libraralien: (Default)
libraralien ([personal profile] libraralien) wrote2020-01-05 09:35 pm
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Snowflake Challenge #2

Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.


Oh man, this is a fun one for me because my fannish history is extremely meandering. I kept only just barely not getting into transformative fandom for...many years, and also have strong lurker tendencies. Put behind a cut, because the description is also extremely meandering.

I was big into Harry Potter as a kid, they came out when I was little and I started reading them between books 4 and 5, probably on the later end, near 2003. I was even online in HP fandom, but only as a lurker, and not really reading fic. I was mostly remember reading theories and predictions. I do remember I must have read a couple Marauder era fics, I THINK Remus/Sirius. I also remember reading one fic involving Ron and something sexual happened and I closed it. I don't really remember how I ended up at any of those fics, but that must have been when I was first aware of fanfic as a thing that existed.

I was also very much into Star Trek (mostly TOS) around this time. I had a Star Trek Encyclopedia that I would just carry around and read cover to cover like a novel. To this day I have not watched Voyager, but I know all the main characters thanks to that encyclopedia. Also lurking on forums, still never posting.

By 2009-ish I would occasionally look up fic for things, but I still only conceptualized it as a thing that existed, rather than a community, if that makes sense. I looked up and read Clerks fic at one point, I remember clearly. I also have a memory of looking up fic for History Boys, and finding an LJ community, but not knowing how to navigate it and giving up. I also watched Buffy, Firefly, Torchwood, Star Trek DS9, and House MD around this time, all of which I would later come back and read fic for, though was not doing so at the time. Also around this time I developed slash goggles, and was seeking out books with gay plots and enjoying slashiness in things I watched and read, but did not know the term or that there was a lot of it out there.

I think I made my tumblr in 2010, and started getting getting exposed to and drawn into fandom as a community that way. I will say, for it's many flaws, tumblr made it very easy for a shy lurker who feels she has nothing to contribute to kind of slide into fandom without even really realizing. The first thing I remember reading on AO3 was The Breakfast Club fic (Brian/Bender). My profile tells me that I made my AO3 account in the December of 2013. I had read A Song of Ice and Fire that summer, and also Pacific Rim came out, and I definitely was intentionally going through AO3 to read fic for both of those, so 2013 is when I consider myself as having first gotten "into" fandom. I didn't post my first fic until 2016, and started volunteering for the OTW around that time too.

I could go into my fandom history since then, but to me it's much less interesting! I've been more or less doing the same kinds of activities (reading, writing, participating in exchanges, volunteering) since then! I talked about some of my fandoms in my Snowflake Challenge #1 post. I did experience my first loss of platform, a fannish rite-of-passage it seems, with tumblr's NSFW ban and have kind of ended up here and twitter. And most notably, I started attending cons in 2017, and have found those to be a very fulfilling development in my fannish life since then!

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