The First Baby Step

[polarissruler]

After recently I made a post in my journal about my first fandom, I decided to ask - how did it began to you? What was your first fandom? How did you found it? Did you start writing/drawing/reading/whatever else first? And do you look fondly on those good old days, or not so much?

Comments

[doranwen]

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.

[polarissruler]

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.)