I KNOW YOU WROTE IT. Don’t lie to me. Don’t you dare look at me and try to tell me you never wrote any. Tell me about it. Make a burner account if you have to, but I want to know. At the Vancouver meetup last night one of our Toasties was too BASHFUL to tell me what they’d written as a teen, so I had to get things started by confessing first:
AT LEAST TWO PARODY FAN FICTIONS OF OTHER FAN FICTIONS for Canada’s short-lived half-hour male version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Big Wolf on Campus (the greatest show in the world), age 11-13
A fan fiction about PEOPLE DYING on Smallville that plagiarized heavily from Good Omens (!) and East of Eden (!!!), age 14
I think that’s it but I MIGHT have written one about Hanson, I can’t recall
These fics are gone now. I deleted them from ff.net sometime in my sophomore year out of a belated sense of self-preservation. I would give untold riches to see them again, and to see if they were as funny as I believed them to be at the time. I like to think that they were. I like to think that the ocean will be as blue as my dreams. I hope.
Tags: confess to me, fan fiction, the internet
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SAILOR MOON
When I was the prime age for overwrought ficcing I was more into fan-art and drawing self-insert OCs to go with my favorite SFF heroines. I believe the first actual fic I wrote was as an adult, and it was about The Sword album Warp Riders. Yay tidal locks.
BUFFY SELF INSERT (written round robin style with best friend, age 12). XENA CALLISTO REDEMPTION FIC (age 13). NO BURNER ACCOUNT FOR ME I HAVE NO SHAME.
Xena…Callisto…redemption fic?? Why has this never occurred to me????????? brb
sci-fi/fantasy Backstreet Boys
this is my favorite answer
Lizzie McGuire femslash. Yep. Yepppppp.
WE DEMAND A SAMPLE SENTENCE ugh I would read that Right Now.
Oh man I think I purged all evidence of its existence, which is terrible because I bet it would be amazing to read now, but I do remember people on ff.net were verrrrrry angry about the concept in 2002.
I wrote a lot of Lizzie/Gordo but I remember briefly dabbling in Lizzie/Kate and not knowing where the hell that was coming from. If I could I’d go back and tell my tweenage self to just go with it.
2nd grade: Space Clifford. Clifford, the Big Red Dog, in space.
Mine was 2nd grade, too! A Power Rangers fic in which I was the Yellow Ranger and I time-traveled to the prehistoric era and rode a saber-tooth tiger like a horse. There were illustrations.
You gotta do it up. I bound Space Clifford in stiff red posterboard and trimmed it into the shape of a couchant dog. There was an ear flap you could lift up to reveal the author’s bio and copyright information.
Also second grade! The Pensevies and the dwarf from Prince Caspian hanging out with Yoda. The events of Prince Caspian pretty much went on as planned, but, y’know, with Yoda.
Prince Caspian figured heavily into my childhood fantasies. Oh yes.
Oh man, I would read the crap out of that story! Imagining Yoda opening up a can on the Telmarines is very satisfying.
I mean, the Narnians did pretty well on their own, but you KNOW that Yoda would have loved to help them get the Telmarines the hell out of Narnia. I can’t think why C.S. Lewis didn’t add that in.
I love you both for that and your Vorkosigan-related username!
Aww, thanks! Come to that, I think Yoda would have also enjoyed helping out the Barrayarans with their Cetagandan problem. Yoda: Purveyor of Truth and Justice Across the Multiverse.
give yourself some credit, that’s a TRANSFORMATIVE WORK
Draco/Ginny where his Death Eater assignment was to stalk her. TRUE LOVE <3 Also, she had a fairy sidekick named Tessa. Oh 12 y/o self.
That sounds. AMAZING. TESSA FOREVER.
It was your textbook LOTR self-insert 10th-walker dealie. I was in sixth grade.
Harry Potter. Gooood old Harry Potter. *Unless we count the story I wrote in 3rd grade as a homework assignment that was basically Tamora Pierce fan fic, right down to the character name “Alanna.” My teacher was very curious about where I came up with that name.
ohmygoodness Tamora Pierce! I had forgotten all about her! I still remember the scene where she gets her period. I was so grateful not to live in middle ages.
Lord of the Rings lightly-disguised self-insert “Legomance.” I was 11. I put it up on FF.net but it got flamed and I took it down after one day. I still have it in notebooks somewhere!
“Legomance”
THERE’S A WORD FOR THIS GENRE??! Oh man. I was 11 too, and knew nothing of the world, and there was a website called Elven Fire that I read on the family desktop computer, always with another Internet Explorer window open in case my mom walked by and I needed to look like I was just googling something
This is exactly my experience, 100%
I’m days late on this but this is EXACTLY what mine was too. It was written in first-person present-tense for some reason, and it wasn’t up on FF.net but rather some LOTR-specific site that I no longer remember but still mourn.
Pokemon non-romantic fanfiction in which my starter was Lapras – age 11
Overwrought DRAMA BOMB hurt/comfort fanfic starring Snape and Hermione (because she was the only worthwhile not-old girl character) (also yes: ewwww) – age 13-15
And then my fanfiction career abruptly ended when my Mum found said hurt/comfort fic under my mattress while snooping, and was like “um… i… like, what is… this?” and the embarrassment was so severe that I still will not allow her to bring it up ever.
I completely forgot about hurt/comfort fanfic. I bet there is so much Supernatural hurt/comfort on Tumblr, though.
ALSO, GO TEAM POKEMON FANFIC WRITERS
There is an extant serious academic paper on Supernatural Hurt/Comfort fic.
That’s how much of it is out there.
WAIT okay, speaking of Snape/Hermione — did you read the fic where she was his apprentice and she had to swear to obey him in ALL THINGS in order to get him to take her on as an apprentice, and then of course it was all just sexy sexy sexytimes. Like, okay, in retrospect, it was seeeeeriously unhealthy, definitely noncon/dubcon, Hermione being duped into signing away her sexual agency and then having that become a magically sealed contract, etc. I *think* there was maybe some light BDSM. And apparently Snape did it because he was loooonely? Gross. At the time I literally couldn’t get enough of it, I thought it was the sexiest smut ever, but looking back, knowing more about actual BDSM things and like consent in general…eeesh.
my snape/hermione phase as a young teenager remains the most “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh” phase of my life, including the rocks-up-nose phase
Yes yes! I actually just reread that fic and it is SUPER GROSS now. At the time, I ate it right up.
Oh moms… My most embarrassing moment was when she found NC-17 fic on my laptop when I was 14 and obviously read through a bit of it/probably all of it to my everlasting dismay (I think it was Buffy smut??). We had a conversation about it in the car on the way to school the next day, and I wanted the earth to swallow me up!
Moms deserve what they get when snooping.
I didn’t write it, but my best friend definitely wrote many volumes of Hanson fan fiction that involved us all. It was more or less collaborative. I may have typed it up for her years ago and given it to her as a birthday gift.
My friends and I would write AU crossovers with, like, Buffy and LOTR and Harry Potter, and also RPF, and just send it to each other, and AIM chat with each other as Angel, Spike, Faith, Buffy, Legolas. It was super-fun, although I think at one point she invented a set of supposedly real life twins (Sebastian and…Jeremy?) who were rich and charming and had houses all over Europe that they promised to take us to. She would chat to me as the twins. Sebastian was my “boyfriend” who I never got to meet.
It got kinda weird after the introduction of the twins. I think some part of me must have known it was all a hoax but I know that for a while I was absolutley convinced they were real.
TEENAGE GIRLS, you delightful, frightening wackos.
A super melodramatic Lily/James fic where all the chapter titles were the songs from “tick…tick…BOOM!”
Guys, I was really cool in high school
I wrote a really melodramatic Lily/James songfic.. So you’re not alone.
I still physically recoil from songfic. Just…why?
I was compelled to write one, and I don’t understand AT ALL.
I wrote X-Files songfic to the tunes from The Little Mermaid as a present for my best friend.
Song fix may be my favorite type of fan fiction. Mostly because the tend to be short, but also because I know I’m not the only one linking song lyrics and characters.
Rurouni Kenshin. About a girl with a TRAGIC BACKSTORY who is the ONLY ONE Kenshin will agree to train because he sees HIMSELF IN HER and then there is a CLIMACTIC BATTLE WITH AN ENEMY FROM HER PAST which ends up in her being severely injured and NURSED BACK TO HEALTH by the Kashin Dojo gang.
uuuuuugh being twelve
X-Files, but I had the luxury of being in my early 20s at the time, so it’s — you know, bad, but just regular bad, not 11-year-old bad. OTOH, I am never allowed to say “but I was too young to know any better!” which is okay. It just made me go straight to the part where I don’t give a shit, skipping the Overly Apologetic phase entirely.
I think I lost like five years of my life to X-files fanfiction. That’s a particularly large cave of the internet to be sure.
Wait, did you write Buffy fic too? If so I loved your stuff.
…and possibly Ray/Ray? Because if so, I loved it, too.
Oh, yeah, that was definitely me. I tried to make fetch happen with Ray/Ray for *years,* and then it caught on after I had gone on to something else. I still take credit, though. *g*
Little bit. It was never a primary fandom for me, but I wrote some Buffy/Faith and some Tara-centric stuff, and — maybe other things? God it’s been a long fifteen years…
Loveslut is the one I remember really loving back in the day, and the Buffy/Faith. (I was Sophia Jirafe back then, didn’t write much myself other than some — sigh — Spuffy. Also Willow/Giles.)
Ummm, for the Immortals series by Tamora Pierce. It was a hilarious self-insert (maybe time travel is involved?). I’m sure my FF.net profile is still there, unless they did a clean-up.
(I named myself after a dragon in a Vivian Vande Velde novel. HINT HINT. I think I also pretended to be male. I did this for a while; it worked gangbusters on the ladies. I have some regrets.)
I also got into some crazy flame wars with what were obviously children (like, 12).
EDIT: OMG I have poetry? About DS9, Greek mythology, Legolas, and Macbeth. Admittedly, some is comedic poetry. But still. ALSO GLADIATOR?
FURTHER EDIT: “Comely face” “smooth as alabaster and hard as granite” “eyes, dark like glowing coals”
How are glowing coals dark?!
OMGGGGGGGGG KILL ME NOWW
I hardcore lusted after the dragon in that VVV novel unf.
Ohhh, unless you count the newsmagazine I put together at the age of 8 set in the world of my favorite movie, which was The Dark Crystal. I don’t, though. Because it was totally not fiction. I prefer to think of it as Speculative Journalism.
outstanding
You are obviously the best and you should feel good about this comment.
“Speculative Journalism”. Love it.
First ever fanfic was when I was 12 and read Gone with the Wind and was SO SADDDDD so I wrote a different ending. And then I searched the internet for other alternative endings and discovered fanfic. The next 4-5 years of my life was just a really long Harry Potter fanfic blackout.
It was Redwall fan fiction, and it explored the moral shades of grey in the Vermin vs Woodlander conflict.
Later, in high school, I received actual class credit and an A for writing Jane Eyre fan fiction in which she writes letters with Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Bennet, Sigmund Freud, and a bunch of other historical and literary figures.
One of my final assignments in … 9th grade? 10th grade? I can’t remember when. May have actually been 8th… was to write a new chapter to The Hobbit that fit seamlessly into the book. I invented an enchanted feast that made all the dwarves fall asleep and Bilbo had to be clever and get them all disenchanted so they could wake up again.
Aw man, that’s like the best school assignment ever. English assignments that let you be a geek were the best.
My librarian/teacher dad taught junior high literature for a few years while I was in college, and one of the books they read was The Giver. We were talking about the ending (before the sequels came out), and I found out that he thought Jonas died at the end. I was appalled, as obviously Jonas lived happily ever after. I convinced my dad to have his students do an assignment where they wrote an epilogue which detailed whether Jonas survived or not. His classes were usually split about 50/50. I thought it was so interesting!
My A-level ‘creative writing’ coursework essay was a new ending to Jane Eyre, because I hated it so much I oculdn’t bring myself to do a real essay about it that might require pretending to have read it. I killed them all.
Man, Redwall fanfic! That was a very weird group – I got very into RP with them and then abruptly fell out of it. I think the group wrote my character out? Probably I died in some stupid way, not even a glorious battle worthy of my brilliant girl hare character :(((
I actually wrote Wuthering Heights fanfic for a writing assignment in a college literature class! The assignment was to take a crucial scene and rewrite it from either Heathcliff or Cathy’s perspective. I wrote as Heathcliff in the scene where Cathy tells him to leave Isabella alone and then Edgar punches Heathcliff in the face and runs away. Fun as hell and a surprisingly helpful and thought-provoking exercise, especially for thinking about how the choice of narrators impacts the way we understand the events of the novel.
A TK/Kari digimon fic cause I was PRETTY UPSET they didn’t end up married in the finale. It was predictably awful. I try not to think about it.
Sci-fi Duran Duran self-insert in 1984, baby!
o lord i might still have it
DURAN DURAN SELF-INSERT* FAN FIC HIGH FIVE
REAMS AND REAMS* OF IT
*yswidt
My people! I have all my old high school journals, in which I wrote at least 6 or 7 fanfics about me and Simon Le Bon, usually in the glamorous life style of Judith Krantz or Danielle Steel (but without all the sex details, as I knew nothing and it made me embarrassed).
They were excruciating and interminable, and I still treasure them today.
oh gawd oh gawd I wrote the (moderately euphemistic) sex scenes too. I also knew nothing. I cannot imagine how hilarious and embarrassing those would be to read today.
THIS SOUNDS LIKE EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER WANTED.
I am SO GLAD you’re here and now I’m going to come sit by you. I got to hang out with Roger and we were just quiet together while my very high-maintenance best friends got Simon and John.
Oh dearie me. My ff.n account is still out there, chronicling my attempts to fit in with my friends through total weeaboo-ness (I was writing about their anime, not the books I liked). I am commenting under that handle (I think? It had a tiger icon) in its memory.
Pretty much ALL of my fanfic was Final Fantasy (7-10) humour fic. It’s weird. And still exists out there somewhere.
Oh man, it was either this ridiculous self-insert Harry Potter fic in which I was an exchange student at Hogwarts and Dumbledore and Voldemort were both in love with Prof McGonagall who was having none of it or it was Willow/Spike smut.
I would absolutely read the McGonagall Is Having None of It series.
I was allllll about Willow/Spike smut back in the day. Pretty sad that a ton of archives have gone down now.
Listen I am not a Harry Potter person, but “Dumbledore and Voldemort were both in love with Prof McGonagall who was having none of it,” made me clap my hands with actual glee.
1st grade I wrote about a dinosaur that had a flute as a nose. it had 40 pages or something. I still don’t remember what it was about. His name was fluteosaurus. I have never played the flute.
I am picturing an orchestra populated by sneezing dinosaurs, and it is awesome.
I could not love a human baby more than this story
I think I peaked at 2nd grade tbh.
I am literally silent-laughing so hard I’m crying at this. FLUTEOSAURUS. Amazing.
But what is this amazing story fanfiction of?!
Oh I should have mentioned – the class was really into dinosaurs and the TV show was huge at the time.
Oh, that show was awesome!
“NOT THE MAMA!” *thunk*
Misandrist hero baby!
Not fanfic, but relevant to this audience: When I was 14, I began (but did not complete) a story about a planet of Amazon-esque women who lived in a different world, and kept men in cages for sex. They were very powerful, and all had names I invented that started with different letters of the alphabet. (So the most powerful one had an A-name, etc.) I didn’t finish it because I couldn’t figure out what the conflict was.
There is no conflict in Utopia
I request a copy of this story pls
It was an X-Men Wolverine/Gambit affair featuring ‘aliens made them do it’ in which Logan cries at least half a dozen times and they get married at the end. Sex as written by a never been kissed fourteen year old…priceless.
