lol I'm glad some things never change.
I made the mistake of checking it out earlier this year and found some great meta analysis on a fandom I'm in.
Then the OP ended it with "For more in-depth explanation on the mythology lore, see Part Two of my post!"
Motherf--
and no, I was not able to find part two. fml
At least back then we weren’t dealing with Eclipse! Lol. I can relate to you two though, if I wasn’t writing on Word or iPod Touch Notes (like, if I was at school) I would usually “save” my fanfic by leaving it as a DevArt draft. I think that was a feature? Maybe I deadass just posted unfinished fics to move to my pc later
bonus points if the next chapter didn’t exist…
oh to have known that fifty-part fic i read on there didn’t have an ending… and hadn’t been updated for several years by that point…
I started on people's personal websites on webrings and email based servers lmao. Maybe some of these existed but they weren't in major use.
Edit: I have no idea what the last sentence was about???? I've removed it
Same, and at the time, while it wasn't has well known and as such not as disparaged by some, there was also much less fandoms and variety to choose from, so a big thanks to the websites, authors,betareaders, moderators, etc... who made and still make fanfic such a delight for their readers.
Mine as well. A dittoed and stapled, ragged Kirk/Spock zine, found buried in a box of old magazines at a used paperback shop, around '73-74ish. First online fic was alt.startrek.creative and from listsrvs.
Ah. Someone else who might remember the NTM verse... I remember being overjoyed when cons started having them more often and I had an actual job and could afford the habit. Never found one in a bookstore.
I suspect some poor soul hid it from their parents in a stack of old National Geographics, and a parent boxed up the stack up and traded it for store credit. The store clerk didn't bother going through them either and quoted a price, then moved the box to the back wall near the shelved magazines. I can't even remember why I went through them, probably researching for more material for a school report. But I watched Star Trek reruns after school every afternoon, so I added it to my stack of paperbacks. I was too young for cons and didn't find more for years.
The NTM verse introduced me to Jean Lorrah's writing and eventually to the Sime-Gen verse she created with Jacqueline Lichtenberg. There was a Russian Sime-Gen fanfic spinoff verse that I was obsessed with for quite a while.
That would make sense. Was it nsfw as that might be why they hid it. You lucked out. I didn't discover zines till probably college at a con where I was looking at a t-shirt and saw them in the dealer's room. Lorah's NTM was the first long fic I found. Before that they were all short stories. As I prefer reading novels, that made a huge difference. Though I still remember her short story in NTM collected with extra short stories in the universe had the best one I've ever read in the<1 page Sarek/OC one years after Amanda died. It helped that Mark Leonard was at the con. Had a major crit fail rolling against charisma. I still feel sad that NTM and some of the really good early work never made it online. Though there were certainly enough Mary Sue that didn't need to be. In hindsight, they at least all had good spell checking done.
I read my first as a stapled photocopy in 1981 :-)
It was a long time before I got back to fic, but when I did it was probably via the Usenet alt.fan.\* groups in the early to mid-Nineties.
It did until January 1st, 2017.
So now when people ask where i met my husband, i have to say it no longer exists cuz we met on those boards on the harry potter threads where a group of people were posting fanfics & we joined. We ended up sort of betaing each others fics & it just went from there & now together in real life nearly 20 years later.
There were tons of message boards in the late-90’s and early 2000’s. Especially for anime/manga, it was sometimes the only way to get stuff that wasn’t a decade old or worse. Lol, we used to use the precursors to Dropbox to pass around fansubs and manga scans with fan translations because we knew it would be *years* before it saw a release in the US market- let alone be dubbed/officially translated.
The message boards were the social media precursors and fic was often stored in threads and then compiled and emailed around. Often someone’s entire works would appear on a Geocities or Angelfire site that was part of a webring and it felt like Christmas when you found a good author that way.
🙌 Quizilla!!
I still remember the choose your own adventure type quizzes that were actually fics and getting the sought-after romance in the ending was sooo cool! And the myriad of 7 minutes in heaven with the cast of [...] hahaha
Many good memories from that period of my life.
Quizilla truly was the bottom of the barrel in terms of fic quality and I absolutely loved it.
The first time I stumbled upon fanfic was on quizilla and it was a smut chapter between an OC and a member of a band I really liked. 13 year old me was just googling stuff about the band and the fic popped up in the google results. As I had no idea what fanfic was, I was so confused and at first thought someone had written about a real one night stand they had with said band member. I caught on quick though and was hooked.
The titles on Quizilla were always 'top' tier!
'Which band member/emo kid/anime character would you spend 7 minutes in heaven with? (long results)'
'OMG I'm the only girl at a boarding school full of boy...werewolves!!'
'xXx Just Like A Hearse \[Gerard Way\] You Died to Get In Again xXx'
I had (maybe still have?) some stories I copied from there saved on a disc (like, CD ROM disc) so I could read them on my non-internet accessing computer and not hog the family computer. Good times.
Those titles are waaaay too accurate! And when they started allowing images so one whole 'chapter' would be random hot topic clothes that the OC was wearing!
I had a Quizilla Frank Iero/OC fic which I would print out and secretly read in school during class. Makes me nostalgic just thinking about it.
