Meme: February 26: O Canada

[dira]

February 26 - commodorified requested and required me to talk about Canada Fandom.

I feel like this is probably a term that requires at least a little explaining, and I expect I am probably the wrong person to do the explaining, but I'll give it a shot from my American-former-member-of-due-South-fandom perspective.

My sense of "Canada fandom" is that it refers to a tendency of a swathe of fandom centered on Canadian media, which I saw as epicentered on due South fandom and spreading outward through other shows and movies featuring Paul Gross, Callum Keith Rennie, Hugh Dillon, and other people who seem to show up in movies with those actors possibly on the basis of a casting phone tree. On top of being fannish about all these sources featuring Canadians, and set in Canada, a lot of people seem to extend a certain fannish attachment to the country of Canada itself, in a way that I have to assume is super weird to actual Canadians. (Sorry, Canadians. IN THE END, IT'S LOVE.)

Having happy fannish feelings about maple leaves and curling and the Canadian Arctic were all just sort of extensions of having happy fannish feelings about Benton Fraser, who loved those things, too, and then, you know: Canada fandom. I guess why Canada is sort of answerable in terms of readily available English-language media for the average USAn fan and sort of like... why corgis and why otters and why flower crowns. Because the internet, eh?

I myself had the odd sensation of being a little bit of a Canada hipster upon arriving in due South fandom: having grown up in southeast lower Michigan as a hockey fan, I already had my own fair share of exposure to excellent things coming from Canada. I totally liked Canada before it was cool, you guys. It was the birthplace of a solid half of the Red Wings roster. I grew up with the CBC as a standard TV channel. From the small town where I grew up, the nearest water park was over the border in Canada. In high school the annual drama club was to see The Phantom of the Opera in Toronto, and my parents redeemed the betrayal of forbidding me my middle school class trip by packing me off to Canada for a weekend at age fourteen. When I was in college Canada was where you went to drink legally in bars at age nineteen or twenty, and in the morning you could get Tim Horton's and Kinder Eggs before you crossed back over the border. So I always knew that Canada was where to get better chocolate and freer drinks and it was some little fraction as weird for me, encountering people who thought Canada was mostly about Mounties and Canadian films, as it must be for Canadians. Canada was the (excellent) place across the river for me, and I had always loved it in that way, even before I got into the fandoms that loved it along with me.

Comments

[kass]

Because the internet, eh?

♥

[sage]

<333

[sapphoisburning]

Did you watch Canadian kids shows growing up? I was way into Mr. Dressup, Fred Penner, Under the Umbrella Tree, and Canadian Sesame Street, but that's partially because where we lived in Detroit when I was little we couldn't get cable but we could pick up TV Ontario with rabbit ears.

Having watched these shows as an American is kind of like growing up in an alternate universe, where none of my friends have heard of this stuff, except for when I meet a Canadian who wants to get nostalgic.

[dira]

Mr. Dressup and Fred Penner, definitely, and I think Canadian Sesame Street? With more French than American Sesame Street? I may have missed Under the Umbrella Tree. :)

[mmegaera]

This is what Murdoch fandom is like, too, only a lot older [wry g].

I didn't discover the wonders of the CBC until I moved here near Seattle in my thirties. I suspect I missed out on a lot.

[dira]

I still miss being able to switch over to CBC coverage of hockey and the Olympics. :)

[mmegaera]

My only gripe with Canadian coverage of the winter Olympics is that they spend an awful lot of time covering curling [g].

But otherwise? Definitely.

[shehasathree]

Thanks for this post, it was great to read. Still haven't watched Due South, but was a bit of a NHL fan in my teenage years (in Australia, of all places).

[dira]

I am a bit of a Due South heretic (well, maybe apostate, technically) these days, so I'll say you can go a while longer without watching it. But yay hockey! :D

[barometry]

Maybe I don't have a lot of contact with Canada Fandom, as distinguished from "fans who are Canadian"? But to the extent that I've seen something like "Canada Fandom" on places like tumblr, it's not that terribly weird to me. Canada is awesome, but also: when we're trying to define our own national character, Canadians don't do much better than "hockey, nature, mounties, ...socialized medicine? Also we say 'zed', and leave a 'u' in 'colour'." So it's hardly dismaying if other people focus on the same things.

Despite that, I think I'm probably glad I was never really "in" Due South fandom, because as a lifelong city-dwelling Canadian who has never seen a red mountie uniform in real life, I found the show's equivalence between "Canadian" and "Benton Fraser" kind of baffling.

