Fandom Story Time, everyone!

[amelialourdes]

All right, I was having a very lively discussion with my friends and we started getting into our fandom origin stories. I want to know your fandom origin stories. What was the fandom that got you into fandom? When did you start discovering fic? Discussions? Did you become involved in a message board? Were you on a ListServ? Was the Internet around when you were in the beginning stages? I want to know everything. Go on. I'm waiting.

Comments

[popfly.livejournal.com]

QaF was my first active - and interactive - fandom. Got into it randomly in 2004, started writing fic on LJ (and my own site!) and the rest is history.

[ghettogreta.livejournal.com]

*nsync was my first. Well, the first I was aware of. I remember when I was younger, I wrote this entire book which was basically a rewrite of 90210, like, the same characters with different names, adding a new one that I made up. So I guess in my head, I've been writing longer. But it was the *nsync boys that eventually sucked me into popslash. And back then, there were message lists or something. It wasn't exactly a board? But it was an email list, and you posted to the list? I don't really remember, because then my friends that I met through there, we all went in on a website and then lj burst onto the scene and the lists were sort of obsolete.

[friday82.livejournal.com]

The first fandom where I actually interacted with people was Star Wars. There was no internet at the time. I joined the official fan club, read their magazines and had various SW pen pals. I got an internet connection in 1996 and became more aware of SW fic, but didn't get into it much. The fandom which made the internet essential for me was the band HIM. I was active on message boards, emailed like crazy, opened a Yahoo!Club and then my own website. Funnily enough, the fandom that got me into reading fic from start to finish was The Patriot/Tavington. And later I discovered QaF and LJ via Ethan's site xhaleslowly.

[fansee.livejournal.com]

I've had two distinct fandoms. Are you sure you want my history in both? Really?

The first one was a literary fandom that grew up around a six-volume series by Dorothy Dunnett that features a beautiful, neurotic, tortured (sometime literally) hero, Francis Crawford of Lymond. When I found Dunnett in 1969, only the first three volumes were written, and they struck me like lightening in the brain. I knew nobody who would be interested in reading them, so I wrote to Dorothy. Silly woman, she wrote me back. I wrote again. She answered. I wrote again. She cried 'Uncle' and put me in touch with two other readers.

Jen and I wrote back and forth, forth and back as the series was completed and a new series started. I visited her in the north of Engand, and she visited me in Philadelphia. Then in 1983 two fans in Chicago started a fanzine, a fore-runner of a list_serve that circulated via the U.S. Mail. "Marzipan and Kisses" came out quarterly, but we managed to carry on conversations nevertheless. I also started corresponding privately with a couple of contributors.

In 1981, my husband and I spent three weeks in Britain. At Walt's insistence, I wrote Dorothy and asked if we could take her out to lunch, dinner, or for a drink while we were in Edinburgh. Instead she invited us to her house for drinks and then to a fund raiser for the Scottish Film Institute. She and Walter got on like a house on fire, sipping their whiskeys, while I, who do not drink much, slid slowly under the coffee table. She was a charmer!

We all wanted to get together and talk Dunnett. (What we wanted was a con, but I didn't know that. I was only vaguely aware that I was in a fandom...even though I was a player.) In 1990 Dorothy gave in and she personally ran a three-day con in Edinburgh. Life-changing event for me! I made so many friends, many of whom I am still in touch with.

There were four more cons before Dorothy died in 2001. It was after the second con in Boston in 1992 that one of the fans started a list_serve out of Columbia University. (That was in the early days of e-mail and well before the World Wide Web or even services like Compu-Serve. All of the members were affiliated with a university; I knew nobody with private e-mail We were very aware of being pioneers.)

My husband Walter and I ran the last con in Philadelphia in 2000. We had to draw the line at about 200 attendees.

Despite Dorothy's death, the Dunnett readers still get together. We have had cons in Ireland, Paris, Malta (I attended), and Istambul (I went to this one, too), and we are getting together in Venice in September 2016, God willing.

That fandom changed my life in so many ways. I never expected lightening to strike again, much less over a TV show.

You don't really want me to tell you my QAF origin story, do you? now that you know I have diarrhea of the fingers? FanSee

[reeface.livejournal.com]

Hi, my name is Ree and I'm old skool. Gosh, lesse, we're talking late 80s I'd say, so way before I even knew what internet was. I was a teen and Star Trek/Next Gen/Star Wars were my first fanfics. I read the pro novels and had a subscription to the Official Star Trek Magazine and iirc it was through their classifieds that I found out about fanzines. Bought new and old ones (through used lists) and was addicted like crack. They were all gen or het, as slash wasn't really on my radar yet. I was such a wee babe.

Wasn't until Quantum Leap around '91 that I actually talked to other fans about an actual show and not just to ask for their list of memorabilia they were selling. Again through fanzine classifieds, I joined a QL pen pal list. Though most people wanted to only talk about their gardens and the weather, and not the show or characters like I was gushing about every week, so that didn't last long. :\

Then the clouds parted and the sun shone through in the mid 90s: I GOT MY FIRST COMPUTER AND MY FIRST ONLINE FANDOM. The end credits on a Methos ep of Highlander were barely flashing by and I was already at my desk searching for everything about them. Found fan-made websites and joined e-mail lists and usenet newsgroups and made my first online friends and squeed like a giant newb and READ ALL THE FICS and meta and discovered slash and fell in love with my first ever slash pairing (Duncan/Methos) and giggled with joy at bad!fic and wrote fics that didn't just live in my notebooks and started my own actor e-lists and created websites and screencapped episodes and joined RPG writing groups and gawked at flame wars in both awe/horror/glee and and and and and.

Oh, fandom. I love you.

And you, Aface! Great topic. ♥