alexcat | Snowflake Challenge

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.

I feel like I might have answered this one a hundred times, thouigh I'm not sure any answer was exactly the same.

I have always been a reader and a lover of sci-fi and fantasy, though mostly sci-fi. Dune and The Foundation Trilogy were my favorites. In media, I was hooked at 6 when my dad and i watched Star Trek in it's original run. I discovered Tolkien in my teens and actually read The Silmarillion when it was first published.

Then there was Star Wars. OMG! That one changed my life. I felt like I'd come home sitting in a dark theater watching that star destroyer go over my head in 1977, when I was 17.

Fandom came, though, with the internet. Until we got a computer and I got online in the late 90s, I had no idea that fandom even existed. I live in a rather backward rural area and had no idea that cons and zines existed, let alone fanfiction. My daughter and I watched CATS on PBS and we were hooked. I went looking online and found chatrooms. A CATS friend introduced me to Babylon 5 by sending me homemade VHS copies of the series. Again, I went hunting and found a lot of B5 fandom stuff and fanfiction. I got involved in modding a chat and message board.

The Lord of the Rings came out in the theater and I began to write fanfiction. I grew tired of the infighting in the Yahoo groups I was in and started my own, making it inclusive of all types of LOTR fanfiction. It eventually became Of Elves and Men, which is archived with nearly 4000 stories at Ao3.

I have since branched out into other fandoms and have written over 3000 stories myself. I met my best friends through fandom and survived the first presidency of the orange dunce and am hoping it will get me through the next 4 years. Fandom has been a lifesaver for me.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Meeting your best friends through fandom is such a great thing. I don't want to imagine how much fun I would have missed during the last years without them.

Not many people I come across who have also read the Foundation Trilogy and would include it in their early history of fandom. (I come to it significantly later, but it's definitely one of the things I've read.) I like seeing plenty of sci-fi and fantasy fans who are still around (and with a very impressive count of completed works there.)

Here's to survival of Fool, Redux.

3000 stories!! That's such an accomplishment 🤩 especially given how much organisational work you do. I'd always admired how much you got involved with B5 but didn't know about the LOTR archive work too. Massive kudos!!

I always loved fantasy, but I'm slightly embarrassed to say I only got into scifi a few years ago. My friend got me to read Ancillary Justice and I was hooked ever since then. I'm slowly working through the Vorkosigan series, but I hope to get around to other classics.

The archival and organizational work you're doing is amazing!