#That'd probably get me started a bit better on fanficiton

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Why Peebs never got into fanficiton

It occurred to me the other day that despite having quite the voracious appetite for fiction back in my youth, I never got into fanfiction. So, how come? Part of it is just the circles I moved in back in the day, as the cis and presumably straight nerd sphere wasn't super into fanfiction, and by the time I started moving queer-wards my habits were kind of set. There is, however, another reason, and it's this particular wild ride I want to take you on today dear readers.

NOTE: It is difficult to tell this story to its full extent without sharing a bit more detail about my meatspace identity than I'd prefer to, so I have taken some steps to anonymize as much as I can. If you by chance have a hunch about the name of the fic I'm talking about, do free to drop me DM and talk about it, but please don't start flinging speculations on here. Thanks in advance.

With that meaty disclaimer out of the way, let's talk about that one time my mother sent me DBZ fanfiction. Back in the days of my prepubescence, my mother was the family's "computer person." She had some education in early IT, database work, and that kind of thing, so she was the one to introduce the Internet into our family. Mind you, this was in the days of the ISDN line, a step up from the 56k modems that took up your phone line, but still a slow and expensive solution compared to the broadband connections that would come some years later.

Not to sound like Grandpa Internet here, but the web was fundamentally different back then. Before the rise of Google, or halfway decent search engines, finding anything on the internet was a question of what search term you used and which of the many many search engines that were available you used, and what you found were of wildly differing quality. A lot of it was homemade web pages following this or that template, hosted on this or that hosting site, but there was very little in terms of connective tissue. This is all to say that when you came across something that was almost what you were looking for, you had the tendency to just check it out and see if it hit the spot eventually.

All this preamble is to say that when my mother sent me a mail with a link to a collection of stories written about a character whose given name was identical to our family name, I decided to give it a gander although I wasn't immensely interested in it. Turns out it was a loosely organized collection of stories about a fan-created character in the DBZ universe, although I did not know this because the ol' screamy punchman show hadn't really made it to my corner of the woods at this point.

This character, whose name was the same as my family name but as best as I know wasn't inspired by anything else than the sound of it, was the daughter of a particularly biologically implausible pairing in the Dragon Ball Z universe, and given how quickly said pairing decided to throw their contempt for biologists and their so-called facts in the reader's faces told me my mother probably hadn't read very far into the thing before sending it my way.

Now, I want to be clear, this wasn't a full-blown lemon or anything, but I was a sheltered kid what sex and sexuality were concerned, and it didn't take much more than a mention of doing the nasty and a tasteful fade to black, that in retrospect left some big questions unanswered, to have me quite flustered.

This isn't to say things didn't get considerably more citrus-y later on. You see, this character grows up and is cool and important in the way such characters often are. What is slightly more remarkable about her is that Alien Puberty hits her like a sackful of bricks and goes what I can only describe as "Transformatively-Fuck-Crazy" on a supporting character. The whole consent situation around the thing is real iffy I realize, now in retrospect, but at the time I was mostly in shock over where this little reading session had taken me.

The session, however, was far from done. Not much came out of this alien consent-light fuck-berserkergang, however, as our heroine had some time travel to get into. At the time I was very confused about the time travel just suddenly being a thing, but later on, I came to realize Dragon Ball Z was just Kind Of Like That.

You see, some Jessica Rabbit-looking alien with a clashing primary colors color scheme and an understanding of the concept of clothing that is adventurous to say the least who wants to kick her ass but finds herself unable to do so on account of the heroine being actually quite good at this ass-kicking business. Our scantily-clad would-be conqueror does the most logical thing in her situation and goes back in time to kill the protagonist's dad. You know, as you do when you have near-perfect mastery of time travel and a grudge. You'd think she'd get into some Kang The Conqueror shit, but maybe that's the next point on her agenda, idk.

This villain also could turn invisible, so nobody's going to accuse her of being a one-trick pony. How does our heroine beat this somewhat overstatted threat? I can't remember, but if I were to guess, it ended in a cliffhanger and lots of screaming, so you can't blame the author for diverging from the form language of the show if nothing else.

So that's the story of my main first encounter with fanfiction. It left me confused in more ways than one, and it kind of became a bit emblematic of the format for me once I figured out that it was in fact fanfiction. Was that unfair of the younger me? Perhaps, while I can't really claim it as a good read, I did keep reading it until I was done. Whether that says more about the fic or about me, I am sure I do not know.