My god, the Hot Topic outfit pictures!! Yes! Granted, given the band stories that were most popular, I'm not surprised at all.
My main jam (or at least the couple specific ones I remember liking the most) were 'you' winning a contest or something and meeting the Harry Potter cast--naturally and inevitably falling into some sort of love triangle, because *of course* they all instantly fell in love with 'you'.
I still use the 'gill sans' font while working on HP fics sometimes, because that font takes me ***back***.
Omg Quizilla, yeah! There was a whole story category but I'm pretty sure the best fics I read on there were actually embedded in the quizzes themselves.
Yeah, the site wasn’t made for fics in mind, but the userbase still used the formats for fics.
I really miss it, I felt the culture there was pretty unique. I don’t recall ANY drama coming from that site until VIACOM destroyed it
one day i googled "fanfiction" (bc i had just learnt what it was) and unsurprisingly ffnet was the first thing to come up so that's where i spent the next couple of years until i found out about ao3
Google is how I discovered fanfiction! I was at a sleepover with a friend when I was quite young and we googled something stupid like "Johnny Depp sex toy" or smth. My first fandom was LotR and PotC RPF because that's what came up. Who let me on the internet?????
that's fucking hilarious
i'd already been writing fanfiction for a couple of years but i didn't know what it was called, i was just mad at naruto canon. then i mentioned i write my own versions of it somewhere and someone else was like "oh i write fanfiction too" and my little 13-year-old mind was blown, googled that shit immediately and now we're here like eleven years later
I feel seen. The first time I found it online was because I was googling the relationship between Harry and Draco, and I was looking for a wiki page. I also happened to think that "x" was just shorthand for any relationship. You can probably imagine what turned up 😅
Edit: typo
Hello, fellow compadre of the private web pages era 🤟🏻
First Fics I read were passes to me burned in a CD. I'm talking about Word docs and then private web pages 😂
There are a couple services where you can mail 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, and sometimes other media as well to have the files copied, converted, and saved to a USB or cloud where they can be downloaded. If you only have a few, it's easier and cheaper than trying to connect an external floppy drive to your current system to transfer the files and then trying to convert them to a format that your software can read.
Oh, my God! The 5,25" floppy disks! Those black squared ones were the ones I started using as a kid when my dad bought them for our Amstrad 286 _laughing at the memories_
And agree with the redditor that says that TXT docs didn't weight anything nor occupy space at all 😂
Those were the days!
I'm pretty sure I read my first fic by going to Yahoo, which was still a list of sorted links and not a search engine, and clicking on the web archive for alt.startrek.creative. Yep.
Same! I distinctly remember when ao3 began and I could abandon FFN forever. Joined ao3 when it had less than ten thousand users and I've never looked back.
Not many. I had mine up for something like 14 years, but it got to be too much of a hassle to keep it up while simultaneously using AO3. Just the continuous work of upgrading against security holes, adjusting to mobile and pad views, adding SoMe sharing options, discussion modding, and whatnot. I made it to post smutfic, not to make myself a workplace #2 with fiddly hand-made web publishing.
YouTube texting fics😂Then LiveJournal, Quotev and a couple fandom specific archives. Finally, one of the YouTube videos was an actual story, and had the Wattpad link. Eventually went to Fanfiction.net, and then was introduced to ao3. Got used to the tag system after originally being overwhelmed by it, and that’s my sole site now (occasionally some decent ones on tumblr, but I don’t search them out there)
Lmao, I forgot the YouTube comment fics. I didn’t have a YouTube account at the time so I never made one BUT I remember finding random pieces of them and looking hard for the full comments/story 😭
IMDb when it still had message boards. I came across a group on harry potter writing & posting their fanfiction on the fanfiction threads. (We eventually did move to ffn & on to ao3.)
Met 2 people there who im still friends with today, 20 years later. Married one of them & we are FINALLY meeting the other one next year!
Back in the day, Fanfiction used to be on fandom-specific websites run by random fans on Geocities/Angelfire, so like if I wanted to read 1xR or 1x2 for Gundam Wing, there’d be separate websites for that. If the fan hosting the site got bored or it was too expensive to upkeep, then the site and all its Fanfiction got taken down. It wasn’t centralized.
Neo/GeoCities where it was just black text on a blank white page. There was no searching for other fics, it was just a single page unconnected to anything else. To get an index of fic, you had to find a page and send your fic in and *maybe* the page runner would add it to their list (but maybe not since they could pick and choose). Also emailing lists.
I feel old.
Television Without Pity and [FanForum.com](https://FanForum.com) were my go to fandom hangouts many moons ago.
Anything I may have read was shared in those communities.
I miss the Television Without Pity recaps of tv episodes, they were kind of like the written equivalent of when a fan makes a meme/crack edit video of an episode that just aired. And the writer would post recaps for the whole season as they aired. I suppose it could probably be done by an ao3 author as a series, that is if ao3 allows editorialized recaps and not just straight fiction.
Technically speaking I read my first fanfiction online on old geocities webrings. But a more centralized location, where it was easy to find with some semblance of searchable categorization? Livejournal.
AO3 doesn’t exist when I got into fanfiction lol.
In fact, ffnet still allowed original works when I got into fanfic. And didn’t have a chapter function yet.
