#thought it might be weird to tag people then decided it'd be weirder not to

[anghraine]

I follow few enough people that sometimes the fastest way to get to a mutual's blog, esp if I've forgotten their current username, is to go to "Following" and find them that way. But sometimes it's fun to go allllll the way back to see my very earliest follows in terms of people who are still at least vaguely active here and whom I've never had cause to unfollow:

@venndaai - first person I followed on Tumblr! We already knew each other from livejournal Star Wars fandom and iirc their migration to Tumblr was one of the original reasons I drifted from "ugh Tumblr" to taking it seriously as a fandom platform at all.

@duncatra - not many people in SW fandom have such consistently good takes and I was a Club Jade fan long before I had a Tumblr account.

@lantur - eventually I remembered that I could follow more people after B1 of Legend of Korra wrapped up. I started following other people with similar Tarrlok or Noatak feelings, and complicated reactions to the finale that didn't just slide into "labyrinthine social justice argument that's transparently about why my ship should be canon." Lantur in particular seemed cool even before she wrote my favorite between-seasons LOK fic ("Chiaroscuro").

@nanyoky - I am pretty sure we met via the Henriad's brief day in the Tumblr sun due to The Hollow Crown casting Tom Hiddleston as Henry V. His was the first performance of Henry V that I much liked, even though Hal is one of my favorite Shakespeare characters, so I was mildly active in the fandom and we hit it off.

@steinbecks - we met through LOK also, but on the Noatak side of my bloodbender feelings, and ended up talking a ton over the entire course of the show over the next few years and afterwards, especially about creative writing and editing. She's the only one on this list that I've met in person, I think—we went out to dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant when I happened to be in town (and she enabled my fascination with the bougiest cheeseburger of my life that for some reason was on the menu).

@grumpyfaceurn - we met through livejournal, also through Star Wars! She was the illustrator of my Lucy Skywalker fics from very early (we were partners in the au_bigbang that produced The Imperial Menace), and even when our interests diverged drastically over the years, we've stayed mutuals out of general accord.

@heckofabecca - I think we met through a random Jane Austen rant of mine about women's statistically average ages at first marriage in Austen's lifetime. At least, it's the first time I remember interacting with her! We discovered a wealth of other common interests, including sharing some extremely strong opinions on Tolkien matters important to us (like Elwing discourse), so it's a very long friendship these days. We even know each other's public-facing names.

@sqbr - Sean and I go way back (P&P fandom on livejournal and various forums, though we mostly got to know each other really well on Dreamwidth). By the time I followed them on Tumblr we'd been close friends and fellow endurers of the Austen fandom cisheteronormativity trenches for years.