four score and twenty years ago: the history of a fangirl
Meme! Tell the story of your personal experience with fandom: a sort of fandom timeline.
I had way too much fun with this. Especially the dates and stuff. Fandom history is fun! \o/ I just hope I didn't miss anything...
(fyi: kinda long.)
Sometime in 2004 (I think--maybe 2003?)
Maria enters the fandom. She discovers the now-defunct harrypotter.com message boards, asks her father if she can join, and then does so. It is her first message board, and also most likely one of the very few that accepts members under the age of 13. She never asks permission to join anything online again. Her username is "mag11", her initials and age at the time. It is quite possibly one of the most boring usernames ever.
She spends most of her time in the "General Book Discussion" forum, arguing for Ron and Hermione's epic love, and eventually discovers the "Fanfiction" forum, and spends the rest of her time there. The boards are constantly spammed, ill-managed, consist mostly of people no older than Maria; topics are on constant repeat, spelling and grammar are considered giant jokes, fanfic is horrific, unmoderated, full of self-inserts, Mary-Sues, cliches, and horrible writing. It's the biggest chaotic mess on the internet.
Maria loves it.
Sometime also in 2004
Maria posts her first fanfiction. There are two "chapters" of something that Maria will never see again but remembers vividly to this day. It involves Harry facing down Voldemort in the Great Hall, ducking a killing curse, said curse hitting Ron, Hermione starting to cry over said Ron's body, Harry pondering over his unrequited love for Hermione because she loves Ron, Hermione's tears of love bringing Ron back to life, Voldemort having his back turned to Harry, Harry shouting something along the lines of "Hey Voldypoo!" to get the said Voldemort to turn, and then killing said Voldypoo when he does. Then Dumbledore comes out of nowhere and tells Harry to follow him upstairs, which Harry does, wondering what Dumbledore could possibly be trying to show him. Maria has no more idea than Harry, and never gets any further with the fic.
Maria abandons this and starts a Marauder epic she never finishes. She wants attention and reviews, and does what everyone else is doing: makes a form of questions for people to fill out and become characters in a proposed story she will write. She never writes it.
Sometime between 2003 and 2006
Maria becomes aware of both FanFiction.Net and MuggleNet.com. Both of these will be important later.
July-ish 2005
Maria, having taken occasional breaks and eventually drifted away somewhat from said harrypotter.com forums, gets back in full force to the swing of things with the recent release of Book 6. The site has been revamped, and eventually her old username no longer works. Her new username is hermy_loves_ron, and she goes by "Tillie" for no apparent reason. She possibly creates multiple usernames and identities, but is too lame/unimaginitive/nice/scared to ever use them for any nefarious purposes. She falls back in with passion. She frequents MuggleNet more and more.
Her mother thinks she spends too much time on the computer. This is probably true.
January 2006
Maria makes a FanFiction.Net account. She lies about her age in order to do this, as she is only 12, still over a full month from being the proper age. Her username is Lady Liln, an obscure name from the Chronicles of Narnia. Her plan in creating a FF.N account is to be able to read Narnia fanfiction and write some of it herself, specifically, a heartwrenching romantic epic in which Edmund falls in love with Princess Elizabeth of Archenland, a gorgeous blonde who is smart and witty and can handle herself in a fight. The two of them fight, fall in love, and the story ultimately has a tragic ending.
It never gets written.
Maria also watches High School Musical on its premiere night. She watches it every time it airs after that.
May 2006
Maria publishes her first fanfiction at FF.N. It is about Ryan and Sharpay's friendship when they were growing up. It is a songfic.
Maria requests that nobody ever read it again.
July-ish 2006
Maria finds MuggleNet.com's fanfiction site. She joins to review a seventh-book fic, which is never finished. She's never experienced a site with quality filtering before. It's exciting.
August 2006
Maria publishes her first Harry Potter fanfic, on MNFF. It's a sappy oneshot without dialogue, originally supposed to just be Hermione/Ron, but, being too short, had a Harry/Ginny part tacked onto it. She gets the color of Ginny's eyes wrong. She is ecstatic when it is accepted.