“Logan cries at least half a dozen times”
This sounds amazing.
He was in a very emotionally vulnerable place on a space ship. I would pay cash money to see Hugh Jackman weep tenderly in the next X-Men film actually.
I actually became internet semi-famous for a while there with my Buffy fanfiction writing. I started at the age of like 14 (BtVS started in 1997, so… 13, ACTUALLY) on Acmecity just hammering out like, thousands and thousands of words at a time of Buffy fanfiction. It was all terrible. My characterization was TERRIBLE and it almost always fell into one of these three categories:
-Songfic (to the WORST STUFF. I very distinctly remember setting one to Lifehouse) in which the lyrics were just randomly pasted into a story without any real thought put into why that song or does it even match the story? Just songs.
-Depressing-ass character death fics in which the plot always started out completely normal and then took horrific, illogical sharp turns to the left in which someone randomly died so everyone else could cry about it (I killed Xander a lot. Once, he fell and hit his head on a rock.)
-AUS IN WHICH SPIKE OR ANGEL (OR BOTH) BECAME HUMAN so that Buffy could marry them and/or have babies and/or mourn one of their death in a mortal we-have-to-have-a-funeral way. Because wtf, self.
The part where I became randomly semi internet-famous for it was that I built a website called “Dancing with the Devil” at which I archived not only my terrible Spuffy fic (that I had literal hundreds of) but also that of all my friends. It got linked on Yahoo’s listing of fan sites for the show, somehow. It is gone now, thankfully.
I went on to write in HP and Pirates of the Caribbean fandoms (AW YEAH NORRIBETH) and get way, way better at it. Now I write original stuff, mostly, but fandom’s where I got my creativity out, and where I developed a lot of my skill. I will always love it.
“Once, he fell and hit his head on a rock.”
a MILLION likes. I sorta think the show would have been vastly improved, had this happened.
DEFINITELY feel you on the “fandom’s where I got my creativity out and developed skill.” I still have a lot of admiration for teen-self and how prolific she was. THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of words. literal, actual novels, with conflict and a beginning, middle, and end. I mean, the quality of the writing was horrible, but holy crap, I have never been as dedicated to writing, and writing consistently, and just plowing through and committing to stories, as I was when I was in middle school and high school. I’d definitely like to try to get some of that back, somehow.
tl/dr: FANDOM FOREVER!
AMEN. To all of that. To Xander hitting his head on a rock, to admiring past-selves who were super dedicated to these stories and the process. I never stopped writing back then. I would love to get some of that back.
Sailor Moon. Everyone died in really terrible ways while Sailor Mercury fell into a depression while failing to save them? I was in 7th grade, which is part of the excuse, but I also had an EXTREMELY happy childhood (not sarcasm) so???? Thinking about it makes me cringe-laugh.
I was also a happy child who wrote deathfic. I think I just wanted some drama, and that was the easiest way to create it! But yeah, Harry Potter’s gang never made it through my stories in one piece.
That is a good point! I had no real basis for what constituted actual drama outside of the obvious (violent, heartwrenching death, I guess).
(I don’t know if drawing comics on notebooks about cartoons I’ve watched is considered as fanfic…whatevs, I was 9!)
But, Harry Potter! And…a few others. Fandom is a rabbit hole: one moment I was just checking out reviews for XMen First Class, the next hour there were 150 fics saved from ao3. I just.
THE CHERIK FEELSSSSS
😉
I’m sort of glad I discovered fanfic when I was 17 and then lurked for a year and a half. I’m 20 now, and turn to it when I need chocolate or a warm blanket, and there’s nothing to hand but coursework. /rambling
(Recs? 🙂 )
It is PERFECT when you need chocolate or a warm blanket! I usually reach out for fic when I’m sad/bored/can’t seem to do anything else, forget about it for months, repeat. I wish I bookmarked things as I read them but I’m a failure that way. This list is pretty good though, and loooooong: http://bea-recs.dreamwidth.org/32881.html
Wow, that’s a giant list! Thank you! *bookmarks under Resist Until End of Term*
I do love books, and stroke them and hug them, but sometimes only a fave fic could cheer me up and send me smiling throughout a grim academic day.
I emailed this to Mallory but it’s too terrible not to share here too:
I was VERY active in the online Buffy fan community in the late 90s and actually managed to find some of my fanfiction from that era a couple of weeks ago (it is grimdark but not as bad as it could have been I guess), BUT my first fanfiction was a spiral bound notebook consisting of one very long piece of Sailor Moon fanfiction that I handwrote in different colored glitter pens and gave to my younger cousin as a terrible, terrible birthday present when I was 10.
God, Buffy brings out the grimdark like nothing else. Mine was terrible super-angsty Buffy/Angel fic where people would, like, vomit from how INTENSE their FEELINGS were. Good times.
Before I knew what fan fiction was, I wrote a Harry Potter self-insert fic when I was eight in a Harry Potter journal in which I was Hermione’s younger sister and Harry fell in love with me.
And then, freshman year of high school I was in a major Rose/Scorpius phase. Aaaaand one of my friends in college tracked the first one down and of course shared it with everyone we knew. Luckily I pretty much exclusively wrote fluff.
Harry/Draco fic I wrote with a friend…something where Harry is like, horribly injured in the muggle world and Draco has to visit him in a muggle hospital and he has all these FEELINGS and Harry is in SUCH PAIN and Draco CRIES and then they KISS and ARE IN LOVE FOREVER. I was 12 and she was 13.
ETA: Although I suppose TECHNICALLY the first fantic I ever wrote was a story I wrote when I was 8 where an original character bearing a striking resemblance to 8-year-old-me traveled back in time and was adopted by John Adams and was so witty and charming she was allowed to attend all the meetings of the Continental congress and ultimately helped win the Revolutionary war because she remembered how to build a machine gun from plans she saw IN THE FUTURE.
That is amazing.
OH MY GOD THAT SOUNDS AMAZING
YES to this John Adams fanfic. I’d read it now, especially if 8 year old you was like Anne Shirley building machine guns.
Okay but “Draco in the muggle world” actually rather intrigues me.
okay but like i think i read that harry/draco fic when i was twelve or thirteen
By any chance are you now one of the writers of Sleepy Hollow?
This is so embarrassing I don’t even want to talk about it, but: I had a home copy of The Oregon Trail, whichever edition it was that let you keep a “trail diary” of stuff that happened. I assembled a wagon train of a family and whoever, gave them all names and backstories, and then wrote a god-damned NOVEL in that trail diary. I incorporated the usual “you have a broken leg!” type stuff into this long sprawling epic about this family, and I worked on it day by day every single day, and I CRIED REAL TEARS when the wagon flipped over and everyone died. So I started again with a different family, and eventually they all made it to Oregon (complete with romances and deaths and whatever) and I printed out the trail diary and drew a cover for it and stapled it together into a book. I think my mom still has it. THE END.
WHY ARE YOU EMBARRASSED THIS IS AMAZING
Came here to say this. AMAZEBALLS.
(Heh. My iPhone has learned that AMAZEBALLS is a word which only exists in all caps, like MISANDRY.)
That’s fantastic !!
My Skyrim character has a three-page long backstory in which it is revealed that she is the direct descendant of my Oblivion character and Martin Septim, and also has several pages about how after the events of Skyrim she took the fight to the heart of the Altmeri Dominion in the form of a strike team made up of all her Housecarls and followers, and WITH THAT IN MIND I respect your commitment to Oregon Trail; let’s be friends.
Childhood me would have loved to have been friends with childhood you, based on this anecdote alone.
I ALSO DID THIS OH MY GOD I HAD TOTALLY FORGOTTEN ABOUT THAT. I never printed it out and I regret it SO MUCH. About x100000 props to you for making a cover for it, that is some serious dedication.
(I also gave them really bizarre names like “Lavender” and “Alistair” oh godddd)
YOU DID TOO??? OMG I WAS NOT ALONE
Oh my god I did this too. I did this EVERY TIME I PLAYED. EVERY TIME.
plz publish
My friends in elementary school would play Oregon Trail on the playground and we had a “Trail notebook” full of character backstories and maps. So more RPG than FanFic but I think tiny me and tiny you would have gotten along.
Oh god I did the “story in a trail diary” too. Just once. It was so fucking over dramatic and awful. But when the game thwarted me by killing my main character I lost it. Even a computer game knew I shouldn’t be writing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHps2SecuDk
That is the greatest thing I’ve heard, maybe all week. PLEASE find out if your mom still has it and report back.
My best friend and I did this too, except all the characters were from the X-files. I assume this was the only Oregon Trail/X-files crossover? Which also means it was the best. Spoiler: Krycek dies.
Did you get to work dysentery into your storyline anywhere? Also, I think you are now duty-bound to get this treasure from your mom and share it with The World/The Toast.
My mom is on vacation right now but I am seriously waiting for her to come back so I can request her to send me this precious work of literature!
I have written over 400 pages of Pokemon fanfiction since the year 2001.
STAR TREK VOYAGER.
I MADE MY MOM READ IT.
she didn’t know from star trek and thought I invented everything.
I never told her The Truth.
Oh man, when I was 11 my best friend and I spent all of recess, every day, on what was essentially Voyager fanfic. We mostly didn’t write it down, but yeah.
Later we DID write stuff down (for Star Trek and also Earth: Final Conflict) and it was all terrible and I sincerely hope it no longer exists anywhere, but I’m a hoarder, so it is probably stashed somewhere in my childhood bedroom. And also archived on the web.
Does it count if I very quietly wrote a love story about me and Tom DeLonge from Blink-182 in a long lost diary?
First was Baby-Sitters Club, in 6th or 7th grade? I started my own “Super Special” and was very proud that I’d mastered all the different handwriting styles.
I could do all the handwriting too! I probably still could, to be honest.
God, I think I — it wasn’t technically fanfic but I definitely tried to bully a group of girls at my church into forming a Babysitter’s Club, recruiting them specifically based on how well they fit the BSC archetypes. So sort of LARPing?
oh my god I would have been all over it if someone had asked me to be Claudia
which reminds me, this is one of my favorite webcomics ever drawn.
Thanks for sharing that, it was awesome!
Even Jessi’s? Wow.
Yessss as children my sister and I wrote a Karen Brewer hatefic (if that’s a thing) and just had a series of terrible things happen to her. Stupid Karen. So annoying with her pink and blue glasses and her little brother.
I am also with a friend who apparent wrote a Kim Possible spin-off featuring Shego and her elementary school music teacher.
It was absolutely Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic. The first I wrote was giving Xander super powers, and it was Buffy/Xander. It was inspired because there was (and is) so much absolutely terrible Xander fic out there that I was proclaiming to an Internet friend that I could write better fic than that crap. So he challenged me to, and then I took a crack at it. I definitely did not succeed with my first fic (but I did manage not to turn any of the girls into whores or dead people! Or make Buffy into a terrible caricature of herself in which she is basically an unredeemable monster for, I guess, having once been a teenage girl. So I feel like it was an acceptable first step.
I eventually broke out into other fandoms like Smallville and Stargate, a teensy bit of Firefly, and massive, massive crossovers between Buffy and many many things, including but not limited to Boy Meets World, Gilmore Girls, and Gossip Girl.
So.
That’s that.
I guess I should also say my ff.net account is still out there. If you were so inclined, it would probably be easy to find.
I went back to my old ff.net account to see which of the Naruto Mary Sue fics I published was first but I must have deleted all of them and now I am sad because they are lost forever (though that is probably a good thing). FF.net says I published a short ficlet about Andromeda Tonks’ life that I clearly remember reading out in class once SO that….was a thing! Excuse me while I go die of embarrassment now.
At age 13 I undertook a multi-chapter Harry Potter fic which involved Hermione dating Terry Boot. To show his love for her, Terry gave her a Walkman containing Alanis Morissette’s seminal album Jagged Little Pill. Later on I also used the phrase “sweaty pretzel of limbs” in a love scene.
One day in the computer lab at my tiny all-girls Catholic school, I was reading my glowing reviews on ff.net when I heard a voice exclaiming “You write fanfic too?” And that, kids, is how I met your mother my first girlfriend. We dated for 8 months, which I think is impressive for a pair of 14-year-olds. We broke up because she cheated on me with a Vile Male.
“Sweaty pretzel of limbs” I am LOSING MY SHIT that is AMAZING
I was months from my first kiss or even anyone trying to hold my hand, but that didn’t prevent me from thinking I had an excellent understanding of how sex works. Especially gay sex, obviously. (IIRC the sweaty pretzel was Ron and Seamus.)
This is THE BEST story ever.
Rent. It was definitely Rent. And it was NSFW.
Not fan fiction per se, but I was heavily involved in Fantasy Pastiche. I wrote the whole army book for an incredibly overpowered race of Super Elves for Warhammer, including back story, full army book, full army list, and illustrations.
I created a complete fantasy world that was an awkward cross between Earthsea and Middle Earth, minus coherent moral or social commentary framework. Again, maps, lore, initial plan for multi volume book saga. There was maybe half a good idea in the whole thing.
Oh, and then there’s my alternative Harry Potter epilogue. But that’s not fanfic, that is BETTER.
(This thread is giving me life this Friday.)
It still makes me cringe to think about this, but totally true: I reworked the entire libretto of “Into the Woods” to feature characters from Final Fantasy X. I feel like I should send several people handwritten apologies.
THIS SOUNDS AMAZING.
Okay, I love this and I have to ask – was it that each character played a character FROM Into the Woods or that the lyrics were reworked to REFERENCE FFX. Basically I’ve never seen Sondheim and Blitzball combined and I want to explore it further.
HAHA ok, it was basically Into the Woods but recast with FFX and set in Spira. As a for-instance, “I Guess This Is Goodbye” was delivered from Wakka to a chocobo.
At the time, I got a critical comment to the effect that I was just plugging in character names and changing things so they rhymed and I was Very Offended because I put A Lot Of Thought into who was what and how the interactions work. Plus, it’s Sondheim, so the rhymes were sometimes hard! Internal rhymes! Slant rhymes!
(Needless to say, the commenter gets one of the handwritten apologies.)
NSYNC. I think I had one where Justin and JC fought over a girl (who may or may not have been a stand-in for me). I think I stopped writing after trying to write a sex scene which 11-year-old me knew nothing about.
If I share my first fanfiction, it’ll be WAY TOO SPECIFIC of a crossover fic and easily found. Let’s just say it involved Boy Meets World characters, time travel, and a pretty big film franchise. And I was 12 and it was HORRIFIC.
I also wrote song parodies based on said film franchise at that time. Sometimes they still get stuck in my head (they were truly terrible).
It was a “Labyrinth” fic where Sarah had a Dodge Ram that always “snarled to life” and drove through cornfields. Then she drove it through ALL OF THE WALLS of the labyrinth because of course she did.
I want to read this.
I enjoy this proactive, take-charge version of Sarah
My BF has a Dodge Ram and I have to say, they do a fair amount of snarling.
The first fanfic I wrote, in about the fifth grade: a very short story (I remember printing it — it was about a page and a half, with CLIP ART OF A WIZARD because it was 1997 and MICROSOFT WORD had just come to my household and I was very excited) about Elanor Gamgee, as a teenager, discovering that she and many other hobbits about her age have some slightly weird magical talents, presumably traceable to the mystical elven dirt that Sam sprinkled all over the Shire around the time they were born. In retrospect this is actually kind of an awesome idea, and I kind of want to see if I can’t recreate and expand on it.
The first fanfic I shared with the general public, sometime in high school: a REALLY, REALLY DREADFUL AND MELODRAMATIC Marauders-era Snape/OFC fic. It is still up, albeit unfinished, on ff.net.
x10000000 points to Gryffindor for wizard clip-art, that is really just the best.
Five thousand words. Sycorax/Prospero OTP. Sonnet-filled like whoa. Atempting, possibly in vain, to get it published.
