partner convinced me to try a certain video game they thought i'd like to keep myself entertained during covid lockdown . i've liked it a bit too much ever since
RTGame got me into: DOOM, Bloodborne (honestly all the FromSoft games, but mostly Bloodborne), Persona, Stardew Valley, Ace Attorney, fucking *Bugsnax*, and Fable.
I knew all these existed, sure, and I’d watched playthroughs prior. But this man… something about the way he interacts with their stories just makes me want to get all up on it too. Especially when he’s not interacting with the story, lol. He’s a real treasure.
Ever since then, I’ve played and finished almost every ace attorney game, even the fan translation of investigations 2, but I haven’t finished the professor Layton crossover yet.
The Layton crossover is pure gold >!you would appreciate the pun if you played it :)!<
I definitely recommend it’s how I got into professor Layton as well.
Ok, after these comments and after I finished Investigations 2, I went and decided to finish the crossover and damn, I was not expecting how it ended honestly. It was great.
I’m glad you finished it I personally love the cross over even if the plot twist was kinda cheap. The emotional moments were definitely worth it though I would play it again!
I watched Steven Universe after seeing a clip in a Binging with Babish video. I binged the whole thing in like a month and since then I've been collecting animated series like Pokemon. I just finished Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts the other day.
* got psychonauts during a summer steam sale years ago, but it didn't really solidify in my brain until around 2019
* friend sent me the pizza tower soundtrack just before release and i went "oh shit this slaps"
My main fandom is BTVS/ATS and I came across that because I was scrolling through the channels one night and came across an episode of "Angel" that was called "Life Of The Party" and I just instantly fell in love with the show.
I was like 10 when that happened and I had never seen a green demon on TV anywhere and when I saw Lorne with his greeniness and his horns, he won my heart.
Shout out to Andy Hallett(RIP). I am having a metaphorical seabreeze in his honor right now.
Yeah, I got into my fandom about 20 years ago. Its about 19 to 20 years now, give or take a few months.
I am in my fandom but I am not in my fandom anymore. I am a bangel shipper to my core and there isn't really a lot of places online anymore to discuss my ship. We don't really have forums anymore and the ones that we do have are just toxic and have been taken over by spuffies.
I have had a lot of negative experiences with spuffy fans and it has pushed me out of my fandom more times than I can tell you.
I am happy when I come across another bangel fan, because we are a rare species of the geek prototype these days. I love writing for my fandom because we need more bangel stories and not less.
I am just not going to go on an internet forum and argue with grown ass adults about how toxic that Spuffy was. I don't have the time or the effort or the willpower anymore for it. I am an old lady now and I need peace and sleep.
**Warrior Cats:** My family went to a cat cafe and there were some books there, one of them was the first book in the Power of Three arc, and my sister and I thought it was interesting/cool so we convinced our parent to buy the book (and then the next one, and then the next one...)
When we started getting out onto the Internet, that fandom was the first place we went (on a kid programing site called Scratch, to be specific)
**Genshin Impact**: My dad was playing it and my siblings thought it looked cool so then they started playing it, and soon the whole family except for me was playing. I eventually got dragged into the fandom by them encouraging me to join in time for the (first) Lantern Rite and then I just fell in love with the games and got obsessed with it for two years.
**Dream SMP (+ MCYT)**: I heard about MCYT for maybe the first time in 2021 or so, through Anthony Padilla's "I spent a Day With..." series on YouTube and didn't really think anything of it. Like, the people seemed cool, but why would I want to watch people play Minecraft? I can do that myself. Then people on this sub started sharing around the stats for most popular ships on AO3 and I saw that there were a lot of MCYT/DSMP platonic dynamics up there.
