fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3311 ]

[ SECRET POST #3311 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3311 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 029 secrets from Secret Submission Post #473.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, the usual awkward-nerdy type. I learned D&D from our nanny, and Star Trek: TNG premiered when I was ten. I got my first kiss at a convention when I was 15, and then attended BayCon every year for the next decade. The convention culture of that era already seems like a distant historical artifact, but it had value at the time. All laser-printed zines and cassette tapes of filk music, and always a corset vendor in the dealer's room...

What's your origin story?

Actual internet fandom...? Probably when I was 13 and found a ChatPlanet chatroom devoted to Sailor Moon.

Fannish pursuits? Oh ye gods, I have no idea. I've always been an exceptionally geeky child.

It was the year 2000, Harry Potter #4 had just come out, and a starry-eyed 11 year old stumbled upon fanfiction.net (although HOW I cannot remember, which makes me sad. I didn't even know what fanfiction was until I found it). So my early fandom experience was very fic-based, which has really held strong for me. I don't usually click with fandoms where there's not much fic.

the public library had a lot of Star Trek books when i was a kid

I have honestly no idea. I think I just stumbled across Fanfiction.net, maybe around 2004-ish? (Making me 11 at the time, though maybe even a bit before that), and then things just developed from there.

I've always been fairly nerdy though, especially with video games and comics, both of which my father introduced me to when I was still little. One of the first memories that I can fairly accurately date is playing Tomb Raider with my father when I was around 5. I also credit video games with the fact that I was always a lot better than my classmates in English through primary and secondary school.

My first fanish pursuit was Pern where I mostly just waited for each new book and I looked in used book stores for out-of-print stuff like the choose-your-own-adventure Pern books. At the time the only thing I could find online was a timeline for Pern history.

Then I moved onto Sailor Moon where I scoured the internet for anything Sailor Moon related, and this was so long ago that some fans had their own sites but there really wasn't that much online. There was no crossover to the Japanese SM fandom (or at least nothing translated) so I never learned anything from that side of things. Of course, I was also hampered by the fact I could only ever search at the library.

My true fandom beginning was LOTR, which I joined just a few months before FOTR came out in theaters. LOTR was my first slash ship, my introduction to porn, my first published fic, my first award nomination for fic, my first comments, all of it. That was back when there were a lot more fandom-specific archives and character websites.

I've never gotten out of LOTR but I've definitely branched out since then.

Fandom like fics and such? Well, I was 14 and a friend was like "Hey. Read this Final Fantasy yaoi fic." I was like gross. And then I discovered Vegeta/Bulma fic and it was all downhill from there.

I too was a kid in the late '80s/early '90s, so it took a while before I got to explore the internet side of fandom. We didn't have a computer in my home until I was 16, but prior to that, there was a place downtown that my dad liked to visit 'cause they had a lot of cool music-related things and whatnot to look at, and they also had computers there. So he'd sometimes bring my sister and me along and we'd poke around on the computers there for a bit.

The first time I encountered fandom online was when I was about, like, 11, 12 years old, I want to say? I'd type in whatever TV shows or books I was a fan of at the time and come across websites about them. "Babysitters Club" and the "Beetlejuice" cartoon were a couple biggies. Then when my family did get a computer, I remember attempting to make my own site to talk about things I was a fan of, but that didn't exactly pan out 'cause I'm shitty at web design :p.

After that, I discovered fanfiction communities and got interested in that side of things. And around that same time, I also went to teen-related forums (TeenInk and Teenspot being a couple notable ones) and would talk about a variety of music and movies and TV shows with them.

I've been fannish about things since I was a little kid, though. I'd happily sit and watch whatever TV shows were my favorites, taping them off the VCR to have my own copies to watch (and I'd go through phases with my Barbies where I'd name them after characters in whatever I was into at the time). I wrote stories about those characters, too, though I didn't know it was called fanfiction back then. And if I was into a book series/author, I read virtually everything in that series or by that author.

And I've loved music practically my entire life, so thanks to my parents, I'd gotten into making mix tapes (and later, mix CDs), and I would read all the rock and roll encyclopedias my dad had stacked around the house, and learn stuff about various artists that way.

1997 or so. I was really into FF7 and Sonic when I was a dumb dorky teenager.

