aria | like the wayback machine, but MORE HILARIOUS

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like the wayback machine, but MORE HILARIOUS

I'm not quite sure how this came about -- probably it came into my head from the combination of a discussion on rereading Harry Potter and something I saw in the Thirty Days of Fanfic meme that's going around -- but I have been thinking about Fandom Firsts. Okay, you've got a new fandom: what was the first fic you remember reading? Did it make any lasting impact on your experience with said fandom? &c.

Here are some of mine!

Harry Potter. I first got into Harry Potter about six months after Goblet of Fire came out, back when personal -- usually geocities -- websites were just starting to migrate to fanfiction.net, FictionAlley was just getting started, and it wasn't unheard of to come across fic that had no incorporated canon knowledge beyond Prisoner of Azkaban. (Holy shit, I feel old. Also, Microsoft Word seems to think that 'Azkaban' is an acceptable word in the English language. How times change.) Basically, what I'm saying is that the first thing I read was Harry/Hermione fic I discovered via the now long-defunct Unofficial Harry Potter Fanclub. The fic had, I believe, pink text on a black background, and featured McGonagall as Hermione's BFF. Needless to say, I was a bit bewildered by this strange expression of a fan's love.

The first thing I remember discovering and loving, though, was (please keep in mind I was thirteen at the time) The Eliza Trilogy. I am so glad the internet keeps records of everything! I am so delighted that I was around with a front-row seat to all the absurdity! And -- okay, I would never, ever read it again, but I have this absurd fondness in my soul for it. I THOUGHT THE PLOT TWIST WAS ASTONISHING. Oh thirteen-year-old Aria, you crack me up. (Sidebar: now I want to make younger self comics a la Kate Beaton, only mine would be me going "Hi, younger self! What fic are you reading?" and then my younger self would be a bit affronted when I'd start rolling around on the floor laughing.)

ANYWAY. Bearing in mind that I was in Harry Potter fandom for a long time, and it was my formative fannish experience, I have another Harry Potter first: Baby's First Slash Fic. At the time I read it, I'd known what slash was for a while, but when I first stumbled across it I felt sort of shocked and uncomfortable. (And my first reaction, after feeling shocked and uncomfortable, was "Oh god, was that a homophobic reaction? It's bad to be uncomfortable!" I also want to give my younger self hugs and, when she is ready, girlfriends.) But eventually, because I loved Remus Lupin to death, I decided I would take a deep breath and go for it, and I read the still quite sweet Remus/Sirius fic Out of the Woods by Canis M. (Searching SugarQuill for it, I discover that I have a huge nostalgic love for everything she wrote.) I fell completely in love and pretty much didn't read anything but Remus/Sirius for about a year.

The funny thing is, I can easily mark major periods of my life by what fandom I was enthusiastic about at the time, and yet those aren't always the fandoms that I have imprint fic for. Good Omens was most of sophomore year of high school, but I read all the fic in a go, so the only vivid memory I have that stands out from the rest is Ordinary People by

daegaer. (I suspect I would still love her stuff unconditionally; I just haven't read it in ages.)

Meanwhile, fandoms by which I don't mark time still sometimes have That Fic for me. For instance, I had at most a brief flirtation with Stargate Atlantis in 2006, but oh boy, astolat's Transcendental. I read it with feverish delight at an internet café in York, of all places, and while I think other SGA fics have eclipsed this one as Best SGA Fic Ever (coughSheppard'sLawandWrittenbytheVictorscough), Transcendental still holds a special place in my soul.

Back in the realm of fandoms I do mark time by, I ... also don't have that fic for Doctor Who. I first got fannishly involved reading

nostalgia_lj's Doctor Who squeecaps, which ... probably explains a lot, not least my still-ongoing desire to Give The Girls Some Goddamn Agency and just write Rose/Martha already. Fic didn't get me into Doctor/Master, either ~~unless Rusty's stuff counts as fic, which it might~~. But, um, I can probably blame New Dawn Fades by

omphalos for the strength of my fascination, my sudden enthusiasm for Gallifrey, and probably the naming of things, so, y'know, I will blame it. With great affection.

Moving right along, due South! I ... kind of have three, all of them helpfully documented, because this was the point at which I started fairly faithfully keeping a delicious account. First we have two of Speranza's, Interrogation and Ping. Interrogation was definitely first, and I knew instantly that I was gonna like this fandom, but Ping is the one that fills me with fuzzy first-fic love; it's so absurd and damaged.

