I’ve always loved how fan works span the gamut, from art to games to videos to filk (and more). My particular expression of fan appreciation and art is the writing of fan fiction, but I’ve never for a moment thought that was the only valid way to creatively express love for a particular series. It’s just the one that drew most heavily on my unique mix of talents and interest.
One thing I particularly enjoy doing is watching fan vids. One vidder, LoveSMK, has become well-known in the SMK fandom for her excellent work in this area, and sometimes in the evening I’ll simply turn on her channel as a playlist. Whenever she posts a new video, it’s something of a treat. Working my way back through her archives is another one.
The first time I saw her 2021 video set to Kelsea Ballerini’s song, “Legends,” my jaw hit the floor.
My first thought was: this would be such a wonderful opening credits montage for a re-imagined series. My second thought was, this so perfectly captures all of what we love about our show, including the nostalgia that so many of us — particularly those of us who are old enough to remember its initial run on CBS — feel when we watch it.
This video has since become one of my “go-to” videos when I need a pick-me-up. It never fails to make me smile while it shows so many of the moments that made this show into what it was, and the sense of nostalgia and happy memories evoked in the song itself matches perfectly.
I knew, fairly early on, that I was going to have to write something in response to this video. I just wasn’t sure what it was going to be for a while.
At one point, I had posted several of my Scarecrow and Mrs. King stories in order using an AO3 series called, “The Usual Suspects.” At the time I created the series, I meant for that name to be a placeholder. It wasn’t going to be the final name for this fan fiction universe, but I hadn’t yet figured out what the name should be. For one thing, I hadn’t yet figured out the point behind what I was doing as I developed this particular sub-universe.
The name came into focus as I developed out the fifteen-book version and saw how the series is going to end. Without giving away too much, I can confirm that the final two stories in the series aren’t written from Lee’s or Amanda’s points of view. They’re written from the perspective of an adult Jamie, and they’re about coming to terms with his understanding, memories, and feelings about his mother and stepfather — the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.
Jamie’s emotional journey evoked the same mood as LoveSMK’s video: while the nostalgia is bittersweet, in the end, it turns out to all have been worth it.
Why, then, did I come upon the name Legends Lost?
Well, I can’t give away all of that answer yet because it would involve some significant spoilers. But I can say that it’s based on the lyric, “we will always be lost in forever.” That sharply reminds me of a meta-level line from a Star Trek: Enterprise fan fiction series that I love:
The real people had their own lives and then they died, and we will never really know what went on there. But these versions belong to all of us. They’ll never stop having adventures; they’ll never stop falling in love with each other. They’re immortal in a way real people can never hope to be.
That one paragraph sums up what it is we fans get from our participation in this wacky lifestyle known as fandom, and it also puts it into is proper perspective. We know that the characters and situations we love aren’t real. That’s not the point. The point is that the stories, and the truths behind them, speak to us in a way that so called “real” stories sometimes don’t. They give us a way to engage with those truths that’s safe and controlled, and helps prepare us for the far messier business of engaging with reality.
In the end, that may be the answer. Several members of the Scarecrow and Mrs. King cast have already passed on, and more will follow. They can’t live forever. Neither, for that matter, can we. That’s simply the way the world works.
But Lee and Amanda? The stories themselves? They can endure forever, and they will.
They endure because we return to them. Because we revisit them, reinterpret them, and, in our own ways, continue them. A fan vid, a story, a piece of art — each one is another way of keeping those characters in motion, another way of engaging with the truths that first drew us to them.
That is what Legends Lost ultimately means. Not that the legends are gone, but that they have passed out of the moment and into memory — no longer simple, no longer untouchable, but still present, still meaningful, still alive in a different way.
And as long as we continue to return and revisit them, reinterpret them, and tell their stories, they will remain what they have always been: not lost, but living on in the way only stories ever do.