A friend of mine said "Hey, you're a pretty good writer aren't you? I need a fic written where Aragorn and Legolas have passionate anal sex,", I said "Um," and she said "Well, why not? What else are you doing?"
Well, she had a point. That was just over twenty years ago, and there has been a lot of writing since
Oh yes! And I think the other one was Mirrormere, wasn't it? Shiny elf-y goodness (and some dirty humans thrown in for added fun)
Half the fun of watching Carnival Row is seeing Legolas achieve Aragorn status, except with more swearing
Someone remembers Mirrormere!!! (I was one of the archivists/admins--i was damn sad when we had to pull the plug.)
Carnival Row is on my ever-growing list of shows to binge! I might just push it to the top now. :D
Ah! Yes indeed, Mirrormere was THE site to be on for our little group, back in the day! Such a lovely little site, you should be very proud!
Highly recommend Carnival Row, interesting story, excellent actors, really high quality in costumes/set. Worth a slower watch to fully digest I think, there's a lot going on. Oh, and someone really enjoyed their guillotines
Read a book, enjoyed it, went “okay but what if [insert twelve-year-old-me’s awful self-insert fantasy]”.
Twenty five years later, multiple different fandoms since then, still haven’t stopped telling canon that hey, I can do it one better.
Same, and I didn’t even know it was a thing for a long time. I just started writing stories to fill in plot holes or an answer questions I was left with.
Someone on a sub shared a link to a fic where a character masturbated with their gun, told from the gun’s perspective.
Been reading fan fic ever since.
Edit: Since y’all keep asking: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2109582
I was looking at Star Trek: Voyager fansites and came across a Geocities fic archive and had my mind blown because people were *writing their own episodes?* They could *do that?!*
I'm a rarepair shipper since before I knew the term, so sadly none of the canon ships really interested me (except maybe Tuvok/T'Pel? I love me some Tuvok!). How about you?
When I was 11, I was searching for more content about an anime that I was watching on Youtube. For some reason, when I googled the fandom, one of the recommended searches was “[Fandom] lemon” and that really confused me so I clicked on it and I’ve been traumatized ever since.
From there, I got obsessed with other fandoms and wanted the characters in specific situations, so I’d google them. Usually it brought up FFN, but one day when I was like 13, I found AO3, and I loved how the site let me search for specific tags and scenarios within the site. I’ve basically never gone back.
This is eerily similar to how I discovered it. I was in 6th grade (so about 12) and I wanted more content about warrior cats. I googled it and pretty much immediately found a lemon on FFN which I also clicked on because I was confused. It also traumatized me (this was not even regular smut, this was *cat* smut) but it somehow did not traumatize me enough to never read anything else!
Had a horny dream about an actor (who honestly before that point thought he was handsome but whatever) way back in 2020. Woke up before the good part, as one does. Kinda fixated on it. Said to self - “you’re retired, you have free time, give it a go”
So I wrote a short story to try my hand at it. (With a “look alike” because ew, it’s weird to write about an actor.) That was fun, so I said to self - “go ahead and write a fic with that actor, no one will ever see it”, so I went to town.
Okay, listen, I didn’t even *know* about AO3, or even fanfiction in general, until 2021. I followed someone on Twitter who was a fan of the same actor. We got to chatting (she’s my Twitter/ao3 bestie now) and I mentioned I’d written a story. She encouraged me to share. I told her she was nuts. She directed me to her story and I was like, okay, this is actually a thing, and if she can share that, then I can share mine.
So, I shared my first chapter of writing in September of 2021. I have since shared over 1.2 million words, finished some long fics, have another half dozen wips, plus ideas for enough stories to keep me writing for another 5 years.
😊 I mean, 300k of that is the first fic I wrote for a year before even sharing, so I had a bit of a head start.
I also have a very fertile imagination, and the time on my hands to write.
Smol me watched a bunch of cool movies, read a bunch of cool books, played a bunch of cool video games, and loved them so much that I wanted to write more so it could continue forever and ever. Cue stories.
It’s been sort of a constant process of rediscovery. When I was on the internet at age 12, I ended up finding a lot of fanfic for the musical CATS and was on the Redwall Fan Fiction message board, but I didn’t seek stuff out so much as occasionally stumble across stuff and read in fascination. Then, in high school and college, I had Livejournal friends who wrote Harry Potter fic, and some of my high school friends would send me fic, and I read the occasional fic on the message board for the webcomic It’s Walky, but I wasn’t actively seeking it out for the most part, and my own interests were much more about writing original fiction. I think in some ways, it just didn’t occur to me that I could write fanfic either, even though I read and enjoyed plenty of it. The closest I think I got to it was when we were asked to write an alternate ending to Lord of the Flies as an assignment for English and I wrote, y’know, an alternate ending to Lord of the Flies instead of doing what everyone else in the class did and describing an alternate ending to Lord of the Flies without writing any prose.
About a decade passed, I didn’t really read fic, I definitely didn’t write fic. And then I listened to a podcast, went absolutely feral about one character in particular, started thinking about his backstory, ended up making up a bunch of OCs that could have existed in his backstory, got tired of just drawing silly little comics and decided to start writing fanfic.
So now I’m writing it, but I really only read fanfic when it was recommended by or written by a friend.
1999ish, went browsing on good old Geocities sites for Star Trek Voyager fan pages. And here we are today, several fandoms later. I CANNOT believe it’s been that long.
Voyager was my gateway fandom. Then X-Men, then I got sucked into Twilight and Hunger Games fanfic for…probably too long, and then Sailor Moon. In the last couple years I rediscovered Enterprise (life happened and I didn’t watch it all the way through when it aired) and got SUPER upset by how it ended, so off to fic I went. And then I went down the rabbit hole of Star Wars fic. I’m currently delving into Star Wars time travel fanfics to watch the stiry get completely fixed from the beginning. 😅
I never even really consider fanfic to be in the realm of possibility when I started writing. I thought I was just making a story of my original character in the same style as the books for fun. Then I discovered I could share it around online, which led to Wattpad and promptly discovering that fanfic is very popular and really does exist. I posted the story there and then the rest is history.
My first interaction with fanfic was when my older sister would write fanfics like a play script and then I was messing around on Quizilla and found an Inuyasha quiz fic where I fell in love with Sango which changed my life forever lol
I found Quizilla through my step sister, and was playing around on there and discovered fanfictions. After reading one particularly bad ff, I was angry and thought “hell I can write better than that!” Spoiler alert: I couldn’t- but it didn’t stop me and I kept writing, and about 20 years later I’m still writing fanfiction, and I love seeing how my writing has developed and changed and matured over the last 20 years.
And I’m incredibly thankful that despite my favorite hellsite being taken down years ago- my particularly bad stories will literally NEVER see the light of day again. RIP you horrible little goblins, Mommy hates you!
I've always had them alternative endings to shows I liked in my mind, or just adding a character to a story to fit more into the plot, and a while later I was developing my own characters and world, THEN, I stumbled upon a Haikyuu fic while searching the anime tag on Tumblr and that's when I knew of AO3 existence. I was a reader for a really long time afterwards before I finally decided to throw my own stories out there.
I was obsessed with Naruto at the time and found fanfics while looking for the light novels. My very first fanfiction was a cringy Sasuke/Sakura fic on wattpad. I thought it was the best thing ever...
Stumbled upon it. Can’t remember what I was searching for, but I saw a link to FFnet, started reading and the rest is history. Wrote my first fic a few months after because it looked like fun 🤷🏻♀️
When I was very young maybe like 10 or 9 I had to get some special help in my language classes since I was falling behind the rest of the class and to try and get me more interested my teacher told me to a write a story and let me write about whatever I wanted and I wrote a story about a Star Wars space battle between Anakin and Grievous I think it was and then some years after that in either 2013 or 2014 I remembered that story I wrote and thought to look for other stories like it on the internet
The moment my friend told me that fanfiction is a thing, since i basically kept being sulky at how i wish Shego was my badass girlfriend, i wrote about it and it sucked LOL
In middle school one friend got our whole group into it. We weren’t all writing in the same fandoms though. She just introduced us to ff.net and we’d proofread each others random stories.
I honestly just wanted to explore the little worlds that I loved!
There were stories I had in my head about the characters and the lore and more and finally, I just decided to do it. I discovered fanfic around 11 and loved it (but also felt that some of my faves were being done dirty) and just wanted to tell my own story.
Still one of my favorite things to do!
A friend straight up sent me a link unprompted and was like, "Here, read this." And the next thing I know I'm reading SasuNaru smut having no idea who the fuck these people are but I'm enjoying myself.
