Fandom Snowflake: Day 2
Day 2
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I don't remember how I came across this fic, but I think I was searching for something Ron and Hermione related, age 14? 15?. And I discovered fanfiction. It's objectively not an amazing fic, but I sometimes remember it as opening the world to me--a whole summer of coming home from summer school gym class and reading sugarquill.net fic for four hours, intent on reading the whole archive. Years of discussing books on Readerville, teaching me to think more critically about the world and to be kinder to the people in it. Meeting some of my best friends. Joining LiveJournal, writing fic, learning sexuality in bits and pieces from grown-ups whose experiences actually looked nothing like erotica. Learning Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is Okay, and about Racefail in college, and going from conservative repressed late 90s kid whose parents think gay people must be Making Bad Choices to knowing real, normal queer people to finally being able to untwist the idea that I wasn't straight, to having assumed for so long and so hard in front of my parents that queer is normal that my mom is actually willing to lobby Congress to stop doing anti-LGBT shit (if I point her in that direction. She's close to 70, I'm willing to do the research for her).
So as far as turning points go, I credit a lot of the direction of my life to
agreyeyedgirl's randomly discovered story page on Mirkwood (I think), and to athenaarena's Never Go Back.
(
comments at Dreamwidth. Comment there.)
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
I don't remember how I came across this fic, but I think I was searching for something Ron and Hermione related, age 14? 15?. And I discovered fanfiction. It's objectively not an amazing fic, but I sometimes remember it as opening the world to me--a whole summer of coming home from summer school gym class and reading sugarquill.net fic for four hours, intent on reading the whole archive. Years of discussing books on Readerville, teaching me to think more critically about the world and to be kinder to the people in it. Meeting some of my best friends. Joining LiveJournal, writing fic, learning sexuality in bits and pieces from grown-ups whose experiences actually looked nothing like erotica. Learning Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is Okay, and about Racefail in college, and going from conservative repressed late 90s kid whose parents think gay people must be Making Bad Choices to knowing real, normal queer people to finally being able to untwist the idea that I wasn't straight, to having assumed for so long and so hard in front of my parents that queer is normal that my mom is actually willing to lobby Congress to stop doing anti-LGBT shit (if I point her in that direction. She's close to 70, I'm willing to do the research for her).
So as far as turning points go, I credit a lot of the direction of my life to
agreyeyedgirl's randomly discovered story page on Mirkwood (I think), and to athenaarena's Never Go Back.
(
comments at Dreamwidth. Comment there.)