I REGRET NOTHING.
You’re my hero?!
oh…oh my sweet unholy lord
Buffy/Spike. It was songfic and I flamed the first grownup who commented to give me gentle concrit. 2001 was a fun time.
My first fic was about Faramir Took (Pippin and Daisy’s son from the Lord of the Rings family trees in the Appendixes) called Faramir’s Fabulous Foot Toupées, where the stress from the Scouring of the Shire had caused some older hobbits to start to bald on their feet. And since hobbit foot hair is a source of pride and all, it was very embarrassing for them. Luckily Faramir Took was there to save the day with his invention and to fall in love with Sam and Rosie’s daughter Goldilocks. It was my proudest moment.
I… want to read this.
this is excellent but I am compelled to point out that Pippin’s wife was called Diamond
/sees self out
YES IT IS ugh my fingers did that dumb thing where I typed the thing that I was saying IRL instead of the words that I wanted it to. (I… may have been listing the names of Sam’s children in birth order just to see if I could still do it.) I’m glad to not be alone in hobbit family tree study, though!!
Tolkien family tree study is compelling. As a teenager I once wrote out long family trees for Aragorn and Arwen, working out what fraction of their ancestry was Vanyar/Noldor/Teleri/Man. I think I still have it somewhere.
Holy shit, that is OUTSTANDING. Also: someone else who wrote next-generation LOTR fanfic!
This sounds super good and also very true to Tolkien’s hobbit feelings.
I am not even kidding I would read the shit out of that.
That. Sounds. Amazing.
i would absolutely read this. like, now. this is brilliant.
The first thing I ever called fanfiction was Hanson. Remember their Christmas album “Snowed In”? Well, I took that as inspiration and my bestie and I wrote a long piece of fanfiction about being snowed in with the Hanson brothers at a fancy-ass cabin at a completely made up ski resort. There were dozens–literally dozens–of others, including one where they were vampires and I think one in space.
My first ACTUAL fanfiction piece, though, was a sequel to Cutthroat Island in which Geena Davis’ character had a daughter who HAPPENED to be my age and also conveniently fall in love with the cabin boy, on whom I had a gigantic crush.
After Hanson I found my way into the Newsies fandom, and my life was never the same again.
Remember their Christmas album “Snowed In”?
DO I EVER. *still has their medley on Christmas playlists*
I am in such love with all of you.
I think it was Lunar backstory self-insert??? I was a child full of shame and self-loathing so I basically stopped immediately after starting and never wrote anything ever again until 2014
erotic songfic about two international soccer players set to “afternoon delight.”
i found it a couple years ago and reread it, and it actually made me laugh out loud (in a good way) because of course my sense of humor is e-x-a-c-t-l-y the same as it was 10 years ago!
OK, I really want to know which international soccer players were involved
It was Milan Baros (formerly of Liverpool/Aston Villa) and Tomas Rosicky (Dortmund/Arsenal), who were both on the Czech Republic national team at the time—I think it was written to tie in with either a Euro or World Cup???
beautiful. :’)
This sounds so amazing and I have no interest in soccer
Somewhere I have a notebook with the drawings and stories of a self-insertion OC in the world of the cartoon Doug (her name was Kate Diamond. She was Skeeter’s off and on girlfriend).
The one that I really put effort into was my BSC OC: Leah Hudson (she was the historian–yes I made up a position for her). She was mostly Stacey & Claudia’s friend and thought she was too cool for the others. She was the on and off girlfriend of Cary Reitlin. Her stories were supes detailed–like pick a book and I could tell you what storyline I made up for her to be inserted into that book.
I think I love you.
Everything about this is wonderful. Doug fanfic? YES. BSC fanfic? Completely.
pretty sure the first dream i ever had that could be considered a dirty dream is the one where i was a cartoon and doug kissed me on the cheek.
what i’m trying to say is that i approve, clearly.
Legend of Zelda OOT fanfiction on a fan site message board.
I was like 12 or 13. I had never played the game before and had no plans for a plot– I just started writing random stuff because it meant I could talk to Strangers on the Internet and that was very novel at the time.
My friend was obsessed with the game and asked me to join the board with her so we could talk to “cute boys” (some creepy 16-year-old with frosted tips I swear to god child-self why would you do that)
(why)
Edit: Also terrible Harry Potter fic where Harry punches Draco in the nose and there is *tension*. I was 15. There were *meaningful looks* and *sweating* probably, gah.
“Legend of Zelda OOT fanfiction on a fan site message board.”
I did this, too! I wrote Wind Waker, though.
harry potter self-insert. DUH.
Riker and Troi were married (obv) and they had a daughter named Cosette (fandoms collide!). She had early-seasons Troi hair with the black ringlets. There was a lady captain and I think also a Native American officer. I was really mad/proud when Voyager came out with a lady captain and a Native officer, but by that point didn’t really watch the show much anymore.
Oof. Hard to say what my most embarrassing fanfic contribution would be. Probably the Harry Potter fanfic that I planned dozens of chapters for, but only wrote a couple of, featuring a blonde American Mary Sue with purple eyes and some sort of speshul power I can’t remember. However, this post has unfortunately made me remember SEVERAL Sakura/Syaoran Cardcaptor Sakura songfics set to Michelle Branch lyrics. MICHELLE BRANCH. I’m sorry, internet.
I filled an entire spiral notebook with a self-insert retelling of The Lord of the Rings. I was a half-elven addition to the Fellowship. Legolas and I had one of those relationships where were absolutely loathed each other, because he was a spoiled Elvish princeling, and I was plucky, obstinate, clumsy-yet-super-good-at-fighting-and-magic elf-peasant, right up until I saved his life and we fell in love.
My elf name is Morharmaiel Anoran Merkalote, if anyone wanted to know.
Approximately a year later I was SO MORTIFIED that I had written this (it was never posted on the internet THANK JEEBUS) that I wrote another fan fiction featuring myself & my ff.net bestie, Laura (who used to write self-inserts, too, but funny ones without all the will-they-won’t-they-tragic-romance), in which we get zapped into Middle Earth, find ourselves turning into Mary Sues, and go on a quest to destroy whatever evil force keeps turning unsuspecting teenage girls into Mary Sues every time they get zapped into Middle Earth.
Also, approximately 200k of Mary Sue-y Pirate of the Caribbean fiction. I’ll give you one guess which actor’s fault all of this is. (Hint: His name rhymes with schmorlando broom.)
That sounds like a REALLY CHARMING self-insert fic, though! (And your follow-up self-insert satire sounds hilarious.)
Dragonriders of Pern, self-insert impressing a green dragon. I was pre-teen and did not realize there were internet worlds where one could share such things, so the only person who saw it was my brother, who teased me because the dragon’s name (unintentionally) sounded like somebody else we knew.
Other than that, I was quite boggled by the whole fanfiction community thing when I started meeting grown-ass women who were into it–until one of them pointed to my historical fiction short story about Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams (which I had brought to a writing workshop) and said That IS fan fiction. Ohhhhh!
ACTUALLY I just remembered I “made” an illustrated book about Danny Zuko and Sandy as aliens falling in love in space when I was 8 (my sister had just shown me Grease for the first time and I was immediately obsessed). All drawinges done in green + purple colored pencils, with some accompanying text. Does this count as my first AU?
I would read the hell out of that. “Tell me about it, space stud.” A skintight black spacesuit. Rizzo’s has Black Flag patches sewn to it. Frenchie’s wild hair floating in zero-G.
I’ll be in my bunk.
I didn’t discover fanfic existed until I was well into my 20s and have never written any, although I do read an awful lot of it. When I was the right age for writing embarrassing fanfic though, my friends and I had an intricate fanfic-like set of alter egos that we wrote stories about. We were all supervillains.
I will re-post what I post in every fanfic thread:
If anybody knows of a Wolf Hall AU fic in which Anne Cromwell survives the sweating sickness and has a romance with Rafe Sadler, please clue me in. I do not have the time or talent to write it, but I would be so so happy to read it.
ask for it at Yuletide – someone will write it for you!
OH GOD I JUST CRIED A THOUSAND TEARS THINKING ABOUT THIS! ANNE AND RAFE!
WOULD READ
“She wanted to learn Greek, he thinks. Perhaps she knows it now.” AUUUGGGGGHHH
I’m not sure if it was a speculative one shot of how a sixth season of Newsradio would be set up, or a future Daria fix where she’s interviewed about her career and family.
I always had a hard time writing. Fiction or essays, I want the write but have a hard time getting down and doing it. I had the idea for a X-Files/Alien cross over where a case Milder and Scully investigate inadvertently sets up Weyland Yutanti. Couldn’t get myself to hammer it out.
SO DID NOBODY ELSE WATCH BIG WOLF ON CAMPUS THEN
My husband downloaded the entire series on a whim last week.
ME I DID AND I THOUGHT I HAD DREAMED IT.
Am I wrong or did the original redhead from Twilight play his girlfriend? Is THAT the part I dreamed?
YOU ARE 10000% CORRECT.
… fun fact: she actually went to Quebec’s version of Teacher’s College, and ended up as a (temporary) substitute teacher in my high school!
CANADA: where everyone really does know everyone else.
Is her hair just as amazing in real life? BECAUSE IT IS AMAZING.
IT WAS AS GLORIOUS AND TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN.
I’ve watched it, yeah. I thought his pale best friend was hot. (He wasn’t.)
I watched it. Merton J. Dingle was an early TV crush.
One of my friends in middle school also had the biggest crush on Merton.
I had one self-recorded Big Wolf on Campus VHS tape and I’m pretty sure the first 30 seconds we’re warped from how often I rewound to repeat the theme song.
I almost got fired from my very first teenage job cleaning motel rooms because we didn’t have cable at our house, so I would turn on the TV and watch Big Wolf on Campus instead of doing my actual job……. <3 Merton was one of my first crushes, along with the guy who talked to Dolphins on Seaquest.
Big Wolf was everything. EVERYTHING.
I’m just now realizing it was Buffy-derivative (even though I watched the Muffy: The Werewolf Slayer episodes a few months ago).
My first, I guess, was an EXTREMELY Island of the Blue Dolphins inspired short story in third grade? Lot of stuff about abalone shells, even though as a Kansas girl I had no idea what they were.
After that? A looooong drought until the past year, where I’ve posted 73K of mostly Destiel fic on AO3. All of which I’m seriously proud of, so I’m linking shamelessly.
The link did not work, alas
not that I was looking for it
but I was looking.
Weird. Try this: http://archiveofourown.org/users/Amelia_Clark/wor…
Bless youuu! 😀
Island of the Blue Dolphins man. I read that book sooooooo many times. And then I tried to read the sequel and just could not get through it. Disappointing.
OT, but: did you see that they think they found her cave a couple of years ago? http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/29/local/la-…
I had just moved out of Santa Barbara, and I was so excited about that news!
I was a beta-reader for the fanfiction section of TheForce.Net (or TFN, as we cool kids called it). I wrote one story that everyone hated and never made it onto the site when I was 13 and sulked for a long time over that. Then, they had a competition to write a story set in the middle of Attack of the Clones, which they thought was conspicuously missing a proposal scene.
I took an old romantic story I wrote, retrofitted it with Star Wars accouterments, and voila, story. It won and was published along with several other stories.
And holy shit, it’s still there on the site. Yes, I was once known as Bant428. http://fanfic.theforce.net/fanfic.asp?action=view…
Haha this is amazing! This line is perfect: ‘They lay side by side, letting silence and love do the talking, until the dawn came: the Dawn of their new lives’.
My solution to my hating the AotC romance was to spray it with sap. ALL the sap.
SO GOOD. I was waiting for someone else to say Star Wars! I lurked on The Force.net throughout high school. I wrote a lot of Luke/Mara stuff but never had the courage to post it there.
My very first fanfic, technically, would have been one of the really weird stories I wrote about Aladdin, starting when I was like…six or seven. And by “really weird” I mean stuff like “Aladdin has an orca whale BFF because orcas were my favorite animal at the time”. And then when I was 12ish I started creating all this complicated stuff about Luke Skywalker’s completely made-up kids, although as it became increasingly obvious that this had almost nothing to do with canon, I attempted to file off the serial numbers and it really did not work.
My first fanfic after actually hearing the term and reading other fanfic was a thing from Elrond’s POV in the Return of the King film, angsting about Arwen. I still write fic, ten years later, and I’m not remotely ashamed to admit it (although I am ashamed to admit I’m terrible at finishing things). Mostly Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff about Loki, at the moment. It’s all at http://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions just in case anyone’s interested.
I love so much that you wrote really weird tiny child Aladdin fanfic! Especially the orca whale BFF OMG ADORBS
It like…was beached marginally nearby and somehow he managed to get it back into the water, and after that they were best buddies and it would give him rides all the time, and because I was at least vaguely aware that Agrabah was, you know, IN A DESERT and probably landlocked, I came up with “the palace line,” which was basically a canal created to connect the ocean with a fountain (not even a pool, a FOUNTAIN) at the palace so the orca could actually come visit.
I also had one about these orphaned girls named April, May, and June, who got stuck in an avalanche and Aladdin rescued and adopted them, like, I DON’T EVEN KNOW
Preteen me wrote a Pokemon self-insertion fanfic where I basically got to hang around the Safari Zone, because that’s all I wanted out of life at the time.
A heavy-handed Drabble about G(a)linda and Elphaba from Wicked. It wasn’t even slash, bless my tween heart.
Edit: the musical, of course. Although I read the book when it was passed around in seventh grade, as Those Kinds of Books always are.
I WATCHED BIG WOLF ON CAMPUS AS A CHILD AND HAD ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT IT WAS CALLED UNTIL I GOOGLED IT AFTER READING THIS. THANK YOU FOR BRINGING IT BACK INTO MY LIFE.
(Also, When I was 11 I wrote a Yu-gi-oh GX crack fanfiction about Chazz getting sugar high where I kept name dropping “the divine secrets of the ya ya sisterhood” even though I’ve never watched it to this day. I knew it was a movie. Starring who and about what were questions I had no time for. Every once in awhile I still get favourite notifications for it from ff.net. I was so determined to get it out there that I saved for a month for a memory stick and went to the nearest internet café two towns over.)
Harry Potter was definitely my gateway fandom. So much overwrought Harry/Draco. My magnum opus was going to be about Draco in Azkaban but he was wrongly accused and somehow Ministry-employed auror Harry would find out and be conflicted about it but ultimately realize all his ideas were wrong and help free him. Obviously they would fall in love along the way, probably with, like, dramatic clutching through prison bars. This also included my gratuitous self-insert who was a sassy girl reporter. I wrote all of one chapter.
So much other HP fic though. And then equally overwrought Legolas/Aragorn for a while.
I would be lying if I tried to pretend that I was entirely out of this habit and didn’t relapse every year when goddamn Yuletide happens.
Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling, on the now-defunct brass ring of the internet weirdos: Typhoid and Swans. Multiple entries. Could see no reason they weren’t the perfect pair.
*NSYNC self-inserts, age 11. Now I’m 26 and write Phil Coulson/Clint “Hawkeye” Barton slash on AO3. I’ve grown a lot as a person.
There’s nothing wrong with *NSYNC fic, but you should’ve been slashing them! Seriously how did any of us ever try to pair them with females? We were so innocent!
Guys, can we start a group for people who wrote songfic? I just want to understand why we did it.
I NEED TO UNDERSTAND
I mean we can start a group but I don’t even know where to start understanding. I don’t even know what compelled me to do it. I never even tied the songs to the stories I was setting them to, half the time. It was like something compelled me to put “I heard this on the radio today so I’m throwing it in here, as if to help the reader imagine what it would be like to read my fic whilst also listening to top 40 hits.”
