December meme: first fanfic you ever read

[melannen]

This one depends a lot on how you define fanfic.

If you're going by "transformative work in conversation with other transformative works based on a shared canon," it was probably some fairy-tale or bible-story picture book from before I can remember. (Honorable mention to Monsterpiece Theater which probably shaped more than I will ever realize I ever learned about storytelling, but it's theater not text, so it doesn't count.)

The first things in the sense of "derivative work of a specific copyrighted canon" that I interacted with in what I now recognize was a fairly fannish way were Heidi's Children and Heidi Grows Up, by Charles Tritten, which were continuations sort-of-with-permission after the author's death. In particular they taught me that just because one particular author thinks something is canon it doesn't mean it actually is. :P It also taught me that it's 100% legit to respond to a book you like by writing your own sequel, so from somewhere around that time there are scribbled bits and pieces of the continuing story of Queen Amethyst and King Peregrine of Ambergeldar.

By later elementary school, I'd decided I wanted to be A Writer, and was subsequently exposed to enough "how to write" advice to make me self-conscious about originality (and self-inserts. and femininity), but shortly thereafter I fell into Star Trek and Star Wars and was reading all the published tie-ins I could get my hands on, so that didn't last long. (I learned about 'slash' from authorized published Star Trek fandom books. And Kirk/Spock from the movie novelization...) Some of the authorized anthologies were culled from zine fic and had all the requirements for fanfic (written by fan authors for fan authors, full of fandom tropes, etc) except that they were (sometimes retroactively) approved by TPTB and published. Most notably for Star Trek: the New Voyages anthologies, and I swear there was at least one Star Wars anthology in the 1990s that included fan content, because I don't think I could have possibly have imagined that incredibly trippy Corellian pastiche of Der Erlkonig, but nobody else seems to remember it? The main thing I remember about these is that the fan-written works, while often not as polished, always felt way more intense than other books, and at age twelve or thirteen I didn't know how I felt about that.

Anyway, it was also around this time that I read my copy of Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" until it literally fell apart, because crossovers + queer poly. I have weaknesses, okay. (And after that, any pro sf author talking crap about fanfic was going to get hit over the head with said falling-apart book until they stopped.) (I don't care what your objection to fanfic is, Heinlein did it in that book) (including exposing children to it at a probably too-young age...) (It's okay, it was a pretty soft book by that point.)

My time in anime fandom was actually fairly fanfic-free, but shortly thereafter I got into webcomics fandom, which at the time was a place where the lines between fan creators and canon creators were very blurry, because pretty much anyone could attempt to create a webcomic (and did), and the fandom activity all took place on official forums that were modded by the canon creators, and it was all very slipstream. I'm sure I read some webcomic fanfic on the Keenspot forums, but if I did, I cannot tell you anything about it, except that it was almost certainly more heavily influenced by anime fandom than Western media fandom. (I also had my only experience with forum-based roleplay there.)

At the time, most webcomics had a sort of proto-blog where the comic creator would post life updates and behind-the-scenes stuff about the comic, and at some point, some webcomic I was reading (Queen of Wands, maybe? That sounds right but it probably isn't) posted their Favorite Fanfic, and it was for a book I'd just read and desperately needed more of, and that is what I usually consider officially My First Fanfic.

It was And When He Falls, by torch, Aziraphale/Crowley. I have just re-read it and it is still good; a better First Fanfic I could not have possibly found! (It must have been pretty new at the time, too.)

I didn't go on from there and read more in media fandom stuff. Not sure why, except that torch didn't have anything else for fandoms I knew, and I was spending pretty much all the internet time I could get keeping up with about 75 webcomics on dial-up.

So I didn't really fall headfirst into being a fanfic fan until several years later, when I was at college, and a bunch of us were going to see the new Harry Potter movie, but I hadn't brought my copies of the books to college with me, so I couldn't re-read them in preparation for the movie, but I certainly wasn't going to go to the movie without reinforcing the buttresses of book canon in my mind, so I decided to read some fanfic instead.

