Introductions before we start

[ruuger]

Sunday is here and it's time to get this thing on the road. The response to b5_revisited has been amazing with over 100 people watching the community already! Thank you to all the people who have pimped the community.

While we wait for the discussion posts to go up (or you wait and I make the posts), how about some introductions first.

I'll go first: I started watching B5 in 1997 when it began showing on Finnish tv. I'd never heard of the show before, but was a 17-year-old who loved scifi, and in those days we were lucky to get any scifi on tv so the fact that it had aliens in it was enough for me.

I can't actually remember what I thought about the first episode, but I do remember the moment when I became a fan of the show, which was when I saw "And the Sky Full of Stars". The episode that sealed the deal for me, though, was - and all you old fans are going to laugh at me now - "GROPOS" in season 2. And by season 4 I had already started my own B5 fansite, 190 Bester Place (which is still up even if I haven't remembered to update it for about three years and celebrates its 10 birthday next month).

In fandom I used to lurk at the Finnish B5 fans' group on Usenet, but was at my most active on the About.com Babylon 5 fans forum and the fabulous JumpNow forums. The last few years my fannish activity has been mostly on LJ, and has included running universe_today and babylon5_love and couple of ficathons.

I can also often be found hanging around in the Buffyverse and X-Files corners of Internet.

How about you? Are you an old fan from the first age of usenet, or a newbie watching the show for the first time? How did you first heard about the show? Where do you hang out, what are your other fandoms?

And remember, no spoilers! Because one of the best parts of Babylon 5 fandom is, after all, watching the reactions of the unspoiled newbies when they reach that episode where that character does that thing and it is revealed that the thing is actually a thing. You know that thing I mean ;)

Comments

[fifmeister.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm a young'un--I was nine years old when B5 first began airing, so looking back I think it's safe to say that B5 was literally the first real TV show I ever watched. I didn't view it when it originally aired, though--I can't remember what year I actually began watching, but it was my parents who got me hooked. They absolutely loved the show when it first aired, and had virtually every episode recorded on a huge collection of VHS tapes sitting in our basement. The quality was less than stellar, obviously, but I didn't care. I remember some days watching multiple episodes in a row because I just couldn't make myself stop.

B5 has had an enormous impact on the way I view all other TV shows, particularly because I watched it at a fairly young and impressionable age, and because it was the first show I ever watched outside of kids' shows. It's kind of weird, but in some ways I almost feel disadvantaged for having viewed B5 first thing in my TV/fandom life--because it's like I watched the very best thing first, and now nothing can live up to it--especially in the area of character development. I can't even count the number of times I've been watching some other show and exclaimed in frustration "Why can't they do this the way B5 did it?" or "If only they had JMS on their writing staff!" There have been a couple of shows that have come close, but nothing as of yet that can truly touch B5. Yeah, I've been spoiled. :p

As far as fandom goes, I've never actually been heavily involved in B5 fandom outside of a few LJ communities. Other shows that I watch (or watched) include Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Lost, Firefly, and (formerly) Heroes.