#bandom fanfics were so very odd

[sobskie]

you guys remember that one fanfiction that the man gabe saporta himself wrote about being the president of america and killing pete wentz and william beckett being his lover and nick jonas having to save the world or am i just delusional

[crashingmanicwave]

hey so u know a lot about Ryden, right?? im v v new to the panic! fandom so it would be lovely if u gave me a quick run down on what the fuck happened. you dont have to, im just confused and curious

Of course, anon! I’m flattered that you seem to think I know a lot! Really, I just have spent far too much time delving deep into bandom history and reading many, many fanfics.

But anyway! This ended up being more of a mini-essay, though I tried to skim over too many complicated details to make it more palatable for reading.  I combed through the tag in my blog and other sources to provide relevant links :)

Now, let’s get down to it.

I’m not sure how much you do know or don’t know, but as with anything, it’s best to start at the beginning.

A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (2005)

Panic! of the Disco was signed by Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy in 2004 with members Ryan Ross, Spencer Smith, Brendon Urie, and Brent Wilson. They were signed literally right out of highschool - one of the agreements was that they had to graduate first!  Ryan Ross wrote the entirety of their first album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, released in 2005 to massive popularity.

(And when I say they were children, I really mean children.)

Brent Wilson ended up getting replaced as bassist by Jon Walker, who’d been playing with The Academy Is up until that point.  And the rest is history, boom, bam, the boys are together!

Now, this time period is what we all refer to as ‘Fever era’ and we were blessed with SO much.

Aesthetically it was just an awesome era! Ryan Ross and his makeup! The dancers! THE STAGE GAY.

One of the most important pieces of ryden lore during this era was Myrtle Beach.

Some of my favorite Fever era ryden content: 

♥  ♥  ♥  ♥  ♥  ♥  ♥  ♥   ♥  ♥  ♥  

(I want you to know that I really had to restrain myself with how many links I put here.)

–

** Now, there’s an era technically in between AFYCSO and PO which we refer to as the ‘cabin era’ during which the boys locked themselves up in a cabin for months and wrote the now scrapped album Cricket & Clover. Most of this album is impossible to find, but here’s a song performed live from it to give you a taste as to what it might have sounded like. **

Pretty. Odd. (2008)

After the scrapped album came Pretty. Odd.!  It’s basically their Beatles album; has a very similar sound and aesthetic to 60′s rock.

We got many, many gems from this era, and MANY important pieces of lore.

Now, this next topic is deserving of its own subcategory purely because of how vital it is to we ryden conspiracy theorists with our tinfoil hats:

-

Northern Downpour

This song is absolutely VITAL to ryden lore.  Vital. 

It’s popularly believed that the lyrics were written by Ryan Ross after the infamous Seattle incident, a staple of ryden lore (and my personal favorite).

Shortly after the split, Brendon had difficulty performing this song on stage and would frequently get too choked up to sing, having to stop and apologize to the audience.

Hey moon, please forget to fall down is one of the most popular lyrics from it, and has been interpreted to mean both ‘please don’t let this night end’ and also delving into the sun & moon symbolic dichotomy widely accepted by most ryden theorists. (Ryan is the moon ☾, Brendon is the sun. ☼)

-

(Cape Town is another popular piece of ryden lore from this time, with The Young Veins even having a song titled as such.  Cape Town being the location of their final performance before the split makes this compelling.)

Some of my favorite Pretty Odd era ryden content:

♥   ♥   ♥   ♥   ♥   ♥   ♥   ♥

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The Split (2009)

Not much of an era, but it marked a lot of change for the band as a whole.  Jon Walker and Ryan Ross left the band due to creative differences, claiming they wanted to continue on with the 60′s rock sound of Pretty Odd whereas Brendon Urie and Spencer Smith did not.

However, based on numerous accounts what we do know is that the split didn’t happen solely because of creative differences.  Tensions were high between everyone, and everyone was fighting and not getting along.

This is more than likely what led to the eventual split and parting of ways.