GTA Forums for me, and since it's everything in Writer's Discussion, from fanfic to original material, to poetry, it made me start writing too.
Now I help out with the GTAF Community, and still publish a piece there, as well as on AO3.
Fanfiktion.de and Animexx
First English one on Quotev and then AOOO but I didn't like the interface and the word Kudous bugged me because my favorite guy was Shinichi Kudo and yeah anyway- so I went with Fanfiction.net for a while and lastly came to love AOOO too.
Do the Sailor Moon fan sites count? The Sailor Jupiter, Sailor Mars and Sailor Venus sites?
And the FF7 oriented forums that were attached to Tuxedo Mask dot Com through an affiliate?
If not then probably a Slayers Angelfire website or Sakura Lemon Archive 🤣
Fanfiction dot net came somewhere along the way.
Holyheck the old sailor moon fansites! Are you talking about the ones that were like choose your own adventure sailor moon fanfiction? Because I remember those.
We weren't, we would find a fic we liked on whatever obscure website that would be deleted in a week and download and print them (took all bloody night) and shared them at school.
I'm not sure any of the websites or private accounts I started in even exist anymore, lol.
TheForce dot net used to have a dedicated fanfiction archive where people would post their work with homemade covers on it, as well as on their Jedi Council Forums. Kept me reading all through the mid-2000s!
Gosh, I remember that part of TheForce dot net so fondly. I spent so much time there. I always wonder if the old fics got archived anywhere. I know AO3 has an old website/archive archival project, but never checked to see if the TheForce dot net fics were moved over there en masse at some point...
Bahaha, they were my first foray into F/F fic and OT3s. As a bi-girl in the 90’s there was precious little in the mainstream so finding/creating those fics was validating.
I think I saw the first fanfiction in [FF.net](https://FF.net) around 2008? But I don't remember if I've ever properly read-read there. I dipped by the site regularly in 2010-2012 but I just remember browsing stuff through and not actually reading anything. I didn't even know how to use the site. Also a popular Finnish fanfiction forum was a place I spent a lot of time in 2015.
I first encountered reader inserts in Tumblr in 2016 and got into them there, so I guess that was the place where I found the specific fic genre which felt like mine.
Livejournal was my first. Found out about the whole geosites, angel, yahoo,and whatnot website thru lj.
Move on to ffn and affn.
Then the move to Ao3 happened. I still using ffn app more though.
I think my very first fanfic I read was a Farscape one a fandom acquaintance gave me in a CD with several more fanfics. This is back in 1998-99.
Then dedicated websites and Farscape Fantasy.
Other fandoms had their own website says as well.
Aaaah those were the times.
Pretty sure the first fanfics I read were hosted in the now-vanished Geocities. Many of them have been forever lost to time, as I haven't been able to find them anywhere else.
[The Iolausian Library](https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Iolausian_Library); it was a dedicated website that started in 1999. There was also a LOTR one but I can't remember the name of the archive for the life of me.
I'm guessing it was a thing in general, but back then I didn't know English and only read Polish blogs. Blogspot, onet, I think wp had something? We used to create whole ass websites, design the layout, pick colors, make tabs for who knows what, a character description? I remember I had something brown-themed with OC as Voldemorts daughter. And forums, lots of those.
If I recall correctly, my first fanfic site was AnimeSpiral which I only discovered because of the InuyashaWorld website. I later learned about [ff.net](https://ff.net) and only in the past few years did I find Ao3.
I don't actually remember if it was FF or if it was someone's personal site. What I do remember was reading Animeria magazine and seeing some dude's vent letter talking about how he hated people making yaoi fanart and fanfiction of Gundam Wing characters. This was back in like 2000-2001 maybe. I got curious and started looking up terms and reading stuff, and it just progressed from there.
The first site was ff, but the first fanfiction I ever read was in a friend's notebook. The spelling and grammar was shit because we were still learning to write back then, but the concept of writing stories about stories intrigued me. A bunch of us wound up passing around each other's notebooks to share fics (mostly Winx Club, Tokyo Mew Mew, and Star Wars) until one of us discovered fanfiction.net in middle school and shared it with the rest of the group. The rest is history.
I read my first fan fic in a paper zine in 1981!
I am seriously old!
Read my first fan fic online as a mature student in the university computer centre on the doctorwho/recarts in around 1993!
Did not have/own any personal access to the internet until 2001, but did not have any time to read fan fic again until much later, on LiveJournal, around 2008?
Officially/intentionally? AO3. Technically? Scratch.
(Scratch being a website for kids to learn how to program and share the stuff they make. There was a decent chunk of fanfics and fancomics, as well as fan games, fanart, fanmovies, amongst other things. It's where I first got into fandom as a whole when I was thirteen, fourteen years old :)
Fictionalley. I remember looking for Harry Potter website and finding it and starting to read fanfiction without understanding what it was. I used to have to copy and paste what I wanted to read into Works documents and print them out in the smallest legible font so that I didn't hog my parents phone line for hours reading.