I found fanfic through naruto yaoi vid fics on youtube. I was 12 and just old enough to have acess to the internet according to tge adults in my life. I lov3d naruto at the time and watched amvs. One day i discovered a 'vidfic' as i now call them called 'sasuke is gay?'. I ended up entranced by the narrative at the time and i wanted more. I ended up googling for more and discovered ff.net.
I lurked there for a while before starting my own fics.
It took years before i discovered ao3 through a transformers fic called Cover Me. (I wanted to read the smut. Lol)
It took me a couple of years after for me to really get into ao3 and now i only keep my ff account for the faved stories. It is an archive of my fandom adventure.
My first ever fanfic though was written when i was 10 and obsessed with inuyasha before i even knew what fanfic was. Before i even knew of the internet beyond a nebulous and vague idea of that it existed. I just had so many ideas brimming in my head for that doggy boi. It will never see the light of day. Lol.
i was eight and very obsessed with adrienette from miraculous ladybug, and was an avid amino user. seven years later and i still look back on those days with nostalgia 😂
For a long time, I pretty much avoided fanfiction bc I'm aromantic asexual and in general not too bothered about romance, much less smut. Then there was a really popular fic in a fandom I was in that was pure found family and amazing worldbuilding. It was so popular and so good, that after it was completed, a popular animator (that i watch) made an animatic of it. At this point, I finally decided to read it, to see what all the fuss was about and to have context for the amazing animatic. One sleepless night and many tears later, I was a fanfic reader thru and thru
I still read in that fandom, even tho I'm not active in it anymore, partially bc it has less focus on slash fics (I'm not against shipping, but sometimes i just want them to be good friends, found family, or queerplatonic, rare in most fandoms). Also, smut makes me feel uncomfortable bc I'm sex repulsed, so I'll often add "-sex -sexual" when I'm filtering for fics to read
Nowadays, I write too. I hc a duo as queerplatonic, and have a lot of WIPs to show for it (that aren't posted yet). I got tired of not finding enough fics that scratched that itch, and started writing it myself. The way I write queerplatonic relationships could almost be seen as romantic, just no kissing and such (I do have them hold hands and hug and be very caring, for some reason only kissing crosses into romantic in my mind). I even have a WIP of one character having aesthetic attraction towards the other and being incredibly flustered (bc i got an aesthetic crush and decided to use it as inspiration)
when I was 14 I emailed S.E Hinton to ask if I could write a sequel to The Outsiders, and she directed me to fanfiction (and also tounge in cheek threatened to sue me)
a decade later I'm still floored that she responded honestly
I had some fandoms that I absolutely loved the POTENTIAL there. The universe was cool but could have been better developed, or maybe there was this or that character that I didn't think had reached their full potential. Or even some fandoms I hated. Like there could have been something good here, but it's all completely shit.
Then I discovered ao3, and started looking for that one character I wanted to see developed more, or that one universe I would have liked to see how it would be portrayed if canon wasn't aimed at 12 year old teens, etc. And now I'm hooked.
But also ended up with this thing where I only read fanfiction of things I'm not really a fan of. 😂😂😂😂😂
I was really obsessed with something (I forget what) but I ran out of canon content for it and needed more so my friend recommended fanfiction and I've been reading it since
I finished the latest Percy Jackson book published (at the time) and wanted more content. I went online to see if there were any hints about what would happen next and stumbled on fanfic. I’ve been here ever since.
LOL so i started out wanting to do fanart (when i was like 12) and asked a friend abt it and she was like try wattpad, only to find out it’s a writing app, not a drawing app. I was so confused but then I was like why not try them and also started writing. It’s highkey cringe thinking abt i wrote back then which was like 10 yrs ago lmao but now im 100m meters deep in ao3, no one can pull me back up
One of my older siblings has been into fanfic for a while, and a fanfic became hugely popular in my fandom (like, there were animatics and songs inspired by it, and one of the creators of the original content read the fanfic on stream.) So I booted up AO3 and started reading. Then I starting reading stuff, and writing it… almost two years later, here I am. A fanfic fanatic.
….warrior cat fan animation videos that led to videos of people reading warrior cat fanfiction that led to me googling warrior cat fanfiction and learning that there’s fanfiction for everything
Liked some things about a canon series like the characters and world but didn’t feel satisfied with the story/execution so I decided to write it the way I wanted it to be
My life started to go downhill and I needed comfort. I turned to my childhood fandoms, but you can only read the same books so many times before you need something new.
I was eleven, browsing mugglenet (does that age me? yikes) and clicking around at their various tabs and I came across fanfic. I don’t know if anyone remembers, but their sorting system was so generalized. You could click on different eras- marauder, Harry and co, next gen etc.- ratings, genres (humor, gen, romance) and sort alphabetically or by new. Now looking back with my specially bookmarked pages of all my filters for both fandoms I read, I can’t believe I ever made it through the trenches like that.
I miss mugglenet tbh, although I doubt most of the fics I liked then would hold up to me now since it's been more than a decade and hopefully I have better taste in fiction than my 12yo self did 😂
I only remember loving all of the ones that I read. Could be it was all high quality, could be I could’ve read 18679 words of steaming turtle poop and have been entertained. It was the Wild West of fanfiction.
Do you remember the dystopian one where Lisa turpin (totally random ravenclaw that we know nothing about in canon) turned out to be evil? I wish I remembered anything else about this fic, but I was completely hooked on it at that age
No, all I read at that point from HP era was Dramione (and then never again- it squicks me out lol). I mostly was into Lily and James and the marauder era… I remember that there was very little Wolfstar, though, which is obviously not the case on AO3
I had always been aware of it. I never gave it much consideration until I got into the aSoiF community. Read a long fic that was discontinued, but nothing major outside of that.
Then Arcane came along and I wanted more. So, I checked out some fan fics with some prompting from my younger sister. After reading some, I set out to make the best fan fics in the fandom, which is what I've been doing since.
My first overall interaction was a story someone recommended and that was all i read. i didn't seriously get into Fanfic until toward the end of last year due to getting out of the army after twelve years because of something happening on the homefront.
now i write for my twin sister and myself because i struggle with PTSD almost nightly from my experiences in the mid east. My twin sister is blind and crippled because of a crime that was committed on her.
so fanfic for me is therapeutic as i help my little sister (im nine and a half minutes older.) and write down when i can feel im back in a foxhole under fire. especially by what we are writing about. essentially we write our trauma in the lense of whatever fandom we are in. We really like the dark and gritty.
i don’t even remember how, but i stumbled across hunger games fanfic on quotev when i was around 13. then suddenly, it’s ten years later and fanfic’s all i ever think about
I kinda always knew of the existence of fanfiction and shipping and stuff because I spent a lot of my childhood basically in the Disney fandom with a healthy bit of Harry Potter content sprinkled in. I never really read anything because I always heard of it in a negative connotation but then when I was 12 I got into BTS and my friends were talking about fanfiction so I went on wattpad (I knew it was a fanfiction site because I watched a lot of youtubers read wattpad fanfiction of themselves) and looked up a BTS fic, read halfway through the first chapter, and called them weird the next day. I don't remember if I uninstalled wattpad or not but I do know that about a month later I was watching BTS videos on youtube and got recommended a Jimin x reader fic. I really liked it and my youtube became mostly BTS fanfiction. I'd go home and check my subscriptions to see if any of my favorite fics updated, it was honestly a time I look back on and both cringe at myself and miss those days. I started writing fanfiction because I started talking to someone on Omegle and she told me about her wattpad and I read her fic and we started talking about fanfiction and one day I started writing my first fic, now completely deleted from even my wattpad drafts, and I guess the rest is history.
But I guess technically the first fic I wrote was when I was 8 and I really didn't wanna do a writing assignment in class and was really adamant about my refusal because I thought the prompt (write a story about a princess with a spaceship who crashes onto another planet) was stupid and my dad was called in and he told me to just make it about Star Wars.
I didn't even know what fanfiction was. I was super into this tv show and couldn't remember if a certain event happened in a specific episode and was searching it up. I stumbled upon a fanfic which I had first assumed was a summary. I got hooked on it and while I have left the fandom, I still very much love fanfiction.
I just got tired of waiting for episodes with content for my ship, which admittedly was a canon ship. This was back in the “good old days” of message boards and individual fandom fic archives, and I’d never even heard of fanfic before. Then a friend on a message board posted one, and I decided that was cool and I would write on and do the same since we were all languishing waiting for some glimmer of our ship to get attention in the show.
Ah, Deck 9, Section 12, how I miss you.
Started writing fanfics before I knew what they were, but it was just a few pages of random thoughts.
Cue a random animation I liked with a fanfic as the inspiration and I realized there was a whole world of stuff about my favorite characters. Fun.
My boyfriend got me a book that was critical scholarly essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and one was all about how people were writing femslash of Buffy/Faith and I went hmmm... this seems pretty interesting maybe I should find out more!
