Fandom nostalgia

[krait]

So for Christmas, I finally got round to digging up all the old photos of trips I had taken with a friend back in 2012; this involved digging up the converted-to-external hard drive of my computer from that era and browsing through it.

(I'm organised, in my own very unique way. But it's the kind of way where four years later my filing system may defeat rational analysis, and "where did I put that? What did I NAME the folder for that?!" is a common refrain.)

While I was doing this, I of course ended up browsing through a lot of other stuff as well, including a whole bunch of my earliest fandom-related folders, when I was just a young serpent learning how this whole 'online fandom' thing worked; I've got canon materials, fan art, LJ icons, drabbles I was working on, and miscellaneous tangential materials all saved together in a jumble. (This post was almost a "political cartoons about Harry Potter" post. Why do I have so many of them? Why were there so many of them? One forgets just how much of a sensation HP was, until things like this crop up to remind one!)

Anyway! I felt such a wave of fandom nostalgia while going through this stuff. So many names I remember: Snaples, Brevisse, Seviet, Lizard, Raven Dunbar, Dovie, sine_qua_non767, Nimori, wikdsushi, Telanu, amethyst_lupin, Donna Bond, Gwyllion, Yukipon, Cybele... I remember them all so fondly, and can't help wondering where they are now, and missing them, and just generally missing the way fandom was, in those days. We were all so joyfully talkative, the fic and art and meta and casual LJ posts just pouring out of us! They felt like friends, though we never met in person.

(A few of you are still around! Hi, isis and dementordelta! There's fanart for your fics stored on my external hard drive and it gave me so many lovely feelings to see it again!)

Seeing "c.2003" and "[name] '04" on so much stuff is kind of mind-boggling, too, because I'm not a person who Has Skills when it comes to tracking time; I joke about being an Old Fan, but it's still a little bit shocking to realise that I was downloading explicit fanworks in a year when half of Homestuck fandom was in elementary school. And HP fandom wasn't my first fandom, but it does seem to be the first one where there was a wealth of fan-created artwork as well as fic - especially explicit fanart. One day I should put together a timeline!

It's really interesting, looking back at it so discretely; one notices trends and little signs of the times... The aforementioned increase in fan art generally, and in explicit fan art. A huge amount of fan art done in traditional media, with all the little things that go with it: handwritten captions and speech in comics, scanner blur. Long-URL personal websites under the artist's signature. Lots of meta-jokes about fandom itself.

Anyway, this post doesn't really have a point. I just tripped over some old fandom stuff and fell headlong into ~~emotions~~ and wanted to fling names out into the void in the faintest hope that they might not be gone forever; someone might know where (and who) they are these days, and pass the word that someone still thinks of them and their work from time to time.

Tell me about your old fandoms, and whether you ever peek into the souvenirs of your past fannish days!

Comments

[extrapenguin]

As a Certified Fandom Whippersnapper, I have less of a history, but I did go look at my old Animorphs Fan Forum presence a few months ago. Now, it was c. 2007 when I was active there, and looking at wee!me's presence, well, be glad that I have improved as a writer since my tween years. Also, what was up with the religion debates then, gah. The forum seemed to be very dude-containing, too.

Then, I went to look at the FFN ExtraPenguin account (since renamed to something completely different), and looked at my Hetalia things and cringed hard. I also looked at the rest of my corner of fandom and cringed hard. Time does not gild all memories, it seems.

The fandoms of then (dude-fandom sci-fi YA book, animanga) and my current fandoms (adult SF books) are structurally completely different, so the only thing that really was comparable was my writing. I am actually capable of stringing together a compelling narrative now, and pressing some buttons. One thing that sort of surprised me was that even tween me was able to make people laugh. (That's right, I got my start writing crackfic.)

In other news, your card arrived, only slightly battered by its voyage across the Atlantic ocean. The jasmine-hibiscus black tea is nice and at pretty much the optimal hibiscus content.

[krait]

I am glad that the card arrived, and wasn't smashed too badly! :D And that the jasmine-hibiscus was good. (I want to like jasmine, but can only manage to do so in very specific circumstances.)

looked at my Hetalia things and cringed hard

Hahahaha, I feel you! Every now and then I am seized by the awful urge to dig up some of my old (and thankfully never published) Gundam Wing or "original" (mostly a Forgotten Realms ripoff) fantasy fic. Cringing always follows!

[gramarye1971]

Oh, I still have some old files from my USENET days! alt.fan.sailor-moon and alt.fan.utena were my first fannish homes back in 1998/1999, and I still have some of the fanart that was made for an Utena fanfiction MST3K site -- now that dates me. I drifted from USENET to Yahoo!Groups, specifically for Dark Is Rising sequence fandom, and joined LJ in 2001 for RP purposes. Around that time, I was writing the massive HP/Dark Is Rising crossover that had me on the fringes of HP fandom.

I still have some of the fanart that was made for my crossover fic, especially since one of my LJ friends who drew it for me sent me all of the original hard-copy art files. I actually feel a little sad thinking about that, because the reason she did so was because she'd just gotten married and was becoming more heavily involved in her religion (Mormonism) and was feeling like her interests in HP and fandom in general were a distraction from the priority she should be placing on her devotion to God. (I strongly suspect her new husband had some influence there, because they were married late as far as Mormon culture is concerned, and I think he was anxious to prove that they were just as traditionally devout as any other couple.) She was really talented and incredibly smart, and I hope that wherever she is now, she still has an outlet for writing and art. So for me, that's the sorrowful side of fannish nostalgia -- missing the people who have fallen away from it because of outside circumstances.

[krait]

Wow, USENET!

I hadn't discovered fandom in those days, yet, but I am still technically a member of one mailing list (Vorkosigan) and several Y!Groups (mostly Harry Potter focused). I joined LJ in... 2004, wow. (I had to go and look at my profile!)