The third one is a slightly different animal. It is old school! It's Aristide and Bone's How Ray Got His Groove Back, and I think reading it was the point at which I sat down hard and went "...oh, this fandom is going to be different." Because, although I started being FIAWOL only about a year after it was posted, I was in Harry Potter fandom, which was where all the teenagers and feral fans and &c were hanging out; Harry Potter isn't an old school fandom. Due South, on the other hand, is some weird hybrid fandom that NEVER DIES (god I love due South fandom) and so, in a way, this story was my introduction to fandom all over again, via textual time machine.

Our next logical regression, therefore, bringing us up to date (while still staying in the early 2000s!) is Highlander. Delicious tells me that the first fic I bookmarked was astolat's Friend of the Devil, which mm, yes, but in the interest of clarity I think the first fic goes down as The Declaration, another of Aristide's. Look at it! It's so old school I can hardly stand it, but unlike a lot of the other old school Highlander fic, it doesn't make my eyes bleed. It also, Methos, um, yes. Yes. I have found (newer) things that I've liked better since, because they are closest to my current fandom sensibilities, but ... I sort of like the circularity of it.

Maybe when I'm finished laughing at my younger self, she can, with absolute justification, laugh back at me.

And what about you guys? If you do absurd things like imprint on old fic enough to remember it, I'd be fascinated to hear what it is. And seriously, don't be embarrassed. My stuff is all old school slash or Eliza Snape, okay, I will really not judge you.

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Well, I'm sort of a n00b, so I certainly remember, but don't have much to contribute except that...

the first fanfiction I read, ever, was something to do with Star Wars, when I was nine. I had no idea what fanfic even was and MANAGED TO COMPLETELY NOT NOTICE THAT ALL OF THE CHARACTERS WERE FURRIES. To be fair, I didn't know what furries were either.

So. Um. Yeah. I stayed away for quite a while after that.
So then... I suppose the first fanfic I ever read with some sort of awareness of what I was reading was your Doctor Who S4! :D

Oh man. I'm amazed at how many people's first fanfic experiences are mildly terrifying. XD

And -- basically you are saying that the s4 project was one of your first fics! MY DELIGHT IS UNQUANTIFIABLE. :D

I am glad to have caused you delight!

For some reason this post made me really want to go find my mildy-terrifying first fanfic experience. SUCCESS! Just... OMGWTFBBQ, NINE-YEAR-OLD ME? WHERE DID YOU EVEN FIND THAT? No I lie, I know where she found it: she saw someone reading it on a public computer at the library, and went home to Google it. *headdesk* She was such a massively ridiculous kid that I am compelled to refer to her in the third person.

I started out in Sailor Moon fandom when I was nine or ten, and didn't run across much that was traumatizing. Early exposure to slash and femmeslash though. And then when I moved on to HP, I stuck with the Sugar Quill mostly after getting frustrated with FFN.

Oh, when I got into SGA fic, the first SGA fic I read on LJ was Auburn's The Taste of Apples, and it totally horrified and traumatized me. It was so deeply creepy to me, and was so very much not what I was expecting to read. Even now I refuse to read Auburn's fic unless I have seen copious indications that it won't totally fuck with me.

And another fandom first I just remembered: the first Highlander fic I read that took my breath away was Amand-r's Heat Goes to Cold. It cemented my undying love for Methos and Methos fic, and really set my standards high for Methos characterizations, since previously I'd read a lot of faintly embarrassing old school gen fic and Highlander crossovers.

The Sugar Quill! It was my Harry Potter base of operations for a while. <3

...Okay, I'm morbidly curious: what is The Taste of Apples about? I googled it but the summary is deeply unhelpful.

And!!! How did I somehow manage to miss Heat Goes to Cold? I'm reading it now and sort of basking, because -- there's Methos! I found him! EXCELLENT. Thank you for mentioning that one. :D

You know, I don't even know if I clearly remember what Taste of Apples was about anymore! I've never gone back to see if I remember it correctly. I just remember that it had a really creepy alien encounter and something freaky happened to the team, and IDEK if it was just me that found it so alarming.

And omg, you hadn't read Heat Goes to Cold?! It's like the shining perfect example of Methos fic and second person POV done well! I love Amand-r's Methos characterization in general: her Methos is smart and weird and fucked up and funny.

Ahaha. And even if it wasn't the most scarring thing in SGA fandom, I imagine creepy alien encounter fic of any variety is not the best first.

I know that I have seen Amand-r recced various places, but either they linked to defunct sites or I was just not paying attention! I may be a bit HUGELY IN LOVE with her Methos now, actually.

Her Highlander Holidays fic from last year was great as well. Also, she wrote a Highlander/Narnia crossover where Methos meets Aslan. *___*

I sort of want to lock her up and make her write endless Highlander fic, but I think she's mostly moved on to Torchwood.

Oh my god it's like CHRISTMAS. Tasty, Methos-y Christmas! (Also: where. Where can I find the Methos-and-Aslan fic. I can't even TYPE I am so unreasonably excited about that premise.)