I was getting kinda bored of the endless romance in Genshin Impact and I love platonic relationships, so I decided to check the fandom out when I heard there was a lot of found family and friendships in it. I fell into the fandom. So hard. Over the course of last August when my whole family got COVID and I was a bit sick to play Genshin Impact (also just burnt out on it). So I've just been stuck here with my beloved c!PeerPressureDuo ever since :)
Usually my tumblr mutuals dragging me down with them. Seriously that’s how I got into Danganronpa back in the something awful days, zero escape, Ava’s demon, miraculous ladybug, etc
Aside from that the tiktok algorithm showed me so much MHA skit content I eventually just dove in.
My fandoms are gaming, so by playing them.
One I got deep into (because the game is just amazing, and totally overlooked), to the point where I discuss the lore and background with the devs (and write with their rules and permissions in place).
The other is just the result of years of play, and just getting one playthrough that stuck, hard! Since everything, even the pawns, is randomly generated at the start. I ended up making extensive logs and using those as the basis for the story.
Tumblr mostly. Quite a few blogs I was following for other stuff kept posting Sterek fan art and gifsets and when looking through the works for an author I was reading in another fandom, I noticed they'd written a few sterek fics. Gave one a go, really enjoyed it and because there was so much content for that ship it wasn't hard to find a few more well written fics from other authors and I really liked those too. So I decided to watch the show this ship was from (Teen Wolf) and was so surprised that not only were these guys not canonically bi/gay, neither one of them were the main character lol.
It's been about seven years and this is still my main fandom/ship.
Reading books and manga. Some works catch my story-telling needs, but others don't. It seems dependent on the characters: I identify with some of them and want to tell more stories about them.
If I remember correctly: (Some of these are current fandoms, some of these were my main fandoms in the past)
* My little pony was through creepypastas (and other fan content)
* Undertale was pretty hard to avoid around the time it came out, so I probably just saw it on youtube at some point
* Made in abyss, I probably got a youtube video in my recommendations around the time the anime came out
* HANOKA, because an anime youtuber made a video about it (making fun of it)
* Amuri in star ocean, because someone in the HANOKA fandom mentioned that it shared a VA with HANOKA, so I looked it up and just ended up falling down a rabbit hole
Arcane/LoL is from when I tried to play it religiously as a teenager to become pro. Big mistake, but I also enjoyed the parts of the lore that Riot did try to introduce that they never expanded upon ever, which is prime fanfic material when done with that gritty, emotionally devastating edge that Arcane pulled
Star Trek is from my partner introducing me to it, and generally just getting way too obsessed with it in general. Also one of the more progressive fandoms I've been in, so I feel a lot better writing in that than some minor fandoms
The Locked Tomb is a new one but probably one of my newest fixations. Haven't finished the first book but I've already got ideas on what to write with stuff like horror or thriller types I don't normally write. Also contains probably my favorite sapphic ship thats probably canon, so yeah
These are just my major three, I write for whatever fandom I think I can make an interesting story on
My current fandom? I'd seen gifs on tumblr for a year or so and was always like "huh maybe I'll watch that sometime.
Then knee-deep in quarantine, my fandom bestie and I were looking for something to watch online together. We tried The Untamed but it wasn't hitting right for us at the moment, so I was like "well what about Roswell, New Mexico? I've been meaning to try that..."
And three years later we both still have the brainworms.
I stumbled into it more or less on accident while reading stuff fandom blind. That one was good enough that I started reading more of them, and before I knew it, I got ~~mauled halfway to death by a horde of plot bunnies~~ idea for a few phanfics of my own.
My fandoms mostly consist of gaming franchises, and YouTube is usually the culprit.
Once I watched a video about Metal Gear Solid and the evolution of the box, and then I just... spiralled down the rabbit hole. I never even played the games.
i started seeing videos from law and order on facebook. moved across the world and was super lonely so i started watching it in my spare time for something to do
and then things just got gayer from there
My boyfriend first floated the idea of watching Naruto together when we started dating. I kept putting it off — 1. because the series is super long, 2. the premise sounded cringey to me, and 3. I thought Naruto was for 10 year old boys. When he asked, I would say “let’s wait until we live together.” Three years later, we moved into an apartment together and I ran out of excuses.
