#also if i end up writing fic for an anime that aired in 2006 you all gotta promise to politely look the other way okay

[altschmerzes]

good evening everyone. i finished death note. bro holy fuck.

i am getting into anime fifteen years later than the rest of my peer group so you may have heard this one before but death note? PRETTY FUCKIN GOOD.

[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.

[maliciouslycreative]

So I’ve mentioned a lot of times over the years that I used to be fandom famous in a small anime fandom and I spent a lot of my time running damage control to an anti however I’ve never actually recounted the whole tale for you all. Buckle up and crack open a lemonade because we’re going on a journey (more under the cut).

The year is 2004, I’m 17, and in my final year of high school. I wrote a lot of fanfic back then, mostly for anime fandoms and around the time I joined Gaia I started posting my fanfic “Several Blows to the Head” which became unexpectedly extremely popular. But before I go forward I feel I should give some back story because some of you will probably get extremely confused very fast otherwise.  

For those of you who don’t know about gaia online let me give you some history. Gaia was pretty much THE SHIT back in the mid to late 2000s. It was an anime themed forum website where you had a little avatar you could dress up.You gained gold by posting, playing mini games, posting in polls, or even just browsing in general. There were hundreds of subforums and in each of them a tonne of active threads. Another feature was the guild system. Basically anyone could create a guild which was pretty much your own themed subforum that  the guild admin could decide the rules and who was able to join as long as they still followed Gaia’s ToS. 

The anime I was into was (Bakuten Shoot) Beyblade, which at the time was an ongoing series. For those unfamiliar with the series a bunch of teenagers use battling tops possessed with the spirits of ancient mythological creatures and even gods to fight each other. Let’s just say it wasn’t winning any awards for amazing writing but it was a lot of fun and I LOVED my small corner of the fandom. It was pretty much your average shonen series of the time which meant that it had a main cast of 5 male characters (with a female lead added in the second season) and then very few minor female characters. The only actual canon ship was only made canon in a post canon addition to the manga that was not even released outside of Japan. So I bet you all are coming to the same conclusion that yes, there was incredibly bad shipping drama. The breakdown of shipping pretty much looked like this

10% slash

70% canon male/OC

20% canon male/canon female

Now to resume our story. I joined Gaia and headed over to the anime forum and found the main Beyblade thread. I posted an introduction and in it made mention that I was a fanfic writer and I liked slash. This was when I met C. I’m not going to drag her name as all of this went down over a decade ago and I hope that she’s grown as a person since then. If any of you are REALLY resourceful I mean the threads still exist. You can go find them and see just how awful it got.  

C was a year older than me and apparently the authority in these parts on all things Beyblade. She was also a writer but in her own words did not write fanfics, she wrote and posted novels. She was pretty well known in the canon/OC circles and had a pretty enthusiastic following. 

So when I came in to that thread and introduced myself I opened a can of worms. I was told that we did not discuss slash ships in this thread because it was not canon and it made some people uncomfortable. And ok, I can see that. It was cool. I was there to have fun and chat with people. I mean anyone that wanted to chat slash I could add on YIM, MSN, or LJ. However, 2 things started driving the knife into the wound.

It was not ok to talk slash but it was perfectly ok for C to discuss in depth her fanfics because it was an OC and obviously did not contradict canon as the stories were post (a currently unfinished) canon

People kept recognising me because my fanfic was exploding in popularity. So people kept bringing up slash and I’d get dragged into it as my fic was usually a catalyst for discussion. 

To keep things from escalating us slash fans decided to make our own thread to talk Beyblade slash. Now, there was some divide in the slash fandom and people pretty much shipped only Kai/Takao or Kai/Rei but for the sake of everyone’s sanity we put our shipping differences aside in the thread and aimed to make it a positive space for everyone. I mean, most of us were multishippers so we tended to just be excited to read anything that wasn’t one of the 9000 OC fics we had to wade through to find any slash. 

Whenever people would come into the main Beyblade thread now if they happened to mention slash they would get an extremely cold message from C if one of us didn’t manage to intervene first and direct the new member to our other thread. 

The other crux of the problem was Kai. Kai was probably the most popular character in the English fandom and Kai was C’s favourite character. She had an extremely specific idea of how people should interpret Kai. If anyone came into the thread and made a post like “I LOVE KAI <3 <3 <3” she would be rather unkind to them making back handed comments about how the person only liked him because he was attractive or a “bad boy” or that if they didn’t have anything to add to the thread they should leave because we didn’t like spamming in the thread. If we ever started character analysis on Kai then C had to have the last word. After all she shared some characteristics with Kai and obviously that meant that she therefore knew him the best. 