Noooo. Actually, I'm impressed; I generally feel a bit awkward and afraid of Torchwood fandom, but I think this is one case in which I can make no value judgment whatsoever on the fandom migration. Highlander > Torchwood? Highlander < Torchwood? WHO KNOWS. XD

Here it is! And ha, sorry that took a bit, I ended up getting sucked in and rereading it.

And I don't judge the fandom migration! I mean, I sort of hate Jack at this point, but whatever. I can understand when someone just doesn't have any more to say in a given fandom.

...You know, the terrible problem with that Highlander/Narnia fic is that I want to write one now too! Only ... um, I don't know if you know His Dark Materials or regularly read Yuletide, but there is an amazing and terrifying crossover fic called The Ivory Horn. It has become my baseline for what Narnia crossovers should be. Not that Amand-r's isn't great! Because it is, and I loved it. It just made me think that I would also love to see a creepier one too.

Oh God, the Ivory Horn broke me when I first read it. I'm a lot more critical of Narnia than Amand-r's fic is, and hold an undying grudge about Susan, so I could see a creepier, darker crossover. I loved Narnia as a kid, until the Last Battle, and I love reading fic that goes deeper with Narnia.

And really, all I can say is wriiiiite iiiitt when it comes to Highlander/Narnia fic. Bonus points if Susan meets Methos.

I think my favorite Narnia crossover to date is From a World More Full of Weeping -- whose solution to the Problem Of Susan I like much better than most. (I would also like to see more of the Narnia/DCU crossover series Azar's started, which is much less strange than it might sound given the universes being crossed.)

...oh, I want more of that fic so much.

I'm starting to think I should make a compilation post of Narnia crossovers and ask for recs. It's a really delicious world, isn't it? It's not like Doctor Who, where you can just easily impose the Doctor on various worlds and easily handwave it; it's another kind of fun entirely, because it's definitely a text that's there to be examined and argued with by other perspectives. :D

please do. just saying.

Oh goodness, my imprint fic! I do not remember my earliest stuff, alas...

The fic that dominates my memories of some of my earlier years in fandom (from 2004 on), though, would be the Dangerverse by whydoyouneedtoknow, which begins with Living With Danger (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2109424/1/Living_with_Danger) and goes on to about ten million more ridiculously long fics, with all sorts of glorious Mary Sues, both OCs and canon characters. It's riddled with prophecies, and destiny, and super-speshul-magical-abilities. I still harbour huge fondness for these fics, though I don't think I'll ever reread them (SO MUCH to reread; it's super-intimidating to even contemplate!)

Back in my days of being a total hardcore Hermione/Snape shipper (I am not joking about how thoroughly I shipped them), the fic I have the clearest memories of reading and rereading with joy was The Lioness Prophecies (http://owl.tauri.org/stories.php?psid=1952) by amr. It...I still totally love it, okay? There are certain ways in which it is ridiculous but other ways in which it is oh so good and my nostalgia only notices the latter.

I tried several slash fics back in my HP days because there were some major slash ships going on there, but I was entirely unmoved by the lot of them. Then in early 2009 I got abruptly converted to slashfic with A Beautiful Lifetime Event (http://intimations.org/fanfic/stargate/lifetime_event.html), by astolat, which I imprinted on very thoroughly.

And if I were to continue into my imprint-fics of ALL my fandoms this would become unreasonably long so I'll stop here. (except to say that your Doctor Who alternate seasons were TOTALLY what I imprinted on for Doctor/Master.)

Oh my lord, Living With Danger looks amazing. Also, because my brain makes weird connections, I just had the sudden vivid recollection of a series I thought was excellent at the time, about how Remus and Sirius were BFFs who ended up with OC wives who I found awesome, and they had children, and one of Remus' sons was named Malcolm, maybe? And Bill was also one of the main characters, and there was lots of EGYPT, and CURSES, and it was AMAZING, but I have no idea what keywords to even look for now. Whiiiich is a total digression, but I thought I would share since you kick-started my brain. XD

fdlsdkfdsjf I LOVE that you were a hardcore Hermione/Snape shipper! That is I think one of the only pairings I was never interested in whilst in HP fandom (I mean, for god's sake, I definitely read Harry/Snape, so it's not like I was adverse on principle or anything). What was Hermione/Snape fandom like?? I am so curious now.

Okay, confession: I have never read A Beautiful Lifetime Event. I know what it is about! I probably know many of the things that happen in it! Everyone has read it and people whose taste I trust say it's great! I just ... never got around to it. I don't think it's actually a point of honor not to read it or anything? I just don't care enough about SGA.

