Snowflake Challenge #1&2

[dreamerinsilico]

Challenge #1

In your own space, introduce yourself! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I have a bio post and a fic index, and I have brought them up to date!


Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish history. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


1995ish-2010: The Dark Ages

While I was a very, very fannish kid/teenager/young adult, I didn't actually "join fandom" as such until my early 20s (or one could make an argument for a bit earlier than that, when I got into WoW, but that feels like a very different sort of creature to me; it was sociable and online, but I didn't really participate in the creative fandom), conducting my fannishness in a solitary manner.

This is, in retrospect, perhaps not a bad thing, because my pre-teen self might have actually died of happiness had they had access to Star Wars fanfic.  (Failing that, there would have been at least one Star Trek: Voyager self-insert OC.)

Anyway, I had all the Star Wars merchandise I could convince my parents to buy me, most of which was books, but I also had the chess set and the Monopoly game and was Princess Leia for multiple Halloweens in a row.  (Good thing that special interest got laid to a fairly gentle rest a long time ago, huh? xP)  There was then a succession of book series I became obsessed with and would have gleefully rolled around in fandoms for them had I known that was a thing - the Empire trilogy (Raymond Feist & Janny Wurts), the Kushiel's Legacy trilogy (Jacqueline Carrey), and then basically everything Janny Wurts ever wrote.  I sent her fanmail when I was thirteen, and she sent me a very kind response.   (And then I got to MEET her at my first DragonCon several years later, and while I no longer follow her book releases with my old level of zeal, that's a special memory to me.)  I was also, along with my brother, enthusiastic enough about the Harry Potter books to go to midnight release parties at B&N.  (I've never really considered myself In That Fandom as an adult, but I have read a lot of excellent fic for it.)

Amusingly, the first fanfiction I ever read (or, well, read any of, as I did not subject myself to the whole thing) was "My Immortal," which a friend linked me back in the WoW days.  It took another year or two until I encountered manifestations of creative fandom that made me actually want to partake. 


2010: Dae Discovers DeviantArt (and then FF.net)

I had been vaguely aware of DeviantArt as a thing due to some porny World of Warcraft art that had been circulated among my gaming friends, but in 2010, when I suddenly had a lot more free time on my hands than I was used to, I found out it was for more than just posting fantasy porn (although I did occasionally enjoy the fantasy porn, as one does), and then I found the Labyrinth fanart.  (It had been a childhood favorite movie, and then my Absolute Favorite throughout my adulthood.)

And then found out that my favorite Labyrinth fan artist also wrote fic.  And thus began the rest of my life.

Later that year, I started writing my first Labyrinth fic, re-discovering my lapsed love of writing stories (which I had done from time to time as a kid, just not fanfiction) and newly discovering the wondrous feeling of validation when someone really likes your work and tells you so.  (Mmmm, dopamine...)


2011-2018: Cosplay, Tumblr, & Kinkmemes

My friend C and I had gotten really into Dragon Age at around the same time, and I also convinced her she should come to DragonCon with me that year (I'd been going since 2008), and it seemed like a fairly natural extension of this situation for us to do Dragon Age cosplay together.  I knew fuck-all about sewing at the time, but wasn't going to let that stop me.  We hit the sweet spot in terms of timing for that - there was a biiiiig group of DA cosplayers that year, as DA2 had just come out, and we both formed some lasting social ties among the DA cosplay crowd.

I don't know when C had gotten into Tumblr, but after the con, she told me about a crackish Dragon Age roleplay she was in, and I was intrigued enough to bumble my way through learning Tumblr's interface and join in.  That RP itself didn't last much longer (I would end up co-moderating a large, Serious DA RP a couple of years later, which resulted in some lasting friendships and several hundred thousand words of RP), but a lot of the social circle remained intact, and Tumblr wound up being my primary vector for fandom exposure from there on out.  I found out about kinkmemes on LiveJournal and wound up reading (and writing) a lot of Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age smut.

I interacted with a whole pile of other fandoms over the years on Tumblr (shows, video games, movies, books, everything), but those two + Mass Effect were my "main" ones, until Overwatch executed a sudden takeover in 2016, and I also found the (tiny, but delightful) Pillars of Eternity fandom.  (If you're an RPG person, you should play it!  It's my Favorite and we need more people.)

And then Hannibal happened.  I was late to the party, but hot damn am I still glad to be there.  

2018: Tumblr Bans Porn

...and I'm still there, but also here!  And I like it very much.  :)

Comments

[james]

I loved the Empire trilogy and still think about bits of it from time to time. Such delightful world(s)-building!

[dreamerinsilico]

I re-read them a few years ago, and they were just as good as I remembered! I don't run into a lot of people who know about those books, that's neat :D

[james]

I read them eons ago when they first came out, so I'm glad to hear they stand up to re-reading. I shall have to check my library for them. (Edited - it was the Riftwar Saga that has books in the series I haven't read.)

[dreamerinsilico]

Yeah, I haven't read all the Riftwar books, either. Several of them! But I didn't find them as interesting - I picked them up after my re-read of Empire, and by that point in my life there was no way I wasn't going to view Pug as a pretty generic Fantasy Protagonist. (Also, I think the collaboration between Feist and Wurts on Empire was a really good one for both of them - there are books by her alone that I like more, but stylistically speaking I think they balanced each other out very well.)

[pauraque]

As ridiculous as the Tumblr Purge was, the silver lining has been meeting folks who went looking for new fannish venues and found DW. ♥

[dreamerinsilico]

<3 And having found DW has been my silver lining!

[enemytosleep]

The Tumblr porn ban is still wild to me haha. I used to be in groups that specifically were porn prompts, and I met my BFF by answering the same prompt on an anon kinkmeme. The power of porn. ♥

[dreamerinsilico]

Right??? Like, porn was not really even a major component of my tumblr experience, most of the time, but just the fact that it suddenly wasn't allowed to exist in that space... really fundamentally altered it, in an unequivocally bad way. As I said, I'm still alive over there because it's an important space for dynamic interaction with my major fandoms, but I've been doing my best to cultivate an identity over here because it's inherently more pleasant, and also tumblr feels very unstable as a community.

[enemytosleep]

I really only use Tumblr for art reblogs, so the porn ban is definitely felt in that way as a lot of my favorite artists packed up and moved to Twitter and Patreon and wherever else.