Late 2006
Maria has a giant three-ring binder full of Harry Potter fanfiction/fanfic ideas; she only uses red notebooks to write in. She sits at her desk and plans out a story for every category on MNFF; she wants to be one of the top ten most prolific writers. She never finishes any of them.
2006, probably
Maria discovers slash in the form of Remus/Sirius, which opens the door for her to eventually discover slash everywhere else.
January 2007
Maria discovers the message boards of MNFF (not to be confused with the MuggleNet message boards), after wondering for a very long time where all the fanfic challenges were coming from, and which she had previously thought were only for beta readers. To acquaint herself with the boards, she registers as hermy_loves_ron on January 4 and then lurks for two months. She does manage to get Sorted into Gryffindor during this time, based on a Sorting Test that actually makes sense, for once.
The boards are articulate, polite, well-moderated, move quickly and are full of activity, populated by very good writers and actually offer online writing courses. The focus is obviously fanfiction, with book and movie discussion only taking place in a kind of "off topic" forum. This is a place for writers.
February 26, 2007
Maria delurks with two posts: one in the birthday thread, as this date is her fourteenth birthday, and one in the Introduce Yourself thread. She introduces herself as Analisa, not so much because of the fear of giving away her identity on the internet, but because Analisa is her middle name, and she always kind of thought it was cooler.
February/March 2007
Maria participates in the forums, posting, commenting, etc. She gets her own drabble thread, which no longer exists. She does not yet have any fandom friends. She still has fun.
March/April 2007
Maria gets fandom friends. She becomes part of a little group of awesome friends around her age she'd first noticed during her lurkdom, and they bond over fanfic and Gryffindor and have their own thread in which to goof off.
May - July 20-ish 2007
The heydey. Maria and her friends have so much fun she can barely stand it. She loves them all. Before the release of Harry Potter Book 7, they vow not to ever leave the fandom, like some people say they will after the release. Right before the release, everybody posts and says "see you on the other side". Of reading the book. Obviously.
Late July 2007
The boards are different: there only to discuss Book 7, as people finish reading it and need somewhere to release their thoughts. Friends trickle back in over time. Maria posts a million times. Now that Book 7 is over, she doesn't know how she'll ever manage to love a book again. She is a little melodramatic.
Early - Late-mid August 2007
Maria goes on a three-week trip to New York City and the east coast. She has no computer access and discovers a book series called "Twilight". Please do not judge her; she is bereft.
August/September 2007
The prospect of catching up on everything she's missed, on MuggleNet and the MNFF forums, over the past several weeks/months (as she avoided the site to avoid getting spoiled) seems far too daunting. Unhelpfully, Maria keeps putting it off. She tries getting involved in the Twilight fandom. It bores her after about a month, and she leaves.
September 2007
Maria, having seen the movie, which has the distinction of being the only movie ever to make her cry, publishes a Bridge to Terabithia oneshot on FF.N, even though she distinctly remembers writing it before summer. She has still never written that Narnia fanfic that she joined FF.N for in the first place.
October 2007
Maria makes a brief appearance back at MNFF, apologizing for having gone missing for a time. She resolves she's back to stay. A lot of her friends are still there, but not all: there has been an influx of newbies since Book 7's release. Despite her earlier vows and current promises, it's not long before she's gone again.
December 2007
Maria is watching Disney Channel when she sees two episodes of Life with Derek, a show which she had never paid much attention to in the past. The Christmas episode is nothing special, but she sees the episode where Derek puts a hula hoop around Casey and the episode where Casey pushes Derek onto a bed, and her mind immediately goes very shippy places.
Assuming she's alone in her almost-incestous thoughts of these two, Maria ventures to FanFiction.Net. There she finds that at least 90% of all the stories are "Dasey". She finds Dasey message boards. She reads. She kind of writes, some.
She pulls her first all-nighter, watching every LWD episode ever on YouTube. She also discovers fanvideos, and watches them by the dozen.
