#My Fandom History

[mortmere]

Another few seconds of MotB appreciation - I find Fraser's little leap here insanely attractive. It's just beautiful.

(I wasn't completely sold on due South until I got to Mountie on the Bounty. It had been slashy fun so far, sure, but now it was slashy fun on an epic scale with an age of sail vibe, and for me as a Hornblower and Aubreyad fan that made all the difference. I also appreciated the music, because the song in this scene with its wistful chorus and tin whistles reminded me a bit of a 1970s hard rock classic I love, "Nantucket Sleighride" by Mountain (which is also a shipwreck song!). I didn't know then that "32 Down" was Paul Gross's own song. But as this episode was the turning point for me, I soon learned that and about a million other dS factoids. Still having fun!

Okay, Ray's little landing roll just before Fraser's pretty leap deserves its own gif, too. Their movements here are the opposite of the heavy wet drag from my last gif, they're smooth and light and graceful and I love them to bits, though I almost get motion sickness from looking at these gifs. :D

[takaraphoenix]

I'm curious, how many fandom have you been a part in? How many shows you like that has no fandoms? What are your fandom history?

Oh, that is such a fun ask, thank you! Brace yourself, I am actually giving a way more detailed answer than you probably wanted.

So, first of all, it depends on what one's definition of "in the fandom" is. Because if I'd count every fandom that I have been a part of as a "spectator" - admiring fanarts and GIFs and reading fanfiction - daaamn, that'd make this a very long list, I think.

Generally, I only count myself as part of a fandom if I also contribute to it myself, because that means this fandom really sucked me in, while the ones I only read in are more... passing fancies, I guess? That's how it is for me, anyway.

So, by that metric, have a little history of Phoe.

My earliest fandom was Charmed, though... very much unposted, like, "physically wrote with ink in a notebook" fanfiction. But that was the first show that really consumed me; my walls were plastered with posters, all my friends who bought teen mags always cut the Charmed articles out for me (which, genuinely, so sweet), heck, I had Charmed bedsheets. Also my very first next generation, the kids of the Charmed Ones. But that was waaay before I even knew the term "fanfiction", I just liked writing so I thought "what if next generation though", particularly due to how important family is in this show.

In 2005, I wrote my first fic that I actually published, though... if it still exists on the internet, it's on an account I forgot about. Twas Yu-Gi-Oh! and Puppyshipping. That was when I was actually diving into fandom, as a shared experience, instead of, you know, faning for myself. Reading fics, exploring websites that brought fans together.

Ultimately, I ended up on Animexx (German fan site, hosting forums, fanfiction, fanart, doujinshi and a shit-ton of other fannish delights) and in the Beyblade fandom.

These two, by the way, went a little hand in hand together. Beyblade and Yu-Gi-Oh! were two of the big anime of the time, airing in the noon-ish block on RTL2 in Germany at the time. That shounen sports-anime genre always got the fangirls.

And the Beyblade fandom was where I really... took off, in a creator way. Wrote a total of 39 fics spanning over 200k words in the three years I was a part of this fandom (2006-2008) and drew a bunch of fanarts too. I joined a writer's circle - kind of a club - for the ship KaRe and that hugely factored into my productivity. We gave each other feedback, had fandom events, met up at conventions. Most of them were in their early to late twenties, some older, so I had a lot of mentor figures in my life there who taught me how to be a better writer. But by 2008, the fandom started to fizzle out, more and more of the writers I admired and was friends with dropped out of it and went on to other fandoms, so by the end, I was out too, because being one of the last ones standing was... frustrating.

I was a little... lost, after that. It's weird, when your very first fandom dies, because you never experienced that before, so how does fandom life go on after that? How do you get into a fandom?

I stopped writing for about a year, not really having a fandom to channel it into, when I watched Sky High in 2009. And oh boy. That movie inexplicably captivated me. I mean, not so inexplicable, there's a pretty boy with a tragic backstory in it, like... that's catnip to me, and he even had fire-powers, c'mon.