I DON’T UNDERSTAND. I used to write what I called ~vignettes~ that were me trying to get to the ~heart~ of the song, and feeling like I just understood it more than everyone else did (I also spent a lot of time on SongMeanings during this period.)
I did it partly because it was an easy way to get a prompt when I wanted to write something and partly because sometimes a song just describes a character so perfectly you don’t understand. But mostly it was the structure of it, which helped me actually finish things.
I know that I always used to get a flash of inspiration when I listened to a song (“Oh, this perfectly applies to the time Naomi and Ruth left to go pick grain”) and then carry on with various reinterpretations (“But what if they were there during the Exodus? Or met up with Judith and turned into righteous Jewish Amazons?”) that got weirder and weirder until they eventually made no sense whatsoever out of context. I never wrote it out as such, but it was very indicative of the writing process of thirteen-year-olds with a deficiency of plotting ability and an excess of Regina Spektor.
excess of Regina Spektor
Does not compute.
Well, for me it was because I didn’t have the actual skill required for making fanvids out of visual media that actually existed, let alone music videos for scenarios that didn’t exist in the original material…
There were a few years in my life where everything I knew about sex was based on X-Files fanfic.
I never actually *wrote* any fanfic until I was 30, but as a kid I had a really elaborate fantasy in my head inserting myself into Star Trek: TNG as Dr. Crusher’s daughter. I guess once I decided Wesley was too old for me, I’d settle for being his sister.
In high school I had surgery and had to take ambien to sleep for a week or so, and one night I was writing in my journal before I fell asleep and when I woke up I realized I had written several pages of Harry Potter fanfic. It involved firewhiskey. I destroyed it immediately bc I was so weirded out by the fact that my UNCONSCIOUS BRAIN had done it, but now I wish I had it back. 🙁
Also I wrote some Gilmore Girls fic in high school but the only fic I’ve ever “published” (I think??) was a Bones thing in *college*, you know, when I was sort of a grown adult.
Harry Potter (novel-length works of majestic Mary-Sueism)
Digimon
Les Miserables (Javert/Azelma platonic angst friendship)
a little bit of Lord of the Rings fic concerned with kissing hobbits
aaaaaand
some very serious angst-ridden N*Sync “normal girl meets celebrities” fanfics.
It was a dark time for us all.
Most recently I’ve written a series of short scenes from a non-existent crossover episode between Sherlock and Doctor Who. They’re REALLY GOOD okay. I’m proud of them.
I read pretty much every Javert fic in existence back in the day (not very many, since everyone was too busy slashing Les Amis), and that sounds VERY familiar.
I didn’t get into fandom until I was 22, so my first fic is embarrassing in a whole other way. It’s ostensibly about the Marauders on a picnic, but it’s also about Remus reading Sartre and realizing he’s totally gay. Because Sartre. And gayness. I don’t even know. Thanks to LJ for making it possible for me to check that!
You are all perfect.
Age 7. The Power Rangers baby-sat me, then decided I was the coolest person they had ever met so we went as a team of best friends to visit Zordon via balloons. Not riding in hot-air balloons. Just holding onto bunches of normal balloons.
6th grade. Did anybody read the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane (So You Want To Be A Wizard, etc)? Those are great books! Anyway, I did one from the point of view of Fortinbras the dog, and only he knows that the squirrels in the yard are agents of darkness. I think that’s the only one I ever actually posted.
8th grade – House/Wilson slashfic. I’m not proud.
As far as reading, I feel you must know:
1) I had a friend who wrote Linkin Park self-insert fic. Not songfic, just fic featuring the members of Linkin Park.
2) I will never forget, for as long as I live, a Chicago (the movie musical)/LOTR crossover I read once in which Legolas sang the following: “Oh, I’m no one’s elf / But oh, I love myself / and all that jazz”. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever read. I don’t remember the quadratic equation. I don’t remember the names of everyone I’ve loved in my life. But I will remember that lyric on my deathbed.
“Oh, I’m no one’s elf / But oh, I love myself / and all that jazz”
THIS IS BEAUTIFUL
I am posting as a guest just to tell you, anonymously, that I had my first ever orgasm while reading House/Wilson slash. Haters gonna hate!
OMG Young Wizards was my first fandom! Starting from when I was around 11 I was super active on the official forums. I recently went back to the site to see if my posts were still there and they all are. I would also venture to say that I can still recite all of the Wizard’s Oath…….
no regrets
when i was first learning how to write, i apparently (we moved, and my parents white-painted over the evidence) doodled on my bedroom wall (in pencil, thankfully) about how i was the little sister of a various power rangers. they had a strong grip on my mini-psyche.
Oh mannn – my first (and only) was one for the Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce when I was about 11, which if I recall correctly featured a new page/apprentice to Alanna (who was totally not all me, nosirree, different name and everything). I mostly remember it leading to the following interaction with my mother:
Mum: *looks over my shoulder at computer screen* “Ooh are you writing a romance novel?”
Me: “Moooom, it’s a lady knight”
Mum: *clasps hands together, gleefully* “A lezzie romance novel, then?!”
Me: *suddenly realizes that’s exactly what I was doing, turns bright red, runs away*
YES Alanna! My feminism is still mostly Tortall-based.
I love your mom.
Complete lack of boundaries aside, she is pretty great. (I may have subsequently developed eyestrain from setting my text really really small to combat over the shoulder snooping).
Your mom! That is the best imaginable way a parent could have reacted.
WHERE ARE MY OTHER NEWSIES FANFIC WRITERS AT?? I know you’re out there.
For the record, I wrote Newsies fanfic from age 14 to 19 and posted on forums and those were like the best years of my life and probably some of the best writing I have ever done. And my pitch to The Toast of a personal essay about Newsies fandom and slash is inevitable.
Oh my god. I wrote soooo much. And spent so much time in chatrooms and making characters for the various houses.
Edit: Houses? Was that what they were called? (This is like 15 years ago, excuse my addled old brain.)
Oh man, now I’m blanking too.
NO WAIT, THE LODGING HOUSES. Yes, I remember those!
YES LODGING HOUSES THANK YOU. I remember there were like, the ‘main’ cool ones (at least in my mind) that never had vacancies, and people would start their own, and there’d be profiles for everyone who was in the house, and pre-scheduled group chat dates for live RPing…it was a really fun few years before I ‘grew up’ and out of the fandom. (I may be overstating the popularity of this – in retrospect, there was a huge part of the fandom that existed outside of this.)
Hope to get to read your Newsies article!!
Oh my god Newsies. Sometimes I forget that it was a real movie, and then I see photos of middle-school me trying to pull off a newsie hat and it all comes back.
In 4th grade I wrote a horrible self-insert fic about a girl newsie who was Kid Blink’s sister and fell in love with Mush and they fought over him and oh jeez just typing it is embarrassing me.
And there was background Racetrack/Spot because of course there was.
Oh man! I remember reading like eighty of those back in the day, and also trying my hand at some self-insertion girl newsie nonsense. You were definitely not alone, friend.
PLEASE WRITE THAT ESSAY. Write it for all of us who wander around wondering if the unrest in our soul is due to the siren call of Santa Fe, or if it’s just because our empty, emotionless sex with Spot Conlon is no longer fulfilling and we haven’t yet met a tender-hearted boy with a Jew fro to be our own.*
*I have never actually written Newsies fic.
Oh boy, it’s coming. Although over time my interest in those boys inevitably skewed towards a much stronger interest in seeing those boys make out.
Over the first half hour of my first viewing my interst skewed towards wanting to see those boys make out. (Though my first viewing was at 22, so… obviously.)
HI HI HI JUST SCROLLED THROUGH ALL THE COMMENTS SCANNING FOR NEWSIES!
Phew. Not only did I write (but never finish) Newsies fanfic, my 9th grade BFF and I wrote tons of…friendfic? About our future lives with our respective celebrity boyfriends. The love between Christian Bale and me was DEEP and TRUE.
Christian Bale in Newsies is, like, maximum hotness and I will have no arguments.
THANK GOD I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS THREAD.
Yup. A few years ago I tried to track down an archive of Buttons’ old site to find my old stories, but no luck.
Every now and then I still check in on Livejournal to see if any of my old fanfic buddies are still kickin’ and most of them are, in some form or another. You should try there!
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3175763/1/Naraku-s-Unw… https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3200770/1/Super-Hyper-…
An OOC Inuyasha fic where Naraku gets killed by butterflies and a HP/Inuyasha crossover where everyone dies. In the Dursley’s backyard. Both pure crack. By 15, I was wise enough to keep my self-inserts locked in my head.
THIS IS THE BEST COMMENT SECTION OF ANYTHING EVER!!!!!
Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul 😀
I wrote Dragon Ball Z fanfiction. Dragon Ball Z *yaoi* fanfiction about relatively marginal characters. It’s still on ff.net, as far as I know (under a much different name than what I’m using here).
I also wrote some pretty good Silmarillion fics–I’d stand by that shit any day–but yeesh, can’t live down the shame of the DBZ stuff.
Wait, which marginal characters? PLEASE BE GINYU FORCE.
In retrospect, the Ginyu Force seems like the obvious choice, right? Sadly, I am not that awesome… It was all Kaioshin/Kibito.
Hmm. I never really had a sense of what fan fiction was as a kid, but I wrote a newsletter for my pen pals in 6th grade that was basically a complete ripoff/loving adaptation of the newsletter the gang writes in LMM’s The Golden Road. Then there was also some regrettable stuff about a romantic relationship between me and Josh Brolin’s character in The Young Riders that I hardly dared to commit to paper. Amazingly, I parlayed my many imaginative gifts into college credit (twice!) when I rewrote Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” from Beatrice’s perspective for an early American lit class, and turned Lillo’s The London Merchant into a comedy called Barnwell, that Ends Well for my Restoration drama class.
I have only ever been and will only ever be a grade A nerd. I regret nothing.
YES
The first thing I ever, ever remember writing was a poem about My Little Pony. A RHYMING poem. I was in like, kindergarten.
“Around and around the world they flu [sic],
To save, her, her pony, her friends, everyone in the world, and you!”
…A rhyming poem. Not, by any stretch of the imagination, a scanning poem. (Alas, that’s all I remember, and it’s long, long gone.)
Then some Sailor Moon stuff, some self-insertion Pokemon stuff with a friend, stories ~inspired by~ LOTR and Redwall that weren’t distinct enough to honestly be not fanfiction, then I fell headfirst into writing Yu-Gi-Oh! fanfiction and I have not stopped writing fanfiction in… gulp. Ten years.
In middle school, I wrote a ton of Center Stage fanfic… I was all about overly dramatic ballet threesomes. In high school/college, I moved on to Harry Potter. I also definitely wrote NSYNC slash fic. Thankfully ff.net deleted that for me, but my Center Stage fic will live on forever.
LOTR in the far distant future (aka, the modern day). Taking off of Tolkien’s idea of England being the Grey Havens. Every one’s dead except Legolas and a few other elves. I’m sure there was a self insert. I think I was 13. Very angry I ended up pitching those sheafs of paper. I remember it being awful, but a lot of fun to write.
Edit: Also edited for appearing in a friend’s LOTR fanfic, as as a Glorfindel fangirl. Search The Lord of the Ringtones. It was hilarious.
Oh man, I really love the idea behind this though. Kind of like a Tolkien-verse American Gods thing!
Yes! Hadn’t read American Gods until High School and I was very angry that Gaiman got to that idea first.
Come to think of it, there was a road trip involved. I think it may have included going to America, but I can’t remember.
I should revisit that idea.
I think I wrote part of one of those too, featuring an OC elf and Cirdan of the Grey Havens! I was very proud of it but very vague on timelines.
I remember The Lord of The Ringtones from when I was still relatively new to fandom, I was v. impressed by it. I am, like, 70% sure I still have it saved* to an old, abandoned modem somewhere.
*We had a kind of sporadic internet connection, so I’d log on for a little while and save a heap of fic to read later.
My brother wouldn’t let me play on his video game consoles, so I would watch him play and dictate what was happening in a notebook. It was mostly Street Fighter and they got into fights in the graffiti alleyways because they often kidnapped/kissed/killed one another’s moms/girlfriends.
I wrote Dragon Ball Z fanfiction. Dragon Ball Z *yaoi* fanfiction about relatively marginal characters. It’s still on ff.net, as far as I know (under a much different name than what I’m using here).
Canadian Idol slash fic is the stuff I most vividly remember, and I wish I still had it.
Also: the short-lived Canadian drama Falcon Beach, Harry Potter, and Vanessa Carlton songs. No, I don’t wish I was kidding.
This is way late, but what was your Canadian Idol pairing? It never occurred to me that there would even be a Canadian Idol fandom in that particular way and I’m curious!
Also, speaking of Canadian Idol, I’m constantly annoyed that they didn’t hire Ben Mulroney to play his dad in that Robin Sparkles “Let’s Go to the Mall” video from HIMYM. I don’t even watch that show!
In elementary school (ELEMENTARY SCHOOL) I wrote two pieces of fan fiction that I recall. Long before I knew what fan fiction was. Because I was 8 and the Internet did not yet exist in my world. One was a story where Disney’s The Gummi Bears came over to my house and had a pool party in my kiddie pool. The other was a full-on Saved by the Bell SCRIPT. It involved Lisa losing her class ring.
Many years later I wrote a shameless Mary Sue that took place in the Daria universe.
I FOUND IT! I found it and I am going to link to it and I don’t even care!
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/894187/1/Afterlife-i…
This isn’t exactly fanfiction, but myself and an accomplice (whom I shall not incriminate without his permission) used the amazing new power of desktop publishing to create an Anti-Barney-The-Dinosaur parody newsletter. I don’t even know why we cared so much. But our hate was blazing and fierce.
I think this is the first comment I’ve ever posted on the whole Internet
My middle-school best friend and I were very into The Lord of the Rings OBVIOUSLY and so we spent most of 7th grade working on what we called our “Lord of the Rings Remixes.” These were screenplay-style retellings of each book of the Lord of the Rings that followed the same general plot arc as the actual books, except we swapped in our own stupid dialogue and had some slapstick asides in the action, added characters and rewrote certain scenes, etc.. I wrote two– one for the Fellowship, one for Two Towers (each like 30 pages long), but never got around to the Return of the King.
Mine are on a floppy disk so they’re basically as good as gone forever and the many shining details are lost to the sands of time, but I just texted this friend and she reminded me that a character named “Bob the Goldfish” traveled around with Gimli, Legolas, and Aragorn (I seem to remember him making wry commentary on their actions–or at least what middle schoolers found wry), and we made Arwen and Galadriel much much more badass. Arwen had to rescue Aragorn from the Uruk-Hai at the end of the Fellowship.
OMG, I’m pretty sure a lot of my back-ups are on floppies too. I had these colourful ones I treasured greatly.
CURSE THE EVER-ONWARD MARCH OF TECHNOLOGY. I lost a huge quantity of my early fanfic in the transition from floppy disks to other storage media.
When I was 12/13 I wrote really bad Jonny Quest fanfiction! The New Adventures, I mean. God I loved Jessie Bannon. http://www.reocities.com/enchantedforest/9706/jes…
Jessie was the bestttt.
Swans Crossing! Pre-Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar teen soap, but my story was mostly obsessed with the red-headed girl who lived in a submarine. It was a great show that I knew not to admit to watching even at the tender age of 12. Thank God I didn’t have the internet.
Never fanfic, but a fair amount of RP fic (my best friend and I would write each other stories about our sexual escapades with famous cute guys).
But RPF most definitely DOES count as fanfic! I’ll never understand why some people don’t agree…
(I am now going to date myself HORRIBLY.)
At the age of 12–ca. 1971, when “fanfic” wasn’t even a thing–I wrote a 200+ pp. novel based on a TV series called The Young Rebels (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065358/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2). Espionage hijinks during the Revolutionary War! It was handwritten on binder paper because I didn’t get my own typewriter until I was 16–yes, other kids get cars at 16, my parents gave me a coming-of-age Olivetti manual typewriter that still lives in my storage unit just in case civilization collapses and there’s no electricity.