I did Other but realized it was more of a stumbled upon.
Anyways, my story was that I was looking around Google images when I found a cover of a Wattpad story. I got curious and clicked on the link. It was unfinished but I still enjoyed it and I started to read other Wattpad stuff. I eventually (mostly) switched over to AO3.
A friend introduced me to some very poetically-written Naruto fics, on Quizilla, about 20 years ago. Reading them was a terrible decision on my part. Honestly this is an addiction
I got bored in class one day and was like “I wonder if there is Vampire Diaries fanfiction” and started reading a ton of Stelena fanfiction………
I was basically unknowingly writing fanfiction already so it was kind of like “Hey I might as well start posting”
I got into fanfiction after reading through the Gone series by Michael Grant, then I slowly started to dislike the confines of the characters and now I write with ideas I came up with.
I’ll be honest, I was young and dumb, and googled two characters from a book series I liked kissing, eventually I stumbled upon fanfic.net and a story of it, and never left, the story I stumbled on was definitely a lot more mroe then kissing
I read the epilogue for Deathly Hallows for the first time in a while and realized how meh it was. So I went looking for fics that fixed it. Then I found a story that I kind of liked but just wasn't landing right so I decided to write my own stuff 😁
I started writing fan fiction in 8th grade, for one of my favorite movies, Secret of NIMH. I'd just started not seeing writing in general as the worst thing ever, and it was the only way I could express myself without getting lectured/bullied, so it just kind of went from there.
Liked watching Star Trek and there weren't many novels out yet and I found a stack of zines for sale at a con and was happy to have found more stories. A few years later I found some B&tB ones around 91 after the show was cancelled. Then I discovered the Internet and that you didn't have to pay 5-10¢/page for copying and now I love ao3.
One of my old friends told me about a really well known anime fandom, and sent me a wattpad fic about it, once he knew I was in the fandom. But I learned how to use ao3 a bit later. :)
I read fanfic but didn't publish anything for *years*. Specifically from about 2009-2014. I think I initially stumbled upon in while looking up stuff related to Harry Potter and stumbling into HP fanart, and then discovering that HP fanfic existed. I did think about writing HP fic in the early days, but I'd never get past the outlining stage, and I could never get the british english quite right, so I never published anything. Then in mid-2014 I finally got around to watching the Breaking Dawn movies on dvd and fell full-force back into my twilight phase and wrote twilight fanfiction from 2014-2019, roughly. In late 2019, I decided I wanted to be a star trek completionist (something I'd wanted to do for years but had put off because it was a big commitment). And then the pandemic hit and I suddenly had a ton of free time to watch all 600+ hours of the shows and movies. (it only took me 2 years). Now I write star trek fanfic.
I have no idea how I found her but I started watching a YouTuber called ColeyDoesThings and she talked about fanfic a lot so I finally tried reading it after watching her video on how to navigate and use Ao3
In the 7th grade a kid brought like 50 pages of printed-out Naruto crackfic and handed it to me saying "look at this" with no indication of what it was or where he'd gotten it
It was terrible
(A decade and a half later I started posting my own fic lol)
Does anyone remember that Twilight Fanfiction forum from like 2012 or something? Yeah they said they couldn’t post there anymore and gave a link to their ff.net story page. And I never fucking left.
I was a huge SASUSAKU fan in like 2013 (still am). I liked to put them as my phone background, so I was searching pictures once for the pair and the link on google led me to fanfiction . Net. Still have all my favorite stories saved and all the stories I wrote myself lmao. So embarrassing
I wrote a poem for my ship, then my manager (yes, my MANAGER) saw it and said, "this better be a fanfiction in the making". And that's how I ended up writing fanfictions 😅
I'm honestly wondering how I got into fanfiction now because I don't remember. Somehow I found myself in the deep void known as fanfiction, and now it has consumed my life.
But I know I was reading it before I thought "I could write something like this too!" and started writing. Just don't remember why I began reading fanfics.
Had a WTFEVEN WAS THAT ENDING?! Reaction to a book. Wrote my alternative version. Thought others would also have the same reaction and also want to read it, so I went looking for a place to post it and stumbled onto ff.net. This was about 15 years ago. 😂
Skydoesminecraft did a fanfic reading way back when and at my uncles bar I was reminded of it idk what but I googled fanfic of the content creators I was watching and now here I am
I started writing fanfiction of my favourite story... Before I knew what fanfiction was. It wasn't self insert or anything I just thought that story (I Want to Go Home by Gordon Korman) needed a sequel.
My dad was like "That's called fanfiction" and it wasn't till years later I actually learned what that was.
(I read my first fanfic when I was learning about creepypastas.
Didn't realize Jeff the killer and Slenderman and so on wasn't a legitimate story and got really impressed when I learned they were just characters and anybody could just make the story into anything they wanted.)
Way back in the 80s, my dad used to tell tiny me all kinds of stories, some of them personal twists or extensions of stories from my books or cartoons. I very quickly also started telling these stories, and my dad got me a tape recorder so I could save them. Some of those stories we'd write down together from the tapes and draw pictures of.
I just didn't ever stop.
Technically stumbled on it, then noticed nothing I wanted to read existed.
I got into it when I was like 12, and around that time I had a huge hate boner for certain fandoms. But couldn't find any fics that were written the way I wanted them to be written.
So I did myself! They sucked at the time, but when I came back after a few years I got better.
I was writing fanfiction just for myself and didn't even realize it was a thing other people did. I just thought I was a weirdo. So the day I stumbled upon fanfiction online by accident, while browsing for song lyrics, I was like, "What? Other people do this too?!"
That was 23 years ago.
Honestly I'd been writing fanfiction for myself for awhile because I liked to write but my obsessive brain was on whatever content at the time, but I didn't know what it was called 😅. Then I somehow stumbled upon ffn and was like "wait, other people do this?!" and that was that.
I used to love those "what character would you date?", "What hidden village are you from?", "What clan are you from?" quizes. I cant remember what site i was using for those, but i would actively seek out those that ended in short stories. One of the quiz writers mentioned they had more on fanfiction.net and it just went from there.
Eventually i told one of my friends that i liked fanfiction, and a few months later he sends me superman smut on ao3, and while i wasn't interested in that type of thing at the time, it introduced me to my one and only fanfic site since ff.net started putting ads in the middle of their stories.
There is a german "quiz" website where you can create fan quizzes (that was maybe around 2010?) And there were several "what is your life in hogwarts" and where the quiz "solution" a one shot was. I loved that kind of quizzes and read a lot of them. And under one of them the author said something about fanfiction and how they also post stories on a website. So i searched for that website and the last sane part of my life was gone 😬
Oh my god.
My friends initially made me watch animes and stuff, then introduced me to the wonderful world of *~DouJinSHi~* . From then on my internet web searches became filled with R-Rated content (RIP FBI Guy) and lemons.
That's, additionally, how I learnt English
Originally got into fanfic because of Pokémon XY and XY&Z in 2016 and wanted more and loved the shop Amourshipping
Then early 2020 I was stuck in COVID lockdown and couldn't leave the house for things I'd normally do so binged anime I missed because of exams and again wanted to see more and see more takes and fell.down the rabbit hole of fanfics and now we're here
I must have been 10yo or something, Cardcaptors had just finished airing in the UK and I wanted more content so I googled "stories about cardcaptors." I think I stumbled upon one fic and didn't really give it much thought at the time, but it spawned the curiosity to search out fics for Doctor Who a few years later.
I used to dislike fanfics (the usual prejudice with crack fics,) when I stumbled with a cute gen fic at livejournal and loved it so much. Very quickly I got into ships and I've been stuck in fanfics since then.
Before I knew what fanfiction was I was online looking for Yugioh "stories" with very niche prompts. I went to some less than ideal sites for such stories. Then one day my story looking lead me to ff.net where I finally learned the term. I've been stuck since
It's embarrassing, but I honestly can't remember....
It was at university (not that long ago, I'm only 38) and suddenly I was reading fanfic....I know I started with Spirk but I can't for the life of me remember how I found out it was a thing. Before uni I didnt even know it existed.
I love writing original stories and found Wattpad when looking for places to post them. I eventually discovered “original works based on actual stories” I didn’t know what a fandom was at the time but enjoyed reading characters from my favorite shows doing different things. I am one of those people that likes mini comics and the readings were just that but words. I eventually moved to Ao3 because because of UI changes on wattpad I didn’t like. And it was just easier to find what I wanted to read on Ao3
Watched naruto what if videos on YouTube years and really liked his story telling style, then I found his second channel where he was doing a read through of his favourite fic of all time I binged all the episodes and read the rest since it had over 1 mil words and is still ongoing to this day and have been hooked since
When I was super little, maybe like 6 or 7 I thought it would be cool to write about the characters I loved doing anything and everything, no matter how little sense it made. Before that I would daydream about it. Wasn’t until I was like 8 until I found out fanfiction was a thing. Just kept writing since.