Which is kind of how I discovered fanfiction.net because a single movie did absolutely not get a huge following in Germany so I started seeking out English fics, even though my English was absolute dog-shit. But it inspired me, it made me write again. One fic, unpublished, in German, but it got me going again and it showed me that hey no it can be that easy, just latch onto something else that brings you joy!

It's also how or why I made my FFNet account; so I could leave proper comments on the Warren/Will fics I read.

By 2010, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief hit theaters and it hit me, personally, hard. I loved that movie, the concept of modern day demigods and Greek mythology being real was just so good. Plus, elemental control, again. I love that stuff.

So I did the very untypical thing of buying the books. All five in one go. And I actually read them. I started writing PJO fics by 2010.

Heck, I started writing a lot between 2010 and 2012, for practically everything that caught my interest - Percy Jackson, Detective Conan (an anime I had been a fan of since the days of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade, only that this one was still going) were the two biggest, but things like Eureka, Transformers, Entourage, Jungle Book.

I started college in October 2011 and I, uh, well, I wrote my fics during class. Because lectures are just not... nah. They let me have my laptop in class? Hell yeah, I'm gonna write.

I had a good friend back then, a friend I made early on, who at one point noticed me writing during class and asked me if I actually post it online and I went hell no, because English is not my native language, heck, for the majority of high school (German high school spans from 5th grade to 13th grade, we don't have middle school), I didn't even pay attention in English and was fully content scraping by. I only really started paying attention in 2009 when Doctor Who saw the return of my beloved Jack Harness but not the return to the German screens so a girl had to make ends meet by watching it in English. So, yeah, though I shot to the top of my class in high school with the literal power of anime and Doctor Who, I didn't feel confident enough to post my stories on websites where actual native English speakers could read and judge them. But he kept nudging me about it and telling me that if I went through the trouble of writing them, I should share them with others who might enjoy it.

So, yeah, everybody say "Thank you, Andy" for actually making me post my fics by January 2012. Which, I just fully dumped all the fics I had written in the past two years within a short span of time. His motto of "if you enjoy it, others will too" really resonated with me so I posted everything.

And it... took off. DCMK and PJO, there was such a positive response from people, actual excitement for the fics I wrote, and I got that sense of fandom community again, answering comments and starting conversations and friendships with people, commenting on fics that I read and enjoyed. The other fandoms I wrote for kind of fizzled out because the shows ended and movies ended (well... stopped being good).

It was so different, being in ongoing fandoms, where the show still aired and the books were still being released. And I do consider myself someone who helped build up the PJO fandom, on the slash side anyway, because I wrote so much for a ship that was so tiny back then - Nico/Percy.

I'm still actively writing for both of these fandoms to this day, 12 years later.

And then came Teen Wolf in 2013. I started watching it during the hiatus between season 2 and season 3 and got really addicted and devoured all the fics I could and I thought "holy shit, this is going to be my next big thing" and then season 3 just... crushed... literally every single hope I had for the show. Don't get me wrong, 3B is, imo, the best storyline, but by then 3A had already destroyed so much. And season 4 kinda sucked, which put me off. And I straight up hated season 5 so I dropped the show and thought that's that, moving on. This was the closest I have come to actually abandoning a story since I left the Beyblade fandom, including the 10 years after this, because the show's quality drop had demotivated me so much, I put the multichapter fic I had started onto a... long... hiatus. I only continued it about 4 years later, when I started feeling so guilty about abandoning the fic that I said "Nah, I am going to rewatch this damn show for the sole purpose of finishing this damn story" in 2018. And I did! Finish the story, and the show.

Ironically enough, this year, Teen Wolf has sank its claws into me again and dragged me in deep. I mean, really deep. I wrote 30k worth of fics for it this month alone and just started a rewatch again. So, consider me officially back in this fandom.