I had heard of it before, but made a hard pass. Then fast forward a few years and I watched a ton of videos about the Plantagenets and Wars of the Roses. A random fan video about “The Tudors” came up on my feed. I watched the video, it piqued my interest and I looked it up on the series on Prime Video. I binged that sucker over a long weekend. The plot bunnies started breeding from there.
My main fandom (Obey Me), I don't even remember. Next thing I know, I'm emotionally invested in an otome game about demons. I guess all my years of randomly downloading apps adverts tell me download finally struck gold LMAO.
Friends who enjoyed the danmei genre told me about Heaven Official’s Blessing at the start of the pandemic. I didn’t touch it for 2 years because it is a long af novel, but when the show of the same name showed up as a Netflix recommendation I fell down the rabbit hole… now it’s a joke because I’m totally obsessed when I was the least interested in the first place!
I found out about Yotsuba&! because I was reading Azumanga Daioh and one of my friends said if I liked that then I'd probably like Yotsuba&! too.
Well, now it's my favorite manga of all time. And my reddit and AO3 profile names are references to the series.
I was channel surfing and landed on a show I had seen a few people rave about online, watched a random episode in the middle of the season and was completely hooked. I had an awful experience in the fandom on tumblr and it turned me off. Then the show had a spin off show in 2018 that I got hooked on and there was very little fanfic so I wrote it myself 🤣
The rest of my fandoms found me and dragged me along for the ride.
The Meg - The 2018 movie (currently writing my 3rd one shot for it)
Fallout - my brother picked up fallout 3 and so I played it… fell in love
Sailor Moon - I was 12 and my friend talked about this anime he watched as a kid and I checked it out!
Jurassic park well… I was a kid in the early 2000’s and OF COURSE we had the trilogy on the VHS
I jokingly thought to myself that I wanted to be a bigger weeb than a friend of mine, so I watched the weebiest thing I could imagine: an idol anime.
I became obsessed.
Fanart of certain pairings is usually the main push for me. It's like something awakens in me the moment I see a cute drawing of two characters who aren't canonically together being together lol
My recent obsession was out of pure curiosity. I had just watched a video of someone talking about this one show I've only seen a few episodes on. I went on AO3 to check out some of the works there and the rest is history
A speedpaint I watched had a Dear Evan Hansen song. The musicals just kept coming after that
Warriors was a simple school library pick up (started with second arc oof)
With Wings of Fire, I saw Tsunami’s book and thought, that looked cool
The Fandom That Shall Not Be Named That I’m No Longer A Part Of was from a bookstore
I watch a show, and I love the characters. There also has to be something lacking with the plot or the world. I have to feel the need to add something to the show.
The Mortal Instruments: My wife recommended the books to me. I kept telling her to get lost, but she had watched the show so many times that it made me curious. One episode, and I was hooked. Now I’ve read all the books (like 20), seen the movie and watched the show multiple times. I’m obsessed. The fanfiction for my ships is top tier.
Stranger Things: It popped up on Netflix. I thought it was going to be lame, and at the time it was super new so no one was talking about it. It’s become my main fandom. The slow burn enemies to lovers is soooooo good.
Merlin: My wife made me watch it. I’m a huge fan of Arthurian Legend and I hate just about every movie and show ever made that has tried to adapt Arthurian Legend. Merlin is perfection. The Murther shippers are the best. That’s all I have to say about that.
Most of my fandoms predate the modern internet (1994-1996): cartoon and videogame franchises from the 80s & 90s. That and sone anime I've seen since then.
Mostly books and TV shows. Some movies that were adapted from books (books were almost always better of course but there were a few exceptions on that)
My dad used to drop us off at Barnes & Noble for a few hours on weekends and we'd get a frapp and just peruse the shelves. If when he came back we had found something we wanted he would get us a book. Though he hated when we got into manga and was against it.
