June Something Day 5

Day 5: Compare and/or contrast your very first fandom obsession and your latest fandom obsession.

There are two parts to my fandom history. The before days when I was very young and into bad boys and smart, competent women, and the now days when I'm into (ahem) complexity and scope, with a very large gap in between when I was absolutely a fan, but very much apart from fandom.

THEN

My first ever fandom obsession was The X Files, and I was definitely too young to watch that show but my mum had a videotape of the Duane Barry/Ascension/One Breath arc and when I confessed to watching it in secret she let me watch it on TV. I was mad about both Scully and Mulder (together and with others) for over a decade, spent my (very limited) pocket money on any magazine that had the show or the characters or the actors in it, and when I got my first paying job I bought the video collections of all the series one by one. I stepped my toes into fandom; chatted on forums and read fics and joined mailing groups and discovered FFN, and it was glorious.

And then the great FFN 2002 purge happened, deleting not just the smut but all the (fem)slash with it because everyone slapped an NC17 rating on anything even remotely queer. To say I was distraught would be an understatement, but I was a teen. So...

This traumatic event (because seriously, FUCK YOU FFN) coincided with the burgeoning relationship between my wife and I, so I got distracted and pulled out of fandom so fast I'm pretty sure I had whiplash. I dipped my toes into reading Snape-centric HP fics on and off, but for most of the rest of the next 15 or so years, I was too disillusioned with fandom and too distracted by life to step into any kind of fannish space.

NOW

And then I discovered SGA.

I fell hard and fast onto the Rodney/John wagon early in season 1 and I started wondering was it just me? Or did other people ship them too? So I looked it up and not only did people totally ship them, there were over 600 pages of fics dedicated to their relationship on a fan-made archive called AO3.

Mind. Blown.

I missed a lot of happenings in those 15 years. With all that time between fandoms, my feelings and interests were different. I mean, as a teen I mostly dug smut, right? But as an adult I wanted something more from my fandom. I wanted angst and H/C and AUs (and yes, smut), but I also wanted complexity and scope and it wasn't enough to just read other people's ideas, oh no, I had to go and get some of my own. And those ideas screamed to be written down.

So I dipped my toes into the writing thing, then I dipped my toes in the sharing thing, and even though I was convinced that posting my first fic would either drag me into a fandom war or doom me to another purge, the world didn't end. I honestly think people are just a lot less argumentative than they were when I was in the XF and HP fandoms. Maybe we're all old and jaded, maybe we're just tired. It almost certainly helps that SGA finished airing years before I even watched it, nevermind looked for the fandom.

(Secretly, I think that having a reliable archive helps too.)

It all couldn't be more different this time around, and now I've written and shared something like 50 fics, which isn't something I ever thought I'd do because I fucking hated creative writing as a kid. I would never have posted anything I wrote back then - and we can all be thankful that my teenage scribblings aren't lurking in a damp, dark corner of the internet.