I ended up on this archive that I can't for the life of me remember the name of. It had a name based on a place in canon, like a lot of them did at the time, but it wasn't any of the ones on the fanlore list of Harry Potter archives. It was specifically aimed at adults, but more 'adult themes' than 'NC-17' and I don't think it was the Restricted Section - RS.org would have been very very new at the time, and I don't think this was, and I didn't have to register an account to read, and also I'm pretty sure RS was an efiction archive, whereas this one gave off the distinct vibe of everything being hand-coded (and possibly of being invite-only.) It only had a few dozen stories on it, by a dozen or so authors, nearly all of them novel-length, but darned if I can remember any of the specific stories; I think a lot of them were crossposted other places too. Multiple pairings and eras, including slash and het and even gen iirc (Is this ringing a bell for anyone else? No?) (ETA: Hah, never mind, it was Diagon Alley, it was on the list after all, I just skimmed it over because the name seemed *too* canon to be the right one. But it was that.) (ETA2: Fuck me, the Draco Trilogy is still readable in its wayback link from fanlore. *eyes first ever archive* *eyes giant to-do list*)

Anyway, I burned through that archive in about a weekend, and after that it was all fanfic, all the time, forever.

Comments

[rthstewart]

Oh this was wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing. My first fan fic as in unauthorized transformative work of a copyrighted propert,y was definitely and without a doubt, Mara's Two Loves -- the greatest Mara Jade fic that existed at the time (circa 1994 or 1995) that was posted on the AOL Boards. Attorney me was horrified at the risk. Writer me was... well, how much fanfiction begins with perusing a popular piece of fiction whether copyrighted or transformative and conclude, "Can I can do better than that? Let's FIND OUT." 2 million words of fanfic hubris later, give or take...

My first experience with slash and NC-17 content came shortly thereafter at Gen Con and a bottle of Jaggermeister (never drink to the second R). I read one that I think was by Ellen Randolph (who flitted in SW and ST zines before moving on to her own verse). It was an SW zine that was, literally, the hat trick/grand slam -- my first slash, my first threesome, my first first incest WOOT -- Han/Luke/Leia. I remember dripping cheese sauce and a tiny washcloth.

And there were indeed official Star Wars licensed anthologies and short stories -- first in the West End Games Star Wars Adventure Journal and then in Tales of the New Republic and Tales of the Empire and Gamer magazine (I think it was called Gamer). I had stories under another name in those properties. A bunch of women fans, like me, were stringing for West End Games at 5 cents a word writing Star Wars RPG material and angling to get short fiction into the SWAJ. When the AJ folded, a number of those stories were picked up for the mass market anthologies under the Bantam Spectra license. IIRC, WEG's short fiction license was limited -- they could only deal with named canonical characters in the gaming material not the short fiction so the stories we wrote couldn't include Han, Luke, Leia, etc. They did, however, comply with the WEG style guide and gaming materials and specs.

[melannen]

Ah-hah! So it would be Tales of the New Republic (and specifically Uhl Eharl Khoehg by Patricia Jackson) that has been haunting my memories - thank you! That's the only one of the '90s anthologies we didn't own a copy of, so that makes sense as the one I have the
vaguest memories of. So they weren't quite pulled from actual zines like the New Voyages books, but maybe close enough.

That's so cool that you were writing for them! (I was twelve, and dreaming of writing for them when I grew up someday.)

[queenbookwench]

I too, remember Heidi Grows Up though I never read Heidi's Children that I recall.

My first transformative work in that sense was probably either one of the Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz books or Alice Through the Needle's Eye by Gilbert Adair, in elementary school, as well as those books that were a blend of RPG and Choose Your Own Adventure--am I imagining that someone did a Narnia one at some point?

My first exposure to the idea that this was a thing someone like me could write was actually a C.S. Lewis quote that I ran across somewhere (maybe Brian Sibley's book about Narnia?) where he wrote in a letter to a child that he didn't plan to write any more prequels but he encouraged them to write their own stories to fill in the gaps in Narnia's history. I wrote a stab at a Problem of Susan fix-it when I was in 8th grade (Morgan LeFay was somehow involved?) and then lots of Tolkien fic and Anne McCaffrey fic.

I was vaguely exposed to the concept of fic as a thing people published on the internet (and to the related concepts of shipping and slash) in college, because my dear friend and roommate was a Due South fan. But the first time I decided to investigate fic was in grad school, in 2001 and 2002, when I lurked on a long-defunct bulletin called chicklit dot com. There was a whole thread of people recommending their favorite fics, and I was a Harry Potter fan, so I decided to check out Lust Over Pendle by AJ Hall. The rest is pretty much history ;)

[espresso_addict]

Thanks for writing this. I've been trying to work out my first exposure to fanfiction with little luck. Almost certainly it was something in my university Tolkien society's zine; along with bundles of pseudo-scholarly meta, they published some fan poetry & lots of fan art, but (they're all online now to check, amazingly enough) very little prose that's clearly set in Tolkien's world as opposed to generic sword & sorcery. It would probably be of the form Marty-Stu in M-e (most of the contributors were male) or the like. I remember finding the lack frustrating and also being annoyed that the more-professional Amon Hen (from the national society) explicitly forbade Tolkien fanfiction (it still does), so I must have known what I was missing.