And now that I am thinking about this, I realize that, 43 bloody years and a PhD in folklore later, my current WIP is time-traveling Mabinogi fanfic. Some things never really change.
I want to read this!
Also I’m disappointed that I’m too young for Young Rebels. Seems like it would be right up my alley.
THIS IS SUCH A GREAT THREAD.
Hook self-insert. Where Rufio LIVES (and then falls in love with moi, obviously).
i definitely wrote out a fantasy in my diary that was essentially a self-insert fic where i went to theatre camp and counselor heath ledger fell in love with me.
much later in life a friend dared me to write some erotica, and i wrote a star trek jim/bones smut fic that was surprisingly well-received.
DID ANYONE ELSE READ DHARMA DRUID’S LOTR CINDERELLA RETELLING????
THE HEROINE WAS NAMED IRULAN.
Darma Druid was my romance writing ICON for yeeeeeeeeears.
I didn’t know I was writing fanfic, but when I was 11 I wrote a story about a 16 year old and her band who were SO AWESOME that the guys from Journey (then MY favorite band, give me a break it was 1983) helped them get a record deal. I had a whole trilogy planned about their career, involving drug abuse (*gasp!*) and heartbreak.
I was also remembering JUST THIS MORNING about how I had done the nerdiest fan art of the ReBoot ladies in Final Fantasy Tactics-style outfits. Dot was an archer, and AndrAIa was a mage/healer. I don’t know if my mom saved them and I may never find them again. 🙁
It was Redwall fanfiction featuring baby animals, including self-insert characters for myself and my best friend. I believe I attempted both Mole dialect and some sort of baby-talk or lisp for the younger characters. I turned this masterwork in to a teacher for a grade. In middle school.
A multi-page fully illustrated fanfic of my favorite manga, Ranma 1/2. I recall they went to Paris after Ryoga provided bad directions. I was about fifteen. The memory causes me to both squirm with shame and then perk up in pride since I remember the drawings really were pretty darned good.
!!! I TOTALLY WROTE RYOGA/UKYOU SLASH FANFIC IN NINTH GRADE!! And then my bff made me write Ranma/Akane because that was her ship and she liked the way I wrote sex scenes (neither one of us had any clue what we were about, of course, but I’d read more romance novels).
My first fanfic ever was for Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I really identified with workaholic Lois Lane secretly writing romance novels when I was 8 (I still do, 20 years later). I spent weeks writing it in my Spice Girls notebook while literally *in the closet* at like midnight every night until my father found it and took it away.
That’s when I learned to start rotating my fanfic and romance novel hiding places.
14ish. A self-insert X-files/Star Wars crossover in which my friends and I were aliens from the Star Wars universe (with Jedi powers, naturally) who abducted Mulder and Scully and dragged them around the galaxy while trying to track down Luke Skywalker, who for reasons I don’t remember had suffered some sort of psychotic break. It got very long and was part of an ever-growing web of fanfics by the same group of friends starring the same characters. At one point we all had AngelFire/Geocities pages devoted to the subject…
I was 12 and it was a Harry Potter has a twin sister fic (one of the first actually, I’m so sorry). She was of course pretty and smart and sarcastic.
1. Severus Snape/Lucius Malfoy school-era fic, 10th grade. I got one chapter in that was largely descriptions of Alan Rickman’s imagined schoolboy sneer and flowing robes and then got embarrassed and threw the notebook away.
2. Ginny/Hermione semi-smut and agonizing coming out feelings. Just after coming out myself.
3. Alex Cabot/Olivia Benson (of Law and Order: SVU) smut drabbles – began at least 3, one of them kinky. These are still saved as drafts on my Tumblr. They’re still my OTP but er, I can’t write worth a damn so…I leave it up to the pros.
When I was a kid I had this weird impression that writing fanfic would basically be stealing someone else’s toys and playing with them wrong, so I quashed all urges, and as a result didn’t end up writing any until I was past 30 and fell into a fandom (Homestuck) I couldn’t *not* write fanfic for. (Having read many essays about the worth, importance, and function of fanfic in my 20s definitely helped.)
Re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: badger weaponry
I used to write Redwall Fanfiction and post them on the HTML-based Redwall Fanfiction Forum. It was about a fearsome rat dictator named Snaggletooth, and was the story of the squirrel archer who set out to take him down. I wrote two chapters and gave it up.
HEY IMPORTANT QUESTION when did you do this? Because I was super into the RFF board from, like, 2000 to….2005 maybe? Until a fit of adolescent embarrassment in which I deleted all traces of my unfinished story that was mainly just loving descriptions of weapons and torture. I was a weird kid. ANYWAY HI.
I was always kind of irritated at Eowyn for not staying behind at Meduseld when Theoden told her to. As an adult I understand her drive to prove herself but as a 13 year old my immediate thoughts were that she was being unreasonably irresponsible. At the same time I was totally in love with her because clearly, so I wrote a retrospectively boring short story about her staying behind and fending off an orc attack with a bunch of other ladies. Naturally she still ends up with Faramir because he’s a total babe and they’re super cute together, and he was impressed by her sense of responsibility. AUGH SO BORING.
Also this is my first comment on the Toast.
Ok, but I love this. I love imagining this from Faramir’s POV: “He’d met plenty of beautiful women in his travels, but he’d never met a woman so utterly responsible.” Amazing.
First fanfic: Pokemon fic where the main characters turned into Pokemon furries after their parents died. Abandoned after prologue
Second fanfic: Pokemon insanity/horror one-shot about a taxidermist who commits suicide. My mother found it and put it in a binder
Third fanfic: Pokemon insanity/horror one-shot about a guy on a stretcher in an asylum, or is he?!
Fourth fanfic: Guilmon/Hughes parody slash. Digimon flopping out of voids in alchemists’ hands when they try to do alchemy. 400 words maybe
Pokemon. I was maybe 8 or 9. Brock was diagnosed with “love disease”, the symptoms of which included heart palpitations, overactive salivary glands, and malaise. Professor Oak had his scientists run tests on him in the lab. An old man would appear periodically out of thin air and impart words of “wisdom” and folk medicine telling Brock to eat certain things (onion, golf ball) (yes, i know, wtf?). That night, while Brock awaited the test results, Gary stole a dream reading machine (?) and spied on everyone’s dreams. Don’t think it went anywhere after that…
My sister and I also drew Archie comics. LOL. I have got to find those and save them forever, they were hilarious to us at the time, and I’m sure they are even better now.
Unless the absurd historical fiction vampire story I wrote in high school (clearly inspired by The Oregon Trail, too much Anne Rice, and a desperate need to prove I was super cool just like my new best friend) counts, my first fanfic was an angsty Harry Potter fic I wrote in college and set after the end of the series.
I just reread it now and dear god, Younger Me, why are you terrible?
That said, not only have I no shame, I have a link: http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/bookwoman/end…
Buffy/Spike, and it was just one big lemon.
I wrote and consumed a TON of Hanson fanfiction. They were the first band I ever really loved, and I fell hard.
I don’t think I ever finished a whole story, but I started a bunch of them and also made a couple of geocities websites for them.
I also still have some binders where I printed out stories I liked in teeny font, and now I’m glad I did because they have all disappeared from the internet.
I’m actually surprised there aren’t more Hanson fanfic-ers here. I thought there were MILLIONS of us. Maybe Toasties just had better taste in music as 11-year olds, I dunno.
I never wrote any Hanson fic, but I read tons of it – for years! The best one I can remember slashed Taylor Hanson with Eminem. So wrong, but SO right!
I want to read so much of this fanfic. I haven’t seen anyone yet admitting that they wrote at Apocrypha (the Law & Order fanfic site), but if you did, I LOVED YOUR STUFF. Just so you know.
The summer after 6th grade (1978), my best friend and I wrote a Star Trek/Star Wars mashup. Over 100 pages of wide-ruled looseleaf paper. We had both just read SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE and treated it as canon, so it was PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT for Luke and Leia to be in lurrrrrvvvv.
After that, every year she and I wrote each other birthday stories set in different universes. The first one was Star Trek, in which we somehow saved Kirk and Spock and they threw a birthday party on the Enterprise for my friend. Once she wrote one for my birthday that took place on Pern, with cute dragonriding boys who–and I specifically remember this–only wanted to kiss, and didn’t try to take advantage of either of us AT ALL (I think we were in 9th grade, and having boyfriend issues). There was also one in which we sang with Simon & Garfunkel. I believe Barry Manilow made an appearance one year too.
Now that I think of it, we were probably the most boring teenagers ever. We kinda remind me of Candy and Grenda from Gravity Falls.
But you two were so adorable!
After reading Young Adult Novel, we wrote dozens of Kevin Shapiro stories, does that count?
My first X-Files fanfic at age 17 was from the POV of an empathic teenage girl who helps Mulder and Scully solve a case; Mulder of course semi-falls for her but she exists to get them together instead. In retrospect, TOTAL MARY SUE, but it was actually a case file in which she knew her brother was the murderer but keeps it from them (and the reader) until the end and it had some other good plotty stuff, and I’m kind of sad I only wrote four chapters and then abandoned it.
It’s funny to me to think of this as “that crazy embarrassing thing I did when I was really young,” though, since I’ve gone on to write hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic over the last 16 years and am pretty happy with fandom as my current creative and social space. I did start out doing goofy stuff like everyone else, though.
If we’re talking things published online, I started with The X-Files, too. I am so glad that my GeoCities site died in the purge, though everything’s still on Gossamer. It’s a mixture of absolutely terrible impulses and frantic English major enthusiasm.
There was a lull (ohai graduate school), then I spent a couple of years in The Office (American version) fandom. I’m proud of the stuff I wrote there.
Currently, I am sitting on top of a decreasingly rough draft of a Sherlock casefic (post 3rd season, John/Sherlock, canon compliant for now). I have started casting around for a beta on Tumblr. It feels so good to write it, I can’t even say.
Final Fantasy VI Meets the Jerry Springer Show. I don’t think I really need to go in depth on the plot for that. It was followed up by a very successful sequel, Lockebo. It was written in script format. I won 8 internets.
My most SUCCESSFUL fan fic was a beautiful sapphic fic called Wilting based on the SaGa Frontier character Asellus and White Rose. It is still in the top 10 things when you google my name and my whole (Republican!) family found it and printed it out and passed it around to show how talented I was, and my Grandma read it and went “They were just good friends, right?”
My first full, official internet fanfic was a Roswell future fic about the kids of the main characters from Roswell. It was something like 20 chapters long, ridiculous, and somewhat troubling. It’s actually still on ff.net and about once or twice a year I get an email that someone has favorited it or left a bafflingly positive comment.
My first ever (pre-internet) fanfic was General Hospital. Frisco and Felicia, aww yeah.
Jumping on the Harry Potter fanfiction bandwagon: mine was about Perenelle Flamel’s death (the 800 some-odd wife of Nicholas Flamel from the Philosopher Stone). I am not ashamed.
Oh, wait, I just went back and looked at my site at Fanfiction.net and apparently, I had written something about the four founders getting together. Huh. https://www.fanfiction.net/u/27572/Twilight-and-S…
I loved loved loved writing stories about minor characters. I had fanfic about Donaldbain from Macbeth.
NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK SELF INSERTION FICTION THAT WENT ON LIKE LONG ENOUGH TO BE A NOVELLA.
Eventually, there was a crossover with Star Trek: The Next Generation (mostly centered around Wesley Crusher). I burnt it when I was 19 and I REGRET IT.
I feel sure I wrote fanfic before I knew what it was (for Jem and the Holograms? She-Ra? I CAN’T REMEMBER) but the first fic I wrote when I knew that this was a thing people did was a Babylon 5 fix-it for my Tragic Doomed OTP. (Marcus, you absolute twat, what were you thinking anyway?) And yes, it’s still on Fanfiction.net.
…Just realized that I’m currently writing fic for yet another massively dysfunctional obsessive/co-dependent relationship, so apparently I have a type.
Final Fantasy VI Meets the Jerry Springer Show. I don’t think I really need to go in depth on the plot for that. It was followed up by a very successful sequel, Lockebo. It was written in script format. I won 8 Internets.
My most successful fic , which still comes up on the first page of results when you google my name, is Wilting, a love story between two SaGa Frontier characters, White Rose and Asellus, a half-mystic knight-lady and a full mystic princess. Someone in my (Republican!) family go a hold of it and printed it out and passed it around to EVERYONE, including my Grandma, who thought they were very nice friends.
(I’m sorry if this is a double post, my browser was giving me a lot of mixed signals)
Before I ever started writing down my fic, I used to daydream about Power Rangers ALL THE TIME. For some reason I hated Kimberly and really wanted Trini and Tommy to get together. There was a lot of DRAMA, as you might imagine.
The first fic I ever wrote down (and published on FFN) was a terrible, horrible, ridiculous Sailor Moon fanfic, all about Usagi sighing mournfully over Mamoru being away… somewhere. I don’t know. I was 12? Possibly 13, and possessed of all the melodrama that a teenage girl could legitimately claim.
These days I write for Agents of Shield, and my current fic is over 200,000 words long and I have no idea how that happened, you guys. It just won’t end. I love it, though, and while my writing occasionally slips back into melodrama, my grammar has at least improved.
Oh dear god it was Naruto fanfiction. MULTIPLE Naruto fanfictions, all NaruSaku or Naruto/Sakura for those who did not spend their tween years glued to Cartoon Network’s awful dubs everyday after school
I liked Naruto/Sasuke more as a pairing but I was a closeted queer and I was like “IF I WRITE SLASH THEY WILL KNOW.”
Also my name on ffnet? Gentle-Wind.
I’m closer to 50 than 40 so there was no ff.net in my preteen days to capture that Battlestar Galatica/Lord of the Rings crossover where I totally saved the day and was perfect. I’m thankful for that.
YES YES YES YES YES YES YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Thank you for existing.
I’m not sure it qualifies as fic, but maybe performance art? The kids in my neighborhood would all get herded into a different house every day for our parents’ sanity, and somehow Animal Planet was always on, so we got addicted to The Crocodile Hunter. One house belonged to a family with a lot of stuffed animals and travel artifacts, so eventually we all started to act out our own Crocodile Hunter adventures with a couch/boat, a huge stuffed snake, and a dull rusty machete. I always fought to be Sui, the dog, until she died on the TV program.
I wrote an angsty Lockhart/Snape slash oneshot… that was also a Kelly Clarkson songfic. Sometimes I remember it and cringe a great cringe.
A truly ridiculous songfic where I interspersed Hank Williams’ “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle Blow” with an inner monologue of Michael Scofield of Prison Break. About loneliness or women or prison or some shit, who even knows.
Final Fantasy 8 parody fic heavily borrowing from the South Park Movie and Terrible cross fandom road trip fic.
My first was in 8th grade, a FF7 paean to The Turks and how hot I thought the jumble of pixels that represented Reno was. It remains unfinished and unseen except for my friend who semi-commissioned it.
A dozen years later, as a grown-ass woman, I started writing some pretty self-serious Homestuck fic, but gave that up after about 6 months, 100,000 words and some serious looking at my life and my choices.
Is there a word in any language that encapsulates “feeling proud of a piece of fanfic while simultaneously embarrassed at its creation and disdainful towards its source materials?” That is all I ever feel; let me tell you about Homestuck..
I read SO MUCH FF7 fanfic about the Turks in middle school. So much. I was a total Reno girl.
(…and I still don’t really understand what Homestuck is.)
Reno was the shit, lbh. And I could try to tell you more concretely about Homestuck, but it would take FOREVER and you probably still wouldn’t really care/understand. Let’s suffice it to say that it was a story that turned into a meme that transmuted into a physical virus that causes fans aged 10-17 to paint themselves grey and titter about buckets, and fans 21+ to argue about unjust erasure of fictional, extraterrestrial sexualities. To death.
