Snowflake Challenge- Day 5
snowflake_challenge Day 5
In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. How did you come to fandom, why did you choose your fannish name, do you have more than one secret identity?
I went through a weird phase in high school where I didn't watch any TV. I can't really remember why now, but one night I went to hang out with friends who were watching X-Files. It was the end of season 5, and the episode was "The Pine Bluff Variant." It was so entrancing, it bowled me over. I couldn't talk about anything else the next day. I watched the rest of the season, and that summer the movie came out. My head was full of aliens and conspiracies and Dana Scully.
In the fall, I went to college, and posted on one of the stairwell doors was a construction paper sign announcing an X-Files viewing party for the premiere of the new season. I was thrilled and declared my plans to go to the viewing party. Everyone in my group of first-year dorm-sharing friends looked horrified that I would watch such a scary, weird show, except for one awesome person who said, "I like X-Files." (This person turned out to be my wife.)
In an X-Files thrall, I watched myth-arc re-runs twice a week between new episodes. I couldn't get enough. K said, "You know, there are X-Files websites," and we spent hours looking up fan sites, message boards, Alien IcePicktures, password locked sites pretending to be Roush BioTech....and then K said something that changed my life. "People even write their own stories."
That's right; my wife introduced me to fanfic. This is especially hilarious if you know my wife, who loves X-Files to this day but is entirely unfannish.
I was all in after that. I read everything, I joined message boards, I wrote detailed episode reviews, and I dreamed about stories. It wasn't until a couple of fandoms later that I actually started to write my own fanfic, but from "Pine Bluff Varient" onward, it was inevitable.
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