[merelydovely]

I got into fanfic through deleterius around 2005, my freshman year of high school. One of my first shiny new high school friends was also a budding artist and introduced me to Deviantart; I can only assume I was drawn deeper into the Harry Potter fandom from there.

The result was that most of the fanfic I consumed at first was, by my own choice, completely terrible. I have absolutely no memory of which poor girl's foray into authorship was my first object of scorn, but I'm sure it didn't merit quite so much smug teenage condescension.

Eventually I read things like The Very Secret Diaries because people were constantly mentioning them, and from there I moved on to the Shoebox Project and other works of actual substance. SBP might actually have been my first proper slashfic. Some Crowley/Aziraphale made it in around that time, as did House/Wilson; I actually bought the TV Guide with their "ISN'T IT BROMANTIC?" article on the cover, just because I was so excited to see their chemistry acknowledged by a mainstream publication.

I fell out of the fanfic habit for a while in college, focusing more on poetry and original fiction, but I got into Attack on Titan, Merlin, Teen Wolf, and Sherlock all around 2013 in the wake of a breakup, and though the fandoms have changed, it's been full speed ahead ever since.

[beatrice_otter]

I have NO idea what my first fanfic was, but in high school in the 90s I was using the school computers to surf fannish webrings and read literally every single fic on fanfix.com (.net? idek). I had been plotting out fanfic ideas (and writing out backstory and timelines for my OCs) for years before I actually either started writing the fic and reading other peoples' fic.

But I did literally try to read every single fic on fanfix. I have a Thing about finishing/completing things, and it was a struggle to me to realize that I didn't have to read a fic if I didn't like it.

[melannen]

I tried to read all of Seventh Dimension once (...bad idea) and I'm pretty sure I did read all of Diagon Alley, so I feel you.

I don't think I ever read on fanfix though, which is interesting!

[beatrice_otter]

Well, it was a Star Wars archive, despite the generic name, and it disappeared really early in the 2000s, so if you weren't in the SW fandom at the right time, you'd never have heard of it.

[oracne]

OMG Number of the Beast! My favorite part of that was the fanfic-Oz stuff - I was young enough when I first read it that all the blah blah blah sex parts bored me. I didn't know you could DO that sort of thing in fiction at the time. Did you ever read Tarzan Alive by Farmer?

[melannen]

That book is in so many ways objectively a bad book, but at it's heart it's about a) crossovers and b) a lot of people having a lot of fun.

It got me started at looking at pro-SF that is basically fanfic! I haven't read any Farmer but I have read "Rainbow Mars," which is Larry Niven's take on let's all go to Barsoom (And of course, "Wizards on Mars," which is Diane Duane's.)

[sewn]

What a great answer to the question. Both first and fanfic (and reading, for that matter!) are such fantastically porous words.

The very first fic I read wasn't by torch, but some of the first did include their X-Files fic. Just clicking through that link to the website made me so nostalgic right now. It still looks so cool; I associated that sort of website aesthetic with (what I thought of as) quality, adult fanfic for ages (a/o/t busy, blinking Geocities and Angelfire sites, which I also loved, but in a different way).

Also, one of the other first stories I read was The Draco Trilogy translated into my native language*, and I still remember the website that hosted it, the colour scheme and the homegrown fanart. Clearly, it's the important things that stick.

*The translation was very involved, and I still remember each chapter had a thoughtful epigraph added by the translator, often picked from angsty metal lyrics.

[anotherslashfan]

I wish I could answer this, but I don't remember at all ;_; It was probably in German, though.

ETA: I dug out my first diary from way back when to see if I could find a hint on what I read when I started out. Instead I found out I apparently wrote a dark-ish Mamoru POV Sailor Moon story?!!! Or rather a short vignette. What the...

[(Anonymous)]

Ok, I apologize in advance, but can you explain in small words what you're talking about with the wayback link on Fanlore page?