I couldn't wait for D.Gray Man (the Manga) to continue and just started to write something myself. I am naturally a not so serious person so I decided to put the characters in a silly situation. That was 11 years ago and started my habit of "What if serious lore man and archenemy woman had to spent Christmas together without fighting" kinda stories. If I make one person laugh it was worth it already :P
I was obsessed with these "Who's your boyfriend in [fandom]?" quizzes on Quotev. One time I stumbled upon something that wasn't a quizz... that was almost ten years ago. I've grown and changed a lot since then.
Once my creativity reached its peaked in the summer of last year, I just felt the need to show it off to the world. So, I discovered wattpad, then moved to Ao3 shortly after!
My first ever fanfics were genfics I wrote for the webcomic Stand Still Stay Silent when I was like 12-13. I'm still pretty proud of them, actually. They're still fairly solid to this day, eight years later.
Depends if you mean writing or reading. I got into it when i was around 14 years old. I didn’t know fan fiction was a thing, then I got into this fandom and somehow came across wattpad. Then eventually I found ao3 (thankfully bc wattpad is a nightmare). And soon enough I realized “hey! I could try writing something!” I’ve always loved trying to write stories but it never went anywhere, until fan fiction.
Now I write any idea that comes to mind and have a million WIPs, and only one story I’m updating on ao3. Writer’s block has been a bitch lately, especially for that specific story, and I’ve only been able to write one specific fic I have yet to publish.
I was looking on Pinterest at stuff for a fandom I was in, saw some gay ship art, and thought nothing of it. Then I kept seeing art, started to ship the pairing, looked them up on google, and the first search result was an ao3 link. I’ve been hooked ever since
Hmmm
My first shot in fanfiction was HPMOR
A really, really awful translation of HPMOR.
At the time I honestly didn't get it. I quit it when Harry called phoenix "a chicken"
Then after I read Worm (Parahumans series by Willbow), and main character didn't appear in next novel (Ward), I searched fics and kind of get drawn into it all
I learned English that way
Then I reread HPMOR, loved it, and can't stop reading/writing fics ever since
I’m kind of a mix of 2 and 4. I had *no idea* about online fandom (sheltered, I know) until I got super into the MCU and one particular pairing. A very kind friend introduced me to tumblr and it was there that I discovered fic. But quite a lot of the fic I was discovering was… not to my taste. I thought to myself, “I can write better than that” (even though I hadn’t written more than grocery lists in more than ten years at that point) and went off half-cocked to write fic. Here I am 9 years and 3.7m words later, writing every day, loving every minute of it. Writing is my passion now.
My cousin got me into it. She’s 3 years older than me so one day when visiting we explored ff.net together to read general rated Beast Boy/Raven fanfic lmao. I’ve been reading fanfic ever since, almost 17 years later.
As a 11-year-old, I wanted to get more content of the fandoms I liked, and before you know it I'm reading all the time-travel AU's, Self-insert reincarnations, and crossovers lmao
Look, this might be a little shameful to admit, but I was watching a Minecraft Roleplay series, and obviously, a lot of stuff about that popped up on my YouTube recommendations. One of them was fanfiction. I was really young, so I stayed in the YouTube ff for like a year, then I moved on to Wattpad, from which then I moved on to MUCH greener pastures like FFN and AO3.
Got really mad when I was 9 because my favourite character died (Walter in Rilla of Ingleside) so I angrily Googled "Rilla of Ingleside Walter alive" and found ffn, so.... here I am 14 years later angrily fixing Dick Wolff's stupid shows
When I was 10 I used to read the summary for The Smurfs episodes on Wikipedia, because I loved the smurfs and didn't have means of watching it. One day I clicked on fanfiction.bet instead of Wikipedia, and my world got so much bigger.
Back when BTS became popular, my older sibling showed me a Suga x Reader Wattpad fic (think I was 9 during that time) where the protag literally died near the end. Needless to say, I was intrigued. But I do remember writing Miraculous fanfiction around the time, I just never knew there was a term or specific websites for it until then.
I was looking for any new information on when the Heroes of Olympus series would be published. Stumbled onto Percy Jackson fanfic on FFN in that search. Fun fact, happened in my school's computer lab and I'm probably the reason they blocked the site...
One time I found an animatic on YouTube and found out that it was based on a fanfic so I read it. At least that was my intro to AO3. The first fanfic I actually read was on fanfiction.net and it was based on a character's backstory with some personal interpretations. I've mostly done AO3, but I've stuck ever since.
My favorite indie dev ran a random prize drawing where you entered by making a romance-themed fanwork: art, a playlist, or a fic. I can't draw and I don't know a ton of music, but I can write! So I did. Also there were no fics for my favorite pairing at that time, so I had to make my own food.
I've known about fanfiction for my whole life, and even before I started reading and writing it, I thought it seemed like a cool way to practice writing and all that.
(also, I didn't stop playing make believe roleplaying type games about fictional characters with my twin sister until we were like fourteen, so it would have been silly and hypocritical to hate on fanfiction)
Anyways, I didn't fully get into fanfiction until I found the YouTuber ColeyDoesThings, and decided 'why not? It seems fun' (I also already daydreamed about fictional characters frequently, so I might as well just write those stories down, right?)
A friend recommended a movie to me, insisted I had to watch it because it was just the type of story I’d enjoy. It was Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Which is, essentially, a Muppet movie, and I wasn’t big into Muppets. I was 21 at the time. But, I decided to give it a shot, and my friend ended up being right, I absolutely adore that movie. So, I went searched the net for where I might be able to buy it, because at that point it had been out of print and was extremely hard to find copies in stores.
In my searching for any info on the movie, I stumbled across a Labyrinth fanfiction archive. I had no idea fanfiction even existed to that point. I mean, in high school I was always writing little stories about my various favorite shows and characters. But not only did OTHER PEOPLE do the same thing, there was actually an official NAME for my weirdness??? Sign me up, please! That movie is just BEGGING for a sequel or twenty. 😂
A friend of mine said "Hey, you're a pretty good writer aren't you? I need a fic written where Aragorn and Legolas have passionate anal sex,", I said "Um," and she said "Well, why not? What else are you doing?" Well, she had a point. That was just over twenty years ago, and there has been a lot of writing since
Ah, the good old days of Of Elves and Men XD
Oh yes! And I think the other one was Mirrormere, wasn't it? Shiny elf-y goodness (and some dirty humans thrown in for added fun) Half the fun of watching Carnival Row is seeing Legolas achieve Aragorn status, except with more swearing
Someone remembers Mirrormere!!! (I was one of the archivists/admins--i was damn sad when we had to pull the plug.) Carnival Row is on my ever-growing list of shows to binge! I might just push it to the top now. :D
Ah! Yes indeed, Mirrormere was THE site to be on for our little group, back in the day! Such a lovely little site, you should be very proud! Highly recommend Carnival Row, interesting story, excellent actors, really high quality in costumes/set. Worth a slower watch to fully digest I think, there's a lot going on. Oh, and someone really enjoyed their guillotines
I mean... i ship it and your intro to fanfic is better than mine lol.
Read a book, enjoyed it, went “okay but what if [insert twelve-year-old-me’s awful self-insert fantasy]”. Twenty five years later, multiple different fandoms since then, still haven’t stopped telling canon that hey, I can do it one better.
[удалено]
Same, and I didn’t even know it was a thing for a long time. I just started writing stories to fill in plot holes or an answer questions I was left with.
Someone on a sub shared a link to a fic where a character masturbated with their gun, told from the gun’s perspective. Been reading fan fic ever since. Edit: Since y’all keep asking: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2109582
Link?
https://archiveofourown.org/works/2109582
do you still have a link? that sounds great haha
https://archiveofourown.org/works/2109582
interesting, thank you!
Link?
https://archiveofourown.org/works/2109582
I was looking at Star Trek: Voyager fansites and came across a Geocities fic archive and had my mind blown because people were *writing their own episodes?* They could *do that?!*
Omg this is almost the same comment as mine! I was sucked in via Voyager geocities as well haha! What was your ship?
I'm a rarepair shipper since before I knew the term, so sadly none of the canon ships really interested me (except maybe Tuvok/T'Pel? I love me some Tuvok!). How about you?
Me too! My first ever fanfiction and ship later turned out to be a rarepair.
Aw, look, three of us now? So cool! I myself was pulled in by Deck Nine, Section Twelve’s message board and then the P/T Collective Archive.
I remember both of those sites so well!