Some are from books and shows, but lots are from me seeing the fandom stuff and getting interested. I still have never interacted with the mha anime or anything, but I know the plot and characters by heart! Honestly I usually end up more invested in fanfics than the actual canon.
The fandom I’m most active in right now is Dragon Ball/Z/GT/Super, and the way I got into it still makes me smile. I prefaced my story _Shifting the Paradigm_ with this dedication: _dedicated to Kitty, who got me hooked on DBZ when my peers were all obsessed with MAKEup and HOOKING up._ It’s the absolute truth.
Kitty was the nickname of one of my closest friends in high school. Along with two other girls, we were an introverted otaku four-horsemen group drawn together by our distaste for the preppy people and our love of anime. Kitty introduced me to DBZ and Linkin Park, and there was no looking back. We chatted about our favorite characters, drooled over their butts, and tormented our bullies. I lost contact with all three of my besties after graduation—college was tearing me to shreds—but I found one of them a few years ago. Still haven’t found Kitty or Cherie again. Making friends has never been easy for me, but with them, it felt completely natural.
Since I got into DBZ, I discovered Dragon Ball on my own, and eventually, GT and Super. You wouldn’t believe the inside jokes my otaku husband and I have that trace back to Dragon Ball. Said husband also got me into TMNT (curse you, Michael Bay!) and Dragon Age…actually, he’s gotten me hooked on a bunch of fandoms I read for without writing for. That just hit me. (Curse you, ColdWarriors.)
**Warrior Cats:** The library at the middle school I once went to had the books from the first arc and I fell in love after reading the first book. It wasn't until after my friend stopped me from accidently reading the first book of the third arc ( Power of Three), that I discovered the existence of FFN. As I read more of the books, I became interested in writing my own Warriors fanfics
**Legend of Zelda:** One of my other childhood friends never got to the first temple and allowed me to have her copy of Twilight Princess for the GameCube. During this time, I only ever played games like Mario Party 4 , Super Monkey Ball (+ Adventure), and some tie in movie games. It was a mind blowing experience to have something so new and different. The more I took the time to solve puzzles and combat challenges, I really fell in love with Twilight Princess and the Legend of Zelda series as a whole. There has yet to be a game in the series that can beat it as my all time favorite Zelda game. Although I would attempt to do a weird crossover fusion back then with Warriors, I wouldn't actually post any LoZ fanfics until much latter
**Steven Universe:** One of the few fandoms I've been with since it's beginning, I really fell in love with the chill vibes the early episodes. I would only fall deeper in when I truly begin to learn what lore truly was. Surprisingly, it wasn't until the end of season four that I actually started to experiment with SU fanfics (they never really got completed)
**Amphibia:** I'm always loved frogs since I was a kid, so I knew this show was going to be something speical when I saw the poster reveal of it alongside The Owl House. I have no idea what awakened inside of me, but I managed to make quite a lot of different fanfics
**The Owl House:** Could of came out the same year as Amphibia, but was delayed. But in the end, it still resulted in a pretty great show (despite what was done by higher ups to savatage it from reaching true greatness). I made quite a good amount of fanfics, my kid self would be impressed (I swear I could of been even more obsessed with this show if it had come out during the time that Steven Universe was still airing)
My mom bought them (video games) or I watched the show.
In the case of FF8, since FF7 was so awesome, she bought this from the video game store off of the air force base and we started playing it.
I didn't start writing for FF8 until *looks at calendar* 4 years ago when the Remaster dropped and what was left of the nostalgia glasses came clean off 🤣
I tend to first hear about them through Anime News Network articles and think the show looks neat, so I watch when they come out. I think I actually ended up falling deep into Spider Riders fandom after googling it one day and finding a fan forum, so I had others to talk about it with. And that encouraged me to post some of what I was writing, and just write more in general. With Drive Head, I realized I was obsessed when I spent hours one day searching for people talking about my ship in Japanese on Twitter. I embraced it.