January 2008
Thanks to jannikajade's FanFiction.Net profile page, linking to her LWD episode reviews, she discovers LiveJournal. She really doesn't get how it works for the longest time, but eventually begins to figure it out. She makes an account so she can more easily read and comment on said LWD episode reviews. hermy_loves_ron seems stupid now, but so does Lady Liln, so she compromises by creating a Lady Liln variant: decaptilizing everything, changing the "y" in Lady to an "i", and smooshing the two words together to make "ladililn". She gets her first LJ "friend" in jannika .
She also writes a fanfic, the first chapters of which she publishes once a day, then the last chapter a month later. It is still the most efficient, prolific and successful she has ever been. It remains to this date the only multi-chapter fanfic she has ever managed to finish.
Early 2008
Mostly through jannika, Maria discovers other parts of tweendom, for instance Drake and Josh, and other fandom-y parts of LiveJournal.
February 2008
Maria stays up far too late watching the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on the N; she sees a promo for a new Zoey 101 episode (a show of which she's watched maybe three episodes before, very long ago). It's something about somebody named Quinn breaking up with her boyfriend and making out with some dude. Maria gets really annoyed at the promo, because by the end of the night they've shown it so many times she can recite it by heart.
February - April 2008
Maria makes one more return to MNFF. There are a lot of new people that she doesn't recognize, but some old people that she does, and she makes friends with some of the new ones and reconnects with the old ones that are still around. She wants to stay. She has fun again. She participates in a fanfiction challenge, a long story which she actually finishes but never publishes: it is too long for the oneshot challenge, and she never gets around to actually posting it before she disappears again.
Aprily 17, 2008
Through the Dasey forums, she hears of Quinn/Logan, and, her interest piqued, somehow gets into it, although she cannot for the life of her remember what compelled her to seek out episodes to watch. Regardless, she is hooked, and pulls her second-ever all nighter, this time to read every single page of the TV.com Zoey 101 forum's Quinn/Logan thread. At this point, the only episodes that have yet to be aired are the finale and the one right before the finale.
April - June 2008
Maria is in the Zoey 101 fandom, as a Quinn/Logan shipper. She spends most of her time on the TV.com forums, is the most prolific she's ever been fanfic-wise, and becomes something of a BNF, due to the smallness of the fandom and especially the Quinn/Logan niche she is a part of, the general youth of most of the people involved, and said surprising prolificness. She gets a couple of friends, even if they aren't quite on the same level of closeness as her previous fandom friends, and overall she's quite content.
May 2008
Maria makes her first actual LiveJournal post, something of a mini-shipper's-manifesto for "Quogan". She intends for her journal to just be a journal of mini-manifestos for all her ships. This never actually happens.
June 2008
Maria finally fulfills her original FF.N purpose and publishes some Narnia fanfic after seeing the most recent movie; it is a short movie-verse fic but a Nania fic nonetheless. It totally counts.
Summer 2008
Maria has her least prolific summer ever; she never finishes her epic Quogan WIP and eventually drifts out of that fandom altogether. She misses all the reviews she used to get, but can't bring herself to write anymore. She feels kind of guilty about that.
Maria also realizes she really is never going to get back into HP fandom again; before she had always thought that, even what with all her short-lived comebacks, she someday would. It's like she's finally admitted the end of an era that ended long ago. She cries.
August 2008
Getting further into the rest of tweendom, Maria publishes a Drake & Josh fanfic.
She also briefly rejoins the Twilight fandom in order to talk about how much the last book sucked. She is turned off the series forever. She never looks back.
She also starts using her LJ for what it was actually meant for--journalling--and goes about acquiring more friends and whatnot.
September 2008
Maria's last hurrah in Zoey 101 fandom: she publishes one chapter of a new fic that, surprise surprise, she never finishes.
Fall 2008
Maria becomes aware, through jannika 's journal, of a show she initially thought looked kind of stupid when she saw it and had no idea what it was whilst channel-surfing: iCarly. What with Life with Derek, Drake and Josh, Zoey 101, iCarly, High School Musical and eventually Wizards of Waverly Place, she has gradually sunk entirely into tweendom as a fandom.
