December meme: THIEF EDITION
I'm just gonna nab questions I think are interesting from other people who are doing the December meme. If there's anything in particular you want me to talk about, feel free to drop your own prompts, but I make no promises. I'll answer the fannish ones here and the non-fannish ones on jedusor.
First up, I'mma talk about my first fandom. By my own standards for fandom, Pokemon was probably my first, but in the transformative sense that most of the people reading this interpret the term "fandom" to mean...
Harry Potter, y'all.
I grew up with Harry. I was nine when I found the series, and I turned seventeen a week before the last book came out. I was such a hipster about all the merchandising--I think there was a time in my early teens when I wouldn't even associate with people who said they liked the movies but hadn't bothered reading the books.
(I did not like the movies. I have never liked the movies. I don't think I've even seen the fifth one or the last one, but I'm not certain, because that is how little I cared about them while I was watching them.)
Here's how into these books I was: at a sleepover when I was eleven, I had a friend open the first book to random pages and read me the first half of a sentence to see if I could finish it. I could. Always. I went to a midnight book release party as the Grey Lady before we knew the Grey Lady was important. I got my grubby mitts on a PDF of the seventh book two days before it came out, and sat in the living room clutching my laptop and sobbing over Dobby while my family side-eyed me.
And I wrote fic. Like many of us, I wrote fic before I realized fic was a thing. I produced a little one-page newspaper when I was eleven, wherein I wrote movie reviews and editorials and a one-panel cartoon, and I did a serial genderswap AU about "Carrie Potter" and her adventures at Hogwarts. I think my earliest memories of using the internet involve very serious debates about the books on some message board now long-lost to memory. I think that was where I first found a link to ff.net, where I hung out until
metaphortunate pointed me toward Rhysenn's fic, which led me to LJ.
I was never very social in Harry Potter fandom. I wasn't a good enough writer to draw any attention, and fandom wasn't really set up for making friends back then. I was in HP fandom because I loved the canon, because I loved the characters and the world and the possibilities, because I was confident (in a wholehearted, carefree, fuck-the-haters way I almost wish I could reclaim) that I could use the platform to produce things that were worthwhile.
Eventually I grew up, and was disappointed by some of the books, and realized that J.K. Rowling was not a goddess, and let go of my singleminded devotion to the series. But Harry Potter fandom taught me so many things about the internet, about relationships, about life, about sex, about writing, about love. There's a secret place in my heart where none of the books after Goblet of Fire have been published yet, where I'm ten years old and Sirius is alive and Harry hasn't hit his capslock phase, where there's almost half the series left to go and it's going to be so amazing, I bet Sirius is really Harry's dad, oh my god did you notice "Erised" is "desire" backwards, holy crap that's incredible, oh man oh man I can't wait for book five...
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/93810.html.
First up, I'mma talk about my first fandom. By my own standards for fandom, Pokemon was probably my first, but in the transformative sense that most of the people reading this interpret the term "fandom" to mean...
Harry Potter, y'all.
I grew up with Harry. I was nine when I found the series, and I turned seventeen a week before the last book came out. I was such a hipster about all the merchandising--I think there was a time in my early teens when I wouldn't even associate with people who said they liked the movies but hadn't bothered reading the books.
(I did not like the movies. I have never liked the movies. I don't think I've even seen the fifth one or the last one, but I'm not certain, because that is how little I cared about them while I was watching them.)
Here's how into these books I was: at a sleepover when I was eleven, I had a friend open the first book to random pages and read me the first half of a sentence to see if I could finish it. I could. Always. I went to a midnight book release party as the Grey Lady before we knew the Grey Lady was important. I got my grubby mitts on a PDF of the seventh book two days before it came out, and sat in the living room clutching my laptop and sobbing over Dobby while my family side-eyed me.
And I wrote fic. Like many of us, I wrote fic before I realized fic was a thing. I produced a little one-page newspaper when I was eleven, wherein I wrote movie reviews and editorials and a one-panel cartoon, and I did a serial genderswap AU about "Carrie Potter" and her adventures at Hogwarts. I think my earliest memories of using the internet involve very serious debates about the books on some message board now long-lost to memory. I think that was where I first found a link to ff.net, where I hung out until
metaphortunate pointed me toward Rhysenn's fic, which led me to LJ.
I was never very social in Harry Potter fandom. I wasn't a good enough writer to draw any attention, and fandom wasn't really set up for making friends back then. I was in HP fandom because I loved the canon, because I loved the characters and the world and the possibilities, because I was confident (in a wholehearted, carefree, fuck-the-haters way I almost wish I could reclaim) that I could use the platform to produce things that were worthwhile.
Eventually I grew up, and was disappointed by some of the books, and realized that J.K. Rowling was not a goddess, and let go of my singleminded devotion to the series. But Harry Potter fandom taught me so many things about the internet, about relationships, about life, about sex, about writing, about love. There's a secret place in my heart where none of the books after Goblet of Fire have been published yet, where I'm ten years old and Sirius is alive and Harry hasn't hit his capslock phase, where there's almost half the series left to go and it's going to be so amazing, I bet Sirius is really Harry's dad, oh my god did you notice "Erised" is "desire" backwards, holy crap that's incredible, oh man oh man I can't wait for book five...
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/93810.html.