fictional_fans | The First Baby Step

Some 20 years ago I was just entering my teenage years and ran into a Saint Seiya/Knights of the Zodiac rerun on cable--I had missed the original run, being a tad too young and taugh to sneer at "violent and perverse japanese cartoons" hah the damage prejudices did then--and wow it pushed so many of my buttons.
Plus a few months later we got internet at home for the first time and there I was, sneaking through Altavista to learn more about my favourite characters and their story, encountering episodes lists, fan sites, and... fanart. Fanfiction. Shipping. Yaoi!
I cringe just a little bit at the memory, oh to be so young and naïve and would-be-edgy, but mostly I look back fondly at it. While I'm relieved that my first atrocious attempts at fanfiction were lost with Geocity, I'm disappointed that most of my first awful attempts at fanart disappereared too, those I wish I'd saved. Some of them are safe at the bottom of a box but the worst, that is, the best examples of baby's-first-trashy-crack-and-porn that I wish I could share again because looking back on it I find them hilarious, got destroyed.

Saint Seiya

😍

Oh, the yaoi. It shocked me a lot the first time I found yaoi fanart, but after that - there was not turning back for me.

I was very lucky, the very first yaoi fanarts I encountered were hidden behind Big! Honking!! Warnings!!! but were actual very tame (just the faces, a hint of bare chests, maybe leaning on each other's shoulder or a kiss on the cheek, and, oh the horror, a dribble of blood on the ones Extra-Warned for Vampires?) and here I was, wondering 1) what all the fuss was about, 2) but why this pair of boys and not another one that had more chemistry? and uh the rest was history.

Well, the first I saw was even tamer - just holding hands, but for me it was the peak of obscenity. (Don't ask why; I was a strange kid. It might have been because it was a non-canon ship and I could not believe something like that existed rather than being yaoi - strange kid, told you.) Once I got over that, my thougt process went in the same direction as you - and as you say, the rest is history.

I watched the original Star Trek on a black and white TV. I overheard a girl in my school talking about Star Trek. I admitted I was a big fan. We'd meet up at her place and talk through our ideas about the characters -- we never thought to write them down.

Somehow we often ended up with Kirk/Spock. The best part was when we acted them out :,)

Guess I began as I meant to go on.

Somehow we often ended up with Kirk/Spock. The best part was when we acted them out :,)

In the immortal words of George Takei: Ohhhh myyyyy. ;)

ha ha ha

Ha! My first was also Trek, but it was the animated series I saw on a Saturday morning. It was astoundingly different from anything else I'd seen. I got my parents to watch and my mother noted that reruns of the live show were airing each night. It was the only thing my whole family watched together.

First "I have a crush on this character" was in the late 60s, the Aquaman cartoon and the original run of Star Trek.

First fanworks were in the late 70s after the release of the first Star Wars movie.

I didn't discover on-line fandom until 2002, but have frolicked most of the years since then. I think honestly the most fun I had in fandom was in those early days, in Saint Seiya and YGO:DM fandoms.

Edited (oops, formatting) 2020-09-15 18:44 (UTC)

Hm, I dind't realize having a crush on character counts as a fnadom thing. I think my first was from Tsubasa from Metal Fight Beyblade.

If I'd had anyone to talk to about it, I probably would have gone on endlessly about how dreamy Spock was. *g*

A few years later I used to race home from school, watch Dark Shadows and then get on the phone with my best friend to dissect the episodes and talk about how dreamy Barnabas/Quentin/et al. were.

But if you're taking fandom to specifically mean written fanworks and meta, then yea, 1977 and Star Wars.

Edited (added) 2020-09-17 11:57 (UTC)

My entry point was via a RL friend who had weekly X-Files watching parties at her house for the first few seasons of the show. This was when we were in middle school. The same friend was very tech-savvy and introduced me to the internet and the fact that organized fandom existed there, including fic.

I'd actually been writing fanfiction for years by then, probably since I was seven or eight? But I had no idea I wasn't the only one. Bless that friend for opening my eyes. :)

I remember having ideas while I was a kid - but I never thought about writing them until I found fanfic existed. But I also was sure I was the only one.

.... well, I feel a bit awkward about the answer given the creator's recent actions, but Harry Potter. I definitely look fondly on it - for the most part. There were moments, some on me (I was a teenage fan and very much a teenage fan sometimes), many on others. :P Still, I loved it, and actually think Harry Potter pretty much spoiled me for future fandoms. There was a love for the universe you don't find anywhere else. I've found subsequent fandoms a lot more focused on fanfic and, if live action, focused on the cast. I just can't relate to that. Don't get me wrong, Harry Potter was VERY much about fanart and fanfiction as well, but it was also about deep discussion and theories. There was much less of that in the fandoms I've tried being a part of since.