You all can probably imagine how well conversations went in this thread. I did my best to kindly welcome people to the thread, redirect them when they needed to be, and tried to calm down discussions when they got too heated. And if things got too bad in the main thread we’d just move to the slash thread and be super excellent to each other. There were days where C became so unbearable that her friends that didn’t even ship slash would come into the slash thread to hang with us because we were just really nice. 

She was also extremely pushy with her fics. Whenever fanfics would come up shed be the first to suggest to anyone that they should read her novels. She even tried it repeatedly on the slash fans. Being completely fed up I one day made her an offer that if she read one of my fics I’d read all of hers. I didn’t even specify which fic. So she could’ve chosen one of my under 5k fics and I would have agreed to read like 200k worth of her fics. She never agreed to this in all the years of me dealing with her. 

The worst part of it all was we couldn’t even really report her for harassment or anything because she was friends with a lot of moderators. The last thing any of us wanted was to get banned over some petty grievance since we’d lose all our hard work to making our avatars look fabulous. 

If the whole mess in the forums wasn’t bad enough there was 1 Beyblade guild and guess who the guild admin was. The atmosphere in said guild could best be described as… tense. Anyone that wasn’t one of C’s rabid followers ran under the constant fear that they’d be booted for saying something that didn’t agree with her narrow view of things. My best friend and I were honestly surprised that she even allowed us into the guild. But she probably couldn’t afford to outright deny us as I was a pretty prominent writer in the english slash community then and my friend was also a prominent writer and artist. 

Eventually we got tired of walking on eggshells constantly so some of the other slash fans and myself pooled our resources together and I created a second Beyblade guild. Our message was simple, we were just there to be a safe haven for ALL fans of the series. We were expecting pretty much the people from the slash thread and then maybe a handful of other people to join.

The entire fandom on Gaia over the course of a couple days abandoned C’s guild and joined ours. Whereas before we created ours hers was on a steady traffic decline our guild was BOOMING with posts. 

Unfortunately the oldest mail I have is from 2007 on Gaia so I don’t have any screenshots of this but C was understandably upset that we’d sniped her entire user base. We did try to smooth it over with her saying that that was never our intention but it ended with her sending me a message that literally said “ok, you win” and this is something I still think about over a decade later. It forever shifted how I perceive antis. 

My whole time in fandom I’d just been here trying to have a good time. I didn’t intend to become fandom famous. I didn’t intend to be in charge of one of the most active Beyblade forums at the time. I wasn’t trying to change C’s mind or fight her. And this whole time she’d thought I’d been fighting against her because we had different views on the series. 

The last episode of Beyblade G Revolution aired in September 2005, her guild officially closed in 2006 and the fandom eventually started drifting into other things. I stayed active in it until probably 2008 when personal stuff drew me out of fandom and then officially took a leave from fandom in 2009 when my best friend passed away. I don’t know what happened to C but I know she was still writing her novels at that point. Whenever I see fandom drama brewing I always think back to her and how frustrated she used to make me and then I think of the “ok, you win” and I’m just left feeling sad for her and people like her. I just don’t understand how people can let their hearts be so consumed by hatred and self righteousness that it poisons their entire fandom experience. I guess that’s a conversation for another time.

One final comment that I would like to make here since I didn’t know where to fit it in above is that my one friend was completely DONE with C one day and we were talking to each other and she was like “she acts like her fics save lives in Africa!” and honestly this is the most perfect description of C’s attitude. Like good for her for believing in her writing but there is sometimes a point where you need to chill out with self promotion. 

[thecountsblog]

A Count’s World Retrospective, part 1

You know, working on The Count’s World anniversary has got me thinking about how I got started in fanfiction in the first place. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but Super Papes wasn’t my first foray into the wonderful world of fanfiction. In fact, I wouldn’t have written TCW at all if I wasn’t already aware of the ff.net community, setup, system, etc. With my 10-year anniversary coming up at the same time the DuckTales reboot is already showing its premier movie and on schedule to launch in about a month, I’m reminded that what really got me into fanficcing was... Darkwing Duck.