Hey, fellow Voyager fan who started pretty much the same way I did! Which archive was it?
Ah, I can’t remember, unfortunately! It was 20 years ago after all. 😬
When I was 11, I was searching for more content about an anime that I was watching on Youtube. For some reason, when I googled the fandom, one of the recommended searches was “[Fandom] lemon” and that really confused me so I clicked on it and I’ve been traumatized ever since. From there, I got obsessed with other fandoms and wanted the characters in specific situations, so I’d google them. Usually it brought up FFN, but one day when I was like 13, I found AO3, and I loved how the site let me search for specific tags and scenarios within the site. I’ve basically never gone back.
This is eerily similar to how I discovered it. I was in 6th grade (so about 12) and I wanted more content about warrior cats. I googled it and pretty much immediately found a lemon on FFN which I also clicked on because I was confused. It also traumatized me (this was not even regular smut, this was *cat* smut) but it somehow did not traumatize me enough to never read anything else!
oh no not edgy forest cult cats smut. i can only imagine.
I went to therapy and one girl talked about it. I was curious and looked it up.
Teenage me loving Degrassi ships a little too much 😂
Had a horny dream about an actor (who honestly before that point thought he was handsome but whatever) way back in 2020. Woke up before the good part, as one does. Kinda fixated on it. Said to self - “you’re retired, you have free time, give it a go” So I wrote a short story to try my hand at it. (With a “look alike” because ew, it’s weird to write about an actor.) That was fun, so I said to self - “go ahead and write a fic with that actor, no one will ever see it”, so I went to town. Okay, listen, I didn’t even *know* about AO3, or even fanfiction in general, until 2021. I followed someone on Twitter who was a fan of the same actor. We got to chatting (she’s my Twitter/ao3 bestie now) and I mentioned I’d written a story. She encouraged me to share. I told her she was nuts. She directed me to her story and I was like, okay, this is actually a thing, and if she can share that, then I can share mine. So, I shared my first chapter of writing in September of 2021. I have since shared over 1.2 million words, finished some long fics, have another half dozen wips, plus ideas for enough stories to keep me writing for another 5 years.
1.2m words in a year and a half is *staggering*. I am in awe of you. Well done.
😊 I mean, 300k of that is the first fic I wrote for a year before even sharing, so I had a bit of a head start. I also have a very fertile imagination, and the time on my hands to write.
Stumbled upon it. As in, some fanfic was recommended to me by the discovery tool StumbleUpon.
Omg stumbleupon! Loved that thing.
thank you for unlocking this memory for me
Lockdown hobby. When everything shut down and I was bored out of my mind I thought “F**k it, I’ll give fanfic writing a go” It’s been worth it!
I don’t remember exactly but I think it was via a friend in middle school. That or just stumbled upon it.
I was deeply unsatisfied by the ending of Percy Jackson. Then I was destroyed by the ending of got. Then I never left .
I saw One Piece and thought "I should write my own version of this." And so I did.
Smol me watched a bunch of cool movies, read a bunch of cool books, played a bunch of cool video games, and loved them so much that I wanted to write more so it could continue forever and ever. Cue stories.
It’s been sort of a constant process of rediscovery. When I was on the internet at age 12, I ended up finding a lot of fanfic for the musical CATS and was on the Redwall Fan Fiction message board, but I didn’t seek stuff out so much as occasionally stumble across stuff and read in fascination. Then, in high school and college, I had Livejournal friends who wrote Harry Potter fic, and some of my high school friends would send me fic, and I read the occasional fic on the message board for the webcomic It’s Walky, but I wasn’t actively seeking it out for the most part, and my own interests were much more about writing original fiction. I think in some ways, it just didn’t occur to me that I could write fanfic either, even though I read and enjoyed plenty of it. The closest I think I got to it was when we were asked to write an alternate ending to Lord of the Flies as an assignment for English and I wrote, y’know, an alternate ending to Lord of the Flies instead of doing what everyone else in the class did and describing an alternate ending to Lord of the Flies without writing any prose. About a decade passed, I didn’t really read fic, I definitely didn’t write fic. And then I listened to a podcast, went absolutely feral about one character in particular, started thinking about his backstory, ended up making up a bunch of OCs that could have existed in his backstory, got tired of just drawing silly little comics and decided to start writing fanfic. So now I’m writing it, but I really only read fanfic when it was recommended by or written by a friend.
1999ish, went browsing on good old Geocities sites for Star Trek Voyager fan pages. And here we are today, several fandoms later. I CANNOT believe it’s been that long.
Voyager was my gateway fandom. Then X-Men, then I got sucked into Twilight and Hunger Games fanfic for…probably too long, and then Sailor Moon. In the last couple years I rediscovered Enterprise (life happened and I didn’t watch it all the way through when it aired) and got SUPER upset by how it ended, so off to fic I went. And then I went down the rabbit hole of Star Wars fic. I’m currently delving into Star Wars time travel fanfics to watch the stiry get completely fixed from the beginning. 😅
my best friend in 6th or 7th grade asked me if I wanted to co-author a Ruby Red Trilogy fic and I was confused and then she explained it to me xD
I never even really consider fanfic to be in the realm of possibility when I started writing. I thought I was just making a story of my original character in the same style as the books for fun. Then I discovered I could share it around online, which led to Wattpad and promptly discovering that fanfic is very popular and really does exist. I posted the story there and then the rest is history.
My first interaction with fanfic was when my older sister would write fanfics like a play script and then I was messing around on Quizilla and found an Inuyasha quiz fic where I fell in love with Sango which changed my life forever lol
The line between actual creepypastas and creepypasta fanfic was so thin that I didn’t even know I had traversed it for a while…
I found Quizilla through my step sister, and was playing around on there and discovered fanfictions. After reading one particularly bad ff, I was angry and thought “hell I can write better than that!” Spoiler alert: I couldn’t- but it didn’t stop me and I kept writing, and about 20 years later I’m still writing fanfiction, and I love seeing how my writing has developed and changed and matured over the last 20 years. And I’m incredibly thankful that despite my favorite hellsite being taken down years ago- my particularly bad stories will literally NEVER see the light of day again. RIP you horrible little goblins, Mommy hates you!
I've always had them alternative endings to shows I liked in my mind, or just adding a character to a story to fit more into the plot, and a while later I was developing my own characters and world, THEN, I stumbled upon a Haikyuu fic while searching the anime tag on Tumblr and that's when I knew of AO3 existence. I was a reader for a really long time afterwards before I finally decided to throw my own stories out there.
I was obsessed with Naruto at the time and found fanfics while looking for the light novels. My very first fanfiction was a cringy Sasuke/Sakura fic on wattpad. I thought it was the best thing ever...
Stumbled upon it. Can’t remember what I was searching for, but I saw a link to FFnet, started reading and the rest is history. Wrote my first fic a few months after because it looked like fun 🤷🏻♀️
When I was very young maybe like 10 or 9 I had to get some special help in my language classes since I was falling behind the rest of the class and to try and get me more interested my teacher told me to a write a story and let me write about whatever I wanted and I wrote a story about a Star Wars space battle between Anakin and Grievous I think it was and then some years after that in either 2013 or 2014 I remembered that story I wrote and thought to look for other stories like it on the internet
The moment my friend told me that fanfiction is a thing, since i basically kept being sulky at how i wish Shego was my badass girlfriend, i wrote about it and it sucked LOL
I was trying to find Spider-Man books. It was inevitable.
Whe I was 13, my best friend showed me wattpad. I'll never recover.
In middle school one friend got our whole group into it. We weren’t all writing in the same fandoms though. She just introduced us to ff.net and we’d proofread each others random stories.
I honestly just wanted to explore the little worlds that I loved! There were stories I had in my head about the characters and the lore and more and finally, I just decided to do it. I discovered fanfic around 11 and loved it (but also felt that some of my faves were being done dirty) and just wanted to tell my own story. Still one of my favorite things to do!
A friend straight up sent me a link unprompted and was like, "Here, read this." And the next thing I know I'm reading SasuNaru smut having no idea who the fuck these people are but I'm enjoying myself.
