History: I Was a Feral Fan
I Was a Feral Fan
I'm 35 years old, and have only had consistent internet access since late 99/early '00. For the previous several years, I'd had it sporadically -- a local bbs my father had access to, logging on to the system at my mother's work, stuff like that. But I'd been a fan, and engaged in fannish behavior, long before that.
I don't think, in retrospect, that there was ever a time I wasn't fannish.
Of course, when a kid dresses up as their favorite character, they don't call it Cosplay, and every kid makes up stories continuing the adventures of their favorite characters. But I didn't stop at an age when authority figures thought it would be appropriate.
Unfortunately, my internet access was still years away.
I was still in elementary school when Robotech came on the air and I loved it. I wrote stories about it, quite a few of them starring none other than (someone with different hair and eyes and name but who was very definitely) me. In junior high, I met Tiffany who was also obsessed, and we had fun being out alternate-selves together and it was great.
We were Mary-Sues, but we'd never heard the term and we wouldn't have cared if we did. And everybody thought we were a couple of weirdoes, but we were okay with that.
And all the while, I kept writing. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I couldn't sell my stories about Robotech and Star Wars and Star Trek, so I started taking the characters I'd made for those stories and putting them into universes of my own devising. At first, the serial numbers showed bigtime, but as I wrote, I learned to disguise those. I learned, also, what made a character realistic.
I kept writing strong female characters, despite everybody who told me that nobody wanted to read that. Despite Lisa, my best friend in high school, telling me that if anybody figured out that I was a feminist, they'd stop reading my books.
I'd had contacts with fandom in the past -- a convention here and there. In one dealer's room, I discovered a couple of fanzines and learned that other people also wrote stories about the characters in their favorite shows, only they called it fanfic and it had sex in it. During a few months of semi-regular internet access, I discovered that fanfic was online, too; I wrote what was both my first slash story and my first publicly available fanfic, but then I moved away from the internet and fandom.
I continued to write strong female characters. Some of them I thought of as lesbians, and tried to imply their queerness. (The only books I know of where lesbian women could be regularly found were the lesbian romances and coming-out stories put out by Naiad press and similar publishers.) Some of my stories also had coded secondary gay characters, but I figured I'd have even less luck placing them if they were open.
During this time, I sometimes went to conventions and fan clubs, but I really wasn't a part of online fandom until The Fellowship of the Ring came out. That was when I discovered that it wasn't just a few people writing fanfic, it was a lot of people, and they were having tons of fun, and I wanted to get in on it!
I plunged headfirst into the heady waters of Aragorn/Boromir, and discovered that a lot of what I'd thought was true was wrong all along. There were a lot of women who like two guys, or two guys and a girl.
I also learned, pretty quickly, that my beloved "me characters" were called Mary-Sues, and that they were very bad. Looking at the stories that other young women had written, I could understand why. They were horribly characterized, barely plotted -- why would anyone want to put those up where anybody could see them? (Though I had the suspicion that, had I had internet access, I wouldn't have known any better.)
I quickly discovered GAFF, the GodAwful FanFic board. It was a the equivalent of a secret clubhouse, where people could go and point and laugh at the badfic without the authors seeing it. It felt like mocking stupid books with my friends, but on a much larger scale.
I was careful never to say it where someone could get hurt, but I know a lot of people were either too careless or to cruel to give a damn.
And I have to wonder -- would I have been able to stand up under that onslaught? Would I have been able to keep writing my female characters, refining them and honing them until they were willing to step out into their own canon? Or would I have given up, buckled under, that part of myself out in disgust?
I'm glad I never had to find out.
I'm 35 years old, and have only had consistent internet access since late 99/early '00. For the previous several years, I'd had it sporadically -- a local bbs my father had access to, logging on to the system at my mother's work, stuff like that. But I'd been a fan, and engaged in fannish behavior, long before that.
I don't think, in retrospect, that there was ever a time I wasn't fannish.
Of course, when a kid dresses up as their favorite character, they don't call it Cosplay, and every kid makes up stories continuing the adventures of their favorite characters. But I didn't stop at an age when authority figures thought it would be appropriate.
Unfortunately, my internet access was still years away.
I was still in elementary school when Robotech came on the air and I loved it. I wrote stories about it, quite a few of them starring none other than (someone with different hair and eyes and name but who was very definitely) me. In junior high, I met Tiffany who was also obsessed, and we had fun being out alternate-selves together and it was great.
We were Mary-Sues, but we'd never heard the term and we wouldn't have cared if we did. And everybody thought we were a couple of weirdoes, but we were okay with that.
And all the while, I kept writing. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I couldn't sell my stories about Robotech and Star Wars and Star Trek, so I started taking the characters I'd made for those stories and putting them into universes of my own devising. At first, the serial numbers showed bigtime, but as I wrote, I learned to disguise those. I learned, also, what made a character realistic.
I kept writing strong female characters, despite everybody who told me that nobody wanted to read that. Despite Lisa, my best friend in high school, telling me that if anybody figured out that I was a feminist, they'd stop reading my books.
I'd had contacts with fandom in the past -- a convention here and there. In one dealer's room, I discovered a couple of fanzines and learned that other people also wrote stories about the characters in their favorite shows, only they called it fanfic and it had sex in it. During a few months of semi-regular internet access, I discovered that fanfic was online, too; I wrote what was both my first slash story and my first publicly available fanfic, but then I moved away from the internet and fandom.
I continued to write strong female characters. Some of them I thought of as lesbians, and tried to imply their queerness. (The only books I know of where lesbian women could be regularly found were the lesbian romances and coming-out stories put out by Naiad press and similar publishers.) Some of my stories also had coded secondary gay characters, but I figured I'd have even less luck placing them if they were open.
During this time, I sometimes went to conventions and fan clubs, but I really wasn't a part of online fandom until The Fellowship of the Ring came out. That was when I discovered that it wasn't just a few people writing fanfic, it was a lot of people, and they were having tons of fun, and I wanted to get in on it!
I plunged headfirst into the heady waters of Aragorn/Boromir, and discovered that a lot of what I'd thought was true was wrong all along. There were a lot of women who like two guys, or two guys and a girl.
I also learned, pretty quickly, that my beloved "me characters" were called Mary-Sues, and that they were very bad. Looking at the stories that other young women had written, I could understand why. They were horribly characterized, barely plotted -- why would anyone want to put those up where anybody could see them? (Though I had the suspicion that, had I had internet access, I wouldn't have known any better.)
I quickly discovered GAFF, the GodAwful FanFic board. It was a the equivalent of a secret clubhouse, where people could go and point and laugh at the badfic without the authors seeing it. It felt like mocking stupid books with my friends, but on a much larger scale.
I was careful never to say it where someone could get hurt, but I know a lot of people were either too careless or to cruel to give a damn.
And I have to wonder -- would I have been able to stand up under that onslaught? Would I have been able to keep writing my female characters, refining them and honing them until they were willing to step out into their own canon? Or would I have given up, buckled under, that part of myself out in disgust?
I'm glad I never had to find out.