Snowflake Challenge #1 & #2

[dickinsons]

It's my first time doing this challenge, let's go!



Challenge #1 was about updating your fandom information, which I've done over at my sticky post and my profile.

And now it's time for Challenge #2: talking about my fannish origin story.

I've always been fannish about things, which, for me, means I always develop obsessions I can't stop talking about and creating things for. Some of the earliest examples I can think of are these:

• At 10, I got a Spanish fantasy book on my birthday. It was about a werewolf elf (werewelf?), and it happened to be the prequel to a book series I read after that one. Anyway, I got so obsessed with said elf that I started writing a sequel to the series that was about him. In longhand! This is a bit embarrassing, but I confess in the fic I killed off his girlfriend because I didn't like her, and made some new villains steal their baby. See? I already liked angst back then!
• At 11-12, I got into manga and anime. I made a lot of traditional fanart of the ones I liked: Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist... I also remember drawing Vocaloid fanart. I started going to anime cons and even cosplayed as Len Kagamine once.
• At 13 I started participating in anime forums. I still have some friends I met through these forums! This is also when I first found fanfiction online, in now defunct Spanish sites such as Amor Yaoi and Slash Heaven. Imagine little me opening a fic tagged as lemon and mpreg, not knowing what any of that meant. LOL.
• At 14-15 I got REALLY into The Beatles, and this early obsession follows me to this day, because I still mostly listen to music from the 60s and the 70s. I met a lot of Beatlemaniacs online, and it was very chill to be a Ringo fan while the Paul fans fought the John fans every day.
• At 15 I started watching a re-run of The X-Files, and boy, did I get obsessed! I basically outed myself by talking about how gorgeous Gillian Anderson was, got into whump through some of the very memorable Mulder torture scenes, and became the multishipper I am today by shipping both MSR and Mulder/Krycek.

All of these are examples of how I got into different canons and did fannish things about them, but I still wasn't very in contact with fandom itself. When I was 15-16 I got into both Doctor Who and BBC Sherlock, and I opened my first Tumblr account and an LJ account. This was between 2010 and 2011. I was also really into Downton Abbey! Since I already knew how to use Photoshop, I started posting icons to my old LJ. Let me show you some of those early icons:



...What's will all the redheads? LOL.

Anyhow, my first fics were posted in 2011 to FF.net, but they were in Spanish, so I'm not sure how much I can share here. My first fic in English, though, was very short and simple, since my English wasn't what it is today back then, and if you're curious enough you can read it here. It was a Johnlock fic, btw. I made a lot of friends in this era, a bunch of which I'm still friends with today!!

However, I never managed to get into SPN, even if I tried because of Superwholock, of course. And, eventually, I got fed up with Moffat's writing, dropping both DW and Sherlock maybe in 2012 or so. I believe my next main fandoms were Hannibal and In the Flesh, for both of which I wrote fic. My Hannibal fic from 2013 was still in Spanish, but from 2014 onwards I've only posted fic in English. 2014 was also the year where I created my AO3 account, so those early fics are there. Some of my fics archived there are in Spanish, but the BBC Sherlock ones are only in my FF.net account.

It's hard to mention all the fandoms I've had since then: I fandom hop so much I can't even keep track of them myself. You can get a decent idea if you check out my fandoms in AO3 and if you look at some more icons I made over the years (yes, I want to post some more because I think I got pretty good at making icons, thank you very much):





Since 2019 or so, I've been mostly getting into older canons, both ones I remember from my childhood (for example, Xena) and ones that are new to me. It's easier for me to think of all the fandoms I've been into since then, so I can list them here in order:

• Xena: Warrior Princess
• Battlestar Galactica
• Star Trek (all of it)
• Babylon 5
• Succession
• Farscape
• Our Flag Means Death
• SG-1
• Saw (movie franchise)
• Blake's 7
• due South

I love fandom history, which is one of the reasons why I tend to get into older fandoms these days. I really love exploring old fanworks, fandom trends, archived sites... The archiving of so much fanwork always seems to me like an act of love: fans saving their fanzines and donating them, newer fans working with the veterans to digitalise and archive older works, etc. It's amazing, don't you think?

In conclusion, fandom has been a part of my life for so long now and it's still a big part of it. I wouldn't have it any other way!