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rheanna prompted:
what was your first fandom and how did you get into online media fandom?I can't remember a time before I self-identified as a fan. I mean, I always was aware of fandom as a thing geeky people do together, so I was never a "feral fan" who was really into something, and only later discovered others were too and found them. My parents and siblings were all fannish when I grew up, variously being into Star Trek, tv series, pulp magazines, horror and SF movies, comics, TTRPGs etc.
Like, my mom told the anecdote how in the pre-VCR days when she was pregnant with my older brother her water broke during an Avengers episode, and she finished watching that before going to the hospital (tbf, it was her second child and she suspected it would take a while, but still, that's fannish priorities right there). I actually checked the air dates for that series on German tv once, and her story checks out... Both my parents told me how their parents had tragically destroyed their pulps and comic books when they were little, whereas my older sister didn't just collect Star Trek novels (there also was a live sized Spock poster for a while) and comics, she also had a chest full of "John Sinclair" horror pulp magazines that she read to me when I was tiny (my parents had no issue with that, my mother for example read "Jerry Cotton" pulps herself), and my older brother hosted D&D nights etc.
Back to my own particular fannishness, my first real fandom was Disney comics, mostly the Ducks, and then collecting comics in general, and also drawing my own. I collected (Disney still, also various European comics, but no superheroes at that time), became a regular at the local comic store, went to trade meetings, later to cons, met with a youth group to draw comics and eventually publish a zine.
The group actually was a city project for "at risk" youth done by social workers, but I didn't realize that at the time since I just saw the flyer in the library, and I was a bit younger than the main target age, like fourteen when it started iirc, and most others where 16 or 17.
Because I was really sheltered even at 14 it actually was a bit scary for me to get to the meeting place at first, because previously I'd only been on my own in my neighborhood (to the library there, to the comic store, the mall etc.), and to the central library in the city center, but the group met at a vaguely run down cultural center behind the central station and later a youth center in a neighborhood adjacent to mine, but one that was significantly poorer, and generally I didn't go to that area. Both places had lots wall signs that drug use wasn't allowed inside, which seemed somewhat alarming to me. I realized later that the funding for the whole thing had come out of the addiction prevention city budget or something, which probably also explains the locations in "drug problem" areas. Some of the other teenagers had mainly done illegal graffiti spraying before (we all brought art samples).
Anyway, the group was really fun, even though besides me only one other girl was there iirc, and it was also very educational. I still have some of the tutorial copies. It also definitely widened my social horizons. We even displayed our artwork at a local comic con eventually in the second year (actually reading the project descriptions in the con program made me realize that the thing was primarily intended as social work, not art education), however I never got my original artwork back after the exhibition. I'm still disgruntled about that, all these decades later.
So I was mostly into various aspects of comic fandom as a teenager. I don't remember anymore how I first learned that fan resources could also be found on the internet, I think a zine might have mentioned a news group as resource or such, but at first I wanted to find out comic bibliography type of things, like lists of comics certain favorite artists had worked on, which wasn't easy to find then. Like, you could find such lists when a magazine did a special on an artist or a writer, but for some there weren't any I could find.
My older sister had access through the university, so I visited her to get access to newsgroups and FTP sites with FAQs about comics and stuff, and printed out piles of posts, mostly from usenet, but also some really early websites. That was back when Lynx and Mosaic were still the main web browsers, and you searched FTP servers with a thing called gopher.
Then my older brother got compuserve at his place, and I looked for fannish things there (also played Myst), both in the groups but also more generally, and found a due South mailing list, but my attempt to join fandom then failed, because his email inbox could not cope with the amount of mail a fannish mailing list generated.
So I was aware of online fandom and wanted to join, but the difficult logistics thwarted me until I gained my own internet access a few years later. Since I was mostly into The Sentinel by then along with comics, I found that pretty much as soon as I had dial up internet at home, late 1997, when there were many Sentinel websites and lists. I think I first looked up an episode guide because I wanted to know whether more episodes had aired in the US than here (there had) and read transcripts (I had only watched the dubbed versions then, though eventually I found fans to get tapes from). I then came across Nightowl's Nest, a fandom resource site, that linked to all sorts of things and discovered fanfic, and then I was pretty much set.
I wrote feedback to the first Sentinel fanfic I found, squeeing about having found fanfic, joined the Senfic mailing lists soon after, and then a bunch of others. It took me a little bit to realize all the red, blinking "slash 18+" weren't related to gore and violence (as in "slasher" movies). They puzzled me, as I didn't understand why The Sentinel would inspire much of that, and why my favorite authors would be into gore when their regular fanfic wasn't violent at all. But since in TS there really was a lot of overlap between gen and slash, the misconception was cleared up very soon, and I joined some more lists.
The Sentinel stayed my main media fandom for several years, though I never was strictly mono-fannish. I also read Due South, Highlander, TPM, and many others, but was primarily active on TS lists (or lists that were open to other things but had grown out of TS) until fandom moved to LJ.
(If you want to prompt me there are still
open days.)