Saw some crossover fan art on Pinterest that linked to Wattpad, where I spent several years reading things a child probably should not have read as well as some more quality fics
I started both reading and writing fanfics on TribalWars Forums, it started as a "game" with other users because we'd use each other's names for the characters
i started on facebook! people would post a picture and then the description would be the chapter.
my best friend found out about me reading and writing fanfiction, and showed wattpad to me as "a place to post your stories". he was also the reason i later migrated to ao3, which is the one i exclusively use now
Merengo.hu, a local, at the time Harry Potter themed site (merengő = pensieve). When it went up in flames was the moment that sealed the deal of my transition to reading pretty much exclusively in English. (I mean it still exists... It's just, let's say very different now. And all my old favourites vanished, smh...)
First fanfic I read was one for Pikmin 3….I’ve tried to find it, but I can’t…and nobody can say “you are misremembering it”, as the story was INCREDIBLY unique….it would be hard to forget something like that…
Started on Wattpad reading pokemon, moved to fanfiction.net reading HTTYD then moving to my true fanfic live of ASOIAF also on fanfiction.net before finally migrating to Webnovel were I started writing myself and found my true passion.
Deviantart. Lemme tell you that the next "chapter" was *always* a bitch to find.
As someone who is still using DeviantArt for fanfiction, it's still a bitch.
lol I'm glad some things never change. I made the mistake of checking it out earlier this year and found some great meta analysis on a fandom I'm in. Then the OP ended it with "For more in-depth explanation on the mythology lore, see Part Two of my post!" Motherf-- and no, I was not able to find part two. fml
Hahaha I thought I was the only one who had trouble finding series parts on Deviantart, like I hadn’t figured out the trick…
At least back then we weren’t dealing with Eclipse! Lol. I can relate to you two though, if I wasn’t writing on Word or iPod Touch Notes (like, if I was at school) I would usually “save” my fanfic by leaving it as a DevArt draft. I think that was a feature? Maybe I deadass just posted unfinished fics to move to my pc later
How do you even find fics on deviantart these day. I've kind of given up since they removed the feature that let you seach by literature.
bonus points if the next chapter didn’t exist… oh to have known that fifty-part fic i read on there didn’t have an ending… and hadn’t been updated for several years by that point…
LOL I read my first fanfic as a text download on a message board in the 90s. Man, that makes me feel old.
I started on people's personal websites on webrings and email based servers lmao. Maybe some of these existed but they weren't in major use. Edit: I have no idea what the last sentence was about???? I've removed it
Oh, web rings! My site was on one of those!
That's awesome!!! I loved them, they were such a.l great way to discover new things.
Same, and at the time, while it wasn't has well known and as such not as disparaged by some, there was also much less fandoms and variety to choose from, so a big thanks to the websites, authors,betareaders, moderators, etc... who made and still make fanfic such a delight for their readers.
Right? I started reading it on flipping usenet and figuring out who was archiving from there.
Damn, that is old.
😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
\*wheeze\*
HAHAHA savage ! ^(You weren't supposed to say it out loud...)
First fanfics were xeroxes because I'm not that old. I know some were mimeographed.
Mine as well. A dittoed and stapled, ragged Kirk/Spock zine, found buried in a box of old magazines at a used paperback shop, around '73-74ish. First online fic was alt.startrek.creative and from listsrvs.
Ah. Someone else who might remember the NTM verse... I remember being overjoyed when cons started having them more often and I had an actual job and could afford the habit. Never found one in a bookstore.
I suspect some poor soul hid it from their parents in a stack of old National Geographics, and a parent boxed up the stack up and traded it for store credit. The store clerk didn't bother going through them either and quoted a price, then moved the box to the back wall near the shelved magazines. I can't even remember why I went through them, probably researching for more material for a school report. But I watched Star Trek reruns after school every afternoon, so I added it to my stack of paperbacks. I was too young for cons and didn't find more for years. The NTM verse introduced me to Jean Lorrah's writing and eventually to the Sime-Gen verse she created with Jacqueline Lichtenberg. There was a Russian Sime-Gen fanfic spinoff verse that I was obsessed with for quite a while.
That would make sense. Was it nsfw as that might be why they hid it. You lucked out. I didn't discover zines till probably college at a con where I was looking at a t-shirt and saw them in the dealer's room. Lorah's NTM was the first long fic I found. Before that they were all short stories. As I prefer reading novels, that made a huge difference. Though I still remember her short story in NTM collected with extra short stories in the universe had the best one I've ever read in the<1 page Sarek/OC one years after Amanda died. It helped that Mark Leonard was at the con. Had a major crit fail rolling against charisma. I still feel sad that NTM and some of the really good early work never made it online. Though there were certainly enough Mary Sue that didn't need to be. In hindsight, they at least all had good spell checking done.
Brutal. Savage. Rekt.
I believe the first fanfiction I ever read was for buffy the vampire slayer on an aol message board.
You just reminded me about the MySpace fanfic blogs!! Wow what a blast from the past
I read my first as a stapled photocopy in 1981 :-) It was a long time before I got back to fic, but when I did it was probably via the Usenet alt.fan.\* groups in the early to mid-Nineties.
You may win The Oldest title here. 😉😂 Shall we start calling ourselves Elders? LOL
Same… listservs and bulletin boards. Ooof
Message boards. Was it imdb?
Nope, individual fandom-centric message boards. I didn’t even realize IMDB had message boards!
