Curate, connect, and discover
Okay, I can’t edit this how I want (leaving only the middle under a cut), so I’ll post my concluding paragraph before the cut.
Being as socially isolated as I am, I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing I have fairly odd behaviours when it comes to fandoms. I tend to jump from one to another as the mood strikes me, but eventually come back to most of them for a while, trawl my way through fanfic and art, and then completely ignore it as I move back to another old fandom.
Okay, that's probably not that odd, but when I cycle off a fandom I tend to ignore it completely and not even mentally count it as something I'm a fan of. Sometimes to the point of almost actively avoiding it, say, avoiding reading a crossover fic for something I'm currently into that's been crossed with one of my previous fandoms that I'm currently ignoring.
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The upshot of all this being- sometimes I’ll effectively ‘drop’ a fandom entirely, only to wander back months or years later and pick back up where I left off. (And in the intervening period, never actively acknowledge it’s something I’ve like.)
The thing is, I don't really even know why I do that. As a kid, most of the time I was always in the process of reading anything from two to four novels at the same time.
Say, I'd have an Asimov short stories compilation lying around, be halfway through one Anne McCaffery, starting off another Anne McCaffery from a different series and had just finished re-reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader because it was a rainy day on the weekend and C.S. Lewis and large mugs of tea just seemed to be on the agendum, and then that evening, one of my Terry Pratchett novels is begging for another read.
And then I'd have trouble understanding why people felt that keeping track of the stories when reading two novels concurrently was such a difficult thing to do.
I didn't have the analogy then, but now that I think about it, isn't exactly the same as having more than one favourite tv show? I just went in as much for the written word as I did tv. ....plus never liking soap operas usually gave me some time free each evening.
When you're eight, a choice between Neighbours, the news or reruns of Yes Minister is enough to make flail in frustration in the lack of anything *good* on the tv, so you need some way to amuse yourself before primetime. I happened to have a large sci-fi/fantasy library on hand thanks to my parents, so I'd pick a book and start reading.
Or it was the weekend/holidays and I had to be *somewhere* so I'd go along to work with my mother, who was a cataloguing librarian. And back in the work areas of the library just happened to be a huge collection of sci-fi that someone had willed to the university, and there's only so many times you can wander around the lake, main square or cafeteria before you're bored out your mind.
And this degenerated into reminiscing about books and my childhood fairly quickly. Huh. Well, that's also a trait of mine, I can never keep on topic. (Or I'll have a long rambling story/theory/anecdote that seemingly everyone else considers off-topic, but dammit- you didn't let me finish and it all ties together!) My tangents never seems to match up with what the rest of the world considers 'understandable'.
The upshot of all this being- sometimes I'll effectively 'drop' a fandom entirely, only to wander back months or years later and pick back up where I left off. (And in the intervening period, never actively acknowledge it's something I've like.)