(Or it was/is a pretty innovative and entertaining webcomic, that got way out of hand on 17 levels.)
Digimon where they all run off after being gassed by a giant ‘mon and pair off inexplicably, age 10. I was all about that Matt/MiMi despite the complete and utter lack of canonicity.
My first-ever fanfic was not published, but it was a 125-PAGE MOVIE SCRIPT about me and my middle school best friend Brittany meeting NSync and our love affairs with Lance and Justin, respectively.
My first on-the-internet fanfic was a Kris Allen/Adam Lambert drabble and it was… decent. Not amazing, but a few dozen people commented/liked it. That’s really mostly it, though, I am much more of a reader than a writer. Drarry, Dramione, and Hermione/Lucius were my HP faves (my HS best friend wrote Harry-Zacharias Smith niche fic that was very good), then of course Kradam happened, and now JohnLock…
Sometimes it amazes me that I am a fully functioning adult and still manage to read as much smut as I do, but then I remember that all of you Toasties are my HOME.
I was really into Beyblade from age 11-12. A child told me recently that this franchise still exists?? I wrote stories about the brooding one with the blue face paint. I clearly remember like, at least 500 words just of him picking a flower in a really broody way. Also: wolf roleplay forums and Invader Zim OCs and really really detailed stories for my neopets.
I scanned the pages preceding me, and didn’t see any (apologies if I missed you), but my first fic was POEMS ABOUT THE ANIMORPHS. My first email address was a portmanteau of my last name and Andalite. No shame, only regret that it died when Geocities was razed to the ground.
a sailormoon songfic to christina aguilera’s “i turn to you,” age 10
(i wrote it on paper and then transcribed it to post on ff.net and the now-defunct “a sailormoon romance” website. it has been lost to the ages, thank god.)
i feel like i should note that 15 years later i’m… still writing sailormoon fanfiction. (among other things, but SM is my One True Fandom.)
I was twelve. The mailing list for X-Men fanfic announced it was going to have a deadline for their fic awards at exactly midnight. It was 1999. New Year’s Eve. I was forbidden to turn on the computer in case of ‘y2k’
But oh, I knew that if I wrote something I would get all the awards and all the people I silently watched and admired would want to be my friends and think I was the coolest twelve year old in the world.
And then, inspiration struck.
I wrote ‘The Cat Came Back’ but with Phoenix instead of Cat and I think that I mentioned Cyclops being stupid.
I did not win any awards.
Oh wait, that was my first ‘published’ fanfic.
There was also when me and my sister, we’re only twenty months apart, were completely into Dragonball Z around age 10 and we would make up screamy nonsensical DBZ stories and laugh like hyenas while our parents silently prayed for death. Just saying ‘Dende says that 2+2=5!’ could set us off until we were doubled over.
We spent an entire trip to San Diego just talking about Dragonball Z fic. I think my father considered giving us to the lions.
Unfortunately, my six years younger brother wanted in on the action. And what does a scornful older sibling say when a tiny child brings you his attempt at fanfic? Fanfic that is SO SUPERIOR when you and your sister do it?
He blames me and my sister to this day for why he no longer does anything creative. I gave a formal apology a year ago, a la government admitting wrongdoings.
And that’s how fanfic ruined my brother’s life.
You should have, just for mentioning Cyclops being stupid!
My very first fanfiction was a terrible, terrible Harry Potter deathfic, where, instead of making it through the end of the first book, Harry, Ron, and Hermione ALL died. It was extremely overwrought and I wrote it in one night at Girl Scout camp.
The next ones were Lord of the Rings parodies (rAnD0m 12-year-old humor), and a story about Jack Sparrow and Anna Maria’s daughter, who somehow worked for Commodore Norrington and ended up having to do a jailbreak because she stole from him. Oh, and she had a buddy based on Bloody Jacky (by L.A. Meyer). Now that I think about it, that might have been the closest I got to writing girl/girl stuff before I realized I was bi.
None of it’s on ff.net anymore, but I posted a ton, and I think I may have had a sexual awakening to a Kim/Shego fic. Oh, 2004………
We also need a thread about the first fanfic we ever read.
Mine was this SPECTACULARLY over the top Harry Potter fic where Ginny gets sorted into Slytherin and turns basically goth and gets educated by seven goddesses and can literally speak ALL THE LANGUAGES and is BFFs with Draco and then she dies and comes back to life and she and Harry are trained as super!wizards and fall in love.
Oh man, I need to go see if it’s still on FF.net.
Ohhh! mine was definitely Redwall fic, in like, 5th/6th grade. I THINK it was centered around a group of fox OCs? or something? probably characters from someone’s Redwall RP or something. I remember absolutely nothing about the plot, but it was quite involved.
First slash fic I read was an angsty Gundamn Wing songfic using Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses.” oh. yeah. ~*~i want to lay you down on a bed of roses / for tonight i sleep on a bed of nails~*~ I can’t remember the pairing, but it was probably Heero/Duo given my predilections…
I actually learned about fanfiction from my mom. She’s a rhetoric professor and wrote a paper on it, and small me heard her reading it and was SHOCKED at the idea.
I think the first fic I actually read was super angsty Buffy/Angel, where it was like thousands of years in the future and Angel was still alive but horribly deformed, and then Buffy appears in the future and is all, “I will save you from your own brooding!” but there is no sex, because I was a very prudish 14-year-old and refused to click on anything NC-17.
It always makes me facepalm, but I started out reading every single Linkin Park slashfic I could find on a still existing archive site. Didn’t care the pairing, I just read ALL OF THE FIC. Oh geez
Mine was definitely Sailor Moon porn.
I think the first one I read was a multi-chapter X-Files one where Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny switch places with Mulder and Scully in an alternate universe. I remember it being really good, but I was also 13 and consumed anything X-Files related.
The first fic I ever read was almost definitely Hermione/Snape and it’d probably creep me out thoroughly if I reread it again today.
Oh my GODDDD when I was in high school I printed out a dirty fanfic for my erm-me time-and my Dad found it and we had THE MOST AWKWARD CONVERSATION EVER about it. BRB DYING.
It was probably X-Files. I don’t remember it specifically.
I do remember reading smutty one where from behind a two way mirror Scully watched Skinner sodomize Mulder (maybe it was the other way around?). She found it hot and masturbated.
Mine was a Potter fic where Harry goes back in time, adopts Tom Riddle, marries a blonde leggy nurse, had two more kidsmand a dog. It was like 4 years after the last book’s release until I discovered fanfic, and 17 year old me was just so enchanted by fellow Potter lovers existing that, looking back, I’ve loved some fics which I wouldn’t nowadays. Just inhaled about a million, tumbling from gen to Draco/Hermione epic romances, to glorious slash and femslashes. No regrets.
oh, definitely sailor moon fic. i don’t think i even knew what it was. and it wasn’t particularly smutty – i just couldn’t get enough (other people…are as interested in this as i am?! and their brains are so much better?! must. consume.)
I fixed Little Women by getting Jo and Laurie together. It was songfic based on Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn.”
BOOOO LAURIE/AMY 5EVA but props for “Torn” because. Yeah.
FTR, I ship Jo/A girl she meets after she becomes a professional writer. The girl’s probably an illustrator, and they hit it off like hotcakes, and they have a full-on Boston marriage situation. Probably they take in a couple of orphans.
I like this ending!
lbr that is probably a happier ending for Jo than marrying Laurie!
I wrote about two chapters of a story that took place after Return of the Jedi about a 12 1/2 year old girl (it was VERY important that she was 12 1/2) tried to revive the Empire. I was… 9? I think? and I never shared it with anyone because this was before I had access to the internet, and I also didn’t know what fan fic was, so maybe this doesn’t count? This was also about the time I was writing an original story about two brothers who caught bioluminescent grubs in space. It was as boring as it sounds. At one point there were two handwritten pages describing the grubs and how they were harvested.
I didn’t really fic again until I co-ran a fan-fic site/forum for a British teen show called 24Seven back in high school, but I only wrote one or two things, I was mostly there just to make friends who liked stuff I did. One of the things I wrote was particularly awful, where one of the character’s sisters joined the cast because it wasn’t bloated enough already, I guess.
I wrote two big fanfics: one was an Animorphs novel about a female Andalite cadet who’s shipwrecked on an island and it was basically Ax’s intro novel but she was a girl and I learned a lot about seagulls to write it. I was probably like 12 or so. I also wrote a long thing about a Redwall-style squirrel warrior maiden (when I typed that just now I realized I still know her name) who carried two swords and her whole family had been killed by rat pirates and she was trying to avenge them. Yeah.
I still write fic, but after those two I took a long break until….gosh, I don’t know. Sophomore year of college? Sometime, and I started writing Luna/Ginny drabbles and then saw Inception and got waaay back into fandom hardcore and now I am as you see me.
I’m writing my first fan fic RIGHT NOW. Actually, I’ve been working on it on and off for over a year. It’s a Potter fic, the main character is Seamus, and that’s all I’m going to say right now because as soon as I post something I’ll probably change it! I’ve decided the fan fic sites aren’t for me, because they’re set up for people who write from beginning to end, and I can’t do that. When it’s done, I’ll put it on my website.
My friend and I (mostly her) used to write fan fiction about the Haunted Mansion – you know, the ride in Disney World? I remember them being quite good, actually. This was middle school.
ALSO – I was never much of a creative writer, so I mostly consume the fanfic of others, and I remember being extremely frustrated by the lack of perfect Ozma/Dorothy fic in the Oz fandom.
My first fanfic was definitely a Buffy one, but I’m not sure whether it was the one where Willow was inexplicably the cousin of one of the Spice Girls, or the one where Buffy turns Angelus back into Angel through the power of song after she’s inspired while watching the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie starring the Bee Gees. OH WAIT NO my first fanfic might have been a sequel to the 1996 tv special Elmo Saves Christmas, creatively titled “Elmo Saves Christmas Again” and illustrated with size 72 wingdings.
Oh, and also: Big Wolf on Campus was indeed the greatest show of all time and I used to daydream about someday owning a hearse and solving supernatural mysteries.
Will you take it as a compliment if I tell you that I started laughing uncontrollably at “Buffy turns Angelus back into Angel with the power of song”?
I just saw this now, and rest assured I took it as a compliment of the highest order!
I just want to say, bless you all for your weird and wonderful minds.
My very first one was for a 5th grade school project and it was a Dragonriders of Pern story where F’lar and Lessa talk about what bronze would fly the new queen. Little did I understand at the time that I was essentially writing about dragon mating habits, but there you have it. After that it would be many years but then I wrote Nathan/Charles Metalocalypse fic after I graduated college, ha ha.
In elementary school, I rewrote one of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books – I think it was the middle one, Castle of Something – so that Taran got kidnapped and Eilonwy had to rescue him, instead of the other way around.
Yes! Eilonwy deserved better. Glad you gave it to her.
Some of the first stories I ever came up with were Land Before Time stories at age 4. I would dictate them to my mother, who would dutifully write them down, and I would illustrate them with my dinosaur stamps.
The first fanfic I put online was probably a Lord of the Rings parody starring lots of people from my writers’ forum as the characters of Lord of the Rings. And it was hilarious and wonderful and I love it still. (I was 15)
I wrote a Green Wing fix-it fic in which a character was saved from dying by the power of love (no, really, it had a medical explanation and everything). Two medical professionals apparently forgot contraception existed and had an unplanned pregnancy. It won “Best Overall Fic” in our messageboard’s awards. What was I thinking?
Also, I never wrote anything down, but I had elaborate daydreams about Buffy and co., after the end of Season 7, going to LA to stay with Angel and continue fighting evil. I had not watched the recent seasons of Angel at this point, so it was hopelessly wrong as regards canon, but I didn’t care. I also decided that the best way to deal with the Buffy/Angel/Spike situation was for all of them to get together, and to include Faith as well (look, I thought Faith/Buffy, Faith/Angel and Faith/Spike were all really hot pairings). There were no complications, just lots of four-way sex. And dancing.
I’m pretty upset I got to this so late because I’m actually kind of proud: LOTR/Queen crossover self insert fanfiction (as in a modern day retelling of LOTR in which the members of the fellowship are the members of Queen plus, I’m pretty sure, me).
that sounds amazing.
as a very active LOTR fanfic reader back in the day I feel like I read this, somehow.
Even though I was really too old to be watching it, I wrote a short fanfic and a few stray bits and pieces about Kim Possible. At least one of them was “Kigo” (pairing Kim with her nemesis, sarky villainess Shego) because that’s what you did in that fandom. I still remember the unwritten idea for a full story that saw Kim take over the world, then jumped ahead into the Kim-dominated future, and the other idea to use a few of the show’s details to build an interstellar future of aliens, robots and artificial humans. I never wrote any of it.
I’m still tempted to write some Fallout 3 fanfic, possibly with a femslash bent.
I really want someone to tally all the comments and make an infographic detailing the toast’s readership’s first fanfic.
Unofficially: When I was wee, I was obsessed with EVERYTHING Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, so I used to illustrate and write these little booklets continuing their adventures. I particularly liked their detective series and one I remember in particular is about their searching for a missing lion cub from the circus.
First Thinly Veiled Fanfic: I announced to my elementary school class I was writing a book. It was essentially Harry Potter with a female protagonist with a limp in America who used pigeons instead of owls. I never finished it.
Officially: My first ever fanfic that I actually put online was a one-shot angstfic (O! How I loved angstfic) set from the perspective of a princess from Harad watching soldiers from her country go to Gondor, to fight for Sauron. Come to think of it, I was a pretty classy, if incredibly depressing young writer, since I continued this angstiness, after my love for LotR settled a bit, into the House fandom as well as dabbling into Gundam SEED and Princess Tutu.
I also got into trouble on the Nickelodeon forums where I used to roleplay in the The Wild Thornberrys forums for basically being too old and flaming little preteens. Aw, flaming. I was a wee prick of a middle-schooler and high-schooler.
My first fanfic really taught me about the breadth and depth of the internet. The thing that spurred me to delve deep into fandom was the musical Cats. There was a whole mythology behind the musical that had developed in fandom, and I can’t quite remember if my first fanfic was terrible poetry about Jemima’s teenage angst or something collaborative and longform about Bombalurina’s dark past with Macavity.
Aquaman. It was tear-jerker romance. Don’t judge me, I was eight.
I… I don’t think I ever did write fan fiction. My childhood is retroactively made lacking by this realization.
Although I am currently collaborating on a piece with a friend about Allan Turing being seduced by a very convincing robot. It’s tentatively called The Turing Testes.
extraordinary. please keep your readership-to-be updated.
oh my gosh, this is so awful. 13 years old I wrote EXTREMELY DETAILED LOTR fanfic and tried to be very different. This included a tale of all the dwarves from the hobbit visiting while Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam are tiny children and chaoes ensues and the story of a female warrior dwarf DOING THINGS AWESOMELY.
my pride and joy was a complete troll account, LOTRGUYSRHOT where I wrote the most mary sueish story I possible could (Patricia the elf, all the men fell in love with her including the Nazgul) and basked in the glory of the flames rolling in.
also the poetry I showed to my parents and grandparents, which I shudder to remember.
Full Metal Alchemist, when I was….Oh, I dunno. Thirteen or so? Twelve? Something like that. Then a brief love affair with Bleach crack yaoi. It was all very, very bad. It’s all still on ff.net somewhere.
*sigh*
Although I’ve been reading fanfic for as long as I’ve had unsupervised access to the internet, I started writing only after I turned 21. And because I was super-frustrated with the way a damn Hindi soap I watched was going. Most present day Hindi soaps are pretteh awful. They’re badly written, have clichéd plots, two-dimensional characters and are regressive to boot. Don’t ask me why I watch them. But this one had me hooked quite seriously because the lead pair had sizzling chemistry (and that is really frustrating when Indian tv norms don’t even permit kissing on prime-time television– forget anything more X-rated).