2014 was when I finally caved and watched Kuroko no Basuke, which was hugely popular in the crowd of former Beyblade fandom members. And kinda got addicted to that. Fully did not write as many fics for it as I wish I would have, but I loved that show.

2015 saw me dipping my toes into DC Comics through the Arrowverse and, mainly, Leonard/Barry. This will, ultimately, kick off my interest in actually reading the comics, we'll get to that in 2021.

In 2016, I succumbed to the MCU. That lasted until 2020 when Endgame kind of, ya know, ended that for me. And, not gonna lie, the fandom experience here didn't really help me want to stay active. Sure, there were many nice people and the response to my fics was overwhelming, but... if your fandom is overly toxic about your favorite character, it's just kind of exhausting and at one point I was just tired arguing with antis too, you know.

But let's go back to what ran parallel to me still being in the MCU.

In 2017, I started watching Shadowhunters. A show based on the books whose movie adaptation I had already seen, and loved, in 2014. One look into Jace's heterochromic eyes and I sold that character my soul. I have written so many fics for this fandom since then, made some truly wonderful friendships (among them my best friend) and am still active in this fandom.

2018 was a bit of an experimental year for me, because I actually got my tumblr account in autumn 2017 and tumblr changed my interactions with fandom again. It wasn't limited to fanfiction and comment sections anymore, you could just... throw your opinions out there, reblog fanarts, GIF sets existed!! That was a game changer. I dipped my toe into a couple fandoms for like... one fic - Musketeers, Star Wars, Maze Runner (that one's fully on Dylan O'Brien btw), Imposters (absolutely fueled by the fact that tumblr gave me GIFs and I started making GIFs for this show and got much more invested than I would have gotten if I hadn't had a tumblr account), Dragon Prince. Honestly, I don't know how I feel about all that. Part of me is always frustrated when I go and throw one singular fic into the abyss and then move on, but at the same time I do enjoy stretching my wings.

Nothing really major to report between 2019-2021, I kind of just... continued on in the fandoms I was in already. I didn't have much space for new fandoms, the pandemic and changes in my personal life were Enough New Things, so I kind of clung onto the familiar.

So Marvel disappointed me by 2020, right. That factored into why, in 2021, I figured, why not focus more on the other side of the two only comic franchises in existence (sarcasm, I am aware there are more), since I was already watching and loving the Arrowverse and continuously writing fics for it. I started reading DC Comics, really diving into it and letting it consume me and started spinning my own Elseworld - creating this patchwork of things I loved in main continuity, many Elseworld stories, cartoons and the Arrowverse. That's still a work in progress, by the way.

2021 is also the year that gave me Shadow and Bone, a show I quickly got addicted to and wrote a couple of fics and still hate that I haven't written more for this show. I know I will, because I know I will rewatch this show and I will remain bitter about my OTP and I predict that I'm going to fall off the deep end and end up writing for it after all. I am reading fics for it though, still.

That's also the year I started writing Buffy fanfiction, because, again, thank you, tumblr. I don't think I would have ever written anything for it if tumblr hadn't shown me that even so many years after the show ended, there is still such an active and dedicated and beautiful fandom, filled with people who create gorgeous GIFs, interesting meta takes and silly shitposts. Love you, BtVS tumblr.

Damn, 2021 was a productive year for me. Because, mind you, on top of DC, SaB and BtVS, I was also still juggling PJO and Shadowhunters.

I also wrote a few Harry Potter fics between 2020 and 2021, though I did not (and still don't) consider myself part of that fandom, those were gifts for my girlfriend at the time.

In 2022, I started watching Fire Country and the show punched me in the face with a really good ship and though only a handful of episodes were out, I wanted to read fics... and there was not a single one... so I started writing them myself.

Honestly, not much has happened in 2023, because I had the most massive writer's block since leaving Beyblade and didn't write a single word in months. I still worked on DC, PJO, DCMK and Shadowhunters though.

And now we're here, in 2024, which sees my Teen Wolf resurgence.

