Snowflake Challenge: Day 5
Jan. 10th, 2015 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
balsamandashIn your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. How did you come to fandom, why did you choose your fannish name, do you have more than one secret identity? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
When I was nine, my family moved from New York to Florida, and in the process isolated me from the cousin I grew up attached at the hip with and finished disconnecting me from the friends I had as a kid until we moved out of the house we lived in til I was 8. There is about a three-year gap between that and fandom of me making and then losing some truly terrible friends, and one set of really nice friends whose parents freaked out when they learned I was a witch, putting me back into relative isolation. That isolation's pretty key as to why I ended up in fandom.
Also relevant: when I was eleven, I believe, my uncle gave me the first two HARRY POTTER books for CHRISTMAS. (at this point my shift key has begun messing up, i apologize if capitals happen at random throughout this post.) I fell in love fast. a lot of the specific details are foggy but i believe that after that i got the rest of the series by the library, then went looking for fanfiction and discovered ff.net. then i discovered fictionalley park.
that was what really spurred me in fandom: the threads and the games and the shipping talk and the character discussion -- the fanfiction was awesome, but the community is what i really stayed for. and when i discovred the slasher's coven [as the main slash fans group called themselves] i followed them to their private message board. I also joined a private message board for cate tiernan's sweep series around the time, which is when i discovered internet rp, although theirs was quite a bit more like d&d than most message boards are.
The coven is the one that really spurred me onto poking fandom interaction in other fandoms, though, and they became very close, very good friends for years. they were my first real internet friends and i honestly don't know how i'd have survived that time period without them. they also introduced me to nano; through nano i met three people in my area who were also, one, fannish, and two, amazing. there was some rockiness, but they are still part of my life to this day; i would be a different person without them. [they also introduced me to a friend, who's birthday post for a person i didn't know i commented on. that person was bast, my fantastic, wonderful partner who i love more than life itself. everything good has come from fandom. everyone good, even more so.]
with one of those friends, i saw rent that november; then i got heavily into musical fandom. since then i've just continued branching more and more, never really dropping fandoms entirely even as i more and more rapidly keep finding new ones. and here i am twelve years later.
[my fannish name has evolved a lot over the years so i'm not going to go into that story right now. i do not have separate identities anymore, though i've considered it once or twice. i did in the beginning, because the idea of being able to be more than one person was interesting, and kind of freeing; but i haven't done that since i started making actual proper friends in fandom, rather than just fandom friends.]
When I was nine, my family moved from New York to Florida, and in the process isolated me from the cousin I grew up attached at the hip with and finished disconnecting me from the friends I had as a kid until we moved out of the house we lived in til I was 8. There is about a three-year gap between that and fandom of me making and then losing some truly terrible friends, and one set of really nice friends whose parents freaked out when they learned I was a witch, putting me back into relative isolation. That isolation's pretty key as to why I ended up in fandom.
Also relevant: when I was eleven, I believe, my uncle gave me the first two HARRY POTTER books for CHRISTMAS. (at this point my shift key has begun messing up, i apologize if capitals happen at random throughout this post.) I fell in love fast. a lot of the specific details are foggy but i believe that after that i got the rest of the series by the library, then went looking for fanfiction and discovered ff.net. then i discovered fictionalley park.
that was what really spurred me in fandom: the threads and the games and the shipping talk and the character discussion -- the fanfiction was awesome, but the community is what i really stayed for. and when i discovred the slasher's coven [as the main slash fans group called themselves] i followed them to their private message board. I also joined a private message board for cate tiernan's sweep series around the time, which is when i discovered internet rp, although theirs was quite a bit more like d&d than most message boards are.
The coven is the one that really spurred me onto poking fandom interaction in other fandoms, though, and they became very close, very good friends for years. they were my first real internet friends and i honestly don't know how i'd have survived that time period without them. they also introduced me to nano; through nano i met three people in my area who were also, one, fannish, and two, amazing. there was some rockiness, but they are still part of my life to this day; i would be a different person without them. [they also introduced me to a friend, who's birthday post for a person i didn't know i commented on. that person was bast, my fantastic, wonderful partner who i love more than life itself. everything good has come from fandom. everyone good, even more so.]
with one of those friends, i saw rent that november; then i got heavily into musical fandom. since then i've just continued branching more and more, never really dropping fandoms entirely even as i more and more rapidly keep finding new ones. and here i am twelve years later.
[my fannish name has evolved a lot over the years so i'm not going to go into that story right now. i do not have separate identities anymore, though i've considered it once or twice. i did in the beginning, because the idea of being able to be more than one person was interesting, and kind of freeing; but i haven't done that since i started making actual proper friends in fandom, rather than just fandom friends.]