(rfdlfdlkgf yaaaaay. The unintentional result of this post is that people are telling me the season projects were their Doctor/Master imprint fics! This makes me UNREASONABLY JOYFUL.)

Living With Danger is amazing. Totally amazing. And man, that series you talk about sounds very related to LwD, as regards the BFFs and OC wives and ADVENTURES. I would have read the hell out of it, is what I'm saying. (Bill and Egypt and curses! I totally went for that stuff too)

Oh, HGSS fandom was INSANE in its own special way. And I am happy to tell you all about it AT GREAT LENGTH. There was a lot of "Hermione is too intelligent and mature to be saddled with a sports-obsessed nincompoop like Ron" and "Snape is just misunderstood and needs someone to love him" and "people being smart together is super awesome". I can still totally get behind the last point, and the first two have a certain element of truth to them, at least.

A big thing in HGSS was a group called When I Kissed The Teacher, or WIKTT, and it would run challenges. And there was this one challenge that just sort of took on a life of its own for AGES AND AGES afterwards, called the Marriage Law Challenge (MLC). It was basically the Aliens Made Them Do It of HGSS fandom, only where "it" is "get married" and "aliens" are "the Ministry". I adored MLC fics unreasonably much: two people thrown together in adversity who must learn to respect one another! And then watch that respect blossom into love!

But alas much of the rest of HGSS fandom looked down their noses at MLC fics.

There was an unfortunately large percentage of writers in HGSS who went a bit too far in the "misunderstood Snape" direction, completely erasing his canonical nasty side (or underplaying it excessively) in order to make shipping him with a good girl like Hermione more palatable.

There was also an unfortunately large percentage of writers who wrote Ron and Harry as boors and idiots, in order to show more clearly why Hermione needed to seek out more mature and intelligent company.

But HGSS fic at its best was a celebration of intelligence and competence, was an exploration of subtle and nuanced morality, was about looking beneath the surface unattractiveness to find the quality of person beneath, was about two people who have been outsiders for so much of their life finding someone who would be able to appreciate them for who they were. <3

And in retrospect one of the things I love the most about it was that it allowed for a strong-willed, intelligent, not-conventionally-attractive female character to take the starring role unapologetically. Nascent feminism ftw!

I will forgive you for having never read A Beautiful Lifetime Event, terrible sin though that is. *grin* If you don't care for SGA then, well, it wouldn't be up your alley. And the pairing type it embodies isn't the pairing type you seem to go for most strongly anyways.

(Such joy is NOT UNREASONABLE. Your season projects are a source of joy and wonder in the universe!)

I REMEMBER THAT HARRY/HERMIONE FIC. Hermione time-traveled in one installment and immediately became besties with inexplicably-young-and-blonde!McGoogles! Who was at school at the same time with both MWPP and Tom Riddle and had a crush on Lupin, and Lily was a Slytherin and Tom's girlfriend and it was INCREDIBLY EPIC. That was in between present-day installments, of course, in which Hermione hung out with American OCs and had a giant romance-novel girlboner for Harry, who was all brooding and manful and oh my god. XD That fanfic was basically Twilight with wizards.

...</flashback to 2000>

You have a much more detailed memory of it than I do! But I do think we're talking about the same one; that sounds pretty damn familiar.

(Oh, oh, I just remembered, another one of my foundational Harry Potter fics was your Voldemort one! I know we have an unspoken rule to not mention the ridiculous HP fic we wrote in the depths of 2001, but -- man, I loved it when I was thirteen. XD)

I may or may not have read the entire thing. XD It was terrible and addictive. (I misremembered the time-travel sequence, though -- Hermione and McGonagall were BFFs in the present, but in the past sequences Hermione was occupying McGonagall's body. And complained in her internal monologue about McGonagall's high heels and short skirts being hard to walk around in. LOLwut.)

AAAH, this simultaneously warms the cockles of my heart and fills me with shame. /o\ Sublimating your tween angst into a Mary Sue's downward spiral into supervillainy: possibly not the world's best coping mechanism.

Daria fandom didn't have much in the way of traumatising pairings. It was where I first encountered femslash (slash proper, not so much until I hit Good Omens), but mostly people were content to write gen and throw virtual tomatoes at each other over pairing preferences.
(No, I'm not kidding. There was once a delightfully meta fic called 'Shipper Wars on the topic, but I think the Internet has since eaten it, and anyway it mostly makes sense if you were in fandom around 2000.)
What it did have? CROSSOVERS. And a few that were called parodies, of the 'insert characters from Thing A into the plot of Thing B, hijinks ensue.' Back to the Future. Star Wars. Yellow Submarine - TWICE. (One of those is another highly meta production, but still.)
Probably the most formative of those crossovers, though: Doctor Who Gives a Damn. In which Lawndale is invaded by Daleks, and Daria, Jane, Four, and Sarah Jane save the day. It still makes me squee, ten(!) years later.