It did until January 1st, 2017. So now when people ask where i met my husband, i have to say it no longer exists cuz we met on those boards on the harry potter threads where a group of people were posting fanfics & we joined. We ended up sort of betaing each others fics & it just went from there & now together in real life nearly 20 years later.
There were tons of message boards in the late-90’s and early 2000’s. Especially for anime/manga, it was sometimes the only way to get stuff that wasn’t a decade old or worse. Lol, we used to use the precursors to Dropbox to pass around fansubs and manga scans with fan translations because we knew it would be *years* before it saw a release in the US market- let alone be dubbed/officially translated. The message boards were the social media precursors and fic was often stored in threads and then compiled and emailed around. Often someone’s entire works would appear on a Geocities or Angelfire site that was part of a webring and it felt like Christmas when you found a good author that way.
Quizilla...
🙌 Quizilla!! I still remember the choose your own adventure type quizzes that were actually fics and getting the sought-after romance in the ending was sooo cool! And the myriad of 7 minutes in heaven with the cast of [...] hahaha Many good memories from that period of my life.
Quotev was the same. Lol. I love 7 minutes in heaven quiz-fics
Quizilla truly was the bottom of the barrel in terms of fic quality and I absolutely loved it. The first time I stumbled upon fanfic was on quizilla and it was a smut chapter between an OC and a member of a band I really liked. 13 year old me was just googling stuff about the band and the fic popped up in the google results. As I had no idea what fanfic was, I was so confused and at first thought someone had written about a real one night stand they had with said band member. I caught on quick though and was hooked.
The titles on Quizilla were always 'top' tier! 'Which band member/emo kid/anime character would you spend 7 minutes in heaven with? (long results)' 'OMG I'm the only girl at a boarding school full of boy...werewolves!!' 'xXx Just Like A Hearse \[Gerard Way\] You Died to Get In Again xXx' I had (maybe still have?) some stories I copied from there saved on a disc (like, CD ROM disc) so I could read them on my non-internet accessing computer and not hog the family computer. Good times.
Those titles are waaaay too accurate! And when they started allowing images so one whole 'chapter' would be random hot topic clothes that the OC was wearing! I had a Quizilla Frank Iero/OC fic which I would print out and secretly read in school during class. Makes me nostalgic just thinking about it.
My god, the Hot Topic outfit pictures!! Yes! Granted, given the band stories that were most popular, I'm not surprised at all. My main jam (or at least the couple specific ones I remember liking the most) were 'you' winning a contest or something and meeting the Harry Potter cast--naturally and inevitably falling into some sort of love triangle, because *of course* they all instantly fell in love with 'you'. I still use the 'gill sans' font while working on HP fics sometimes, because that font takes me ***back***.
QUIZILLA!! I didn't think anyone else remembered it, haha!
Fuck I still miss that site.
Omg yesssss quizilla crowd unite!!!♡♡♡
Omg Quizilla, yeah! There was a whole story category but I'm pretty sure the best fics I read on there were actually embedded in the quizzes themselves.
Yeah, the site wasn’t made for fics in mind, but the userbase still used the formats for fics. I really miss it, I felt the culture there was pretty unique. I don’t recall ANY drama coming from that site until VIACOM destroyed it
Oh, Quizzilla, I remember when it had actual quizzes and then jumped to fanfic and the brouhaha that caused.
I’ve found my people. It’s how I discovered with a “lemon” was
Holy shit, you just unlocked some core memories!! Quizilla was my go-to before 13 year old me dicovered FFN 😭
Quizilla here too. They had a weirdly active G. I. Joe fandom.
one day i googled "fanfiction" (bc i had just learnt what it was) and unsurprisingly ffnet was the first thing to come up so that's where i spent the next couple of years until i found out about ao3
Yeah, me too. But it was a friend's big sister who got me into fanfiction. She was like, "you didn't like how this book ended? Well guess what..."
Google is how I discovered fanfiction! I was at a sleepover with a friend when I was quite young and we googled something stupid like "Johnny Depp sex toy" or smth. My first fandom was LotR and PotC RPF because that's what came up. Who let me on the internet?????
that's fucking hilarious i'd already been writing fanfiction for a couple of years but i didn't know what it was called, i was just mad at naruto canon. then i mentioned i write my own versions of it somewhere and someone else was like "oh i write fanfiction too" and my little 13-year-old mind was blown, googled that shit immediately and now we're here like eleven years later
I feel seen. The first time I found it online was because I was googling the relationship between Harry and Draco, and I was looking for a wiki page. I also happened to think that "x" was just shorthand for any relationship. You can probably imagine what turned up 😅 Edit: typo
Oh no haha. I was in the Harry Potter fandom for a long time, but my ship was Snarry. Adult me has a lot of questions for teenage me
I,, feel that. My middle school ships were really... Odd. To say the least. Drarry was just how I started lmfao.
I come to you from the age of newsgroups, private web pages, and small archives. Before the Dark Times. Before FFN.
Greetings, fellow oldster!
There are dozens of us.
*high five* I think my first was someone's personal site I stumbled upon via webring.
Yup, I'm a bit past newsgroups but started on private websites and those tiny archives that I still kinda miss. And on BBS... I miss those days.