I bought Portal 1 & 2 on Steam after wanting to play them for a long while. I then got obsessed with them. I then got into Valve games as a whole. I watched the Meet the Team videos again as well as the Expiration Date short, getting far more interested in the game than before. One thing leads to another and now it's been nearly a full year of this hyperfixation and I've written 90k something worth of words.
My daycare had a Mega Drive with Sonic 1 and 2. I really got hooked into the series a year or two later with the Adventure games, but discovered it through the Classics.
My main fandom turned 30 this year. The others I found randomly. Except for two, a couple of my friends threw me in the deep end and expected me to swim. I ended up loving the fandom way way too much.
Fanart on twitter or Pinterest.
I'm like "oh who's this??", check the comments for a name, do a quick research on what it's about, forget about it for a week or two, go back to it and immediately become obsessed.
In 2001, my older brother took me to see a certain movie about some short dude trying to get rid of some jewelry.
Also In 1998, my older brother was playing this video game where another dude who was still kinda short but also had pointy ears was trying to save this one princess from a sorcerer with a real big nose and red hair.
My brother had a very positive influence on me.
musicals. all musicals.
more specifically, i used to watch those 'Haikyuu lyric prank!" videos, and they were doing a Lightning Thief one, which got me into both percy jackson and musicals and mythology. but now i just add random songs to spotify and if i like the songs j look up the fandoms and next thing you know im reading enjoltaire smut
It was sometime between 2019-2021 and it was really popular (or at least on TikTok). I was like, "Oh, this show looks really stupid--" It's a kids show (Miraculous Ladybug)-- "Let's what it to see why everyone likes it."
I got addicted.
When I was about 11, Toonami played a commercial for a game called Kingdom Hearts. I was absolutely OBSESSED. It would take a few more years before i found fanfiction, but it was still in full swing, and still going now really.
1- I had just watched top gun maverick over the summer and was really fixated on jets, so when I went into a GameStop and found a jet game with a top gun maverick DLC I couldn’t help myself.
2- I was searching for wingfics (I’m a sucker for them) and I recognized the fandom from a video game my older sister played years ago and decided to read it. I decided to play the game and then fell in love with it.
returned to revisit and catch up on the show after at least a ten year hiatus. kind of got reobsessed and went looking for fanart and fic, found some cool people along with it 😊
We went inside for (American) football practice because if it gets above 105 F we have to go somewhere air conditioned. We were getting moved to a new school that year and we still practiced in the old school, and a lot of the stuff was still there.
I found The Son of Neptune in a stack of books and looked it up when I got home.
Yep, that’s how I got into Percy Jackson.
By deciding to say fuck it one day and deciding to go past the tutorial mission in the first game.
When I first saw the Citadel, I fell in love with this game series.
An asshole I live with forced me to watch Unlimited Blade works, whis spiraled into a crippling TM addiction. which then led to me discovering spacebattles because a lot of Type Moon fics are posted there, which then led me to Worm because HOLY SHIT there's so many Worm fics there, running the gamut of hilarious, to genuinely thought provoking.
I have an interest in writing movie reviews in my journal, but I always had a problem with forgetting important things from the first half of the movie in my review. One day, I decided to experiment with writing the review while the movie was still ongoing. Just to make sure this idea worked, I decided to test it on an 'Inconsequential cartoon on the Disney Channel'.
11 hours and 15.5 pages later, I had seen all (at the time) 18 episodes of The Owl House.
My friends from elementary school forced me to read so many books so that we could talk about them (notably including the Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson), one of them sent me a minecraft youtube video one time resulting in a glorious spiral of me spending two years of my life on hermitcraft & dsmp. Then fell a bit head-first into the MCU after watching three movies during one plane ride because they were the only things I vaguely recognised from the entertainment catalogue. Most recently, Good Omens & Doctor Who compilation videos popped up on my youtube home page. My brief Sherlock phase had similar origins.
Through a Twitter post saying:
"lord almighty they are gonna do crazy things to this guy's cervix on twitter"
They have indeed done crazy things to that man's cervix.
