Fandom origins.

[gabolange]

Apparently it is January and once again time for the Snowflake Challenge! I will presumably do a few challenges and not others, but hey, tis a snowy, sleepy Friday where I am and so.

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.

This is one of those things where there's either a lot of story or none at all. I have always been a certain kind of fan--the kind that wanted their stories to continue, who wanted to play in these big, fun universes that media created.

I started writing fanfic in my head as a very young child. I found it on the internet in the very early days of Gossamer and MSR, and possibly wrote some horrifying Mulder x Scully fic with a friend when I was eleven. I mostly diverted myself by reading Star Wars extended universe novels, which I collected and read until they fell apart.

And then in 1998 or so, I started watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I was 14, I had unlimited Internet access. I started reading SeemaG's fanfic, though on her old website, which even has a section for the work I would have been reading at the time.

And that was the beginning. I started writing fic with Voyager in around 1999, including with my own Geocities page. Some of those stories were until recently archived at ParisNights, which seems to have gone down in the last year or so. I mostly lurked in college, when I found Farscape and Bablyon 5 and hopped (quietly) headlong into LJ culture. I started writing fic in "the modern era" in 2006. I survived Strikethrough.

And I have never left. I am now a fandom elder, in a quiet way. I've been on AO3 since the second day of open beta. I still post to Dreamwidth, but have managed to both build communities on Tumblr and Discord. I've written in 18 fandoms. I met my person in fandom, now 18 years ago. The person I am in the closest contact with, fannishly, I met at around the same time. I continue to make new friends and find new stories and write more words.

I grew up here, and now I suspect I'll grow old here, too.

Comments

[gabolange]

Yeah, there's a lot of chatter these days about how fandom is losing its community focus, and I think in many contexts that is true--but having people who are active and participatory in that (old school?) way to engaging goes a lot way to maintaining it all.

[silveradept]

It does. There's just a lot of people choosing to be bad fans to those doing their fandom in public, so I get not wanting to do it in public. (I wish they would, because it's great stuff, but I get why not.)