Entry tags:
Snowflake Challenge day 2
Well, at this rate I should be done by the time the snowflakes melt ...
Day 2: In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.
It's complicated! I only got into fanfic in my mid-20s, and got into it in stages - that is, I wasn't just All In on the whole thing at once (reading it, writing it, talking to people about it); I kind of eased in by way of anime fandom.
I've always done that wildly obsessive thing that I still do now, with a variety of books and comics and TV shows across my entire childhood, but I really wasn't around people who appreciated it, so I just did it for the most part on my own. I drew fan comics - I particularly remember drawing little Star Trek TOS cartoons for my sister - and described entire episodes of whatever I was into in exhaustive detail in my diary, but otherwise my creative urges were mostly channeled into writing original fiction that just happened to bear some striking resemblance to whatever I was into at the time.
I went off to college in 1995 and got online, but I was still mainly in original fiction circles and remained that way for years - which at the time were largely separate. I participated in various mailing lists dealing with creative discussion and SF/fantasy worldbuilding, and I gradually became aware of message boards and chatted with people about TV shows and books. I also found out that fanfic was a thing and read it now and then.
I still remember exactly the thought process that went into writing fanfic for the first time around 1999 or 2000: I thought it would be an interesting challenge, so I decided to see if I could write fanfic for some of the books I was interested in, and did some little missing scenes and such. Then I tried writing something similar for some of the anime I was watching. I had been interested in anime since my teens in the 80s (Robotech and such, the stuff that was around on US TV in the 80s, and I had looked up enough to learn what anime was and where it came from). And I watched a little of it in college. But when it started to hit the US video store market in a big way in the late 90s, my then-roommate and I got into it, and we watched a bunch of it in the late 90s, including the first half of the anime Trigun (all that was officially released at the time).
I got wildly invested in that show, and after moving to a different state, uprooted and lonely, I ended up for the first time figuring out how to get my hands on fansubs - this was in 2000, so my sources were message boards and Ebay - and watched the rest of it with terrible subs ... and then I dived into fanfic with a passion. My first big project was a 100K+ "sequel" to the Trigun anime that I posted in bi-weekly chapters for about a year. I also ran a Yahoo discussion group for it and people sent me fanart.
It was a heady time. I was wildly into anime for a few years, in the days of website hit counters and message boards and Streamload (kind of an early Dropbox; a lot of anime was passed around this way because you could "streambeam" it to another person's account without having to download over our inevitably slow connections) and animemusicvideos.org and LimeWire. I started learning how to make AMVs in about 2002 on my eMac from a combination of digital fansub files and Saiyuki DVDs that I bought at Best Buy and ripped. (I never posted any of those, although I still have some of them; it was purely for fun.) I completely missed the VHS vidding era - I gather the anime fandom were early adopters, because by the time I started getting interested in vids in 2000, digital was already ubiquitous. Anime fans were very young, very online, and very international. There might have been local anime events going on around me, but I was never aware of it; everything I knew was online.
You can get an idea of the various fandoms I bounced through by looking at my first few years of AO3, although that doesn't really tell the whole story because there were a lot I didn't write fanfic for. Trigun and Dragonball Z were my two big fanfic fandoms, but as far as what I was into, I remember going through Yugioh, Saiyuki, Yami No Matsuei, Cowboy Bebop, early One Piece, and early Fullmetal Alchemist, among others. Sort of a who's who of early-2000s shounen anime/manga.
I didn't have a lot of social interaction with other people in anime fandom, however - I transacted with other people to get fansubs, scanlations, or vids, but my social life was going on elsewhere. I was extremely involved in comics conventions and non-fanfic comics fandom at this time, and when I was chatting with people online, it was mostly on comics message boards. I'm still friends with a number of people from those days, fellow small-press indie comics creators, some of whom have since gone pro or moved into tradpub or done something entirely different with their lives.
Over in anime fandom, I was all too aware that, as a person in my mid to late 20s, I was considerably older than most people I was in fandom with. (Meanwhile I was one of the youngest people among the comics fans I was hanging out with.) I became friends with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
xparrot, really the only friend I still have from that era in my fanfic-fandom life, in part because she was one of the only people I interacted with who was about my age and also into the same things I was into fanfic-wise: gen h/c, which was my "brand" even then. Gen and h/c were both not that popular in anime fandom circles of the time, and Xparrot and I stood out because we wrote a lot of it in a fandom milieu where it was fairly uncommon.
