My Fannish History - a Snowflake challenge

[respoftw]

I’m a compulsive person. I’ve always fallen hard and fast for things that interest me but for a long time my fandom experience was kept offline.

Back when I was around 13/14 (mid-late 90s) I was a huge Backstreet Boys fan. My bedroom was plastered in posters and me and two of my friends would spend hours and hours every week talking about the band and taking turns regaling each other with imaginary tales of ways we could meet the band and what would happen. It now occurs to me that this was my first foray into fanfic, verbally at least! And, it was self-insert (shudders!)

I’ve been a fan of a lot of things (Buffy and Angel being the biggest) but my fanning was kept private.

The first time I connected online with fans was in the early 2000s (late teens age wise) when I “discovered” the band James (of Sit Down fame). The band were broken up at the time but their music got me through a very dark time and while immersing myself in it I found an unofficial fan website that had a still active message board that I became super active in. There was swapping of bootleg CDs, tracking down rare recordings, song discussions etc..

I fell away from the message boards when I met my now partner in 2003 and my fanning went back to being a private thing until 2013 when I was off sick from work, bought myself the Castle season 1-5(?) boxset to binge and fell in love with side characters Ryan and Esposito (And now my DW handle makes sense). I started googling to see if I there were any Ryan and Esposito focused episodes I could skip to (looking especially for any episodes where they got whumped - before I knew what the word whumped meant) and stumbled on a link that took me to FF.net.

I had never read fanfic before, had barely even heard of it, but - at the ripe age of 29 -I was suddenly hooked.

I devoured Castle fanfic and then decided to go looking for other Tv shows I loved. I moved into DCU, MCU, Star Trek AOS, found AO3, Merlin, then Teen Wolf, then fell in love with Agents of Shield enough that I actually started writing fanfic myself in 2015! (Fitzmack could have been everything, damn canon to hell). (there was one TW fic I wrote before that in 2014 but I try to forget it exists)

After a few months in AOS, I moved on to write for MCU after seeing Age of Ultron and falling heavy in love with Hawksilver. Those are still my most popular fics and was the closest I ever became to being tumblr famous, lol.

I stayed with Hawksilver for about a year with a slight detour into Star Wars and Finnpoe in there.

And then. Then I found SGA. I had been a fan of SG1 back in the day (while my fanning was offline only) but by the time SGA came around we didn’t have cable anymore so I never saw it. Jump to 2016 when I saw a mutual from the AOS fandom posting McShep content on tumblr, saw the show was on Netflix and started to watch.

190 fics and close to 4 years later I’m pretty sure I’ve found my forever fandom.

I still enjoy other fandoms, I still read other fandoms (most recently Reddie), but SGA is my fandom home. It’s quiet nowadays but it’s drama free, there’s so much amazing fic out there that I’m still stumbling across old classics that I haven’t seen before 4 years later, and the people who still play in this fandom are some of the nicest and most welcoming that I’ve ever come across.

Additionally, SGA and my various ships in it is the only time I have EVER read and written in the same fandom. I barely read any Fitzmack, Hawksilver or Finnpoe when I was writing but I will Never have too much SGA in my life.

Comments

[verdande_mi]

BSB was also my first fandom! I had two friends who wrote fic, and that was also self-insert, which did not interest me. But reading fanfic in general did; I just had no need to see myself or people I knew in them!

SGA is a strong, strong fave of mine as well. I mostly read McShep, but I enjoy other pairings too. And I agree, there can never be too much SGA fic <3 <3

[respoftw]

I’m very ashamed of my self-insert past,lol!

[seleneheart]

That's a lot of fics in a short amount of time! It's so amazing how things go when you've got that fire in you.

[respoftw]

So true!

[logicgunn]

I wondered where your handle came from. :)

Pretty sure SGA is my forever fandom too. I'm not one to jump from thing to thing, I tend to be ride or die.

[respoftw]

Yay! I’m so glad to hear that

[littlelostcat]

Castle is one of my uncomfortable loves. I love and loved the show -- until I heard about the behind the scenes crap and it soiled the show for me. But I still love it, if that makes sense? Like, if I could stream it I would absolutely binge the first few seasons (I stopped liking it once they got married, it felt off).

And, YES. Ryan and Esposito were 100% the best thing to come out of that show -- and the fact that they're still really close IRL?? Makes my little fandom hard swell. <3!! And love that that's where your name came from!

[respoftw]

I never actually finished Castle! And knowing how toxic it got behind the scenes makes me not want to, lol. The first few seasons are fantastic though :)

[littlelostcat]

I think I did finish it -- but it was always a "will they won't they come back" thing, and then he did and she didn't so they cancelled, if I recall?

But, yeah, the first 1-4 or 5 seasons were pretty special!

[otherearths_outthere]

“I will Never have too much SGA in my life.”
Yep.
Amen sister.

[popkin16]

YAY for fandom homes :D

[badfalcon]

I was also super late to SGA, been here around 4-5 years, but the fandom on Tumblr was so welcoming and friendly and drew me in. So while I prefer SG1, I find the SGA fandom... less clique-y, I guess

[isabellerecs]

Bless you. You were my Hawksilver hook up when I was despite in those weeks after seeing Age of Ultron. ;D I'd wondered at the handle, but that makes perfect sense (and they were the best thing about the that show).

[respoftw]

Yay, Hawksilver :) The fandom was active for a good while - I wonder if it still is?

[isabellerecs]

I was a little surprised to discover that there are 791 stories with their tag on AO3, but I do think that a great deal of them are stories that merely mention them together rather than focus on them. That is still a great deal more than when I looked last. ;) Though I do sometimes wish that the relationship tags could be tiered so that one could easily narrow the list down to stories with the searched pairing as the main focus. :D *sigh* Little dreams. ;D

[respoftw]

As of just now my fic accounts for 11% of all the Hawksilver fic on AO3 - wow, that’s wild!