Snowflake Challenge Day #2

[kingstoken]

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

I'm not sure where to start, but here goes.

When I was young I was a sports fan, I watched the Blue Jays, the Leafs, figure skating (I had a picture of Kurt Browning on my wall) and showjumping (I was a little obsessed with horses at one point, and I have a photo of me with the great jumper Big Ben). I was fannish about these things, but not in a transformative way.

When it came to media fandom I was blessed to have a brother, and a male as one of my best friends, and through them I was lucky enough to be introduced to things like superheroes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well loving all the girly things like Barbie and My Little Pony. I remember, years later, going to University, and when I would talk to some of the other young woman in my dorm, I would be surprised at how few of them had ever watched Batman The Animated Series or Transformers to name a few.

My mother introduced me to the original Star Trek, we used to watch the reruns on Saturday afternoons, if I remember correctly, and later we watched The Next Generation together.

I did things like shipping when I was young, but I didn't understand what that was at the time. I just remember loving certain parings and really wanting them to get together, a few examples Storm/Wolverine, Jesse/James (Pokemon), Picard/Crusher, among many others. I also vaguely remember writing some bad poetry inspired by my favourite characters and pairings. Side note, when I was about 25 I threw out almost all of my teenage poetry, thinking I was too old for that, and now I wish I hadn't done that, not because it was good, it probably wasn't, but I wish I could look back now and see how my writing has progressed over the decades.

My first time being actively involved in a fandom was The X-Files, at university I was part of the X-Files club, we used to watch episodes together and have discussions after. We even tried to host, well not a con, but an event, it didn't turn out so great, the only people who turned up were our friends, probably out of a sense of obligation. I later left X-Files fandom, mostly because I didn't like the way the show was going, plus I did not want Mulder and Scully together (yes I guess I was an anti, shippers turn away in horror).

I missed all of early online fandom, and I'm super jealous of people who talk about being on mailing lists and having a GeoCities page. I lived in a rural area for majority of my life and internet access was poor or nonexistent. I spent many years travelling to school computer labs or local libraries to use their computers, and when you went you often had specific things that needed to be accomplished and there were sometimes time limits on how long you could be on the computer, plus their was always others waiting for your spot, so it didn't leave a lot of time for casual browsing. We didn't have home internet until 2007ish and even then it was spotty at best. I could go into this more, but it would make this post way too long and not really about fandom.

I came into tranformative fandom later in life than most people, I wasn't in my first online fandom until my early 30s, that is when I wrote my first fanfiction and posted it to tumblr. In fact, tumblr introduced me to a lot of my fandom life. My first online fandom was Game of Thrones/ASOIAF, followed by The Walking Dead, and several others since. I got my A03 account basically because their was some scare in 2015 that they might shut down tumblr, it turned out to be false, but it forced me to do some online research and I asked for an A03 invite, just so I could back up my stories in another place. Since then I have never looked back, and I post my stories almost exclusively there now. My first exchange, I think, was the Caryl Secret Santa on tumblr, my first A03 based exchange was Yuletide or the Small Fandoms Fest. This past year I have done several exchanges, they challenge me, and it is fun to make something for someone else.

Anyways, this went on way longer than I intended, and I'm probably forgetting some stuff, but here is fannish me, as it were.

Comments

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Cool! I liked learning more about you!

[kingstoken]

I'm glad you enjoyed it, it feels a little weird to talk about myself so much, but trying to condense down one's fannish history was harder to do than I thought.