So anyway. Yeah. The first and only thing I’ve written is a HUGE amount of fanfic about a silly Hindi soap called Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon? and its infuriating lead pair of Arnav and Khushi.
Self-insert Valdemar fic when I was…12? I think. Later some Harry Potter. Now I just content myself to write in really obscure fandoms every couple years for Yuletide.
My sister wrote Prince William fan fic and I wrote Prince Harry fan fic. WE WERE VERY YOUNG.
Late bloomer, but it was x-files, Muldet/Skinner. Won a Wirerims Award. *pops collar*
I was too easily embarrassed to actually write fanfiction, but my cousin and I had a few conversations where we plotted out crossover episodes for shows we watched. There was a Homicide, Life on the Street/ Sex and the City crossover that I really wish had actually existed. It ended with Pembleton reading Carrie’s column out loud to the rest of the squad.
And of course I rewrote the entire arc of the X-Files in my head multiple times, but what X-Files fan didn’t?
Self-inserty Star Wars fanfiction, before I even knew what fanfiction was. Then a couple of years later, I wrote a ton of Buffy and Angel fanfiction. Unfortunately, most of it was on slayerfanfic and is totally gone now–I would love to see what it was like. I don’t think it was good, I just want to know. (And probably hide.)
Romance fanfic about Harvest Moon for N64. That’s right. The farming simulation game. Then someone emailed me and said, “This is the worst fanfic ever and you should take it down,” and I DID. And I never wrote another fanfiction again.
OK, I know it was Lord of the Rings, but it was either a VERY DEPRESSING introspective Eowyn-POV fic where she decides to ride into battle after Aragorn HER ONE TRUE LOVE (I was very Eowyn/Aragorn-positive back then for some reason, which is weird since now I would probably slice apart anyone who tried to keep her from Faramir), OR it was a self-insert thing where Legolas was in love with me and I was an elf named Feriniel or something and it was so dumb, maybe the worst thing ever. Probably still on my LJ somewhere but I’m too afraid to look.
I think my first fanfic was actually for school — in 8th grade — where I turned in both Flatland fanfic (about A.Square’s daughter breaking her father out of prison, obviously) and Ivanhoe/Rebecca fanfic. Then I graduated to writing Tamora Pierce stuff and posting it on ffn.net
Flatland fanfic (!!!) <3
I wrote a Spongebob fanfic on a yellow legal pad in 3rd grade including illustrations. I made everyone find significant others but with characters I made up.
ALSO I vaguely remember writing stories about my two (real life) red eared slider turtles Franklin and Checkers where they talked and went on adventures.
I also wrote fanfic about the French Resistance — basing all the Resistance fighters on Les Mis characters.
First and to date only complete and published fic was a humor, one-shot, challenge fic for Gundam Wing. It was on shinigami.org circa…1999ish?
Age 14–Harry Potter fanfic in which Harry is a jerk and dating Hermione and rapes her and I don’t know why it was so dark. I wrote it on the bus ride home from school but I don’t think I ever published it online.
Late to the party but: final fantasy 1, the Nintendo one, and I wrote about the endless fight the characters went though as actors versus the player, because reboot, probably.
when i was like 7 or 8 i drew a lot of what I think could count as fanart for the Wild Thornberries (I was particularly good at drawing Eliza’s plaits, I was very proud of myself, I think my mum kept the drawings somewhere), and then when I was 15 or so I rewrote the Harry Potter epilogue ft. Dr Who and Donna Noble and a dragon they and Hermione had to save the ministry from, and Hermione was divorced and for some reason Malfoy and one of the Gryffindor boys were getting married???? and then a really short and kind of angsty Remus/Sirius. and then when I was 16 I got an A in english on a poem about Jordan from the Great Gatsby being in love with Daisy and the first stanza was published in the yearbook. SO.
I just can’t believe I wasted all that time in my youth beating myself up for being a weirdo who liked reading and writing fan fiction, when clearly, all of the coolest people did it! To be fair, there probably wasn’t many other in my small ton of 700 that did.
I read a LOT of Star Wars fan fiction, and wrote a lot of Luke/Mara smut that I never showed anyone. Actually I used to hand-write it because I was so paranoid about my parents finding it on our family computer! They were mostly about them bickering a lot, and then one of them almost dying/becoming ill, and them getting together after a near-loss realization of love from the other. It was basically Anne and Gilbert over and over again.
I wrote an rpf story about JC Chasez and Lance Bass having sex on a beach. Not the alcoholic drink, actual intercourse on a real beach. The other three members of NSYNC were also there somewhere, probably. No sex for them, though. I was a huge Lance girl.
When I was in elementary school (early 2000s), my best friend and I spent most of our time playing the “game” In The Time Of Godric Gryffindor, in which the main characters were lions back, well, in the time of Godric Gryffindor. We named them all after flowers. Godric and the rest of the founders showed up occasionally. My friend and I each had 5-10 specific lions that we regularly pretended to be so that we could act out scenes. I have no idea how we came up with this or why we thought it had anything to do with Harry Potter, but it was kind of awesome.
In sixth grade I wrote maybe 20 pages of Marauders-era fic? There were original characters but it wasn’t particularly self-inserty. I think it was supposed to be humor. I never had any interest in writing Trio-era, though.
…tbh since then I have started quite a number of fics in quite a number of fandoms, although other than a Danny/Rusty Ocean’s 11 one-shot, I actually don’t think I’ve finished anything. #ADHDproblems
Felicity (the American Girl character) self-insert. I was 10.
There are WAY too many of these to read but I want to read them all!! Mallory, I beg you, please do a roundup post of these next week.
Also, mine was Neopets, and it was PUBLISHED in the NEOPIAN TIMES. Peasants.
Thank you for reminding me that I also had Neopets fic published in the Neopian Times! It was about my pet Ado (she was some kind of griffin thing- I forget what they were called) and it was titled Much Ado about Ado and I was SO PROUD.
Remus Lupin sadness porn when I was 10/11. Like, not actual porn, but a directionless, multi-chapter story (unfinished) about when he was undercover with Greyback full of gratuitous moping. I found it again when I was 16 and it was, I don’t know, not terrible? Better than Fitty Shades probably.
Three categories here:
For blatant ripoff, er, I mean pastiche – I was about 6-7 when I was writing stories *heavily inspired by* the Secret Seven. Later there followed stories *heavily inspired by* Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Swallows and Amazons, and ST:TNG.
For sheer id-tastic Mary Sue-ness – I never actually wrote any of this down, but it was an epic crossover between ST:TNG, my ST:TNG-inspired novel, and “Oh hey for some reason ST:TNG is filming in New Zealand and I get to be a guest star!”
First actual-written actual-fanfic – I *think* it was “That Laser Eye”, and I also believe it may have been the first Janeway/Seven slash story published (at least on Usenet) in the world, a distinction only marred by the fact that (living in New Zealand as I do) the episode introducing Seven was some months away so I was writing based on second-hand accounts of it and guesswork. Good times, good times.
I wrote what I am pretty sure was a Hardy Boys fanfic in my class journal in second grade. I don’t remember much except they had adventures with a self-insert character named Sophie, which I liked as a name much better than my own.
Either Artemis Fowl or Neopets. I wrote both around age 11-12, I’m not totally sure which was first.
The Artemis Fowl one was about a self insert girl who went to the same private high school that Artemis transferred into, but she was — GASP — a changeling who had been kidnapped by faeries as an infant into a loving family that let her re integrate with humans. It was intercut with stanzas of “The Stolen Child” by Yeats.
I also had an ongoing Neopets story-journal with a friend, where we would exchange letters and postcards from two faerie BFFS (I was Sirena the Water Faerie, she was Aracely the Earth Faerie).
I have a crush on all of you! This thread is the BEST THREAD EVAR.
I want every single one of these stories posted to the Archive of Our Own for safekeeping forever. Stat! ( archiveofourown.org: it says invite only but last I checked, you get an invite the same day)
Also does anyone remember the way people used to use Quizilla quizzes to basically write fanfic or sometimes actual fic? There was one called “I’m a girl in an all boy’s boarding school”and it went pretty much how you’d expect. That one wasn’t fanfic I don’t think though
ahhhh I found it she reposted the first three chapters http://quizilla.teennick.com/user/youandmeboth/pr…
I can’t remember the first one, but it was probably Sailor Moon. However, I would like to tell you about the early fanfic that I remember best, and I think Mallory is going to like this: let’s just say it comes from the time in my life when I was reading Star Wars EU novels really heavily, I earnestly believed I could have it published as an EU novel, and it commits horrifying crimes against Star Wars canon.
The essential thing about this fic is that at some point after the end of Empire Strikes Back and before Luke went to Tatooine to construct his new lightsaber, he was captured by Imperial forces and brought to Coruscant (This TOTALLY could have happened, ok!). The Emperor is old and decrepit as fuck, and he needs a successor. He’s only managed to father one daughter in all his time as emperor, on account of his decrepitude. He also has a problem with with Vader being a total malcontent who wants power for himself (come on Vader, you think Palpatine doesn’t know you’re proposing to Luke that you guys should overthrow him and rule the galaxy yourselves? You dummy!). Obvious solution that any monarch would hit upon: POWER SOLIDIFYING ARRANGED MARRIAGE! Train Luke to be evil, marry him off to the daughter (she had a name, I’m sure of it… I just can’t remember it. We may as well just call her Mary Sue for now), you’ve successfully established a dynasty and gone a long way towards neutralizing your Vader problem since he’s now the father to the next emperor.
Since Palpatine is kinda sexist and not that interested in his daughter, she’s managed to grow up to be not-that-evil, so OBVIOUSLY she and Luke ACTUALLY FALL IN LOVE while he’s being held there. But then one day there’s this perfect opportunity for Luke to escape, and she does the noble, self-sacrificing thing, and uses her force powers to make him forget he’d ever been there in the first place, because he’s too important to the rebellion and she knows he’ll try to come back and rescue her and just get captured or killed. And then after the emperor is killed, she manages to escape Coruscant in the chaos. Years and years later, she and Luke stumble across each other, he gets his memory back, and DRAMA ENSUES.
I have to say, it feels really great to be able to tell people who I know will understand. Thanks, Toasties. Thanks, Mallory.
Also, to this very day when I google my real name, I can find the fic I wrote for Roar, the short lived (but BRILLIANT!) show about the Roman invasion of ancient Ireland (which I found out a decade later never even happened! ROAR LIED TO ME) starring Heath Ledger. I mean… My real name, though? Was I really so proud of my Roar fanfiction that I wanted it to be attached to my name FOREVER?
EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT SOUNDS AMAZING.
I wrote an epic length X-Men evolution fanfic with an OC, which I tried really hard to not make me, but it ended up just being me because I was fucking twelve and wanted to be an X-Man SO BADLY (I still want to be an X-Man so badly, tbh tho).
But, I think technically the first fanfic I ever wrote was for my seventh grade history class. We had an assignment where we had to write a fictional story about some historical event from the time period we were studying. I wrote about a Pony Express rider and put WAY more effort into it than any of my classmates. Like, I’m pretty sure my teacher was concerned over how much I cared about writing a Pony Express story. I still have a lot of Pony Express feelings, but fortunately that was my first and last foray into Pony Express fan fiction.
*whispers* Is everyone gone yet?
OK, a few years ago I realized that my middle school best friend and I wrote a long, long series of Real Person Self-Insert fic, in which we were each a part of separate sets of Famous Sextuplets, and our siblings were all our favorite tween/teen celebs. Our #1 crush was our boyfriend/friend’s brother. Hers was JTT, always, and mine changed sometimes but was definitely Brad Renfro for awhile, Elijah Wood, probably a few others. Also, our siblings all had to date the other person’s siblings too, so like Rider Strong had a whole storyline with Christina Ricci. For example.
Since this was, cough cough, 1992-ish, there was no Internet on which to post this masterpiece. It was saved on my parents’ Apple, until that went kaput, and sometimes my friend would print the whole beast out so she could take it home with her to read in between our sleepovers. On the one hand, THANK GOD none of it exists anymore, but at the same time…kinda wish I could read it.
I am weirdly gratified to discover that five bleeding pages of comments in, no one has mentioned fic based on Steven Brust’s Dragaera novels. Now, I am not terribly into fanfic generally, and my example is kind of atypical, but I mention it because of the exceedingly high dork factor:
1) It was a poetic ballad in rhyming couplets. Wait. Possibly quatrains?
2) I wrote it as an assignment for English class when I was… 15? Ish?
3) I MAILED it to the author.
Mr. Brust sent me a very gracious non-form letter in reply. I hope to the Demon Goddess that it’s still somewhere in my possession, or my mom’s basement. I don’t think I even have a copy of the ballad itself. Someday perhaps it’ll be unearthed when the Vlad Taltos series is given the worldwide plaudits it deserves and they naturally start publishing Steve Brust’s correspondence.
Gilmore Girls. Starting in 2001. So much Gilmore Girls. So very much Gilmore Girls that I still occasionally write it out of force of habit and because it’s comfortable.
Pokémon. My protagonist was a Pikachu trapped inside her Pokéball. The inside of the Pokéball was heavily inspired by the inside of Genie’s lamp from I Dream of Genie: an abundance of purple pillows. It was a metaphor. I was 11.
A Les Mis self insert in which I was a bad ass female revolutionary and both Enjolras and Grantaire were in love with me. (I was a senior in high school and most definitely knew better at that age.)
Within a year or two I had cut out the middle man (myself) and just started slashing Enjolras/Grantaire. The quality of the fic didn’t improve, but the sex scenes became a lot more interesting.
Mine was a post-apocalyptic dystopian space opera. For Neopets.com.
Basically, the evil Dr. Sloth had finally managed to take over the planet of Neopia (mainly due to the fact that after about the fiftieth failed takeover attempt, everyone had stopped taking him seriously), and had accomplished his goals of mutating all the Neopets and generally ruining everything. A tiny band of rebels had to use whatever dubiously useful technology they could get their hands, paws, tentacles, and various other appendages on to bring down his evil empire and free the planet.
The story gleefully used just about every overdone sci-fi trope I could fit into it (Alien Invasion! Evil Overlord! Evil Twin! The Last Of Her Species! Rebels vs. Empire! Space Battles! Heroic Sacrifice But Actually Not Dead!). I had a blast writing it, got it accepted to the Neopian Times, and have never really written anything like it since.
So many fond memories from that website.
…that’s amazing. (I tried to write a couple Neopets fics, but I never finished them, so I never got anything in the Neopian Times.)
omggggg my first fic was an ASOIAF one, actually. And I was not a teen. But still. And it’s still up on AO3, completely unfinished, as I don’t really ship the ship it revolves around any more. Also, I get distracted easily and am a slooooow writer, which is a bad combo. But it was the first thing I was brave enough to share with others, so I guess I have to be proud of it.
I love this thread so much and I love all of you in this thread so much!
A 30+-page Dark Angel fanfic in 8th grade. All I remember is that it involved a helicopter, and what to my mind was a really steamy sex scene that, I am pretty sure, mostly consisted of making out.
I was about to say “it’s been so long that I don’t remember” but actually it was an invented Sailor Scout, Sailor Apollo, whose planet was destroyed and became the astroid belt. I forget what the story was about but she had curly hair which was fun to draw (by which I mean trace from existing Sailor Moon stuff I had but add curly hair).
Then I wrote a lot more fanfiction after that but that was the first.
Fan poetry, mostly. LotR-inspired. Or, rather, FotR-inspired, since *for years* there was only the first book (in a “slightly abridged translation”, as translators themselves put it). And later – several years later – an attempt to reconstruct The Silmarillion from what the “main” translator wrote about it in the preface to the new “Fellowship” edition, non-abridged this time. I also kind of envisioned it (Silmarillion) as an epic ballet.