I already knew what fic was, though. I'd dabbled in some for other things I liked, and I'd been writing fanfic for a very long time. I just didn't know it had a name until middle school, and was never really involved in a fandom until high school.

Edited 2020-09-15 19:47 (UTC)

Harry Potter was one of my longest Fandom stays. I remember looking at the endless number of stories at FFN, wondering how it got so high...

It sounds you've had a wonderful experience there and that's nice!

I'm one of nature's lurkers, and I was aware of fandom long before I found it properly.

I first became aware that fandom existed as a teenager in the 80s, devouring all the books and magazines I could about Doctor Who and Star Trek, but I didn't have the nerve to try and contact anybody about it. It wasn't until I got online in the late '90s that I'd say that I was in fandom, and even then I was a lurker for a long time. The first fandom I read in was Buffy, but it was two or three fandoms later before I actually started talking to anyone. I do miss the days of LJ, partly because I had quite a few friends there, and partly because the main form of interaction was text, which is what I love most.

Hello, fellow lurker. I remember it took me the longest time to start interacting with people online (irl, I had my cousin to talk to - luckly we share most of our Fandoms)

*waves hello* I have a younger brother who shares a lot of my fannish shows, though he's not into online fandom, so that did give me some outlet. But I'm a reader, not a writer or creator, and getting up the nerve to say anything other than "I love your story" took a long time.

Even now it takes me all the bravery I can muster to leave a longer review or join a new fandom. If I have already gotten used to it a little... It takes almost all the bravery I can muster.

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.

You must have been an amazing eight-year-old to gather such bravery. (Meanwhile I'm still afraid of going to cons - and the current situation doesn't help at all.)

I was v. precocious, and my father (otherwise a dickhead) took me. Alas! It turned out that I am actually not into big crowded loud spaces, and it was full of middle aged dudes in velour with no time for an 8-year-old running around underfoot. I'm still scared of going to cons now too.

Ouch, that sounds bad. Poor kid.

I'm sure it wasn't as bad as I remember it! But I was skeeered.

My first fandom was Lord of the Rings - discovered through various parodies and jokes (I loved looking up humor stuff at the time), and somehow stumbled across fanfiction.net as a result. Read or looked at all ~200 fics in the LOTR section on there (before the films came out, lol) - though I didn't discover most of the other LOTR sites till years and years after that! But I didn't even *try* to write any fic for it until much, much later - like at least 10 years later! (It was a good number of years before I wrote ANYTHING; up till somewhere around 2007 I actually used to insist I wasn't a writer, LOL. I look now at my AO3 profile with over 100 fics and 200+k words and just laugh at my younger self. And even when I was definitely a writer, there was a good while I was too intimidated by LOTR to write anything for it; now I've written quite a few exchange fics for LOTR and feel quite comfortable with it.)

The first fandom I wrote something in was Smallville. I was on a family trip and handwrote the thing out, lol, which is kind of amazing to me because I generally don't have the patience to write out ANYTHING by hand (even a ficlet less than 500 words), but I guess I was inspired! I was on KryptonSite at the time, though I think I just posted my fic straight to ff.n. And it was decent enough to me that I imported it to AO3 later, which I thought was cool. (Not all of my next few fics were worth that, though, lol.)

And the first real fandom I got into as far as serious participation was probably Lois & Clark; I read thousands of fanfics, posted a lot on the message boards, participated in the Kerth Awards ceremony online, and spent hours and hours chatting on the IRC channel on Undernet with people who became friends, some of whom I'm still in contact with.

So I think of all three of those as my "first fandom" in a way.

I'm not counting the stories I made up as a child before I heard of fandom, though those were fanfics in a way; in most of those cases I would borrow the general storyline of the book or film and come up with my own characters to reproduce the same story with, rather than take the existing characters and invent new adventures for them. And I didn't write much of that out; it was more for me to tell myself to imagine with, and a very solitary adventure. No one else I knew did anything like that and I had almost no friends as a child owing to moving around a lot and being very unusual - wasn't till I was an adult that I realized I had Asperger's and suddenly so much of my life made sense, lol. So it never occurred to me that that was anything that other people did or that I should look for people online in relation to that. Wasn't until I was into fandom for some years before I went "huh, I sort of made up fanfic as a kid, didn't I", lol. Fortunately none of that was ever posted anywhere for people to see! I have some papers with names, ages, and other details, and I think somewhere I *might* have an old story or two that I actually typed up (but it wasn't a story with dialogue as much as it was a "this happened, and then this happened" sort of litany). It's just as well that no one ever saw them, lol.