I know practically nothing about Daria, but the amount of meta fic sounds EXCELLENT.

There was probably slightly less meta than I've made it sound like. But... well, sometimes the insanity from the forums leaked over into the fic.
('Shipper Wars was kind of a thing of absolute beauty at the time, though I'm not so sure it would have aged well, if I went looking now. But, well. When the weapon of choice is oddly-colored tomatoes...)

Okay, this is where we acknowledge that I have been around for way longer than I like to think about sometimes....

The first fanfic that I actually "imprinted" on, I think -- as a reader, not a writer -- would have been Star Trek: The New Voyages (the Marshak/Culbreath book, not the much more recent fanvid-series); specifically, the story that stuck was Ruth Berman's "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited". And it should be noted that I bought the book new when it first came out (eep!). I don't think the book was my absolute first encounter with fanfic, but it's the first that stuck.

Next we hit the work(s) that permanently hooked me on crossovers, also dating from waaaaay back: that would be the eight issues of The Holmesian Federation. I actually ran across the zine about halfway through its run, but eventually acquired copies of all eight issues, which I still have.

My first major brush with online fanfic also precedes the Web proper; I was hanging around on various parts of the GEnie sci-fi community during the composition of an epic multi-author crossover crackfic known as "Bugs Bunny vs. the Borg" (aka "Carrot Juice, Earl Grey. Hot"). Regrettably, it's not presently available on the Web (and I foolishly failed to capture a copy a year or so ago when it turned up briefly). This was a novel-length affair in which a holodeck accident in the early stages of the TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds" brings a veritable encyclopedia of toon characters to life on and around the USS Enterprise-D as heroes and villains alike ("I am Wocutus of Borg. Pwepawe to be assimiwated.").

Now we jump forward dramatically, because after GEnie, I more or less gafiated and didn't go hunting fanfic at all for a number of years. And then Gargoyles happened, and then I did, and one of the first things I found was All Through the Night. Which was not just Gargoyles fic, but also excellent crossover fic of the right kind, and I was back to reading fanfic in at least a few of my fandoms-of-interest. It is very much Merlin Missy's fault, in a good way, that I rediscovered the fic world and have stayed around at least on its fringes since.

Now we jump forward some more, because the fandom that kicked me into actually writing fic in an active way was Kim Possible. And here I have to point at two stories: Rocinante's Anything Is Possible, whose strong meta qualities had me hooked very early on (I kept saying "he can't DO that!"...and then he did, and made it work), and Allaine's An Unacceptable Sitch, which turned a lot of my prior assumptions about slash inside out, again in a very good way, on the way to telling a d*mned good story and launching a really excellent series. I signed up on FF.Net in order to review Rocinante's work, found a community of supportive KP writers there, and produced several stories (and fragments of stories) before wandering across to LJ and Yuletide and from there to Dreamwidth and AO3.

And that's probably much more than you wanted to know.... :-)

It is definitely not more than I wanted to know! I hit the minimum age for being actively in fandom around the same time that current internet fandom really started to blossom, so anything that happened before that is fascinating to me.

I am now deeply in love with the whole notion of the Holmesian Federation, by the way. :D

HF was a fascinating zine while it lasted. The quality of the stories was highly variable (the Batory series the Fanlore article mentions was, IMO, actually one of the weaker aspects of the zine, whereas the book-length Doctor Who story making up #3 was very good indeed), but the premise was irresistible.

One fascinating bit: it goes against a lot of what's supposed to be the fanfic-community norm, but the KP community over on FF.Net was (and to some extent remains) largely populated by adult males, including a significant number of folks over 40, though I didn't actually realize this till after I'd become established there. It's not that there are no tween-and-up girls there -- quite the contrary -- but it's enough of a contrast to the prevailing demographic that I sometimes react a little sharply to some of the more aggressively feminist corners of the fic communities.

OMG! I wrote on that! It was like 20 years ago when we did that on GEnie! Now I am so horribly sad that my disk copy was damaged!
I wrote for the only non-WB characters, the Ducks!
How I really the SFRT on GEnie!!!

Since this post I paid a visit to the Wayback Machine. This is what I found (and promptly made sure to archive...).

WOW!!!!!! THANK YOU! I cannot tell you what its like seeing this after so long! We started it on GEnie, back in the day, and i was only a kid writing my part on my old Apple IIc

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WOW!!!!!! THANK YOU! I cannot tell you what its like seeing this after so long! We started it on GEnie, back in the day, and i was only a kid writing my part on my old Apple IIc <yeah... a LONG time ago!>.

We started it as a lark... just something funny. One person was WAY over serious about it, but ya know... it really WAS fun!
Still can't believe it was 20 years ago!