Lizzie McGuire. I launched into hardcore Lizzie/Gordo shipping mode after the movie came out. I was 12 at the time. Then I saw School of Rock and started writing fic where I shipped the kids and I had Very Specific Shipper Opinions based solely on which ships were in the first SoR fic I read.
Because I am OLD, my first fanfic (a term I did not at that time know) was based on Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades.
Points:
1- I discovered Georgette Heyer at my grandmother’s house at the age of 10
2- I wrote my story in RUNES, which was the first code I learnt to hide all things embarrassing from my 5 siblings, who had no mercy
3- This was one of the few pieces of my early fiction I kept and I was heartbroken when it recently got destroyed by a flood.
Next, I moved on to Gordan Korman (I want to go Home and the Boots series), LM Montgomery (Anne/Diana 4EVAH), and then my first original work which I was going to have published by Mills & Boon (Harlequin in the US) where a novice NUN in AFRICA falls in love. Please note I was 14 when I wrote this, and knew nothing of a)nuns b)Africa c)sex.
Please, the people want to know: are we talking Bruno/Boots?! Cathy/Diane? OP pls
-Ludicrious self-insert romance with Rudy from IWTGH, where I was a camper at the all girls camp next door (again, please note I lived in New Zealand and only knew of “summer camp” through the medium of American popular culture.)
-Boots was always always Boots/Bruno. There could be no other pair.
This was all pre-Internet so there is no evidence of my early GENIUS remaining, sadly.
Thanks to you I have spent the last week mired in Bruno/Boots; it is so delightful and uniformly wholesome.
Stargate/Star Trek crossover epic, of which only three chapters were ever published. And then a oneshot about mpreg from Devil Wears Prada?? Yeah idk either.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991. Yes. The Kevin Costner one. Yes.
I keep thinking of terrible fanfic-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off that I wrote as a kid, and then thinking, No, but before THAT… and it goes all the way back to me lying on the kitchen floor with a green crayon and asking my mom how to spell words so I could write what happened after the end of a picture book I’d just read. I was 3. The story extension included my imaginary cat. I had an imaginary cat. We had a real cat, so I’m not sure why I needed an imaginary one.
I almost never write fanfic now, and when I start, it’s just one scene and I never write the whole story.
Because you needed more cats – is the obvious answer. 😉
At 12 years old, I wrote a Final Fantasy X fanfic starring Tidus reincarnated as a girl after the events of the game. She had no memory of being Tidus. She had a dragon (who was ALSO Tidus) living in her head. They were both dorks. Her love interest was Auron reincarnated as a guy named Orion (SO CLEVER). The whole thing was very slice of life. There were some perilous events later in the book, but mostly it was about lady Tidus (her name was DESTINY) acclimating to life on Spira during the Eternal Calm.
Oh, man. Starting back in like 1995 I started writing this huge, sprawling, Paradise Lost AU fix-it fic. I invented my own fantasy world where everyone had animals that represented their souls, there were witches and a cowboy with a hot air balloon and talking polar bears, and it switched between like a modern day universe and a Victorian England one? I added a femme fatale villain and made Adam and Eve children. Wow. You could probably still find it now if you went looking. It won some awards. I was 50.
Age 19, HP, AU Draco/Ginny one-shot where she owns a muggle music venue/ bar. Very angsty and very short.
OH WAIT! When I was 15 I wrote fanfiction about traveling to London where my friends and I *just happen* to meet and pair up with Dan Rad, Rupert Grint, etc. AND THEN I TURNED IT IN FOR A CREATIVE WRITING ASSIGNMENT IN ENGLISH CLASS.
I teach middle school and in my creative writing class last year, I got MULTIPLE fics submitted for the short story assignment. I got self-insert RPF, The Fault in Our Stars fic, SUPERNATURAL FIC, which LOL I’ve dabbled in SPN fic myself. >.>
This comment right here is seriously making me consider a career change.
The first one was a tragic self-insert fic about me and Spiderman, where I was a cool superhero and Spiderman a lovable, bumbling idiot who got himself into all sorts of trouble from which I had to rescue him. I illustrated it myself with myriad sketches of Spiderman’s rotund (or so I pictured) ass. And then, a few years later, I fell violently in love with Erik Lensherr/Magneto (of course. While my friends sighed about Harry Potter, I secretly harbored a crush for Tom Riddle all through middle school) and wrote a TERRIBLE 200 page saga about our Troubled But True Love.
I cannot POSSIBLY be the only person who wrote Dune fanfic. Specifically, a huge battle between CHAOM spaceships and Jihad-ing Fremen. Jesus, just reading that I realize what a huge nerd I was.
I wrote an awful emotionally wrought Draco/Hermione one shot as Head boy/girl fanfic at age 15. It was horrific and has long since been removed from ff.net. Lots of teenage angst, and feeling torn by demands of parents, families, friends, school & good v evil.
Love reading through these!
Funnily enough came across my first fan fic written back in 1998 about Prince William. I’d tried to find it many times over the years but angelfire was always down. Anyway it’s back up now and it was a horrifying look into my mindset at 14 years old, and riddled with bad grammar and bad spelling. Entertaining non the less.
Thanks for admitting it! I do too. I've been writing it on and off for 14 years. I worked on my most recent fic today. NO SHAME.
(For the record, Ron/Hermione were my first too)
Actually, I thought of it because of the comment above re: soccer player songfic! I never thought I'd see it either. Proof that bookish and reserved souls can ALWAYS find a like-minded weirdo on The Toast.
And Iker was definitely always invited to join my threesome (foursome?) with Sergio and Xabi.
Snape / Hermione parody that I wrote for my best friend’s 17th? 18th? birthday.
Only kind of not a parody because I actually shipped them.
This can still be found online. Also, for fanfiction I never wrote down, I shipped Dr. Quinn / Sully HARD as a child. I used to tell myself stories about them before I went to bed, and only later did I learn the word for those stories … fanfiction.
Age 12: bridge to teribithia alternate ending.
Similar age: Tamora Pierce with actual sex scenes, and I’m so ashamed.
An Elijah Wood fanfic at the height of my LOTR awkward teenage fandom days! It was about a girl who stalked him and tried to mould herself into his ideal girlfriend, and after he dated her and eventually broke up with her she stalked and murdered/attempted to murder his subsequent girlfriends. Very Fatal Attraction! I never finished it, but the two endings I was tossing up between was either that she got impaled by a falling stalactite and died, or she was locked up in a mental institution and was slowly chipping away at the metal bars on the windows with a nail file in an attempt to escape.
It’s still probably on an Elijah Wood fan board somewhere. I’m dying of embarrassment thinking about it!
Wallflowers fan fiction. As in, that random 1990s band. I know. But y’all. I combined Wallflowers + vampires. Really. And I had another Wallflowers super fan who was going to do a comic book of my fan fiction, and drew up the characters… Anyway, it’s my secret favorite accomplishment.
Jonny Quest! At least the only one I ever posted was Jonny Quest. It was the mid 90s, and I was excited to have Cartoon Network… so that happened. I also spent two years working on a Voltron epic in a spiral notebook, which I (thankfully) never typed up.
First was Queer As Folk Brian/Justin POETRY (age 12), and I was tickled when I discovered four years ago that I never managed to delete my old fanfiction website, explained here: http://la-fields.livejournal.com/392796.html
I can’t remember the first piece of fanfic I wrote, but the first I actually published was an ‘Alias’ story (Sarkney forevs). Because I’ve still got the email address I used to sign up to ff.net back in those days, I still get alerts when people Favourite the torrid outpourings of my teenage mind and debate with myself over whether I should reply or get back to work when the PMs come through asking when I’ll update (which I haven’t done since 2006). Ah, the heady days of relative fandom fame!
I was an odd child and teen with a ludicrously intense view of copyright (thanks, LawyerMom and LawyerDad!), so I only spun fanfiction in my head and never DREAMED of writing it down where God and the Law could see it. (I did have an extremely involved idea for a novel which looking back was a BLATANT ripoff of Tamora Pierce’s Alanna series.)
So the very first fanfic I wrote was at the late age of TWENTY-NINE, and it was a collection of diary entries written by Prince Zuko of Avatar: The Last Airbender, who I found hilarious in his broodiness. This was the very first one:
“Dear Diary, another terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day. Azula tried to kill me again, and then I fell down. Can’t find Avatar, but stepped in sky bison poop, so maybe he’s around. Nobody understands my pain. No progress re: my honor. Now Uncle is snoring, so can’t even sleep. Guess I’ll just brood in the dark. – Zuko.”
YES.
Trigger warning here for sexual violence (oh boy).
My first fanfic, aged 13, was a Batman Begins PWP (it’s been a while since I’ve used that acronym) about Batman and Scarecrow. It was a rape scene, because I was a horny child and had absolutely no morals. Batman/Bruce Wayne wakes up in a straitjacket because Scarecrow has captured him. Said villain then forces Batman to suck him off. That set the tone for the rest of the slash fic I wrote over the next four years.
It no longer exists anywhere, which is a shame because I really want to read it to see how my 13 year old self wrote about blowjobs.
excuse me you are perhaps referring to the three chapter long handwritten epic west wing fanfiction i wrote at age eleven starring me as president cj cregg’s fiesty daughter — at one point i call my love interest (the son obviously of josh and donna) a “chavenist” for not wanting to use the pink silly string when pranking the senior staff of the west wing during a hurricane-related government shutdown. in the space of three chapters there are two white house lockdowns, a state dinner in which i faint onto the french ambassador AND on top of it all a guest appearance by a christmas donkey.
You know, I honestly don’t remember what my first fanfic was about. But I guarantee it was Harry Potter-related, and I never finished it. All of my early fics were HP, and only one actually got finished.
I am looking for Baby-Sitters Club and not finding it! I have a whole notebook that I wrote a fanfic in about dealing with a horribly racist family(?), mimicking the writing styles of the various babysitters. I was really good at Jessi’s long-tailed cursive and Stacey’s bubbly, be-hearted print.
So I’m slightly horrible because my first fic… was twilight fic. It was pretty dark too. It started with Bella’s father being murdered by a vampire, and then she vowed revenge against all of them. But she realized she couldn’t fight them as she was so she like somehow figured out edward was a vampire and she FORCED him to bite her. And then there was lots of murder. I was a weird kid I guess.
A close family member was hittin’ the Twilight fanfic hard and seventh grade me was all, oh cool im happy if ur happy seems like fun, but then I did a little digging and found out that HOLY GOD there was MORE HARRY POTTER AND LOTR on the Internet but with SEX IN IT?? And I never looked back.
Oh man, BWOC! I rewatched it a couple years ago and oh geez, it was inappropriate how many pants feelings I still have for Merton and Merton/Tommy. I def wrote slash about them. A lot. Yep. Of course, some were self-insert romance/smut fics – I was goth in middle school and if I was transferred to Pleasantville I would have ~understood~ him and we’d have all the hot geeky sex in his basement.
I also wrote stuff in the Redwall universe, but not using any actual characters except in reference to past events or prophecies. This was an outgrowth of all the Redwall message board RPGs I played in.
My first fanfic might have been about the John Peel Diadem series – lots of smut! drama! love triangles! self insert! An OC named Trixie (WTH, self, w.t.h.) who was basically a human Eevee (I loved/love Eevee, this was not a coincidence) who could transform between all the standard fantasy novel ‘elements’ and was paired up with Pixel (ugh, how I loved writing about the conflict between her ultra-hippie-nature-being self and his super-cyborgian-unathletic self.) There may have been crossover fic with the Diadem heros coming to Hogwarts to train Harry and co. on battling the forces of evil. I stopped reading before the series finished and I am seriously tempted to get them from a library. I was obsesssssed and I wonder what they’d be like to me now.
I wish I had written more Mary Sue fanfic.
I did however write a Mary Sue parody fic for Harry Potter because, when I was a teenager, I was Extremely Cool & Interesting. It mostly focused on my Hufflepuff OCs.
I AM JUST COMMENTING TO SAY I PROBABLY READ YOUR BIG WOLF ON CAMPUS FIC, MALLORY, BECAUSE I HAVE READ EVERY SHRED OF WRITING ON THE TOPIC AND STILL OCCASIONALLY LAUGH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY ABOUT THINGS I CAN’T REMEMBER WHETHER THEY WERE CANON OR FIC, SO
HI
also, it was either NSYNC or Gundam Wing, for me. AND SO MUCH SPIKE/XANDER, WOW
After a long and rewarding decade of hXc *~wolfstar~* readership (Remus/anyone 4 life), my sole excursion into authorship is about 500 handwritten words on Dean/Seamus, vis à vis political implications of THEIR LOVE after the war, currently residing in my sketchbook? I am 24 years old.
I’m not sure if it counts, but when I was little (around 6-8 yo) I used to act out “plays” for my younger sister that were sequels for my favorite movies and TV shows (I remember The Lion King in particular) or were ripoffs of same (I created a “show” called Shelley the Sheltie that was basically a copy of Wishbone).
Oh mercy, mine are embarrassing.
I think, technically, my first fanfic was Pokemon, and I was 12. I don’t remember the details, but it was definitely DARK and EDGY, like I think the first scene was Missingno. (yeah, the glitch) swooping down and killing a rattata.
But I made fanfics in my head before then. Like, in the minutes (or hours) I spent lying in bed before actually going to sleep, I would imagine myself as the girlfriend of Tails. Yes, the fox. From Sonic the Hedgehog. I WAS LIKE TEN, OKAY. And my name was Tailsie, very creative.
I swear I’m a well-adjusted person now.
Oh god, I wrote a long meditative piece on Colin Creevey descending magically to the bottom of the Great Lake. Something something mind-connection with the squid, something something. It was absolutely terrible, and so so earnest. Nothing *happened*, but there were loads of descriptions of the way the light filtered down. Ohhhhh godddd, I’m remembering more and more of it now.
Definitely something super short based on the Chronicles of Narnia in first grade. Then something about Delirium from Sandman in high school. They must have had some kind of plot? Maybe? I didn’t start READING much fanfic/ understanding fanfic sites existed until college, so they’re lost forever.
Ack, I know this thread is done now, but I’m commenting anyway for posterity.
I think technically my first fanfic was written when I was about ten, although I insisted at the time that it was an original work and I didn’t know what fanfic was yet. It was called Katerina the Warrior and it was a Redwall ripoff. I remember the title and I remember my mom gently telling me that it sounded an awful lot like Redwall, but sadly I can’t remember any plot details. I’m not even 100% sure that Katerina was a squirrel now that I’m thinking about it, she could’ve been anything really. I eventually abandoned it unfinished, and as I don’t think it was ever printed out, it has been lost to time.
My first intentional fic was Harry Potter, of course, it was James/Lily and it was based off the Click Five song “Just the Girl.” I’m sure it was terrible, but I can’t go back to confirm that because I took it down, along with all my other fic, when I more or less left the fandom. I mean, I never truly left, HP is still very very important to me, but I did stop posting in the forums and reading fic and stuff.
That whole ‘never truly left’ thing is so on point. I may not post, read, or follow the HP fandom any more, but it’s definitely still *my* fandom, somehow.
I approve of YOU (one week later).
ST>TNG self insert as one of Rikers sisters. Smaller sister turned out to be God. Also rabbit poop in Data circuits.
Some complicated stuff about Gillian Anderson and Davis Duchovny had a daughter how got raised by a secrets organization and trained to travel in time in Quantum Leap style. Her best friend came from a parallel universe that was a Star Wars rip off and was like the Emperors daughter or something. The best part was that may self insertion was not the main character but a side character, who just happened to know everything but never go on an adventure.
I was a very shy teenager.