Fictional Fans

I was into Doctor Who and Star Trek as a kid, and made up stories about them in my head, and even attended a Star Trek convention when I was, like, 8. (It scared the shit out of me and I did not go to another convention until I was in my 20s!)

But my first real fandom was X-Files. One friend was obsessed with it and convinced me to watch it, and I got hooked as well. I was in high school and it was in the very early days of the internet. We had a class on The Internet and one of my friends in the class managed to use his lab time wisely and dug up what I think might have been the very first Mulder/Krycek slash fic, which he gleefully showed me.

This was the era of mailing lists and Geocities rings, which I devoured and then started writing as well.

You know what? It was great. I don't have zero regrets (I was mean to some people, and some people were mean to me, and most of what I wrote was crap, and I have strong feelings about how the X-Files set us up for Trump and *gestures vaguely* all of this) but it was mostly a good experience. I met my best friend through one of those mailing lists. I learned how to conduct myself in an online community. I got far more experience with writing and editing than I would in any other milieu. I'm glad that the stuff I wrote is largely lost down the memory hole but a lot of what I learned and the friendships I made endured.