First of all, if you’re just here for the recommendation, here it is:
I wholeheartedly recommend you listen to The Friendship Onion.
It’s a new-ish podcast by Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, who played Merry and Pippin in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They talk about some LotR, sure, but there’s also food, bad impressions of Americans, meditation, and quantum physics, and I love it. I LOVE IT. It is joy wrapped in humor wrapped in friendship topped with two of the most delectable accents to ever be spoken by humans, ever. Go listen to it immediately.
Alright. If you’re here for the whole story behind this post, here we go.
At the turn of the millennium, I, along with all the other interesting people you know, participated in a number of fandoms. They were wide and varied, starting with The X-Files and ending, I suppose, either with my death or with Benedict Cumberbatch’s retirement, but they generally concerned immersive fantasy worlds, sci-fi, and/or unconventionally attractive male leads.
I read a lot of fan fiction in those days, collected a lot of miniatures, stared at a lot of posters, changed a lot of desktop wallpapers. I kept a blog about the actors I’d latched on to from each universe. I read episode recaps and lurked on discussion boards.
I sank many, many hours of my one wild and precious life into Smallville and Lost, X-Files and Star Wars, X-Men and Zelda and The Sims and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. And if we include musical fandoms? BSB? *NSYNC? 98 Degrees??
I could have earned two or three PhDs in the time I spent fangirling.
But if I’m going to level with you—and believe me, I am—all of those fandoms COMBINED do not begin to touch my early 2000’s obsession with Lord of the Rings.
Holy monkeys, did I love some Lord of the Rings.
On most weekends in 2002, you could find my roommate and I locked in our dorm room with a box of Zebra Cakes and the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring. We preferred to watch with the cast commentary on, absorbing Billy Boyd’s accent and discussing our marriage prospects with each of the hobbits, and thus whiled away the last of our teenage years three magical hours at a time.
The full film was too long for weeknights, but we had those covered, too. If one of us had had a bad day or a paper she didn’t want to write or an insufferable lull in her schedule, we’d cue up a cast interview, then recite lines back and forth until she was healed.
It was during this time that I acquired Action Figure Legolas. He became a main character on my blog, offering his thoughts on my celebrity boyfriends, my hapless Sims, and whatever else I was complaining about from week to week. If news was slow, I’d pose him Elf-on-the-Shelf style around the room and write captions for his daily activities.
Elijah Wood’s anguished face was the last one I saw before I went to sleep at night (unless I happened to roll over and look at Michael Rosenbaum on the opposite wall), and I usually woke up to my roommate playing the Fellowship soundtrack on her computer. In my spare time, I scoured the internet for pictures of the cast and/or composed clever AIM away messages about Billy Boyd reading to me out of the dictionary in heaven.
You get the idea.
So, I love this podcast because I love these two actors, I love the sorts of things they like to talk about, and I love listening to people who have that spark of human chemistry that lifts us off this mortal coil from time to time.
But more than that, I love this podcast because it reminds me what it was like to love things without inhibition.
When I became a teacher, I packed away my fangirl tendencies. I had ideas about what befitted a proper schoolmistress, and later a proper woman, that were probably helpful to my career but definitely unhelpful to my soul.
Fandoms, along with anything else too immature or too worldly or just TOO MUCH, were parts of me I began to minimize and flatten. I got so good at keeping them out of other people’s view, in fact, that eventually I couldn’t find them at all. Not even when the other people were gone.
The best evidence of this is that I’ve been writing full time for year and a half, and I’m just now getting back to creating things that are nonsensical and dumb. Immature, silly nonsense was the foundation of my creativity for the first twenty years of my life, and it took me until, like, yesterday to haul it back out.
And do you know how I felt when I found it?
Gleeful. Zebra Cake gleeful. Watching Dom interview Elijah in a fake German accent for the first time gleeful.
The same way I felt when I found Legolas in the attic, when I listened to The Friendship Onion, and when I was an enthusiastic member of the LotR fandom.
It is possible that, along with Neil Diamond fans, the world is divided into those who have fandoms and those who do not. I don’t know what it’s like not to get obsessed with pieces of pop culture, but I do know that we all have parts of ourselves we feel like aren’t fit for public consumption, that are a little too embarrassing or too childish or, you know, too much.
But one thing I’m taking away from my reconnection with fan culture is that, whatever the thing is that brings you joy? It’s yours. And somehow, that also makes it everyone else’s, because authentic joy is contagious.
Billy and Dom’s certainly is. They’re like a joy biological weapon.
Did I tell you to listen to The Friendship Onion already?
Do it. Or do something else you love but don’t think is cool. Maybe once you start making a little room for unapologetic enjoyment, more will come trickling in. If you’re anything like me, what you need will show up not early or late, but, drumroll please…
Precisely when it means to.