This post makes me so happy in a nostalgic-y kind of way.
I REMEMBER THE UNOFFICIAL HARRY POTTER FAN CLUB!

My real first fandom experience was on the Tamora Pierce forum Sheroes. There was some fic on Sheroes Fans, and the only thing I remember about it was that it was all terrible.

I never seriously read fanfiction in Harry Potter, but I do rememeber read The Shoebox Project during Shoebox Summer, in which it updated every Thursday, and

dustuck, who is still primarily in the Potter fandom, being very impressed. And I remember this one Snape/Hermione fic (I am not a Snape/Hermione shipper by any means, so gods know why I started reading it) in which Snape dies and leaves Hermione all his possessions and everyone thinks they were secretly carrying on an affair at Hogwarts, and Hermione is very confused because they weren't. But it turns out that Snape left clues on how to bring himself back to life and Hermione would be the only one smart enough to figure it out. I kind of was amazed by the plot.

There was one Thanksgiving in which I read *so much* Phantom of the Opera fic. I do remember this basically being the one fandom I've run across in which Main Male Character/OFC is an acceptable pairing. I do remember The Sorcerer of Rouen as being very much like an old fashioned detective novel, with smuggling and Pinkerton agents and the like.

There is actually no one fic that sticks out from the Merlin fandom. I read basically everything that was out there of the Merlin/Arthur and OT4 variety and then followed the big authors back in time to SGA, even though I hadn't yet seen the show. I do remember my very first SGA fic (*checks delicious* nevermind, the one I remember as the first was actually my very second SGA fic). It was Waiting For My Real Life To Begin by toomuchplor (and considering that my almost-first fic in the fandom was written (I think) during the last season, this shows my tendency to get into fandoms after the show is over). It's actually a really good fic, but I remember being very confused as to Sheppard's character. He seemed kind of inconsistent. And then I saw the show and was like "She has the best Sheppard characterization EVER".

And then I exhausted all the good McShep fic (though I still read in SGA; McKay/Sheppard is still kind of the pairing of my heart) and read the entirety of Hawks and Hands without ever seeing an episode of due South.

But it turns out that Snape left clues on how to bring himself back to life and Hermione would be the only one smart enough to figure it out. I kind of was amazed by the plot.

God, please tell me that fic was as good as it sounds and that you remember what it was called or how to find it.

Last Will and Testament

in execution not amazing, but the idea is still truly awesome

Ooh, the name is familiar! I'm looking forward to reading it, thanks!

I can't believe I never checked out the Sheroes forum, seriously; before I got a computer and was introduced to fandom as a concept, I was hugely obsessed with the Tortall books and pretended to be a girl-disguised-as-a-boy-training-to-be-a-knight all the time. :D

Shoebox Project! Deep in my heart I'm still a bit sad they never finished it, although who knows how much I'd actually like it on a reread.

Yay, SGA fic! I have not read that one before, so I now have it open in a tab. (An easy way to get me to read SGA fic: tell me that something has the best Sheppard characterization ever. I am so easy for John Sheppard and his stupid face.)

HAWKS AND HANDS. Oh god Hawks and Hands. It was actually one of the last due South fics I read, because I was terrified of the sheer length of it and I also knew I'd want time to savor it. (When I did read it, I lost pretty much thirteen straight hours devouring it wholesale. Heh.)

Canis M.'s fics were wonderful. *adds to to-reread list*

I don't even remember the first HP fic I read, never mind stuff I read in my first fandom, The X-Files. Some fics stick out, though - I may do this meme about them instead. :D

I think 'Waiting for Ganymede' was one of the first fics I ever read that had sex of any kind of it, or at least reasonably well-written sex.

Please do this meme for the fics that stick out to you! I love trips down memory lane and I also love free recs. :D

Sadly, that one seems to have disappeared from the internet. D: Maybe people in finder comms have saved copies or something. I hate it when fic goes away.

...and I posted that a minute before I found it on a yahoo group. Wheeeee.

Ahahah The Eliza Trilogy! Oh HP, you were the best fandom ever, clearly; I'm sorry I wasn't really in it until 2008 when I was bored on the internet in Japan.

When The Phantom Menace came out I read a lot (and even posted some, ack) fanfic on theforce.net forums. I don't want to know if it's still findable by the wayback machine, and I don't remember anything about the stories I read, either. Probably they were all het or gen, as I had no notion of slash at the time.

And then, essentially, there is a nine-year gap in my fannishness in which I was in anime fandom, full stop, and neither read nor wrote fic. This changed with discovering The Shoebox Project in 2008, and then last year I read Stealing Harry over the summer--I had been reading fic in patches between those two points, but I feel like reading Stealing Harry at my godawful summer data entry job really sealed the deal. I also wrote my first fic in ten years at that job.

