My fandom history

[nicevenn]

I was a senior in high school when the first Lord of the Rings movie came out. At the time, I had no interest in fantasy and wanted nothing to do with the movie. But a friend wanted really wanted to go, and since I'd already said no the last few times she'd invited me to do something, I decided to grit my teeth and bear it.

Gollum creeped the hell out of me, but Legolas didn't. So when the next two movies came out I went to see them, too. Somewhere along the way I read the books. It wasn't until after The Return of the King came out, however, that I discovered slash. I already had an interest in two guys fooling around, mind you, I just didn't know people wrote about that stuff...

I think I was looking for a Legolas wallpaper for my laptop when I accidentally stumbled upon a Legals/Aragorn fic. Not my pairing of choice, tbh, but I read it anyway. Then I searched for more. At first I assumed gay men were writing those stories, but as I became more involved, I learned that most of the authors and readers were women. 'OMFG, there are other perverts like me out on the loose!' I thought.

I continued reading, and after a while I wrote a few of my own LOTR fics (God help anyone who ever read them). The Harry Potter craze was already well underway, but I managed to ignore it for the longest time. 'Who the hell would want to write Harry Potter fanfiction?' I thought whenever I went to Adultfanfiction.net and saw the thousands of stories under the HP category.

One day, a friend invited me to go with her to her boyfriend's house. At some point they decided they needed some alone time, so my friend asked if I'd ever seen any of the Harry Potter movies. I said, "Uh, NO." And she said, "They're really good. You should watch one, you'll love it." She put it on for me, and by the time they were done I was like, "Noooo, I don't want to leave! I wanna watch this..."

I went home and rented the rest of the movies that were out. Then I moved on to the books. I saw the H/D potential from the start and went looking for fic. That's when I discovered LJ :)

Inevitably, some of my LJ friends have developed an interest in other fandoms over the years. I'll admit, it sometimes annoys me to see the HP goodness on my f-list interspersed with fic and squee about fandoms I have no interest in. I'm usually good at ignoring it, so that's what I did, but this Merlin thing was getting out of control. I'd never seen an episode, but I saw pics and icons and thought, 'Those guys are FUGLY--WTF is wrong with you girls?'

Then, one fateful Friday night in March, I was bored and SyFy was running its series two premier, so I decided to watch. You know what happened next. I made a massive squee post about it that weekend.

The funny thing is that each time I get into a new fandom, I can't imagine that it will ever happen again. And then it does. I certainly hope I won't discover anything new for a while. There isn't enough time in my day for more than two fandoms...