Late 2008
Maria, like so many other Dasey fans, becomes disappointed by and turned off by LWD's fourth season. But she's deep enough in the rest of tweendom not to leave LJ or any such thing.
Sometime in 2008
Maria hears once or twice of Newsies' thriving, cult-like, slashy fandom. She's intrigued. She thinks she really should watch that movie again.
She also, in some gradual way, gets over her aversion to RPF. This may be because of her embarrassing fangirling of "Brangelina" whenever she goes to a grocery store and sees them on the cover of a magazine, but in any case, it opens the door for potential future RPF ships.
December 2008
Maria discovers fandomsecrets. She'd known about it before, but this time she discovers it For Real and starts watching it. This will be important later. Eventually.
January 2009
She rewatches the Star Wars movies and becomes active in a fandom, on a popular forum, for about a week and a half, and ponders writing a big epic fic (she never does). She does this a lot, has little flings with fandoms that don't last longer than two weeks: this is just one of the bigger/more memorable examples.
February 15-ish, 2009
She finally rewatches Newsies. In the next week, she watches it four more times.
February - Spring 2009
She becomes obsessed with Newsies all over again, but this time it's With Slash and With Fandom, which only serves to intensify the childhood obsession. She pens fic (of course), finds and joins the Refuge, devours everything they have. She becomes friends with stttmsbwa and they squee about Newsies together. She watches the movie about once a week. She first comes up with pirate!newsies and begins the fic that will become Spot's Story (in an attempt to make sense of his canon self), both of which, in typical Maria fashion, take eons to ever see the light of day.
April 24, 2009
Somehow, from what she's seen on fandomsecrets and from newish-but-awesome-friend stttmsbwa, Maria gets intrigued by Supernatural. She always read the secrets, because they amuse her, and, in her own words, "the idea of incestous hot gay brothers excites" her. She reads about the show on Wikipedia, watches a bunch of mini-clips with somebody's favorite quotes on YouTube, and eventually watches the season three finale. She tries to resist getting into the show. stttmsbwa is merciless, and she is pushed over to the dark side, metaphorically speaking, by pictures of hot Texan boys eyesexing the camera and each other.
In her defense, they're really hot.
Also, during this month, she discovers that LJ and Refuge-goers coninator and quillandink23, by some strange and amazing coincidence, are not only the same age as she, but furthermore live in the same tiny city and sparsely populated state. They start having occasional Newsies-oriented meetups that continue to this day.
April 25, 2009
Maria gives in. She resolves to only watch one episode of Supernatural per day, in order to avoid developing an obsession that completely takes over her life, as Maria's obsessions are wont to do. There are twenty-two episodes in the first season, so she should be done with it in twenty-two days.
April 30, 2009
Maria begins watching the second season.
April/May 2009
Over the course of nearly exactly a month, Maria watches all four seasons of Supernatural. She rushes home every day and YouTubes late into the night. It's kind of pathetic. Maria is okay with that.
She squees more over it, with stttmsbwa. It's all the more fun to have someone to squee with, and Maria completely falls for the characters and the plot and just the show, overall. It becomes an obsession.
May/June 2009
Maria contemplates getting into the Supernatural fandom. It's a lot bigger than she's used to her fandoms being, what with her own corner of HP fandom having been so small and self-contained and all. She thinks maybe she can get a good grasp on it over the summer. She also thinks she can write some sort of epic!fic for the series.
Summer 2009
Unforeseen circumstances mean that Maria does not get a good grasp on the fandom. She does not write said epic!fic. She does read some good fic, though, and enjoys that.
Summer/Fall 2009
Through Newsies, tweendom and Supernatural, Maria gets fandom friends the like of which she has not had since 2007. Only these seem to last longer. Maria thinks this might just be another heydey--another highlight era of her long and storied fandom career. She's super happy again, squeeing and suchlike.
Winter 2009/2010
Heydey continues.
January 2010
Maria contemplates what new fandoms she'll possibly find this year. She watches the pilot episode of Chuck, thinks she'd like to watch some more.
No more information is available on this subject at present.
January 31, 2010
Maria types up a history of her time in fandom.
She is not entirely sure she can stop referring herself in the third person.