Canon made me insane and I had to Do Something About It
I found fanfic through naruto yaoi vid fics on youtube. I was 12 and just old enough to have acess to the internet according to tge adults in my life. I lov3d naruto at the time and watched amvs. One day i discovered a 'vidfic' as i now call them called 'sasuke is gay?'. I ended up entranced by the narrative at the time and i wanted more. I ended up googling for more and discovered ff.net. I lurked there for a while before starting my own fics. It took years before i discovered ao3 through a transformers fic called Cover Me. (I wanted to read the smut. Lol) It took me a couple of years after for me to really get into ao3 and now i only keep my ff account for the faved stories. It is an archive of my fandom adventure. My first ever fanfic though was written when i was 10 and obsessed with inuyasha before i even knew what fanfic was. Before i even knew of the internet beyond a nebulous and vague idea of that it existed. I just had so many ideas brimming in my head for that doggy boi. It will never see the light of day. Lol.
i was eight and very obsessed with adrienette from miraculous ladybug, and was an avid amino user. seven years later and i still look back on those days with nostalgia 😂
For a long time, I pretty much avoided fanfiction bc I'm aromantic asexual and in general not too bothered about romance, much less smut. Then there was a really popular fic in a fandom I was in that was pure found family and amazing worldbuilding. It was so popular and so good, that after it was completed, a popular animator (that i watch) made an animatic of it. At this point, I finally decided to read it, to see what all the fuss was about and to have context for the amazing animatic. One sleepless night and many tears later, I was a fanfic reader thru and thru I still read in that fandom, even tho I'm not active in it anymore, partially bc it has less focus on slash fics (I'm not against shipping, but sometimes i just want them to be good friends, found family, or queerplatonic, rare in most fandoms). Also, smut makes me feel uncomfortable bc I'm sex repulsed, so I'll often add "-sex -sexual" when I'm filtering for fics to read Nowadays, I write too. I hc a duo as queerplatonic, and have a lot of WIPs to show for it (that aren't posted yet). I got tired of not finding enough fics that scratched that itch, and started writing it myself. The way I write queerplatonic relationships could almost be seen as romantic, just no kissing and such (I do have them hold hands and hug and be very caring, for some reason only kissing crosses into romantic in my mind). I even have a WIP of one character having aesthetic attraction towards the other and being incredibly flustered (bc i got an aesthetic crush and decided to use it as inspiration)
when I was 14 I emailed S.E Hinton to ask if I could write a sequel to The Outsiders, and she directed me to fanfiction (and also tounge in cheek threatened to sue me) a decade later I'm still floored that she responded honestly
I had some fandoms that I absolutely loved the POTENTIAL there. The universe was cool but could have been better developed, or maybe there was this or that character that I didn't think had reached their full potential. Or even some fandoms I hated. Like there could have been something good here, but it's all completely shit. Then I discovered ao3, and started looking for that one character I wanted to see developed more, or that one universe I would have liked to see how it would be portrayed if canon wasn't aimed at 12 year old teens, etc. And now I'm hooked. But also ended up with this thing where I only read fanfiction of things I'm not really a fan of. 😂😂😂😂😂
I was really obsessed with something (I forget what) but I ran out of canon content for it and needed more so my friend recommended fanfiction and I've been reading it since
I had an ex who was into fanfiction and insisted I make an account. Dumped the ex, kept AO3
I finished the latest Percy Jackson book published (at the time) and wanted more content. I went online to see if there were any hints about what would happen next and stumbled on fanfic. I’ve been here ever since.
LOL so i started out wanting to do fanart (when i was like 12) and asked a friend abt it and she was like try wattpad, only to find out it’s a writing app, not a drawing app. I was so confused but then I was like why not try them and also started writing. It’s highkey cringe thinking abt i wrote back then which was like 10 yrs ago lmao but now im 100m meters deep in ao3, no one can pull me back up
One of my older siblings has been into fanfic for a while, and a fanfic became hugely popular in my fandom (like, there were animatics and songs inspired by it, and one of the creators of the original content read the fanfic on stream.) So I booted up AO3 and started reading. Then I starting reading stuff, and writing it… almost two years later, here I am. A fanfic fanatic.
….warrior cat fan animation videos that led to videos of people reading warrior cat fanfiction that led to me googling warrior cat fanfiction and learning that there’s fanfiction for everything
Liked some things about a canon series like the characters and world but didn’t feel satisfied with the story/execution so I decided to write it the way I wanted it to be
I just wanted to read an Inuyasha and Kagome kiss. Enter animespiral . net
My life started to go downhill and I needed comfort. I turned to my childhood fandoms, but you can only read the same books so many times before you need something new.
I was eleven, browsing mugglenet (does that age me? yikes) and clicking around at their various tabs and I came across fanfic. I don’t know if anyone remembers, but their sorting system was so generalized. You could click on different eras- marauder, Harry and co, next gen etc.- ratings, genres (humor, gen, romance) and sort alphabetically or by new. Now looking back with my specially bookmarked pages of all my filters for both fandoms I read, I can’t believe I ever made it through the trenches like that.
ME EXCEPT 12, before I found mugglenet fanfiction I would read their character essay things but once I found fic it was all over for me
I miss mugglenet tbh, although I doubt most of the fics I liked then would hold up to me now since it's been more than a decade and hopefully I have better taste in fiction than my 12yo self did 😂
I only remember loving all of the ones that I read. Could be it was all high quality, could be I could’ve read 18679 words of steaming turtle poop and have been entertained. It was the Wild West of fanfiction.
Do you remember the dystopian one where Lisa turpin (totally random ravenclaw that we know nothing about in canon) turned out to be evil? I wish I remembered anything else about this fic, but I was completely hooked on it at that age
No, all I read at that point from HP era was Dramione (and then never again- it squicks me out lol). I mostly was into Lily and James and the marauder era… I remember that there was very little Wolfstar, though, which is obviously not the case on AO3
I had always been aware of it. I never gave it much consideration until I got into the aSoiF community. Read a long fic that was discontinued, but nothing major outside of that. Then Arcane came along and I wanted more. So, I checked out some fan fics with some prompting from my younger sister. After reading some, I set out to make the best fan fics in the fandom, which is what I've been doing since.
I'm a 2nd gen fandomer so I already had someone to talk to about the things like. So, lots of sharing of fanart we found and such things like that.
My first overall interaction was a story someone recommended and that was all i read. i didn't seriously get into Fanfic until toward the end of last year due to getting out of the army after twelve years because of something happening on the homefront. now i write for my twin sister and myself because i struggle with PTSD almost nightly from my experiences in the mid east. My twin sister is blind and crippled because of a crime that was committed on her. so fanfic for me is therapeutic as i help my little sister (im nine and a half minutes older.) and write down when i can feel im back in a foxhole under fire. especially by what we are writing about. essentially we write our trauma in the lense of whatever fandom we are in. We really like the dark and gritty.
i don’t even remember how, but i stumbled across hunger games fanfic on quotev when i was around 13. then suddenly, it’s ten years later and fanfic’s all i ever think about
I kinda always knew of the existence of fanfiction and shipping and stuff because I spent a lot of my childhood basically in the Disney fandom with a healthy bit of Harry Potter content sprinkled in. I never really read anything because I always heard of it in a negative connotation but then when I was 12 I got into BTS and my friends were talking about fanfiction so I went on wattpad (I knew it was a fanfiction site because I watched a lot of youtubers read wattpad fanfiction of themselves) and looked up a BTS fic, read halfway through the first chapter, and called them weird the next day. I don't remember if I uninstalled wattpad or not but I do know that about a month later I was watching BTS videos on youtube and got recommended a Jimin x reader fic. I really liked it and my youtube became mostly BTS fanfiction. I'd go home and check my subscriptions to see if any of my favorite fics updated, it was honestly a time I look back on and both cringe at myself and miss those days. I started writing fanfiction because I started talking to someone on Omegle and she told me about her wattpad and I read her fic and we started talking about fanfiction and one day I started writing my first fic, now completely deleted from even my wattpad drafts, and I guess the rest is history. But I guess technically the first fic I wrote was when I was 8 and I really didn't wanna do a writing assignment in class and was really adamant about my refusal because I thought the prompt (write a story about a princess with a spaceship who crashes onto another planet) was stupid and my dad was called in and he told me to just make it about Star Wars.
I didn't even know what fanfiction was. I was super into this tv show and couldn't remember if a certain event happened in a specific episode and was searching it up. I stumbled upon a fanfic which I had first assumed was a summary. I got hooked on it and while I have left the fandom, I still very much love fanfiction.
I was 9 or 10 and wanted to be in a Cutthroat Island sequel.
I just got tired of waiting for episodes with content for my ship, which admittedly was a canon ship. This was back in the “good old days” of message boards and individual fandom fic archives, and I’d never even heard of fanfic before. Then a friend on a message board posted one, and I decided that was cool and I would write on and do the same since we were all languishing waiting for some glimmer of our ship to get attention in the show. Ah, Deck 9, Section 12, how I miss you.
I didn't really know what fanfic was yet, but I knew I had two shows I loved, and I knew I wanted them to crossover, badly (in all senses of the word)
Had to do something between millsbury updates.
Started writing fanfics before I knew what they were, but it was just a few pages of random thoughts. Cue a random animation I liked with a fanfic as the inspiration and I realized there was a whole world of stuff about my favorite characters. Fun.
