Snowflake Challenge #2

[mistressofmuses]

For snowflake_challenge: "Talk about your fannish origin story."

My true fandom origin stretches back before I can specifically remember - coming up with games and play-acting stories based on the shows I watched and books I read. I would imagine my own Pokemon team as I played in my yard, or come up with improbable ways in which I could meet and hang out with characters from Redwall or Valdemar or Tortall or Sailor Moon. I don't think I ever wrote any of those stories down; I just acted them out when playing. (Though in middle school I did start to write a story that was absolutely just a thinly-veiled, serial-numbers-filed-off version of Outlaw Star, haha.)

My first formal introduction to the idea of organized fandom came while sitting in the cafeteria in high school. Freshman year, probably? My friend Kelsey and I were talking to each other, and she said something to the effect of, "It's weird, but when I'm going to sleep, I imagine stories about my favorite characters and me where we go on adventures and things." 

I said something like, "That is SO weird, because I do the same thing! How crazy!"

Third friend Erin (who I always thought was way cooler than me, and would soon become my source for weird VHS anime and such) rolled her eyes and smacked her hands down on the table and said, exasperated, "Oh my god, that's not weird at all! Haven't you ever heard of FANFICTION?" 

She then dramatically walked away, and Kelsey and I stared at each other a moment. I was bemused, because no, I had not ever heard that word! She said it like it was something I should have been familiar with, so I was vaguely embarrassed that I apparently didn't understand something I should, and now slightly-cooler-friend realized it!

That night I googled the term, and found fanfiction dot net and that was that! From there I also found other sites like media miner, as well as the then-wealth of individual sites and character shrines and personal archives and such. I eventually started writing fanfiction of my own. (It was all very bad. There were terrible songfics!)

(Ultimately I also introduced much of the rest of the friend group to fanfiction. I was one of the only ones with easy internet access and a printer, so I'd print off favorite fics, and we'd pass them around in binders.)

It wasn't long before I'd also joined my school's anime club, and then for many years went to the main anime con in the region.

So thank you, Erin, for your offhand comment, introducing me to the idea that it wasn't that weird to imagine your own stories about your favorite characters!

Comments

[tjs_whatnot]

Haha, that's awesome! I cannot believe how many posts I've read of this challenge that lists Pokemon as their first inklings about how to "play" in the world that was created for what seems just that purpose! I was a nanny for a girl who was really into Pokemon when she was young and I wonder if she ever gone fannish about it like I've read from others.

[mistressofmuses]

I feel like Pokemon lends itself really well to kid imaginations, and the allure of having your own little group of magical animal friends, in a world where you're expected to go off on an adventure of your own. It is interesting that it's a common entry point into that type of imagining!

[scarlipswolfwife]

When I was in junior high and high school, I wrote fanfiction. I didn't know the term *fanfiction*, however, which had been around for quite a while at that point. I didn't know that a lot of other people wrote it - and I sure didn't know that ADULTS wrote it! My BFF and I wrote a variety of (Mary Sue) fanfiction based off our favorite stuff (Fright Night and Lost Boys were the two big ones). I didn't learn about the term fanfiction until I was on my very first computer and finally connected to the internet, and I stumbled on Yahoo Groups, and I especially stumbled on one for Loki (myth/real) and in that was someone who wrote Jay and Silent Bob fanfiction. The funny thing is that she used a name from a fantasy book I love, wherein one of the MCs is Rimble, the Trickster, and I met her in a *LOKI* group...and now here I am, writing Marvel fanfiction, with quite a bit of Loki. So yeah. I'd say that Loki got me into fanfiction again.

[mistressofmuses]

It's funny to me - in a good way - how very many people DO fannish activities, writing their own fanfiction and the like, without ever having encountered the idea that other people were doing the same. It seems to just be something about the way a lot of people's brains are wired! (And lol, while I didn't actually write it down, I know that a lot of my early imaginative playing in canon worlds was deeply Mary-Sueish.)

Funny that fandom has been a noticeable cycle for you!

[scarlipswolfwife]

I had other friends - my BFF back then and I both did this, but other friends in junior high and high school wrote different fanfiction and as far as I know, none of us knew that's what it was called. One friend of mine was first really super into writing Friday the 13th (the TV series about the antique shop and cursed items!) fanfic and then later Quantum Leap fanfiction. In those early years of mine, I first wrote a Children of the Corn fanfic (so Mary Sue LOL) and the Fright Night and Lost Boys, and there was no shit a time when I wrote Monkees fanfic because Nick at Night started playing all the old Monkees episodes. I think I *almost* wrote Route 66 fanfic but I never quite started anything with that series. And thinking back on shit...I think I started to write Less Than Zero fanfics, but the characters from the movie might've been more background characters to the original characters (again, very Mary Sue) - that kills me, thinking about it, given my huge Tony Stark love these days. I think by high school, I was mostly writing "original" fiction and the same all through college and when I quit going the first time. Then when we started playing Vampire: The Masquerade, I started writing OG fiction but based on rpg characters. Then eventually right into the J&SB stuff that has landed me here.

That is a truly weird cycle, and I love it.

[mistressofmuses]

I definitely love that it's just the way people's brains work! I didn't write any of the "fanfiction" type stuff down, but wrote a lot of stuff that was very obviously just "serial numbers filed off" stuff where I'd basically just changed the character names and then wrote my own plot. It was functionally fanfiction, ha.