Snowflake Challenge #2: Fannish Origin Story

[ermingarden]

Today's challenge is to talk about my "fannish origin story." My first fandom was Star Wars, especially the old Expanded Universe novels. Like many people, I was writing fanfic before I knew there was a word for it, and certainly before I knew about online fanfic archives and fan communities! (I actually had a secret ambition of writing a Star Wars novel myself someday.)

Someone pointed me toward fanfiction.net before too long. I joined FFN in 2012, and when I checked the dates on my profiles I was shocked to see that I only joined AO3 in 2013 - in my memory the stretch of time when I was on FFN but didn't know about AO3 is longer, for some reason.

When I was first entering fandom, a lot of the people I looked up to were active in journal fandom, and I was honestly pretty intimidated. It took until 2018 for me to get up the nerve to join the cool kids on DW, and I'm very glad I did! The conversations I've had here have shaped my attitude toward writing and fandom in a really positive way - and, of course, I've made friends <3

Comments

[ermingarden]

This has me thinking back and realizing I've been kind of obsessed with Star Wars for the substantial majority of my life.

Interestingly, I do know one person who's really not into Star Wars, and it's my mom! She went to see A New Hope in the theater as a teenager and literally fell asleep. (Which is also impressive because it's not exactly a quiet movie.) She doesn't like Tolkien, either, and if I didn't look so much like her I'd almost wonder if we're actually related!

[elwendell]

I used to have a friend who could not stand any kind of movie or TV series that involved fantasy of any kind. She hated musicals and I told me her then boyfriend was disgusted when he took her to see the first Alien movie, and she laughed her way through the entire thing. I, on the other hand, rarely watch anything that does not have an element of fantasy.