I think my first real fandom would have been Dr Who (I was a kid in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s - we had Dr Who on near-constant re-runs on the ABC, and this was the Old School stuff - Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davidson, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy - complete with BBC wobbly sets and all the rest). Actually, if we broaden it out, I think my main fandom as a kid would have been BBC science fiction - Dr Who, Blake's 7 (caught the tail end of the final series when I was about 8 and just old enough to stay up and watch it), Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and so on, but dropping out before Red Dwarf became a Thing.
First transformative fandom - technically, the band a-ha, about whom I hand-wrote (green ink) about 30 - 40 pages of self-insert fanfic at the age of about 15, involving myself and my friends.
The fandom that pulled me onto the internet - Pratchett fandom. I was a regular on alt.fan.pratchett back in the bad old days of Usenet from about mid-1997 through to about 2003, when my ISP at the time stopped carrying newsgroups. Met a lot of people, went to my first convention (Pratchettcon 2002), travelled overseas to meet people and such.
First online transformative fandom - Lord of the Rings. I got into this about the point where the movies came out in 2000 (when I was 29) - prior to this I'd tried to make my way through the books about once a decade since I was about 12, but kept bombing out during all the faffing around in the Shire in the early stages. The films actually gave me a good enough idea of what was going on with the story to get me into reading the books again, and once I got started, I was hooked. Stayed in LOTR fandom until the films had all come out, at which point I drifted away, and picked up a few others; usually from being directed there by the various enthusiasms of fandom friends and compatriots.
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I think my first real fandom would have been Dr Who (I was a kid in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s - we had Dr Who on near-constant re-runs on the ABC, and this was the Old School stuff - Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davidson, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy - complete with BBC wobbly sets and all the rest). Actually, if we broaden it out, I think my main fandom as a kid would have been BBC science fiction - Dr Who, Blake's 7 (caught the tail end of the final series when I was about 8 and just old enough to stay up and watch it), Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and so on, but dropping out before Red Dwarf became a Thing.
First transformative fandom - technically, the band a-ha, about whom I hand-wrote (green ink) about 30 - 40 pages of self-insert fanfic at the age of about 15, involving myself and my friends.
The fandom that pulled me onto the internet - Pratchett fandom. I was a regular on alt.fan.pratchett back in the bad old days of Usenet from about mid-1997 through to about 2003, when my ISP at the time stopped carrying newsgroups. Met a lot of people, went to my first convention (Pratchettcon 2002), travelled overseas to meet people and such.
First online transformative fandom - Lord of the Rings. I got into this about the point where the movies came out in 2000 (when I was 29) - prior to this I'd tried to make my way through the books about once a decade since I was about 12, but kept bombing out during all the faffing around in the Shire in the early stages. The films actually gave me a good enough idea of what was going on with the story to get me into reading the books again, and once I got started, I was hooked. Stayed in LOTR fandom until the films had all come out, at which point I drifted away, and picked up a few others; usually from being directed there by the various enthusiasms of fandom friends and compatriots.