I suspect that reading the Eliza Trilogy without knowing that things could be better was a unique and genuinely awesome experience. (And yet somehow when I read the Draco Trilogy around the same time, I was less than impressed ...? WHO KNOWS.)

THE PHANTOM MENACE FANDOM. Okay, I have to confess, pretty much my entire brush with Star Wars fandom was the Sith Academy, but damn, someone mentions the Phantom Menace at all and I start laughing uncontrollably in fond remembrance.

Having never been in anime fandom, I am deeply curious about how it is different than other fandoms! How do things work over there in anime land?

Instead of fic and vids, there is cosplay and AMVs. Not that people don't write fic (I have! thanks, Yuletide!), but it's less common than in media fandom.

Also at the time I was big into it--I still love anime and manga, but not quite in the same way now--there was a big emphasis on fannishness as collecting: anime figures, anime 'goods' (merch, essentially), that sort of thing. That's much less prominent now, for various reasons.

Oh wow, fandom firsts...

My very first fandom on the internet was Star Trek: Voyager. I had no idea what fanfiction was at that point, and was very surprised to discover what it was. I don't remember the first fanfic I read in that, probably because over the course of a year and a half I read an embarrassingly large number of Janeway/Chakotay fics, many of which were awful. There were a lot of good ones too. The Voyager fandom is/was enormous.

I got into Harry Potter fanfic looking for Snape/Lily stories, which ironically, I never ended up reading. Somehow, in playing with the settings on Fanfiction.net I discovered that Snape/McGonagall existed. My thoughts upon finding this went something like "What the heck? The internet is a strange, strange, place, and who would ship Snape and McGonagall? That's almost too wierd to believe." It was such a weird idea to me, that I decided I had to read a couple of short fics, just to try to understand what possessed people to ship Snape and McGonagall. Three or four stories in I was hooked. There are some really good Snape/McGonagall fics out there. This is one, one of my favorites, and mildly Snape/McGongall, sort of more a friendship piece than a romantic one, but still a little shippy: http://juliefortune.livejournal.com/22745.html
I've also read most of DailyProphetEditor's fic at (fanfiction.net), including a funny one called "Goldilocks and the Four Heads of Houses" (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3732804/1/Goldilocks_and_the_Four_Heads_of_Houses) that involves Lockhart pursing Snape, and unexpected Snape/McGonagall. A lot of Snape/McGonagall fics ignore the seventh book, at least in terms of what we learn of Snape's motivations, but some of them deal with it or just tweak canon a smidge.

I also found some McGonagall/Hooch fics, which I think were the first (fem)slash fics that I read, although I definitely remember seeing Janeway/7 fics in the Voyager fandom, I just didn't read them.

Oh holy shit. lol, my first fanfic, eh? I think it was a Sailor Moon femmeslash fic when I was about 9 years old... all I remember about it was two girls (sailor scouts, I can't remember who) who held their breath for an absurd amount of time as they had sex at the bottom of a pool. lol!

At some point around here, I remember reading my first yaoi "lemon" story (I was 10 years old at the time). It wasn't even a fandom fic-- it was an original story about an angel called, "Shatters of a Heart." It was EXTREMELY explicit (involving many different kinks: foodplay, waxplay, iceplay, sensory deprivation, etc.). I recall being very shocked, mildly horrified, intrigued, and absolutely baffled. I didn't even know what half of the stuff was-- so I looked it up on Alta Vista... and was promptly assaulted with a bunch of gay pornography! xD

Somehow, I recall stumbling across an extremely explicit Monster Rancher's fic around this time... it had bestiality and furries... um, I remember avoiding fanfic for awhile after reading that one. xD I suppose you can imagine. lol

Next, I somehow managed to stumble across a AU Highschool Ares/Joxer Xena fic without realizing that it was Xena (fandom). *facepalm* I imprinted very heavily upon this fic-- I think it was the ground work for one of my biggest guilty pleasures in any/all fandoms. x3

It was at this point that I finally found HP fandom. Ironically, I ended up reading a fic called, "Yet Another Snape meets the Dursleys story" without having actually read any of the Harry Potter books! I'm pretty sure it sort of combined with my favorite trope from the Xena fic and reinforced them quite heavily when I imprinted upon it as well. I... don't even know if it was a Snape/Harry fic or not-- but the second one I read, was!

It was called "A Bittersweet Potion" and it was around this point that I up and fell "in love" with Snape. I read (devoured, really) all the Harry Potter books that were out and obsessed in this fandom for years. One of the first fanfics I attempted to write was from here! It was my first main fandom (and I'm still in love with it-- I read a Snape/Harry fic just last night, as a matter of fact) and I'm almost certain that it set the standard for everything else I've loved and read in any/all fandoms...