–

The Young Veins (2010) / Vices & Virtues (2011)

Ryan Ross and Jon Walker formed The Young Veins, releasing Take A Vacation! in 2010.  Unfortunately, the album was something of a failure and the Young Veins went on a seemingly permanent hiatus not very long after.

Panic! at the Disco, at this point consisting only of Brendon Urie and Spencer Smith, released their official third studio album, Vices & Virtues.  

During this era, frontman Brendon Urie was known to have been going through a deeply depressive slump, his state of mind reflected in the bonus tracks on this album.  In interviews he stated that the split left him depressed and upset.

As far as we know, Ryan and Brendon still spoke to one another at this point, at least through Twitter interactions.

–

Ryan Ross & The Catfishing Incident (2013)

This is something of a low point on this timeline.  To give you the quick and dirty version, an obsessive Brendon fan obtained Ryan’s phone number and texted him while pretending to be Brendon.

It worked. Ryan believed her.

They spoke for a while, the catfisher uploading screenshots of their messages. 

Ryan was interested in rekindling his friendship with Brendon.

However, as most things don’t stay secret forever, it came out that the person Ryan was texting was not, in fact, his former best friend and was completely horrified.

As such, the next time he and Brendon saw one another, with Brendon interested in rekindling their relationship - Ryan ended up never responding.

–

Present Day

At this point, as far as we know, Ryan and Brendon don’t speak to one another.  We could write until the cows come home about how they’ve vagued one another in each of their respective song lyrics.  There’s a lot of mystery as to the true reason of the band’s split, and why no one seems to speak to one another.  Why there’s still lingering bad blood.

What we ryden conpiracy theorists believe is this -

Essentially, a relationship was had at one point between Ryan and Brendon.  How deep this relationship went or how far it went is the part up for contention.  I personally believe that it was a short-lived but passionate affair - since Ryan had a girlfriend during most of his career with Panic!.

But you can take a look at the evidence for yourself, decide what you believe!

[earlgreytea68]

On the Anthropological Fandom Impulse

When I first got into fandom, I feel like I did it in the way that you hear about it: I watched a thing (for me it was always watching), and I loved it so much that I wanted *more,* and then I sought out fic, and then I waited to feel like I had something I needed to say about it. This is what people will traditionally tell you fandom is. 

But, Idk, as I’ve gotten older, I have shifted this. Fandom has become more of a habit, a general way in which I interact with creativity, rather than a specific reaction to *someone else’s* creative work. Which isn’t how fandom is traditionally defined but is how I do it, and I guess I’m writing this out to see how odd this is, and where this impulse comes from within me? 

Because it’s been a while -- a very long time -- since I consumed a piece of media that I loved so much I wanted to seek out the fic. I have tried. I have consumed all of the things that are big fannishly now. None of them really caught my creative spark. 

The first thing to catch my creative spark after Sherlock was in fact Inception. Not because I’d seen the movie (which I had seen, and barely remembered). But because the Inception *fandom* seemed kind of amazing. I read a fic, and then another fic, and then more fics, and then I was performing what I now call my Fandom Anthropology. I dug through historical layers, uncovering old rec lists, ending up on old LJ kinkmemes, letting them link me to other things, finding fanvids, going through meta, until I had assembled a picture of what I thought the fandom was doing, what the fanon conventions were, which pieces of canon were the most important. It was like settling into an entirely different mental location and mapping it out like a tourist. 

Since the Inception rabbit hole, I have always consistently come to a fic-reading rabbit hole not from the canon but from the fandom itself. I subscribe to authors on AO3, and whenever they update with a fic, I tend to click on it curiously. I am such that I can tell right away if I’m going to be caught by a ship or not. I’m actually fairly predictable in what I like, tbh. I’m sure you can pick up on my preferred OTP dynamic. :-) 