(Though I will heart Paul Gross through all of his Canadian cinematic endeavours, and in honour of the recently-ended Olympics, I really think that everyone who hasn't should watch Men With Brooms, the curling-centric underdog-sports-team movie that is also a romantic comedy where Paul Gross's ex-girlfriend left him to be an astronaut. It's way better than that description gives it any right to be.)

[dira]

...I am suddenly reminded that one of the things I miss from the CBC is those Molson I AM CANADIAN commercials. I once somehow committed one to memory on first watching (and then I think had a conversation with someone about how I enjoyed Canadian patriotism because it was focused on beer and hockey even while I felt super squirmy about American patriotism which so often focuses on, you know, war and exclusion?)

I love Men with Brooms SO MUCH. It is the movie that made me able to forgive Paul Gross for the over-the-top self-parody that Benton Fraser became in the latter years of Due South, and it's such a perfect Sports Movie, idek.

[minim_calibre]

Canada is where we store my extended family!

I kind of dig Canada fandom. I mean, I totally suffer from Canada Rose Colo(u)red Glasses (emotionally--intellectually, I certainly know better), as growing up in the US (even in such an almost-Canadian part as Seattle) in the 1980s made me wonder why my parents hadn't ever moved *back* to the Motherland, so I feel Canada Fandom contains my emotional kindred or something.

Only, y'know, without the shiny Certificate of Foreign Birth from Ottawa.

Regardless, I would share with them my Timbits. If there were ever any leftover when we get back from visiting family. Which there rarely are. It's a long drive.

Because Seattle is almost-Canadian, and my parents are both from Canada (as is my sister), I grew up on CBC children's programming. Mr Dressup and The Friendly Giant were more of a part of my childhood than The Electric Company (though that was mostly due to my mother's dislike of the latter).

[dira]

...Man, now I just want some Timbits. COME ON TIM HORTON'S, WISCONSIN IS A BORDER STATE TOO. COLONIZE US FASTER.

[renenet]

Sorry to be a downer, but, technically, Wisconsin is not a border state at all. Like, if you look on Google Maps at the dashed line state boundaries that extend out into Lake Superior, Wisconsin totally gets cock-blocked by Minnesota's and Michigan's dashed lines before reaching Canada's. (And I totally swear that this is how they measure such things, for real, because the Wikipedia page on the US-Canada border says Pennsylvania has 62 km (42 mi) of border with Canada. Having grown up in NW Pennsylvania I can assure you that those 62km are somewhere out in Lake Erie.)

/reference librarian :)

But perhaps Tim Horton's could be convinced to lob some Timbits at the Apostle Islands from Thunder Bay? We could send trucks up to bring them down to us in SE Wisconsin.

[dira]

Okay, um. WE'RE A NORTHERN TIER STATE. IF IT'S GOING TO BE THIS COLD WE SHOULD BE CONSOLED BY TIMBITS, I AM JUST SAYING.

[renenet]

I, too, would welcome the Timbits brigade of our Great Northern Overlord's Arctic Invasion. I assume they also bring thermoses of hot chocolate with them?

[dira]

You gotta wash down the Timbits somehow, and they don't really go with beer, so I assume that's how it works!

[sperrywink]

So much love. Canada does good tv.

[dira]

<3 <3 <3

[sophia_sol]

as a Canadian, Canada fandom is really kind of weird to me - but also awesome because like nobody else ever talks about Canada? So it's nice to get confirmation that we exist and are worth talking about! (relatedly, every time I read the word "eh" I'm kind of thrown because even though I use it irl all the time I'm just so not used to seeing it written down.)

[dira]

Aww, yay! I'm glad it's the nice kind of weird. <3

[petronia]

Man, I have lived this long without knowing there was such a thing as Canada Fandom, but aww. XD

(It occurred to me this year, during Olympics season, that Canadians are intensely proud of being liked, in a way I'm not sure people from other countries are -- that we're actually really happy that our international reputation is something on the order of "that nice lady who always shows up at potlucks with the great macaroni salad".)

[dira]

Heee, that reminds me of the fact that I was told, when going to study abroad for a summer in England, that people in England who thought you were North American would often ask if you were Canadian, because Americans were generally really chuffed to be thought Canadian while Canadians tended to be a bit offended to be mistaken for Americans. And it was true, I got asked at least once if I was Canadian and was totally excited about it. :)