It was Xparrot, in fact, who talked me into joining LJ in about 2005. I hadn't done any blogging and in fact I didn't do much with my LJ for the first year or so, other than post occasionally - but then in spring 2006 I got into Stargate Atlantis, which I would say was my first big Western media fandom. It was also huge on LJ, and really my first experience being in a big fandom at the height of its popularity - I guess Dragonball Z was also kind of that, but because I wasn't really active on the social side of it, I mostly just read fanfic and the majority of the fandom passed me by.
But SGA was when I really started making friends in fandom, and doing all the sort of standard fandom things - participating in exchanges, running events, things like that. I'd say *that* was the point from which there's an uninterrupted line pointing from there to here; I've changed a lot of things along the way (went from LJ to DW, from ff.net to AO3; got on Tumblr and Discord) but I'm still interacting with a lot of the same people, and doing things in a similar way, without the big sea changes in the kind of things I was doing in the early years.
Day 2: In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.
It's complicated! I only got into fanfic in my mid-20s, and got into it in stages - that is, I wasn't just All In on the whole thing at once (reading it, writing it, talking to people about it); I kind of eased in by way of anime fandom.
I've always done that wildly obsessive thing that I still do now, with a variety of books and comics and TV shows across my entire childhood, but I really wasn't around people who appreciated it, so I just did it for the most part on my own. I drew fan comics - I particularly remember drawing little Star Trek TOS cartoons for my sister - and described entire episodes of whatever I was into in exhaustive detail in my diary, but otherwise my creative urges were mostly channeled into writing original fiction that just happened to bear some striking resemblance to whatever I was into at the time.
I went off to college in 1995 and got online, but I was still mainly in original fiction circles and remained that way for years - which at the time were largely separate. I participated in various mailing lists dealing with creative discussion and SF/fantasy worldbuilding, and I gradually became aware of message boards and chatted with people about TV shows and books. I also found out that fanfic was a thing and read it now and then.
I still remember exactly the thought process that went into writing fanfic for the first time around 1999 or 2000: I thought it would be an interesting challenge, so I decided to see if I could write fanfic for some of the books I was interested in, and did some little missing scenes and such. Then I tried writing something similar for some of the anime I was watching. I had been interested in anime since my teens in the 80s (Robotech and such, the stuff that was around on US TV in the 80s, and I had looked up enough to learn what anime was and where it came from). And I watched a little of it in college. But when it started to hit the US video store market in a big way in the late 90s, my then-roommate and I got into it, and we watched a bunch of it in the late 90s, including the first half of the anime Trigun (all that was officially released at the time).
I got wildly invested in that show, and after moving to a different state, uprooted and lonely, I ended up for the first time figuring out how to get my hands on fansubs - this was in 2000, so my sources were message boards and Ebay - and watched the rest of it with terrible subs ... and then I dived into fanfic with a passion. My first big project was a 100K+ "sequel" to the Trigun anime that I posted in bi-weekly chapters for about a year. I also ran a Yahoo discussion group for it and people sent me fanart.
It was a heady time. I was wildly into anime for a few years, in the days of website hit counters and message boards and Streamload (kind of an early Dropbox; a lot of anime was passed around this way because you could "streambeam" it to another person's account without having to download over our inevitably slow connections) and animemusicvideos.org and LimeWire. I started learning how to make AMVs in about 2002 on my eMac from a combination of digital fansub files and Saiyuki DVDs that I bought at Best Buy and ripped. (I never posted any of those, although I still have some of them; it was purely for fun.) I completely missed the VHS vidding era - I gather the anime fandom were early adopters, because by the time I started getting interested in vids in 2000, digital was already ubiquitous. Anime fans were very young, very online, and very international. There might have been local anime events going on around me, but I was never aware of it; everything I knew was online.
You can get an idea of the various fandoms I bounced through by looking at my first few years of AO3, although that doesn't really tell the whole story because there were a lot I didn't write fanfic for. Trigun and Dragonball Z were my two big fanfic fandoms, but as far as what I was into, I remember going through Yugioh, Saiyuki, Yami No Matsuei, Cowboy Bebop, early One Piece, and early Fullmetal Alchemist, among others. Sort of a who's who of early-2000s shounen anime/manga.