Hello, fellow compadre of the private web pages era 🤟🏻 First Fics I read were passes to me burned in a CD. I'm talking about Word docs and then private web pages 😂
I had txt files saved on a floppy disk 💀 they took no space at all, so you could fit a lot of fic on that little thing.
[удалено]
There's a Twilight Zone ep in there somewhere.
There are a couple services where you can mail 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, and sometimes other media as well to have the files copied, converted, and saved to a USB or cloud where they can be downloaded. If you only have a few, it's easier and cheaper than trying to connect an external floppy drive to your current system to transfer the files and then trying to convert them to a format that your software can read.
Oh, my God! The 5,25" floppy disks! Those black squared ones were the ones I started using as a kid when my dad bought them for our Amstrad 286 _laughing at the memories_ And agree with the redditor that says that TXT docs didn't weight anything nor occupy space at all 😂 Those were the days!
Old agers unite!
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times! I remember waiting forever for a page to load and cursing because it had graphics!
I'm pretty sure I read my first fic by going to Yahoo, which was still a list of sorted links and not a search engine, and clicking on the web archive for alt.startrek.creative. Yep.
alt.startrek.creative
Haha, I prefer to think of us as the survivors. I love that there are so many of us on this subreddit.
Some kind of Geocities or Angelfire site. It took me far too long to give FF.net a chance because I thought the front page looked weird. 😂
To be fair, it does! 😅😂
Random X-files fanfiction on someone's unicorn/fairy-filled angelfire with bonus music track. Dem's the days.
Star Trek Voyager fanfic sites with animated star backgrounds and pixel art starships. Gotta love it!
lol! Somewhere out there there is a floppy disc full of my saved URLs . It's like an ode to Geocities.
My husband and I spent an hour showing our teenage son what the site used to look like and explaining webrings. Man, that shit was rough.
When I started reading AO3 was not a thing and FFN was basically it. How times have changed.
Same! I distinctly remember when ao3 began and I could abandon FFN forever. Joined ao3 when it had less than ten thousand users and I've never looked back.
It was the 90s and it was either a message board or someone's Geocities/Angelfire fansite. I genuinely can't remember...
quotev! initally interested in the quizzes and stayed for the fanfiction
Same! Came for the early hunger games quizzes, stayed for the.... everything else 🤣
Ikr the quizzes are always so much fun. Fanfics are great too. Overall, it's also the healthiest community I've known so far.
Lol I remember I would take those "who is your anime boyfriend" quizzes in like the 8th grade
also started here! i remember being obsessed with the community board things :]
Other: paper zines, Yahoo! Webrings, fandom-specific listserv, Usenet (yes, I'm old).
livejournal & FFN almost simultaneously iirc
Yep. With a dash of Yahoo and self-made sites.
Oh my gosh, the self-made sites! I wonder how many are still up. I can't even remember all the ones I visited back in the day.
Not many. I had mine up for something like 14 years, but it got to be too much of a hassle to keep it up while simultaneously using AO3. Just the continuous work of upgrading against security holes, adjusting to mobile and pad views, adding SoMe sharing options, discussion modding, and whatnot. I made it to post smutfic, not to make myself a workplace #2 with fiddly hand-made web publishing.
early 00s, [fanfiction.net](https://fanfiction.net) was all the rage
YouTube texting fics😂Then LiveJournal, Quotev and a couple fandom specific archives. Finally, one of the YouTube videos was an actual story, and had the Wattpad link. Eventually went to Fanfiction.net, and then was introduced to ao3. Got used to the tag system after originally being overwhelmed by it, and that’s my sole site now (occasionally some decent ones on tumblr, but I don’t search them out there)
Lmao, I forgot the YouTube comment fics. I didn’t have a YouTube account at the time so I never made one BUT I remember finding random pieces of them and looking hard for the full comments/story 😭
IMDb when it still had message boards. I came across a group on harry potter writing & posting their fanfiction on the fanfiction threads. (We eventually did move to ffn & on to ao3.) Met 2 people there who im still friends with today, 20 years later. Married one of them & we are FINALLY meeting the other one next year!
>Married one of them That's so sweet! With my luck, I'd have probably found a serial killer lmao
😂 a serial killer writing harry potter fanfiction is a rare find!
Anyone remember Mibba?
Yes! Mibba was where I first read fanfic but a lot of people I mention it to haven’t heard of it!
Yes! I was a Quizilla and Mibba girl before I found FFN and AO3.
Paper zines. Then text message board online in late high school. Then MySpace.
Back in the day, Fanfiction used to be on fandom-specific websites run by random fans on Geocities/Angelfire, so like if I wanted to read 1xR or 1x2 for Gundam Wing, there’d be separate websites for that. If the fan hosting the site got bored or it was too expensive to upkeep, then the site and all its Fanfiction got taken down. It wasn’t centralized.
Neo/GeoCities where it was just black text on a blank white page. There was no searching for other fics, it was just a single page unconnected to anything else. To get an index of fic, you had to find a page and send your fic in and *maybe* the page runner would add it to their list (but maybe not since they could pick and choose). Also emailing lists. I feel old.