So, I feel like that covers your first and third question. I don't think I can answer your second question though. Because I have truly consumed so many shows over the course of my life and I'm not... interested in "bonus content" - aka fics or fanarts or GIFs - for the majority of them. They're just entertainment that is running in the background while I write fics for the fandoms I'm in. The only times that I watched a show and wanted a fandom and didn't find one were Imposters and Fire Country, both due to having been really new back then. But other than them, I've been pretty lucky by getting attached to things with very active and often times even very big fandoms.

[do-you-know-this-queer-character]

Do you know this queer character?

Castiel is Queer and Agender or Genderfluid, and uses varying pronouns based on presentation!

[bone-yarddz]

Audio books but it’s Michael Sheen reading books as Aziraphale and sometimes you hear David Tennant shouting something obnoxious as Crowley.

[ralkana]

When I studied abroad in Sheffield in 2000, I joined the Sheffield University Star Trek Society as a way to make friends. I'd watched TNG and TOS in middle school and high school and attended a couple of Trek cons, but I'd kind of fallen out of the habit with DS9 and Voyager. Hanging out with my new friends rekindled my love of Trek and introduced me to Voyager. I liked it, and I vaguely thought Tom & B'Elanna were a cute couple.

When I got home from Sheffield in the summer of '01, I was bored one day, clicking around on the internet, which I was damn happy to have access to again, and I decided to look for pics of Tom & B'Elanna. I found fic, which was a fairly new and fascinating concept to me, and I started reading. One of the fics was a generational longfic that had Janeway/Chakotay as a side pairing. And I thought, "Hmm, that's an interesting thought..."

So I searched for and read another fic with J/C. And then another. And then another.

And that was the beginning...

(Pssst, hey- truth or dare)

[crabsnpersimmons]

It has come to my attention that I haven't drawn sun and moon as chibis yet

I have rectified the situation:

all is right with the world

[ailabyuwu]

*cough* i mightve uh.... i mightve gotten too obsessed with @the-b1ah's AU and needed to draw danny (AND HIS SUPER DUPER CUTE JACKET LIKE OMG???? i want it so bad) bc i couldn't think of anything else jaskjdflasdfks;af

[somewhereincairparavel]

JASON GRACE PLAYS LACROSSE AND TENNIS. I CAN'T AND WON'T BE NORMAL ABOUT THIS-

[conarcoin]

TW: Unreality, fictional death and violence

Me and my friends started our search for this fic in 2021. It is now 2024, and we have finally found our white whale, courtesy of an anonymous user who sent me a document containing the full text of this work.

SMPRonpa is both a highly controversial and incredibly impactful piece of fanfiction in regards to how the MCYT fandom would evolve in the years past. While the author buried it due to harassment, I believe preserving it is important as it is a huge part of MCYT fandom history. I hope that sharing this finding will help demystify the fic and some of the misconceptions about its content.

Just like with the reconstruction - this is being published with the intentions of media preservation and documentation of fandom history. We ask that you do not attempt to identify or contact the author of this work. They want to be left alone.

[spirk-trek]

Nor No Man Ever Loved | Virginia Lee Smith, 1982

[thegeminisage]

SPOCKANALIA VOLUME 1 IS NOW ON AO3!

do you like vintage fanzines, but hate reading tiny font? do you love spock, but hate the headache you get from squinting at textured paper and imperfect scans? are you someone who wants to read SPOCKANALIA but has trouble getting your screenreader to cooperate with 60-year-old PDFS? have we ever got news for you. @maulthots and i have been very, very, VERY hard at work digitizing SPOCKANALIA, a SFW star trek fanzine about spock first published in 1967, and now you, YES YOU, can read it on AO3!