Tiny fifth grade me did not have any friends. Pretty much at all. What I did have was a classroom computer which we could sign up to use for the fifteen minutes at the end of the day before our bus showed up. I signed up pretty much every day, and through there I discovered the joys of Nick.com and it's message boards. People could write stories about the things I loved?

Not long after that I started using the computer at home, pretty much constantly. (I had to, due to the aforementioned 'zero friends' other kids had started signing up for the computer so they could pointedly grin at me while I couldn't use it) I thought 'hey, if there are Nick stories, maybe there are other stories! I shall use a search engine!

about ten minutes later I found my self on the Shaman King subsection of Fanfiction.net, and thus began a decade + long hobby that I have yet to shake.

I read SH fics while I was at school, then fics in other fandoms, then talked to people about HP on a forum and an online Hogwarts school.

My brother has been moderating the Spiderweb Software forums for as long as I can remember. I thought all the meta was interesting, so I made an account and tried my hand at it. It was an unusual fandom in some ways, with no shipping and barely any fanfics, but it was also very chill and accepting of newbies.

Well, I wrote fanfic back from when I was very young, maybe seven or so? (late 1980s or thereabouts.) Not that I had any idea back then what "fanfic" was, I just knew I wanted more of the stories I liked and had run out of books, so I wrote my own.

But I never really knew anything about fandom as a community activity until the advent of the internet... in the summer of 2001 I was a uni student, and went to visit my then-bf for six weeks; he worked during the day and I was miles away from anyone and anything I knew, so basically spent 99% of my time for 9 hours a day on the internet. I stumbled upon the Pit of Voles, and some other long-defunct fan sites, and I've never resurfaced since.

In 2005/2006, I said to myself, "Gee, I wonder if there are any Harry Potter stories on the internet..." And I've been hooked ever since!

Like a lot of people here I was a geeky kid (from a geeky family) and my first real obsession was ST:TNG when I was about 7, I think. That was in the early 90s. But I didn't really get involved in fandom when I had a bit more autonomy and was allowed online for a whopping 30min a week! This was when I was about 10/11 and I was mad about The X-Files.

Wow, I've been doing this for 20 years.

It was the summer of 2002. Little eleven year old me had just gotten my first AOL username, and wanted to see if I could find out why my copy of Gold refused to save anymore, so I put "pokemon" into the search bar. After some (very unhelpful) scrolling, I came across a website containing stories about Pokemon written by other people, located on a site full of stories about literally everything I could imagine written by even more people than little eleven year old me ever thought even existed in the world. It took me two years to realize that you didn't have to be a professional author to have an account there, and it sort of spiraled out from that.

There was also that time when I was a little kid where me and my two best friends pretended to be Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, but I didn't particularly enjoy that (I always had to be Spock -_-). Getting into D&D in my early teens was a lot more fun, but the fanfic thing happened first, so I consider that my personal start of darkness.

Hmm, I wrote Digimon fanfic when I was nine before I knew what fanfiction was. I started using the internet when I was thirteen to post my badly-written fanfic and I found a forum dedicated to anime, so I spent the better portion of my teen years nerding out with likeminded strangers. Good times.

I was raised by Trekkies, so really I was either going to absorb it all and love it or rebel against it, I ended up loving geeky stuff and have been playing tabletop games from a very young age and enjoying geeky shows/movies for as long as I can remember.

I found fanfic when I was 9(I got really into Pokemon and ended up stumbling across fic for it, nothing over PG and I mostly just read GEN) but since it was dial-up back then I didn't fully get into the fanfic world until I was 16, had slightly less-shitty internet and my own PC.

I was 12 our family got our first home computer. On Christmas I was gifted with Nancy Drew video games. They were amazing. But I got stuck on a puzzle... so I went online and after waiting for the long dial up process I found a Nancy Drew message board. That was my first toe in the water. Later in middle school I had friends who we got very fangirly over like Good Charlotte and other dumb bands, but I don't know if I really consider that fandom.
But the real kicker was at the start of high school, when my new friend introduced me to Star Wars fanfiction. After that it was all downhill. It was all FF.net and message boards. Then later DeviantArt and LJ. Some Quizilla... which was weird.

