December posting meme: earliest fannishness
thegrrrl2002 asked me: what is the earliest TV show you were fannish about, before you even knew what being fannish was all about? Like, you were making up stories in your head about the characters without realizing that it was a thing.
Well, when I was four, I allegedly told my mom that I was going to marry Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, and she said that you can only marry one person so I'd have to choose, and I said, no, YOU have to choose, I get to marry them both. (This story got told and retold 10,000 times while I was growing up, along with That Time I Wanted To Marry Underdog, and I don't remember it at all.) So that was probably Baby Destina's First Head Canon (TM). *g*
But aside from that...
I wrote pages and pages and pages and pages of The Rifleman fic. Yes, you read that right, the black and white western from the 50's/60's. I think I was nine or ten, and it was in reruns on afternoon TV with The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid and Bonanza, and I just wanted to make up stories about Lucas McCain and his cute kid Mark, whom he loved more than anything. Mostly Mark was in Terrible Danger and In Need Of Rescue and then Lucas shot people (but he was really sad about it) and then they hugged and everything was fine. And from that, I graduated to writing pages and pages of Bonanza stories about the brothers going on adventures.
Very quickly thereafter I started making up Battle of the Planets stories in my head, about Mark and Princess, with a side of Jason. But it wasn't until CHiPs and Baa Baa Black Sheep in the late 70's that I was really just writing longhand stories on yellow notebook paper in blue felt tip pen about the bros - Jon and Ponch, and Boyington and Gutterman. Also I wrote a hell of a lot of Rat Patrol fic centering on Troy and Hitch. But you know, I didn't know it was fanfic. I didn't know fandom was a thing. I had no clue. And when I was trading CHiPs stories with a friend - I'd write pages, she'd write more pages, while other kids were playing Barbies - we were like, this is great! It's too bad no one else does this! Hahaha *retro facepalm*
I threw a lot of that fanfic away when I found it in my old bedroom closet, after my mom died. IDK, it didn't seem important in that moment. I regret it now. But I still have several notebooks filled with Baa Baa Black Sheep stories, along with the Outsiders novel I wrote when I was in 9th grade (did you know the Curtis brothers also had a SISTER?!), and the Star Trek novel I wrote in 10th grade which is suspiciously like Triangle by Marshak and Culbreath, but totally different. Oh, to be a kid bursting with stories and have no idea what a Mary Sue is. Good times.