updated features of SPOCKANALIA on AO3 include:

text has been meticulously retyped and can now be read at whatever size you have your browser settings on, which means the line width also changes based on the width of your browser window or device screen

images are dynamic to fit on your screen whether you are on a pc or a mobile device so you don't have to scroll until your hand breaks and still only see mr. spock's eyelashes (you have to turn work skins on for this feature)

backgrounds/paper texture/echoes of ghost text removed (by hand!) from images for easier viewing, and in some cases the images have been rotated to correct tilted/sideways scanning

images come with ALT TEXT for those using screen readers!

here are a few before/after shots for your perusal:

so what are you waiting for?! get your inner 60s fangirl (gender neutral) on and read SPOCKANALIA today!!

and if you think this is COOL AS SHIT (i do), please consider giving this post a reblog or leaving us some love on AO3! we have only your good vibes to fuel us as we contemplate volume 2 💪

[cyberpunkboytoy]

I see a lot of people in the Mouthwashing tag frequently listing 'keeping Curly alive' in the list of crimes Jimmy has done, implying or sometimes outright saying that not mercy-killing Curly was a cruel and unusual act...and would like to caution against that.

There's a long history of abled people deciding someone's quality of life is too horrible to merit letting them live (usually to nonverbal or otherwise 'low functioning' people lacking a clear means to communicate) and condoning the murder of disabled people under the guise of kindness. Curly is an extreme example, and one could argue he might prefer to be 'put out of his misery,' but it's important to note that we don't know, no one asks, and there's no attempt to communicate either which way.

How extreme pain and 'low quality of life' are handled are very nuanced and complicated topics, but you can never decide for someone else what kind of life isn't 'worth living.' Curly is obviously a videogame character, but these attitudes can and do affect the lives of real people & are worth being aware of.

[a-random-fandom-friend]

Sometime going into a trending tag is very funny. "If the two male leads of this tv show from the 2000s/early 2010s don't canonically end up together, I don't know what I will do with myself !"

I don't know how to explain to you that before, like, 2017, This Did Not Happen. There were straight couple, and next to them were Ambigusly Close Men (Often With Female Love Interests), and you considered yourself lucky if in the finale they weren't in straight relationships. There were hints. There were gay actors, there were jokey "ahah let's not talk about New Year Party!", there were people being homophobic to them. But it was known that they Would Not End Up Together.

Please manage your expectations.

[fandomsandfears]

sending love to all fic writers out there <3 I'm deleted bookmarks on ao3 for works that have been deleted and it is HAUNTING. A total of 37 of my bookmarks are deleted works. many were in the 1-5 chapter range, most were under 10. I didn't note that they were finished so they were probably stories just getting off the ground, that didn't get to see their peak no matter how great of a premise they had. I only know this because I use my bookmarks like I'm meant to subscribe to works. I record what chapter I left off reading on in the notes (on priv).

There was one that i had noted left on a hiatus. There was another that I noted was being rewritten, I hope its thriving out there anew <3

There's one that was deleted ongoing with 29 chapters.

There's one deleted that was finished at a whopping 41 chapters.

Anyways, this is my little grieving love letter to authors out there <3 you're writing is so important and I understand any reason you may have for deleting it but your work wasn't in vain and it was loved.

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[elizabethminkel]

My latest fandom column for Atlas Obscura is live! This one is on @terrorcamp, a Terror fandom con + polar history conference that truly feels like it straddles both fandom and academia. Many thanks to the brilliant group of people who spoke to me for this piece, especially TC organizer @areyougonnabe, of course!!

There are so many quotes I love, but one of my favorites was from Hester Blum, a Penn State English professor, on how the event reshaped her thinking about current teaching in the humanities:

Watching the presentations from younger fans also made her reassess the way she and her colleagues approach their students; many academics discuss younger generations’ interest in “relatability,” and how it prevents them from engaging with history and literature. “One of the things that this conference made me realize is how fundamentally we have misunderstood what it means to be ‘relatable,’” she says. “And it’s not simply a lack of critical distance or affinity—but the kind of passionate fan response, as something that is deeply critical and deeply thought-through. It was one of those moments that was like, ‘Oh, this can be the future of engagement.’ This was incredible.”