I'd mark my start as a fan with becoming a Duran Duran fan when I was ~12. This was in 83. I had a couple good friends who were also fans, so we squeed together. However, I had no idea there was a thing such as fandom (rural Canada, what can I say).

My exposure to fandom came with my access to the Internet, which for me, was in 96...I discovered slash fic and mailing lists. My first online fandom was The Sentinel. It was so nice to find like minded people. At the time we didn't have Internet at home, so I ran my website and did all my emailing and mailing list stuff at the public library! I had the internet at home by about 98. Made life much easier.

I was always interested in certain books and games (some really classic/popular stuff like Harry Potter and Pokemon were major parts of my childhood, as well as other Nintendo franchises and other books, particularly Wheel of Time) but didn't get into "fandom" per se until college. I did get into the YGOTCG in high school which exposed me more directly to nerd culture, and then my then-friendly-acquaintance, who I was getting ready to room with and later became very good friends with (I'm at her house chilling right now!) told me about LiveJournal and showed me some anime she liked and the rest is history.

That was about...oh...5-6 years ago?

I was never super active in fandom, maybe moderately so for a while but now I mostly come here, read some fic and very infrequently write a drabble myself. I've gotten really into video games and some other forms of media though, it's a bigger chunk of my hobby/free time than it used to be, also do to other factors (namely falling off the thing that was my biggest hobby for a while).

I was always the kind of kid who obsessed over tv shows and wrote fic, but real, organized fandom had to wait until I was in high school. I got into Star Trek and met a girl who was also into it, and who went to cons and bought zines and such.

That was probably it, although I dropped it while I was in university and didn't pick it back up until the late 90's and Nitcentral.com.

When I was 12, I was desperately without friends at a new school. I met this cute girl in my gym class who had an X-Files shirt on. I don't know why but when she asked me about it, I fibbed and said I liked the show. After that, I had to actually watch it to catch up to the lie. When I watched it (Anasazi, live!), it totally blew me away and I got heavily into the AOL chat room stuff. I lived and breathed X-Files for a few years until I jumped ship in season 7 (no worries, I've come back). Then I got obsessively into Velvet Goldmine, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor. At the same time, I was really into beat poetry. Then I got into manga. From there, it was police procedurals. Sharp turn into science fiction tv, etc. Then I went back into manga and anime where I kind of am right now since I'm just a casual tv viewer now. I've been to 3 conventions, bought a few fanzines, written fanfiction, read fanfiction and doujinshi.

I was really only VERY into fandom for a few years but otherwise, I'm strictly a lurker. :/

I grew up in fandom as my parents are pro sf writers and totally know that convention culture that you're talking about, although I'm a little younger than you. One parent was even a past GoH at BayCon (pm me if you want to know who/what year) and many other cons. WorldCon was always my summer vacation, and LosCon my Thanksgiving break. Now I still go to LosCon, but while there's a lot of the same people there it's just not the same. Plus people who were our family friends keep dying... And several of our friends who are dealers can't break even enough from cons to justify the transport anymore.

I remember running around ugly carpets as a tiny thing, discovering anime there at 11, and mostly the hurry-up-and-wait when my family was waylaid in a hall by another writer friend, or a fan of their stuff.

I have been a fan of tuff throughout my life but my first real association with a "Fandom" was buying Doctor Who magazines in my teens.

After that, the next real interaction with Fandom only came when my brother Noddy lived with us in 1999, with his computer and an internet connection. I started poking around a Star Trek parody webcomic and got involved in the message board affiliated with it.
Noddy however moved back to Sydney and his computer followed him, so I was left with internet access only through the Tafe computers for a year. During that time I found a Baludir's Gate fanfic titled "Bethphel's Diary" that I read, but I didn't go much further until after I got a computer of my own, at which time I followed links into the Attic (aka Gamejag), a message board for BG fanficcers.
Through there I met a lurker who was a DBZ fan and moved into that, DBZ led to HP, HP led to LotR, then I moved on to Final Fantasy, then Transformers, Doctor Who, SPN and back to LotR via the Hobbit, spent some time in Dragon Age, flirted with Mass Effect and am back to playing BG again.

There's a short form of my fandom history over the last 17 years and prior for you.

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[ SECRET POST #3311 ]

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