what happened after all those definitive, watershed clashes. Maybe we were cowed by the spiraling anarchy of those very incidents. Maybe the young people of that time grew up vowing to never perpetuate that kind of divide again when they had their own kids. Maybe Hollywood and Madison Avenue learned that there was so much more money to be made if they could maybe figure out a way to continue marketing toys and candy to the part of the demographic with jobs and disposable income. Who can say for sure?!

Well, except for the first one, that shit didn't happen. Those 1960s long-hairs all grew up to be the Boomers we know today. The one thing they knew less about than responsible social politics (ironically!) was parenting. However we, their progeny, ended up, we started out feral.

Maybe that's why the barriers aren't there between my generation and our kids: nobody really told/showed us what being an adult was supposed to look like. The crowd at Marvel movies and comic conventions are just as many GenX weirdos as GenZ (and later) scenesters doing some very mainstream late-capitalist consumption. My kids have (mostly) moved out, but when they come around, it's usually to hang out and watch a superhero something or other. OK, and maybe score a free meal, but that's another blog.

My first fandom was JRR Tolkien. Some teacher (second grade I think?) read The Hobbit out loud over a series of days. Before that I had known about (and had the vinyl record version, way before you could get stuff on home video) the Rankin-Bass cartoon version of The Hobbit. No seven-year-old should have known who Orson Bean or Brother Theodore were, but I was just that enthralled by it. Then I read Lord of the Rings in the summer between seventh and eighth grade and that was it.

Now today, we're 20 years past not just successful but iconic movie versions of the "unfilmable" LotR and about three hours away (as I type this) from the debut of the Amazon series The Rings of Power, which was completely incomprehensible just 25 years ago. A measurable part of me, of course, is terrified they're going to fuck it up by making up a bunch of shit I don't like. I can tell you from trailers and from the fact that I've read most of the ancillary writings and the canonical The Silmarillion that most of the content here is going to be big, blind swings. It's based on a period for which there just isn't that much information beyond a few signpost events and sketches.

I'm going to watch it, though, of course I am. Fandoms are built on anti-rationality. I'm one of the people for whom nonsense words like Meneltarma and Laiquendi mean something. I'm either going to weep with disbelief that I'm seeing something I'd never imagined would be realized OR the next blog you read in this space, I will be a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor and I'm gonna burn some shit down. That's a rough paraphrase, of course, but you get me.

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*Pretty standard ones, really: guitar, video games, pretending to read to avoid conversations in public places, corn-silk doll clothes making and the occasional light thaumaturgy.