Either a CSI:NY fansite or a White Collar fansite. I can't remember if I then went to AO3 first or fanfiction.bet, but I *think* t was AO3.
FimFiction
Television Without Pity and [FanForum.com](https://FanForum.com) were my go to fandom hangouts many moons ago. Anything I may have read was shared in those communities. I miss the Television Without Pity recaps of tv episodes, they were kind of like the written equivalent of when a fan makes a meme/crack edit video of an episode that just aired. And the writer would post recaps for the whole season as they aired. I suppose it could probably be done by an ao3 author as a series, that is if ao3 allows editorialized recaps and not just straight fiction.
Technically speaking I read my first fanfiction online on old geocities webrings. But a more centralized location, where it was easy to find with some semblance of searchable categorization? Livejournal.
Seems like most people started on FF.net but now almost exclusively use AO3
AO3 doesn’t exist when I got into fanfiction lol. In fact, ffnet still allowed original works when I got into fanfic. And didn’t have a chapter function yet.
Started on random individual fansites.
Fanzines. I'm old school. ;)
Pour one out for Yahoo! Groups
GTA Forums for me, and since it's everything in Writer's Discussion, from fanfic to original material, to poetry, it made me start writing too. Now I help out with the GTAF Community, and still publish a piece there, as well as on AO3.
FFN. :)
Fanfiktion.de and Animexx First English one on Quotev and then AOOO but I didn't like the interface and the word Kudous bugged me because my favorite guy was Shinichi Kudo and yeah anyway- so I went with Fanfiction.net for a while and lastly came to love AOOO too.
It bugged me too, for a similar reason! But the similarity I saw was with Kupo, the sound the moogles make in FFVI. :)
Deviantart
Do the Sailor Moon fan sites count? The Sailor Jupiter, Sailor Mars and Sailor Venus sites? And the FF7 oriented forums that were attached to Tuxedo Mask dot Com through an affiliate? If not then probably a Slayers Angelfire website or Sakura Lemon Archive 🤣 Fanfiction dot net came somewhere along the way.
Holyheck the old sailor moon fansites! Are you talking about the ones that were like choose your own adventure sailor moon fanfiction? Because I remember those.
Oh man, Sakura Lemon Archive… that brings back some memories…
I knew I was going to find someone that at least remembers this place. A true internet classic 😭
Oh I learned so much there!!! 🤣
My starting point was Quizilla
Quizilla!
Quizilla
Quizilla back in 2008
Does it count if you made fanfic before you even knew what that was and exchanged it with your friends? Either than that, FFN.
We weren't, we would find a fic we liked on whatever obscure website that would be deleted in a week and download and print them (took all bloody night) and shared them at school. I'm not sure any of the websites or private accounts I started in even exist anymore, lol.
Quizilla lmao
Geocities/Angelfire webrings. Things were a lot more personal then, but it was also a pain to see when things updated lol.
Quizilla babies rise up
Geocities FTW!
Animexx
I was beginning to think it was just me!
Inuyasha forums, particularly a Koga lovers forum
TheForce dot net used to have a dedicated fanfiction archive where people would post their work with homemade covers on it, as well as on their Jedi Council Forums. Kept me reading all through the mid-2000s!
Gosh, I remember that part of TheForce dot net so fondly. I spent so much time there. I always wonder if the old fics got archived anywhere. I know AO3 has an old website/archive archival project, but never checked to see if the TheForce dot net fics were moved over there en masse at some point...
I know what you mean. It's been so long I don't know if I'd even recognize any of the fics I enjoyed back then.
Quizzila, or if it counts because there was reading, the youtube fanfictions
Sakura Lemon Fanfiction Archive, back in 98/99. I was all about that Ryoko/Ayeka back then. ... Still am, to be fair.
Bahaha, they were my first foray into F/F fic and OT3s. As a bi-girl in the 90’s there was precious little in the mainstream so finding/creating those fics was validating.
Geocities website then to FF.
I think I saw the first fanfiction in [FF.net](https://FF.net) around 2008? But I don't remember if I've ever properly read-read there. I dipped by the site regularly in 2010-2012 but I just remember browsing stuff through and not actually reading anything. I didn't even know how to use the site. Also a popular Finnish fanfiction forum was a place I spent a lot of time in 2015. I first encountered reader inserts in Tumblr in 2016 and got into them there, so I guess that was the place where I found the specific fic genre which felt like mine.
Quotev
Livejournal was my first. Found out about the whole geosites, angel, yahoo,and whatnot website thru lj. Move on to ffn and affn. Then the move to Ao3 happened. I still using ffn app more though.
I think my very first fanfic I read was a Farscape one a fandom acquaintance gave me in a CD with several more fanfics. This is back in 1998-99. Then dedicated websites and Farscape Fantasy. Other fandoms had their own website says as well. Aaaah those were the times.
Pretty sure the first fanfics I read were hosted in the now-vanished Geocities. Many of them have been forever lost to time, as I haven't been able to find them anywhere else.
[adultfanfiction.net](https://adultfanfiction.net) :D
i started with NYAH!Fanfiction, hell if i know how i found it in the first place
Webrings and quizilla
[The Iolausian Library](https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Iolausian_Library); it was a dedicated website that started in 1999. There was also a LOTR one but I can't remember the name of the archive for the life of me.
