#the MSTing is from Usenet 1996

[wheel-of-fandoms]

Great question! ... Moving on... Seriously though I have no idea....

OH wait, maybe I do? Basically, I got into fan fic very late, and even now don't read much of it, and what I do tends to just be... smut. I might read more of other types if I got back into reading more in general, but I have been struggling with that. Anyway, I can't at all what I might have read first on AO3 Anyway that said, what I just remembered was way back in my early 20s when I found a script-style Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing on the famously bad "The Eye of Argon" short story. It wasn't just generically riffing on Eye, it was with the standard MST3K characters and all. So I suppose that counts as fan fic of MST3K. Even though I only seen a few parts of a couple episodes of MST3K.

It was probably 10+ years after that when I first read any fan fic on AO3 (and nothing on any site in between). I suppose I might have seen like individual posts that might have counted as micro-fics for some stuff.

Oh, and here is that MSTing of Eye if anyone is interested:

I do feel bad for Jim Theis though, he was 16 when he wrote it (and it was 1970, fantasy was full of purple prose in general back then). He died in 2002, only 48 years old.

Some other info about Eye and Jim

[trdsf]

So, since I clicked on 'Yes, and I feel compelled to reblog and share the story' (which I don't really, but that's the closest to my answer, which would have been a simple 'yes'), I suppose I'm obliged to reblog and tell the story.

Let's go back about 30 years to my first Internet account, back when you could reasonably keep up with a Usenet newsgroup or three via a dialup BBS. No, I'm not going to explain Usenet to the whippersnappers. I had been -- and I still occasionally use -- 'ikaros' as an online handle, which nomme de Net dates back to the VAX VMS 11/750 at my college in the early 1980s. Always all lower case, for reasons I simply do not recall. It was an affectation probably influenced by having read too much e.e. cummings in grade school.

Anyway, I fell in with the Usenet fan MSTing crowd, and for a MSTing of Batman Forever which I think we belted out of the park, I came up with the character of Dr Sherwood Forrester, the long lost twin of Dr Clayton Forrester. Ere long online, I was signing off as 'The Rev Dr Sherwood Forrester' or 'trdsf'.

Skip forward to 1996 and the MST3K ConventioCon Expo Fest-O-Rama 2 Electric Boogaloo. I'm wandering the halls early on Sunday with a friend and who do we bump into but Trace "Clayton Forrester" Beaulieu, who had just announced his retirement from MST3K shortly before the convention. While shaking his hand, the conversation went thusly:

Me: I'd like to say thank you for the last several years... He: Well, thank you very much. Me: ...and the best of luck in the future... He: Thank you, thank you. Me: ...and can I have your old job now? He: (throwing his head back and laughing) Sure!

And ever since then officially online I've been trdsf, aka The Rev Dr Sherwood Forrester.

As it happens, I am properly a reverend, as I have a formal ordination via the Universal Life Church as a minister in the Church of the SubGenius. And once I up my membership in the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, I shall definitely purchase a Miskatonic doctorate. :D

tl;dr -- trdsf is a hardcore MSTie and nerd and always has been.