My Piece of the Internet

Challenge #2


In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.




My first fannish experience was a deep, heart-felt love for the Baby-Sitter’s Club books at age 9. I read every one I could get my hands on, many more than once. I dreamed of having a “full set” of all the books that existed at the time. The main series was still being written when I was reading it; I think they were around #100 at the time. Looking back on it, the Baby-Sitter’s Club is a natural gateway to fanfiction. It essentially is fanfiction AU in the sense that every single book, every trip, every summer vacation, every event, happens when these girls are all 13; they are perpetually in the 8th grade. It’s no wonder I like reading hundreds of iterations of stories about the same characters to this very day!

Around the same time I got into The Baby-Sitter’s Club, I became pretty heavily obsessed with Xena: Warrior Princess as well. To me, Lucy LawlessXena was the coolest, most beautiful woman that could possibly exist on the planet. And in retrospect, fuck yeah little me! I had great taste and I support that opinion wholeheartedly. I actually went back and watched the entire run of Xena on DVD when I was in college and loved it again as an adult. The comedy, the angst, the camp… it’s all really top-tier.

Even though I was a huge fan, I was never in a fandom. Because I was 9 and the internet barely existed. My first actual fandom came when I was about 12 or 13 and I put “Harry Potter” into a search engine and got this result:



This website pretty much set the course for me. I read every single page of it until there was only one that I hadn’t explored, because I didn’t know what it meant: Fan Fiction. When I finally clicked on it and read some of the stories there, that was pretty much it. I found my way from there to FanFiction.net. I read a ton of stories and also wrote a few extremely awful Sirius Black centric fics that I posted and am too afraid to try and find because death by cringe seems unpleasant. There was an “event” in fan history around 2001 in which a certain BNF was kicked off of FF.N for plagiarism and a new Harry Potter forum was born. I distinctly remember Fiction Alley launching on Harry Potter’s 21st birthday: 7/31/2001. There was a placeholder page on the site counting down to launch day. I was so excited. Fiction Alley was such a fun place in those days. At some point around that time I also started following fic writers on LJ and eventually I snagged an invite code so I could get my own livejournal account.

Livejournal was THE SHIT back in those days. Hugely active, so much fun, pretty much unlimited content to wade through… there were roleplaying games you could follow, meta writers, memes everywhere, your icon was everything… Yeah. I miss the days of livejournal. But I was there for strikethrough and I completely understand why it all went south. Fans needed a safer space.

Around the time that the fan community was splintering away from livejournal I was drifting away regardless due to life circumstances. I got busy, I graduated from college, I stopped reading as much as I had when I was a kid. It wasn’t until around 2017 when I had a more stable job and relationship that I got back into fandom. And fandom as an adult is honestly just as fun and exciting as it was when I was a kid! My main fandoms these days are smaller, but I like having a bigger presence within them and feeling that tight-knit sense of community. And I guess that’s it, that’s how I ended up here talking to anyone who might have read this far. (Did you actually read this far? Holy moly, I really love you!)