The Disney Afternoon aired on TV when I was little, and I have memories of playing at DuckTales and Darkwing with my brother, as well as having toys and storybooks of those series. But, like most things from my childhood, they faded away as I grew older. I have no idea what brought it up, but I didn’t think about Darkwing Duck again until 2006, which is forever known as The Year I Moved to Disney World.

This was a transitional period in my life: I was on my own for the first time, learning how to function with my disabilities, and for the first time doing something I loved in a place I loved and getting paid for it. But still, it was lonely at times. For the first half I didn’t get along with any of my roommates, I had trouble making friends at work, and things were all-around rough.

This coincided with an interesting period in Internet development. 2006 was a unique time in Internet, as it was after the time when having internet access in your home was approaching ubiquitousness, but the structure and scoiety still had that old “wild west” feel. People had things like MySpace, LiveJournal and other platforms for creating content and connecting with like-minded individuals. However, this was all incredibly new and nobody really knew what to make of it yet. The “old fandom,” which I had not taken part in, which was mostly tied to bulletin boards, old terrible fansites, mailing lists, etc., were all falling to the side as things like LiveJournal groups and fanfiction.net began to make it easier to bring fandom together.

Also back then, you couldn’t go online and look up any episode of any cartoon you want on kisscartoon or watchcartoononline. I only had access to a handful of episodes on dailymotion and that’s it. The first DVD hadn’t even been released at the beginning of this escapade. So a google search for Darkwing Duck doesn’t bring up the show’s wiki or its illegal episode torrents. It brings up old fan sites, which later rehosted their works on ff.net where a whole new generation of content creators was using it as a platform to share their works.

So I, being on my own and lonely, began to read. And read. And read. And when I finally made a friend who would watch the show with me on the DVD that came out while I was down there, we speculated. The speculation tied with my new discovery of fanfiction, and I began to write.

None of these works have ever seen the light of day. They have not been published or even finished. One of them is so embarrassing I won’t even tell you what it was about if you begged me, but the other one was something special. It was going to be my magnum opus. For all of 2007, the year I came home and crashed hard, it kept me going. Fanfiction made the post-Best Job Ever blues pass by so much more easily. I was really excited about this being my grand debut on the internet.

However, life had other plans.

My brother got a Wii for Christmas in 2007, and with it Super Paper Mario. I played it and loved it, but what I did not love was the ending. I was so upset that Blumiere and Timpani's ending was so... unsatisfying! They just disappear and that's it? I couldn't even bear to watch the credits, I just went to my room and cried. (The knowledge of the post credits scene helped soothe the burn somewhat, but I still felt cheated.)

Like I did two years previously, I handled the vacant gap with fanfiction. Like before, it fleshed out a world that I wasn't ready to leave. The one that took most of my attention was "Odium and Love," by Lazlo Pizzazzlo (then named Lazlo Titan.) But there were so many good ones. I had already set aside my "Magnum Opus" because I was too removed from the source material to do a good job, so I thought, "Why not write about Super Papes?"

All these ideas came to me: instead of writing one big fix-it fic, I would instead break it down into small, managable chunks. Since I was even back then a huge animation enthusiast, I thought about making it like a Saturday morning cartoon, except with more continuity. I took inspiration from a lot of other sources, which I will dicuss later, weather permitting, but the two shows that had the biggest impact in terms of setting were Aladdin: The Series and All Dogs Go to Heaven: The Series, both TV series that took pace after sequels to great movies that played around with the setting to make the show work. I figured I'd do three, maybe five, and then move on.

I did not expect people to respond as they did. I actually did not expect people to respond at all. I expected my first fics to go unread and unnoticed. But people liked it. And I found that I liked it, too. So I wrote more, and more. Five became nine, which led to a movie, which led to more. I lost steam not too much later, so I started branching out to other fandoms. But every time I thought I'd moved on, I wanted to go back. So I did.

Now here we are, ten years, twentyish shorts and a "movie" later, and I'm still here. I never did finish that debut story, and all my notes on it are long gone. Maybe I'll tackle it someday. Maybe not. Maybe I'll branch out more to other fandoms, or maybe I'll stay here. I never planned for any of this to happen, and I haven't planned for anything after this. But I'm still here, and if you're reading this you are, too. Or maybe you just got here. If so, you're welcome to stay. I appreciate the company. I know I have trouble interacting with my readers, but this is why I got into fanfiction in the first place: because I was lonely, and I liked a thing but there wasn't enough about it.