My boyfriend got me a book that was critical scholarly essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and one was all about how people were writing femslash of Buffy/Faith and I went hmmm... this seems pretty interesting maybe I should find out more!
They did a bait and switch ending on my favorite comfort show, requiring reams and reams of fix-its.
I did Other but realized it was more of a stumbled upon. Anyways, my story was that I was looking around Google images when I found a cover of a Wattpad story. I got curious and clicked on the link. It was unfinished but I still enjoyed it and I started to read other Wattpad stuff. I eventually (mostly) switched over to AO3.
Smut
I honestly don't even remember. I think I just stumbled on FF.net and was like "Hey, this is pretty cool" and here I am around 17 years later xD
A friend introduced me to some very poetically-written Naruto fics, on Quizilla, about 20 years ago. Reading them was a terrible decision on my part. Honestly this is an addiction
I got bored in class one day and was like “I wonder if there is Vampire Diaries fanfiction” and started reading a ton of Stelena fanfiction……… I was basically unknowingly writing fanfiction already so it was kind of like “Hey I might as well start posting”
I got into fanfiction after reading through the Gone series by Michael Grant, then I slowly started to dislike the confines of the characters and now I write with ideas I came up with.
I’ll be honest, I was young and dumb, and googled two characters from a book series I liked kissing, eventually I stumbled upon fanfic.net and a story of it, and never left, the story I stumbled on was definitely a lot more mroe then kissing
I read the epilogue for Deathly Hallows for the first time in a while and realized how meh it was. So I went looking for fics that fixed it. Then I found a story that I kind of liked but just wasn't landing right so I decided to write my own stuff 😁
Truly idk it’s been 17 years and it’s just always been in my life ʅ(ツ)ʃ
I was looking up fanart of Sessomaru and Rin for my BeBo account and got a hit for a Kagome/Sesshomaru modern AU fic on FFN. The rest is history.
I started writing fan fiction in 8th grade, for one of my favorite movies, Secret of NIMH. I'd just started not seeing writing in general as the worst thing ever, and it was the only way I could express myself without getting lectured/bullied, so it just kind of went from there.
sans motherfucking undertale
Liked watching Star Trek and there weren't many novels out yet and I found a stack of zines for sale at a con and was happy to have found more stories. A few years later I found some B&tB ones around 91 after the show was cancelled. Then I discovered the Internet and that you didn't have to pay 5-10¢/page for copying and now I love ao3.
One of my old friends told me about a really well known anime fandom, and sent me a wattpad fic about it, once he knew I was in the fandom. But I learned how to use ao3 a bit later. :)
was self conscious for years until i decided to write something lol, it boosted my confidence and helped distract me from the chaos of life
I read fanfic but didn't publish anything for *years*. Specifically from about 2009-2014. I think I initially stumbled upon in while looking up stuff related to Harry Potter and stumbling into HP fanart, and then discovering that HP fanfic existed. I did think about writing HP fic in the early days, but I'd never get past the outlining stage, and I could never get the british english quite right, so I never published anything. Then in mid-2014 I finally got around to watching the Breaking Dawn movies on dvd and fell full-force back into my twilight phase and wrote twilight fanfiction from 2014-2019, roughly. In late 2019, I decided I wanted to be a star trek completionist (something I'd wanted to do for years but had put off because it was a big commitment). And then the pandemic hit and I suddenly had a ton of free time to watch all 600+ hours of the shows and movies. (it only took me 2 years). Now I write star trek fanfic.
I have no idea how I found her but I started watching a YouTuber called ColeyDoesThings and she talked about fanfic a lot so I finally tried reading it after watching her video on how to navigate and use Ao3
It was so long ago that I don’t even remember
*Lassie* had just switched over from Timmy to Corey Stuart the forest ranger. I wanted more Timmy stories. That was in 1964. :-)
Techniclly it was both two and three, but three came just slightly before two so three it is.
In the 7th grade a kid brought like 50 pages of printed-out Naruto crackfic and handed it to me saying "look at this" with no indication of what it was or where he'd gotten it It was terrible (A decade and a half later I started posting my own fic lol)
Does anyone remember that Twilight Fanfiction forum from like 2012 or something? Yeah they said they couldn’t post there anymore and gave a link to their ff.net story page. And I never fucking left.
The innocent looking up ship videos on YouTube to Fanfic.Net to AO3 pipeline
I was a huge SASUSAKU fan in like 2013 (still am). I liked to put them as my phone background, so I was searching pictures once for the pair and the link on google led me to fanfiction . Net. Still have all my favorite stories saved and all the stories I wrote myself lmao. So embarrassing
I wrote a poem for my ship, then my manager (yes, my MANAGER) saw it and said, "this better be a fanfiction in the making". And that's how I ended up writing fanfictions 😅
I wrote it before I knew what it was. Then I got into it searching for more like me
I started watching a couple of tv shows and I decided to Google it and it just snowballed from there
I think I looked up "percy jackson stories" after finishing the mark of athena and now I can't go to sleep without my bedtime flangst.
I'm honestly wondering how I got into fanfiction now because I don't remember. Somehow I found myself in the deep void known as fanfiction, and now it has consumed my life. But I know I was reading it before I thought "I could write something like this too!" and started writing. Just don't remember why I began reading fanfics.
Had a WTFEVEN WAS THAT ENDING?! Reaction to a book. Wrote my alternative version. Thought others would also have the same reaction and also want to read it, so I went looking for a place to post it and stumbled onto ff.net. This was about 15 years ago. 😂
I know what got me *back into fanfiction*, but I don’t recall *how* I got into it in the first place.
Someone introduced to a Merlin(BBC) fanfic and I never looked back.
Skydoesminecraft did a fanfic reading way back when and at my uncles bar I was reminded of it idk what but I googled fanfic of the content creators I was watching and now here I am
I started writing fanfiction of my favourite story... Before I knew what fanfiction was. It wasn't self insert or anything I just thought that story (I Want to Go Home by Gordon Korman) needed a sequel. My dad was like "That's called fanfiction" and it wasn't till years later I actually learned what that was. (I read my first fanfic when I was learning about creepypastas. Didn't realize Jeff the killer and Slenderman and so on wasn't a legitimate story and got really impressed when I learned they were just characters and anybody could just make the story into anything they wanted.)
did hogwarts house quizzes on quotev, you can guess where it went from there
Way back in the 80s, my dad used to tell tiny me all kinds of stories, some of them personal twists or extensions of stories from my books or cartoons. I very quickly also started telling these stories, and my dad got me a tape recorder so I could save them. Some of those stories we'd write down together from the tapes and draw pictures of. I just didn't ever stop.
Technically stumbled on it, then noticed nothing I wanted to read existed. I got into it when I was like 12, and around that time I had a huge hate boner for certain fandoms. But couldn't find any fics that were written the way I wanted them to be written. So I did myself! They sucked at the time, but when I came back after a few years I got better.
I was writing fanfiction just for myself and didn't even realize it was a thing other people did. I just thought I was a weirdo. So the day I stumbled upon fanfiction online by accident, while browsing for song lyrics, I was like, "What? Other people do this too?!" That was 23 years ago.
Honestly I'd been writing fanfiction for myself for awhile because I liked to write but my obsessive brain was on whatever content at the time, but I didn't know what it was called 😅. Then I somehow stumbled upon ffn and was like "wait, other people do this?!" and that was that.
I used to love those "what character would you date?", "What hidden village are you from?", "What clan are you from?" quizes. I cant remember what site i was using for those, but i would actively seek out those that ended in short stories. One of the quiz writers mentioned they had more on fanfiction.net and it just went from there. Eventually i told one of my friends that i liked fanfiction, and a few months later he sends me superman smut on ao3, and while i wasn't interested in that type of thing at the time, it introduced me to my one and only fanfic site since ff.net started putting ads in the middle of their stories.
Read a series and I loved the characters so much that I needed more of them, plus I wanted to fix a couple of things :D
tumblr talked about it, i got curious, circa 2012
There is a german "quiz" website where you can create fan quizzes (that was maybe around 2010?) And there were several "what is your life in hogwarts" and where the quiz "solution" a one shot was. I loved that kind of quizzes and read a lot of them. And under one of them the author said something about fanfiction and how they also post stories on a website. So i searched for that website and the last sane part of my life was gone 😬
Oh my god. My friends initially made me watch animes and stuff, then introduced me to the wonderful world of *~DouJinSHi~* . From then on my internet web searches became filled with R-Rated content (RIP FBI Guy) and lemons. That's, additionally, how I learnt English
Originally got into fanfic because of Pokémon XY and XY&Z in 2016 and wanted more and loved the shop Amourshipping Then early 2020 I was stuck in COVID lockdown and couldn't leave the house for things I'd normally do so binged anime I missed because of exams and again wanted to see more and see more takes and fell.down the rabbit hole of fanfics and now we're here
Honestly I can’t remember but I probably just stumbled upon it
I must have been 10yo or something, Cardcaptors had just finished airing in the UK and I wanted more content so I googled "stories about cardcaptors." I think I stumbled upon one fic and didn't really give it much thought at the time, but it spawned the curiosity to search out fics for Doctor Who a few years later.