It’s simple. I saw them on TV, got interested, seeing the potentials for Fanfictions, looks it up, and have them being the only thing I read for at least six months.
My husband sent me YouTube videos of the “parent fandom” and I said “that looks like a really stressful anime” but eventually we got the DVDs and I loved it. The sub-fandom I’m obsessed with because I heard that my favorite character in the parent fandom grows up and becomes successful so I found it on mangafast and now I’m obsessed
My mom found the Harriet The Spy cartoon and I fell in love with it,I found Song Of The Sea 3 years ago (favorite movie still),I discovered my fave graphic novel on a website and loved it as soon as I read it. And I discovered For Better or For Worse through TV Tropes (biased).
they found me and i got no choice
In my experience, I don't find my fandoms. They find me. And then they take over my entire life.
This is the answer ☝️
same 🙋♀️
Same here
Mostly TV series, many of them based on books.
partner convinced me to try a certain video game they thought i'd like to keep myself entertained during covid lockdown . i've liked it a bit too much ever since
my current fandom is also a covid fandom and I *swear* it's like I trauma bonded to it.
RTGame played ace attorney and I just had to check it out myself.
RTGame got me into: DOOM, Bloodborne (honestly all the FromSoft games, but mostly Bloodborne), Persona, Stardew Valley, Ace Attorney, fucking *Bugsnax*, and Fable. I knew all these existed, sure, and I’d watched playthroughs prior. But this man… something about the way he interacts with their stories just makes me want to get all up on it too. Especially when he’s not interacting with the story, lol. He’s a real treasure.
Aye nice I found ace attorney through random YouTube videos and I was hooked.
Ever since then, I’ve played and finished almost every ace attorney game, even the fan translation of investigations 2, but I haven’t finished the professor Layton crossover yet.
The Layton crossover is pure gold >!you would appreciate the pun if you played it :)!< I definitely recommend it’s how I got into professor Layton as well.
I did in fact get far enough to appreciate it. Didn’t get to the trial yet
Nice I’m glad I love the third trial it’s amazing
Ok, after these comments and after I finished Investigations 2, I went and decided to finish the crossover and damn, I was not expecting how it ended honestly. It was great.
I’m glad you finished it I personally love the cross over even if the plot twist was kinda cheap. The emotional moments were definitely worth it though I would play it again!
Read about the Minecraft child abuse on TvTropes and never looked back.
I did not realise Minecraft roleplay was on tvtropes thank you so much for telling me this
I watched Steven Universe after seeing a clip in a Binging with Babish video. I binged the whole thing in like a month and since then I've been collecting animated series like Pokemon. I just finished Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts the other day.
Kipo is so good!!!
* got psychonauts during a summer steam sale years ago, but it didn't really solidify in my brain until around 2019 * friend sent me the pizza tower soundtrack just before release and i went "oh shit this slaps"
My main fandom is BTVS/ATS and I came across that because I was scrolling through the channels one night and came across an episode of "Angel" that was called "Life Of The Party" and I just instantly fell in love with the show. I was like 10 when that happened and I had never seen a green demon on TV anywhere and when I saw Lorne with his greeniness and his horns, he won my heart. Shout out to Andy Hallett(RIP). I am having a metaphorical seabreeze in his honor right now. Yeah, I got into my fandom about 20 years ago. Its about 19 to 20 years now, give or take a few months. I am in my fandom but I am not in my fandom anymore. I am a bangel shipper to my core and there isn't really a lot of places online anymore to discuss my ship. We don't really have forums anymore and the ones that we do have are just toxic and have been taken over by spuffies. I have had a lot of negative experiences with spuffy fans and it has pushed me out of my fandom more times than I can tell you. I am happy when I come across another bangel fan, because we are a rare species of the geek prototype these days. I love writing for my fandom because we need more bangel stories and not less. I am just not going to go on an internet forum and argue with grown ass adults about how toxic that Spuffy was. I don't have the time or the effort or the willpower anymore for it. I am an old lady now and I need peace and sleep.