I read all recs sent to me, but not all of them necessarily hit me at the right time. And then suddenly something will catch me and I’ll just spend a little while devouring everything I can in that universe. I did that with Social Network RPF (which I revisited this summer and it remains delightful) and Sports Night (which was a show I’d been fannish about in the early 2000s before being fannish was the more organized thing it is today) and Marcone/Dresden from the Dresden Files (I read some Dresden Files many years ago, but left off before Marcone even entered the narrative) and for a little while I read a bunch of Raven Cycle fic (despite never having read a word of these books). There was a small attempt to explore BTS fandom but I found it a little impenetrable (I couldn’t get a handle on the characters); I also tried to read some One Direction stuff but mostly got distracted that no Harry Styles was like how he was in my head (Idek, I barely listen to One Direction, I have no idea where my very clear picture of Harry Styles came from, but I kind of think he’s a delight, he’s just my fave). 

But, anyway, the point of all of this is: I read fanfic these days not because of inherent interest in the canon but because writers I like are writing in it. And if I like the characters they write well enough, then suddenly I’ve opened up a ton more fic that I can read. As far as I can tell, I am treating fic as original writing. I come to it with little knowledge of the characters. All I know about it is its *genre.* And fic is definitely its own genre. I know the basic shape of everything that’s going to happen in every fic I click on, so I’m entirely reading because something about the characters have caught me. Not because of canon, but because of *fanon.* Because, Idk, so often it’s the fan artists who are really creating this marvelous complexity, and I feel like I’m just cutting out the middle man. And, once I’ve been caught by a dynamic, lucky me, it’s super-easy to find a million other ways to explore those characters. And the canon of them is entirely secondary to me in the first exploration, and then eventually becomes part of my excavation of what’s going on. 

Is this a weird way to do fandom? I feel like it might be. But also I don’t think it’s necessarily the *wrong* way. It might even have always been my preferred way, but before the age of AO3 and Tumblr, it was actually harder to jump between fandoms. I know you *could* do it on LJ, but I remember when I switched from DW to Sherlock, having to be like, “Hey, were are the Sherlock people on here? Where do I find them?” Whereas now it’s just all simpler to run productive searches that get you what you’re looking for. Or just asking on Twitter, “Hey, who knows anything about this fandom and wants to point me to the best fics?” 

This has been, for me, a far more reliable way to discover things I love than to sit around waiting for a canon to find me. I would never have randomly rewatched Sports Night last spring had a Sports Night fic not crossed my inbox. I would not be listening to nonstop Fall Out Boy had a random bandom fic not crossed my inbox. Fandom is the thing I use to introduce me to mainstream culture; not the other way around. 

And, tbh, I am kind of enjoying doing it this way. I guess the main thing I fear about it is that I probably miss canon the first time around, because it turns out I find myself letting the *fandom* seduce me in. So, like, I know Fall Out Boy songs, and even had friends in bandom, and paid, like, zero attention to anything fannish, until I started reading bandom fic, and then I had to perform Fandom Anthropology, and uncover old LJ posts and new Tumblr primers and long lyrical analyses (that are WAY better than any analysis of any FOB lyric on Genius, those analyses are...weird, Idk). 

So, Idk, in ten years I’ll probably finally get the huge appeal of the big fandoms today. There’s a possibility I’m bad right now, at this point in my creative life, at, like, being part of the *active* fandom formation part of things. Which I don’t say in a way to imply that I’m annoyed with myself, because I’m not. I am doing lots of original writing because that’s apparently what I’m in the mood for and life is too short to fight with the things you want to write about, and6 being part of an active fandom is a very different energy than just kind of passively enjoying a fandom. If that makes sense? And I think you just go through cycles. My most creative fic periods coincided with a lot of soul-searching transitioning in my life as I staggered into my career. I feel like I’ve finally got a bit of a handle on who I am? And that feels a little bit like it’s unlocked an original writing impulse within me that honestly had been dormant for many, many years. 

Which is all to say: Being creative is an all-over-the-place experience. If you roll with it, you never know where you’re going to end up. And the key, I think, is to learn to just go with it without judging yourself too harshly for it. There’s no wrong way to do creativity. I don’t think there’s a wrong way to do fandom, either (apart from being a bully, of course).  The universe is infinitely expanding.