Having only recently discovered Utena, I envy you a lot! Discovering it so late has left me unable to fangirl about it the way one can with a new fandom, so all my glee mostly simmers quietly in the back of my head instead of sloshing all over the internet.

If you have any good fanfic squirreled away from the Usenet days, please send it to me!

The missing people are definitely one of the sharper edges of fandom retrospectives, aren't they. :/ There are quite a few HP writers I miss, as much for the more personal interactions we had as for the fic or art they made... I hope your friend, wherever she is, is still making stuff that she enjoys!

[gramarye1971]

Utena fic recs? Sure! Over on AO3, Celeste_Goodchild has done me a great service by having written most of the Black Rose Arc Mikage-centric fics that I would have wanted to write myself. And for some older fun classics, if you will pardon the bad formatting from a time long ago:

- Sovereignty-Associationist Girl Nanami by Alan Harnum and Paul Corrigan, in which cursed poutine turns Nanami into a rabid Quebec separatist.
- Student Council President's Day by Katherine Barnett, in which a made-up holiday allows Touga to have sex with almost everyone at Ohtori.
- Some badfic MST-ing from the Satellite of Revolution, in which Mikage traps the duellists on a satellite and forces them to read terrible Utena fanfiction.

Most of Alan Harnum's stuff is worth looking at, but I warn you to not read Jacquemart -- not because it's bad, but because it's really, really good, and if you start reading it and come to the last posted part and find out that there is no more, you will wail and gnash your teeth. It was bad enough when I was reading it as he was writing it, and suddenly it stopped. (It's a classic case of the author have written himself into a corner and not being able to find a way out of it.)

[goss]

(here via network)

Awww, I so relate to this post. I was way more into Smallville than HP, but have fond memories of many of the names you mentioned. I miss Lizard's presence online too, but happy that things are going so well for her IRL.

[krait]

Hi!

Your name is vaguely familiar to me, though I'm failing to nail down details. Friendslist-of-a-friendslist, perhaps? :D

I miss Lizard a lot and wish her the best wherever she might be now!

[goss]

Friendslist-of-a-friendslist, perhaps?

Heh. Maybe? I was pretty active in my little corner of fandom with Smallville, but when HP came along, it was such a *HUGE* fannish community (and so much wank. lol.) that I somehow got shy and decided to stay on the fringes mostly, dipping my toes in occasionally with some Harry/Draco fanart, but mostly just lurking and reading fanfic.

[tropicsbear]

Recently I kind of went into a dive of my old fannish files and discovered a cache of hilarious early 2000s official Saiyuki art. I uploaded it to Twitter and Tumblr and had a blast reminiscing with fellow fans.

[krait]

Haha, isn't it great?

I have a lot of hilarious official Gundam Wing and Weiss Kreuz and Yu Yu Hakusho art tucked away in the depths of my hard drive(s), too. :D

[pennie_dreadful]

This is a super relevant post, as I was just feeling the urge to go look back at stuff from when I was first becoming an active participant in the Valdemar/LHM fandom around ~2009/10. I don't have any surviving fics I wrote in high school, but I did used to (hand!)write Animorphs fanfiction (without realizing what I was doing; I had no idea what fandom/fanfiction was, I just loved those books and once a month was just not fast enough to keep me entertained lmao). Sadly, I lived in a super rural area and we were late getting internet access (even now where I grew up the only internet options are dial up through the phone company-cheap and crappy, or satelite internet-we tried it once and it was really not worth the price. The cable company just refuses to come all the way out here.) I didn't really establish an online presence until ~2004 or so. I discovered fandom pretty fast and was all over ff.n leaving comments, but not posting anything of my own--I was just too shy. Fun fact though, 13 or 14 years ago, I left a comment on a LHM fic by thene, but she didn't reply. That fic just kind stuck with me, since in those days good LHM fic was few and far between, much less fic set post-canon, and 6 years later when I started posting my own LHM fic, we met on LJ, (thankfully she had the same username as on ff.n!) I remembered her/her fic, we got to talking and we've been friends ever since.

[anotherfmafan]

Yay! Very glad you enjoyed taking your trip down fandom memory lane. :)

Compared to many of my fandom friends, I am still on the short side in terms of fandom history at somewhere around 12 years. But I am getting closer all the time to having been into FMA for half my life, and that's kind of fun. :D

[pennie_dreadful]

Oh, I am officially past the point of being a fan of the LHM for half my life! I was fifteen, had just checked it out of the school library that morning and started reading it during lunch. I'm thirty one now, and I've made peace with the fact that I am now and forevermore LHM trash XD Other fandoms come and go, but there'll always be that one pairing/character that just...imprinted on our ids and won't let go, amirite?

[clawdine]

^^ It's nice to look down memory lane. I got my start in fandom around 1999 in Cybersix, when I first had my own internet access as a wee kiddo. Webrings, ugly websites and such. My favourite fansite then is still up today! I was mostly solo then, and didn't quite pick up communities until a couple of years later. It was mostly anime and various J-type fandoms like video games, visual kei etc.

I wouldn't know the wonders of Western-media fandoms until 2011 (hahaha BBC Merlin), and hence I missed the HP/LOTR fandom entirely, though I did watch the movies. And how I got into Merlin was through someone on fandomsecrets reccing fandoms for M/M! I think FS recced Captive Prince as well. :) It was really good to see it finished.

Aaaand now it's come full-circle with me being back in anime fandom, Yuri on Ice.

I do miss people who've left, and that's why I try to keep in contact with friends through other mediums like Tumblr and Twitter. For me, fandom is where friendship starts, but I really want to know friends outside of our shared fandom as well. I'm glad fannish trends seem to be more accepting of that now.