Hm, kid!me's stories where also mostly of 'this happened, that happened' variety. And I agree about hand-writing - at most I can note down a detail I don't want to forget (and only if my phone/laptop can't be used.)

Late 60s, The Jungle Books by Kipling, age 8, quickly followed in the next few years by Star Trek on the black and white TV and ACD's Sherlock Holmes and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

"Cos"play (acting out characters, wearing things symbolic of the characters) and stories in my head mostly.

Mid 70s, my first experience of sharing fandom with others was in high school, my gfs and I wrote fanfic about our favorite band.

As a kid I also had lots of stories in my head. (I say kid, but kept doing it as a teen, too).

Pokemon was my first real fandom, which I think I got into through being on usenet as a kid. I had an OC who was Gay's older sister, who had purple hair and was a member of Team Rocket :p I was pretty into Team Rocket. Also rivalshipping. (And honestly, my tastes haven't changed much, even if the fandoms have.) I used to make little fanshrines, which is mortifying and adorable in retrospect. I'm pretty sure these are now lost to the depths of time, although you can still find some of my early fic on ff.net /o\

Pokemon was my childhood, along with Yu-Gi-Oh and D. Gray-man (it aried on the children's channel and my parents believed anything animated was good for children), but I never wrote much about it. But I also liked Team Rocket a lot - especially James.

I became aware of fanfiction around 2000- Harry Potter, as it happens. I read some in a rather vague way, without a thought I would write myself. Then, in 2003 I saw a promo shot of Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook in Peter Pan and somehow that picture triggered me into writing. I wrote almost feverishly for two years. Eventually realising it was very therapeutic for me, and purging a lot of things festering in my mind. Then I didn't write much until 20014 when a rewatch of Classic Doctor Who made me fall in love with writing once again. Since then I have been writing more or less steadily, in a number of fandoms- whatever takes my fancy. :)

Yeah, my first readings went like this. I never imagined I would write a story at first. Writing in multiple fandoms is hard (at least imo), so good luck with that!

I got into Pokemon and Digimon when I was little and it was my first microcosm of fandom - writing fanfic and drawing fanart pretty much for myself. I visited a lot of Geocities sites back then for cheats and stuff - saw some fanart and fanfic but didn't really engage beyond quick looks at it.
I first discovered the Harry Potter fandom via LiveJournal, and that was what really got me into fannish circles. Especially knowing that you were allowed - encouraged! - to ship things that weren't at least heavily implied in canon! (I thought I was alone back in Pokemon land shipping Ash and Gary and not having a word for it - all the sites were all about Ash and Misty haha)

In some ways, I'm very glad we have options and easier ways to share fan joy and connect with each other. On the other hand... There was something incredibly lovely about old hand-coded sites, the level of commitment and love that went into them. And I love LJ-style communities better than I ever loved Tumblr. It's a huge part of why I'm back on DW now!

It took me very long time to realize I can ship things that aren't at minimum heavily imliped. That's way I have no ships for most of the things I watched as kid - even when I rewatch them.

I absolutely agree about Tumblr. I tried it once and still have my account there, but I don't use it at all. (Expect the one or two times I was looking for icons.)

I watched ST:TOS as it was aired because my terrible husband was a huge fan, and I certainly couldn't talk to him about it even if I'd had the terminology! A few years later a woman at a party was talking about K/S and I felt a strong kinship with her, but I never met her again and had other concerns.

Fast forward to 2001, when an internet friend in Michigan with whom I read manga found out that there was to be something called yaoicon right across the Bay and insisted I go. Which I did, for one day, and it totally sensor-overloaded me but there was no turning back. I'm not entirely sure how Gundam Wing became my first acknowledged fandom, since what I purchased at yaoicon was a Trigun fan comic. There may have been some recruiting for one or more GW yahoo groups, because that's where I ended up; they were great! I still know people I met there, including a very close friend. In April 2002 I was given an invite to LJ by

darthneko, and at year's end I fell into LotR. Nothing's hit me like that since, though I've been active in XM:FC and Rivers of London.

It's nice to write this all out.^_^ <-- very old anime fan credential

Coming in late:

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.

The First Baby Step

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