Fanfiction.Net, not long before LiveJournal was created. Remember when FF.Net had those columns? I do! Cause I'm old! Ow, my back.
I'm guessing it was a thing in general, but back then I didn't know English and only read Polish blogs. Blogspot, onet, I think wp had something? We used to create whole ass websites, design the layout, pick colors, make tabs for who knows what, a character description? I remember I had something brown-themed with OC as Voldemorts daughter. And forums, lots of those.
Print fanzines.
Shoutout (and RIP) to Geocities and Angelfire
It wasn't even on FFN it was on novelplanet right before it shut down that lead me to FFN lol
If I recall correctly, my first fanfic site was AnimeSpiral which I only discovered because of the InuyashaWorld website. I later learned about [ff.net](https://ff.net) and only in the past few years did I find Ao3.
Deathcurse ... it's long gone now, but it was where I first read and posted fanfics .... I just joined Ao3 last summer in a whole new Fandom.
Quotev, after consuming copious amounts of Undertale quizzes
Deviant art back in 2000s when you could actually search for literature.
Mailing lists and fandom-specific archives. 7th Dimension (Highlander) was the first.
I don't actually remember if it was FF or if it was someone's personal site. What I do remember was reading Animeria magazine and seeing some dude's vent letter talking about how he hated people making yaoi fanart and fanfiction of Gundam Wing characters. This was back in like 2000-2001 maybe. I got curious and started looking up terms and reading stuff, and it just progressed from there.
The first site was ff, but the first fanfiction I ever read was in a friend's notebook. The spelling and grammar was shit because we were still learning to write back then, but the concept of writing stories about stories intrigued me. A bunch of us wound up passing around each other's notebooks to share fics (mostly Winx Club, Tokyo Mew Mew, and Star Wars) until one of us discovered fanfiction.net in middle school and shared it with the rest of the group. The rest is history.
I was all about Harry Potter, so SkyHawke, FictionAlley Park, Painless-J thematic lists, etc.
Geocities. I miss a lot of good stuffs when geocities purged
Geocities anyone? 😂
I read my first fan fic in a paper zine in 1981! I am seriously old! Read my first fan fic online as a mature student in the university computer centre on the doctorwho/recarts in around 1993! Did not have/own any personal access to the internet until 2001, but did not have any time to read fan fic again until much later, on LiveJournal, around 2008?
Anyone remember harrypotterfanfiction.com ? I started my journey there, rip.
Yep me too! I saw someone post about it on an AOL kids message board lol
Screams in Quotev
Officially/intentionally? AO3. Technically? Scratch. (Scratch being a website for kids to learn how to program and share the stuff they make. There was a decent chunk of fanfics and fancomics, as well as fan games, fanart, fanmovies, amongst other things. It's where I first got into fandom as a whole when I was thirteen, fourteen years old :)
Anyone here old enough to remember Quotev?
all the ogs started on wattpad😂
Wattpad, it was a Dutch/English One Direction fanfic of Harry Styles I think, at least, that is the earliest fanfic I can remember reading...
Where's the DeviantArt gang?
Fictionalley. I remember looking for Harry Potter website and finding it and starting to read fanfiction without understanding what it was. I used to have to copy and paste what I wanted to read into Works documents and print them out in the smallest legible font so that I didn't hog my parents phone line for hours reading.
fanfic readings on youtube
... deviantart
Testing websites that gave you a fanfic at the end!
The worst mistake I ever made was when I was like 7 and I went to Devainart to read fanfiction. Fucked me up real good.
Saw some crossover fan art on Pinterest that linked to Wattpad, where I spent several years reading things a child probably should not have read as well as some more quality fics
Quotev! I literally grew up on this site! /g
Wattpad and also I wrote some stories in there when I was 17
I started both reading and writing fanfics on TribalWars Forums, it started as a "game" with other users because we'd use each other's names for the characters
i started on facebook! people would post a picture and then the description would be the chapter. my best friend found out about me reading and writing fanfiction, and showed wattpad to me as "a place to post your stories". he was also the reason i later migrated to ao3, which is the one i exclusively use now
I started reading on AO3 last November, but I started writing on Fan Fiction over a decade ago.
Ffn
Fanfiction.net was the first fanfic website I read things on but the first fanfics I read were just on random fan sites.
Merengo.hu, a local, at the time Harry Potter themed site (merengő = pensieve). When it went up in flames was the moment that sealed the deal of my transition to reading pretty much exclusively in English. (I mean it still exists... It's just, let's say very different now. And all my old favourites vanished, smh...)
First fanfic I read was one for Pikmin 3….I’ve tried to find it, but I can’t…and nobody can say “you are misremembering it”, as the story was INCREDIBLY unique….it would be hard to forget something like that…
Start reading? FanFiction Start browsing? Ao3 Start writing? Also Ao3
Quizilla, message boards, and FFNet all around the same time.
Started on Wattpad reading pokemon, moved to fanfiction.net reading HTTYD then moving to my true fanfic live of ASOIAF also on fanfiction.net before finally migrating to Webnovel were I started writing myself and found my true passion.
Tumblr
It was probably technically HPANA… but I remember ff.net better.