I didn't have a lot of social interaction with other people in anime fandom, however - I transacted with other people to get fansubs, scanlations, or vids, but my social life was going on elsewhere. I was extremely involved in comics conventions and non-fanfic comics fandom at this time, and when I was chatting with people online, it was mostly on comics message boards. I'm still friends with a number of people from those days, fellow small-press indie comics creators, some of whom have since gone pro or moved into tradpub or done something entirely different with their lives.
Over in anime fandom, I was all too aware that, as a person in my mid to late 20s, I was considerably older than most people I was in fandom with. (Meanwhile I was one of the youngest people among the comics fans I was hanging out with.) I became friends with
xparrot, really the only friend I still have from that era in my fanfic-fandom life, in part because she was one of the only people I interacted with who was about my age and also into the same things I was into fanfic-wise: gen h/c, which was my "brand" even then. Gen and h/c were both not that popular in anime fandom circles of the time, and Xparrot and I stood out because we wrote a lot of it in a fandom milieu where it was fairly uncommon.It was Xparrot, in fact, who talked me into joining LJ in about 2005. I hadn't done any blogging and in fact I didn't do much with my LJ for the first year or so, other than post occasionally - but then in spring 2006 I got into Stargate Atlantis, which I would say was my first big Western media fandom. It was also huge on LJ, and really my first experience being in a big fandom at the height of its popularity - I guess Dragonball Z was also kind of that, but because I wasn't really active on the social side of it, I mostly just read fanfic and the majority of the fandom passed me by.
But SGA was when I really started making friends in fandom, and doing all the sort of standard fandom things - participating in exchanges, running events, things like that. I'd say *that* was the point from which there's an uninterrupted line pointing from there to here; I've changed a lot of things along the way (went from LJ to DW, from ff.net to AO3; got on Tumblr and Discord) but I'm still interacting with a lot of the same people, and doing things in a similar way, without the big sea changes in the kind of things I was doing in the early years.
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And I'm not even remotely surprised that you've always been a gen h/c person, I think it's one of those things where you're just wired that way... (also, xparrot is one of those people whose fic I will read canon-blind just for the fantastic h/c!)
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And yeah, I also think some people are simply wired like that. I liked it and wrote it even before I knew it was a thing or there were words for any of it.
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Trek club, which was just as wonderful and dorky as it sounds. LOL But I didn't find online fandom until I was in grad school.
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That sounds like a fun ride into and through fandom! I also didn't know you had such a background in anime. Interesting! :)
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/joke
/sort of joke
In all seriousness the amount of cringe that I have reading my teenage diaries is exponentially magnified by imagining at least some of that being online. That being said, there's plenty of stuff I wrote as a teenager that I wouldn't mind other people reading, or at least knowing about, so hopefully teen!me would've been halfway decent at curating her online existence ...
I think I would have enjoyed knowing about the existence of online fandom and I would have LOVED serial online storytelling. (I used to adore comics and soap operas, and wished that something more like that existed for text.) I imagine that if I had been online, any other option would be equally hard to imagine! But I like that I had the privacy and mental space in the pre-internet world to spend a lot of time developing my own worlds, which is something I don't do much anymore.
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I also got invited to LJ really early, in 2002, so I got to experience the full craziness of online HP fandom in its heyday and nothing has come close to matching the insanity since.
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(I'm pretty sure I knew you were on LJ quite a bit before I was, but yeah, that was a heyday I completely missed out on!)
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It also blows my mind a little that I managed to be in online fandom longer than you, somehow XD But I did find my way to anime fandom first when I got online (Sailor Moon for the little teen mee XD It ran at 5:30am every morning and I watched it regularly before school. Then once I learned how bad the dubs were and the lack of later seasons ... I used to borrow Chinese dubbed SM VHS tapes from the library, printing the transcript of English translations next to me as I watched it ^^;;; and that is the most obsessed I've ever acted in any fandom XD)
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VHS and fan translations! I also remember reading online transcripts of episodes of shows I couldn't watch, back before everything was streaming. IIRC I "watched" a bunch of Stargate SG1 that way when it was airing a year ahead on cable that I didn't have.
I am delighted that my smarmy gen was exactly what you wanted, though! I need to write more smarmy gen.
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