Snowflake Challenge 2015 - Day 5

snowflake_challenge  - Day 5

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. How did you come to fandom, why did you choose your fannish name, do you have more than one secret identity?

My online name, winterlover, has nothing to do with any of the fandoms I'm in. I wanted to choose one that's relatively neutral so that the name would not go "out of fashion". Of course it has a special source, but not a too obvious one. My LOTR-fan friend would disagree, haha.
I use InsaneJournal mostly to communicate with my first group of fandom-friends and have made my Dreamwidth journal more about bandom. I'm not really active on Livejournal, I have that account to be able to comment. I use the same name on all my fannish platforms (sometimes spelt differently because the original had been taken). My twitter account is private and I only look at tumblr, I don't blog myself.

(I thought I wrote about my fannish origin already in one of the past years, but I can't find the entry, so there might be repeats.)

When I was a teenager I wrote things. They were mostly self-inserted (Mary Sue?) love stories, but original ones. I also wrote poems and lyrics.
I'm a big music-fan and got obsessed with David Bowie when I was 15. I found other Bowie-fans to communicate with (in pre-internet-times) and we met up for gigs and fan-parties or conventions and I'm still friends with some of them. I've broadened my interests to other music now, but I don't see this as being in a fandom. It's real life for me: buying records, listening to music, going to gigs.

I found out about fanfiction through one of my Bowie-friends. We both liked to watch gay movies or read stories with gay content. We shared videotapes and books. One time she copied me a non-explicit, romantic story which turned out to be Kirk/Spock fanfiction. I still have it somewhere.

I found out about online fanfiction very late. A friend was/is a big LOTR Frodo/Sam fan and she told me about Livejournal and the stories she was reading. I was curious, because of the m/m content, but soon found out that I wasn't too keen on Hobbit-slash. But at least now I knew what slash was. I read some Harry Potter fic, which I liked most when the sex-scenes were written well.

I like to watch TV and movies and read books, but I'm not a natural shipper. That's why I preferred to watch movies or TV-shows that already had gay characters.

One of the TV shows was German daily soap "Alles Was Zählt". I didn't watch regularly but I knew about the gay storyline which lead me to searching for it on Youtube. And I found more than I was looking for: a whole community, not only Germans but people from all over the world enjoyed watching subtitled episodes provided to us by the lovely "EskimoKissProject" (EKP).
First I only laughed about the hilarious summaries by the lovely uploaders and about the funny comment section, but soon I found out about their community on InsaneJournal. Their enthusiasm and input made me delurk and get involved. I found a group of friends who had my kind of humour, were no tinhats and wrote brilliant fanfic. This was the first time I was inspired to write fanfiction myself, to expand on the storyline, continue scenes or write an alternate reality (*coughsthreesomecoughs*).

Unfortunately the storyline of that soap was discontinued and the TV station forced EKP to take all episodes off YouTube. And now the fannish enthusiasm in the show has faded or moved on. I'm still friends with the wonderful core of that community, we also met in person more than once, but there are other subjects we talk about now, our other interests or fandoms are more varied.

I wasn't looking for a new fandom after that, but for more fanfic to read. I was spoilt with the brilliant writing of "my" fandom, so I didn't want to risk reading too much bad fic to find the good ones. I resorted to reading work that had been podficced. I thought that if someone wants to read a fic out loud and record it, the writing can't be too bad. And I was right. I found great fic. First I read lots in the Adam Lambert fandom. I followed some of the writers into bandom. I say "follow", but I was late to everything. I've only been reading since 2013, but so I had plenty of older fics to choose from.

And this is the embarrassing part where I admit that I came into bandom not because of the bands or their music, but because of the fic. I fell in love with the characters, with how they were written. Only recently, after everyone came out of their hiatus, I'm also learning more about the "real people", but I'm not actively searching for RL stuff.

All this is certainly part of the reason why I'm not confident in my writing yet. Am I even allowed to write about people I really know nothing about? Because I'm no *REAL fan? But I'm a fan of the subject. I love to read about bands, gangs, musicians on stage, on tour, in vans, in busses, in hotels and the resulting drama. And there are lots of amazing AUs that I didn't expect to love so much.

And I also discovered a lovely and welcoming community in bandom. That's reason enough for me to try and take part whenever I feel able to.