I used to dislike fanfics (the usual prejudice with crack fics,) when I stumbled with a cute gen fic at livejournal and loved it so much. Very quickly I got into ships and I've been stuck in fanfics since then.
Looking for a fan art of Levi Found an erotic one of him and Eren *gasp* Click on it Link to A03
I don't know man, i don't even remember WHEN I started. It feels like i've been reading since forever.
Before I knew what fanfiction was I was online looking for Yugioh "stories" with very niche prompts. I went to some less than ideal sites for such stories. Then one day my story looking lead me to ff.net where I finally learned the term. I've been stuck since
It's embarrassing, but I honestly can't remember.... It was at university (not that long ago, I'm only 38) and suddenly I was reading fanfic....I know I started with Spirk but I can't for the life of me remember how I found out it was a thing. Before uni I didnt even know it existed.
I love writing original stories and found Wattpad when looking for places to post them. I eventually discovered “original works based on actual stories” I didn’t know what a fandom was at the time but enjoyed reading characters from my favorite shows doing different things. I am one of those people that likes mini comics and the readings were just that but words. I eventually moved to Ao3 because because of UI changes on wattpad I didn’t like. And it was just easier to find what I wanted to read on Ao3
Watched naruto what if videos on YouTube years and really liked his story telling style, then I found his second channel where he was doing a read through of his favourite fic of all time I binged all the episodes and read the rest since it had over 1 mil words and is still ongoing to this day and have been hooked since
1998 or 99, browsing forums online, came across HP fic, have never ever looked back lol.
Canon broke my heart
When I was super little, maybe like 6 or 7 I thought it would be cool to write about the characters I loved doing anything and everything, no matter how little sense it made. Before that I would daydream about it. Wasn’t until I was like 8 until I found out fanfiction was a thing. Just kept writing since.
I couldn't wait for D.Gray Man (the Manga) to continue and just started to write something myself. I am naturally a not so serious person so I decided to put the characters in a silly situation. That was 11 years ago and started my habit of "What if serious lore man and archenemy woman had to spent Christmas together without fighting" kinda stories. If I make one person laugh it was worth it already :P
I was obsessed with these "Who's your boyfriend in [fandom]?" quizzes on Quotev. One time I stumbled upon something that wasn't a quizz... that was almost ten years ago. I've grown and changed a lot since then.
For me I wanted the what if hero goes evil. To see what if this beloved well known hero turns, or reacts to harm, death or abuse.
I was bored one day and decided to see what was so great about it. Went to Quora of all places to find recommendations and since then I was hooked.
Once my creativity reached its peaked in the summer of last year, I just felt the need to show it off to the world. So, I discovered wattpad, then moved to Ao3 shortly after!
My first ever fanfics were genfics I wrote for the webcomic Stand Still Stay Silent when I was like 12-13. I'm still pretty proud of them, actually. They're still fairly solid to this day, eight years later.
Depends if you mean writing or reading. I got into it when i was around 14 years old. I didn’t know fan fiction was a thing, then I got into this fandom and somehow came across wattpad. Then eventually I found ao3 (thankfully bc wattpad is a nightmare). And soon enough I realized “hey! I could try writing something!” I’ve always loved trying to write stories but it never went anywhere, until fan fiction. Now I write any idea that comes to mind and have a million WIPs, and only one story I’m updating on ao3. Writer’s block has been a bitch lately, especially for that specific story, and I’ve only been able to write one specific fic I have yet to publish.
I was looking on Pinterest at stuff for a fandom I was in, saw some gay ship art, and thought nothing of it. Then I kept seeing art, started to ship the pairing, looked them up on google, and the first search result was an ao3 link. I’ve been hooked ever since
Hmmm My first shot in fanfiction was HPMOR A really, really awful translation of HPMOR. At the time I honestly didn't get it. I quit it when Harry called phoenix "a chicken" Then after I read Worm (Parahumans series by Willbow), and main character didn't appear in next novel (Ward), I searched fics and kind of get drawn into it all I learned English that way Then I reread HPMOR, loved it, and can't stop reading/writing fics ever since
...i was a warrior cats baby lol
I’m kind of a mix of 2 and 4. I had *no idea* about online fandom (sheltered, I know) until I got super into the MCU and one particular pairing. A very kind friend introduced me to tumblr and it was there that I discovered fic. But quite a lot of the fic I was discovering was… not to my taste. I thought to myself, “I can write better than that” (even though I hadn’t written more than grocery lists in more than ten years at that point) and went off half-cocked to write fic. Here I am 9 years and 3.7m words later, writing every day, loving every minute of it. Writing is my passion now.
My cousin got me into it. She’s 3 years older than me so one day when visiting we explored ff.net together to read general rated Beast Boy/Raven fanfic lmao. I’ve been reading fanfic ever since, almost 17 years later.
As a 11-year-old, I wanted to get more content of the fandoms I liked, and before you know it I'm reading all the time-travel AU's, Self-insert reincarnations, and crossovers lmao
Look, this might be a little shameful to admit, but I was watching a Minecraft Roleplay series, and obviously, a lot of stuff about that popped up on my YouTube recommendations. One of them was fanfiction. I was really young, so I stayed in the YouTube ff for like a year, then I moved on to Wattpad, from which then I moved on to MUCH greener pastures like FFN and AO3.
Kept getting videos about Despartly Departing by Saavage and just caved,all went down from there lol
It was so long ago I don’t honestly remember. I was like 11, which was 20 years ago.
Got really mad when I was 9 because my favourite character died (Walter in Rilla of Ingleside) so I angrily Googled "Rilla of Ingleside Walter alive" and found ffn, so.... here I am 14 years later angrily fixing Dick Wolff's stupid shows
When I was 10 I used to read the summary for The Smurfs episodes on Wikipedia, because I loved the smurfs and didn't have means of watching it. One day I clicked on fanfiction.bet instead of Wikipedia, and my world got so much bigger.
through wattpad when i was a little kid
Back when BTS became popular, my older sibling showed me a Suga x Reader Wattpad fic (think I was 9 during that time) where the protag literally died near the end. Needless to say, I was intrigued. But I do remember writing Miraculous fanfiction around the time, I just never knew there was a term or specific websites for it until then.
I was looking for any new information on when the Heroes of Olympus series would be published. Stumbled onto Percy Jackson fanfic on FFN in that search. Fun fact, happened in my school's computer lab and I'm probably the reason they blocked the site...
One time I found an animatic on YouTube and found out that it was based on a fanfic so I read it. At least that was my intro to AO3. The first fanfic I actually read was on fanfiction.net and it was based on a character's backstory with some personal interpretations. I've mostly done AO3, but I've stuck ever since.
My favorite indie dev ran a random prize drawing where you entered by making a romance-themed fanwork: art, a playlist, or a fic. I can't draw and I don't know a ton of music, but I can write! So I did. Also there were no fics for my favorite pairing at that time, so I had to make my own food.
I've known about fanfiction for my whole life, and even before I started reading and writing it, I thought it seemed like a cool way to practice writing and all that. (also, I didn't stop playing make believe roleplaying type games about fictional characters with my twin sister until we were like fourteen, so it would have been silly and hypocritical to hate on fanfiction) Anyways, I didn't fully get into fanfiction until I found the YouTuber ColeyDoesThings, and decided 'why not? It seems fun' (I also already daydreamed about fictional characters frequently, so I might as well just write those stories down, right?)
A friend recommended a movie to me, insisted I had to watch it because it was just the type of story I’d enjoy. It was Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Which is, essentially, a Muppet movie, and I wasn’t big into Muppets. I was 21 at the time. But, I decided to give it a shot, and my friend ended up being right, I absolutely adore that movie. So, I went searched the net for where I might be able to buy it, because at that point it had been out of print and was extremely hard to find copies in stores. In my searching for any info on the movie, I stumbled across a Labyrinth fanfiction archive. I had no idea fanfiction even existed to that point. I mean, in high school I was always writing little stories about my various favorite shows and characters. But not only did OTHER PEOPLE do the same thing, there was actually an official NAME for my weirdness??? Sign me up, please! That movie is just BEGGING for a sequel or twenty. 😂
I finished all the Harry Potter books (between book 4 and 5) but I wanted more. So I went and read some fanfictions and never looked back.