What I mean is that after 10+ years in fandom, I've come to notice a certain pattern in my ships and tropes. A JerkAssWoobie (or something similar-- someone cold, Snarky, and usually unwilling to share with his emotions-- someone who becomes a woobie in my head) with an outgoing, cheeky extroverted character. xD ...So, Snape/Harry? Rodney Mckay/John Sheppard? Kirk/Spock? Heero/Duo? lol, I'm not sure what happened here, but dammit, fanfic created my preference in men! *head desk*

Anyway, I held on tightly to the Harry Potter fandom for a good 5-7 years (while occasionally delving into other, smaller fandoms like Gundam Wing and Smallville before eventually coming to the conclusion that anime fandoms usually have lower quality "yaoi fic" whereas slash fandoms usually have higher quality slash fic).

Eventually, though, I ended up tentatively delving into Stargate: Atlantis where I quickly found love in one Dr. Rodney Mckay. I put HP fandom (and Snape) on the backburner for a good year or two after getting into this fandom (and once the charm wore off, I switched between HP and SGA periodically). Oddly enough, I can't really think of any fics in this fandom that really imprinted on me. Hmm, the only one I can think of that really piqued an interest in me was this one Rodney/Ronon fic I stumbled across where they were trapped in a spaceship that was running out of oxygen and they ended up having to share the last bit of it (via a spacesuit with a tank of air) with each other. xD It sort of aroused the erotic asphyxiation kink in me and made me curious (Star Trek rather shamelessly grabbed hold of it at a later date and took off running).

It was around this point that I really started getting into LiveJournal, actually. I've had multiple previous accounts in the past, but it was only when I got in SGA fandom and started making some fandom friends that I really understood the point of it. x3 I can distinctly recall some of my most favorite fanfic in SGA fandom (Permutationality, Through the Noise to the Sea, and Male Enhancement to name just a few off the top of my head. Oh yes and, of course, SardonicSmiley. She was, perhaps, my most favorite John/Rodney author. xD).

Eventually, the new Star Trek movie came out in 2009. I went to see it in the theaters a day after it was released and fell in love yet again. <3 I went home (the fandom was practically non-existent on LJ at this point) and watched the Original Series (which I now love more than Reboot!) before delving headfirst into the KS-Archive. I skipped around between fandoms here (since the actual ST fandom had yet to really explode with fic)-- switching between many different minor fandoms (but always coming back to HP, SGA, and ST). I also discovered Delicious and started dutifully adding bookmarks and learning how to use the tagging system.

Finally, I found my fourth main fandom: Supernatural. I'd actually started watching SPN years earlier, but an episode in season 2 freaked me out so superbly that I didn't come back until season 4 came out (and even then, I only went back in because I heard they'd brought a slash fangirl into the actual show). It was at this point that I broke my cycle: Dean/Castiel. Castiel was my new favorite character-- but he wasn't like any of my previous favorites-- he was wasn't a Jerkass Woobie! He was still, perhaps, a woobie... but he was quite unlike anything I'd encountered before. A poor lost angel sent to Hell (and Earth) for the first time to rescue Dean, completely new to emotions and never having questioned his orders before. <3 Dean was also a woobie, so it still didn't fit my typical ship slot. xD

I haven't been obsessed with a fandom like that since I first found Harry Potter. xD I was obsessed in every sense of the word. It was all I talked/thought/read about for a year straight. My love for it was the burning passion of a thousand suns. x3 It even prompted me out of my cubby hole and helped me begin writing again (I'd suffered from a pretty severe writer's block for years). I flourished in that fandom. I created DeanCasBigBang (the LJ community and the website) and it was amazing. Unfortunately, I wore myself out there. I'd exploded into the fandom with a big bang and slowly faded out after the season 5 finale.

That leads me where I am today! :D I'm still a huge lover of all of my main fandoms (HP, SGA, ST, and SPN). I still love reading fics from all of them-- I always will... but I currently find myself fandomless for the first time I can remember. There is no specific fandom for me to gleefully spend my time with right now. ;__; After 12 years in fandom, I actually feel a bit lost. lol It's mildly disconcerting.

P.S. Er... Hi! Nice to meet you. <3 I'm Ophie and I found your post via Google when I was searching for information about the WayBack Machine. xD Hope you don't mind my huge-ass comment... >.<;

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

like the wayback machine, but MORE HILARIOUS

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*strolls down memory lane*

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"Carrot Juice, Earl Grey. Hot"

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Re: "Carrot Juice, Earl Grey. Hot"

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Oh, by the way, hi! Nice to meet you~ :D

strolls down memory lane

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