Fangirling Since 1983

Challenge #1

In your own space, introduce yourself!

I updated my sticky post here

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.