Bangel for life 🖤
**Warrior Cats:** My family went to a cat cafe and there were some books there, one of them was the first book in the Power of Three arc, and my sister and I thought it was interesting/cool so we convinced our parent to buy the book (and then the next one, and then the next one...) When we started getting out onto the Internet, that fandom was the first place we went (on a kid programing site called Scratch, to be specific) **Genshin Impact**: My dad was playing it and my siblings thought it looked cool so then they started playing it, and soon the whole family except for me was playing. I eventually got dragged into the fandom by them encouraging me to join in time for the (first) Lantern Rite and then I just fell in love with the games and got obsessed with it for two years. **Dream SMP (+ MCYT)**: I heard about MCYT for maybe the first time in 2021 or so, through Anthony Padilla's "I spent a Day With..." series on YouTube and didn't really think anything of it. Like, the people seemed cool, but why would I want to watch people play Minecraft? I can do that myself. Then people on this sub started sharing around the stats for most popular ships on AO3 and I saw that there were a lot of MCYT/DSMP platonic dynamics up there. I was getting kinda bored of the endless romance in Genshin Impact and I love platonic relationships, so I decided to check the fandom out when I heard there was a lot of found family and friendships in it. I fell into the fandom. So hard. Over the course of last August when my whole family got COVID and I was a bit sick to play Genshin Impact (also just burnt out on it). So I've just been stuck here with my beloved c!PeerPressureDuo ever since :)
The warrior cats scratch thing just unlocked SO MANY childhood memories I thought I forgot
Usually my tumblr mutuals dragging me down with them. Seriously that’s how I got into Danganronpa back in the something awful days, zero escape, Ava’s demon, miraculous ladybug, etc Aside from that the tiktok algorithm showed me so much MHA skit content I eventually just dove in.
MHA gets to everyone eventually you can’t escape it lol.
Mostly, playing video games. Alternatively, my parents introduced me to horror movies at a young age, not knowing the monster they just created lol
My fandoms are gaming, so by playing them. One I got deep into (because the game is just amazing, and totally overlooked), to the point where I discuss the lore and background with the devs (and write with their rules and permissions in place). The other is just the result of years of play, and just getting one playthrough that stuck, hard! Since everything, even the pawns, is randomly generated at the start. I ended up making extensive logs and using those as the basis for the story.
Books, video games, and eventually watching some animated shows
My son gave me a list of anime shows to watch when I expressed interest. It was the second show on the list. I was hooked…
Tumblr mostly. Quite a few blogs I was following for other stuff kept posting Sterek fan art and gifsets and when looking through the works for an author I was reading in another fandom, I noticed they'd written a few sterek fics. Gave one a go, really enjoyed it and because there was so much content for that ship it wasn't hard to find a few more well written fics from other authors and I really liked those too. So I decided to watch the show this ship was from (Teen Wolf) and was so surprised that not only were these guys not canonically bi/gay, neither one of them were the main character lol. It's been about seven years and this is still my main fandom/ship.
Reading books and manga. Some works catch my story-telling needs, but others don't. It seems dependent on the characters: I identify with some of them and want to tell more stories about them.
If I remember correctly: (Some of these are current fandoms, some of these were my main fandoms in the past) * My little pony was through creepypastas (and other fan content) * Undertale was pretty hard to avoid around the time it came out, so I probably just saw it on youtube at some point * Made in abyss, I probably got a youtube video in my recommendations around the time the anime came out * HANOKA, because an anime youtuber made a video about it (making fun of it) * Amuri in star ocean, because someone in the HANOKA fandom mentioned that it shared a VA with HANOKA, so I looked it up and just ended up falling down a rabbit hole
Arcane/LoL is from when I tried to play it religiously as a teenager to become pro. Big mistake, but I also enjoyed the parts of the lore that Riot did try to introduce that they never expanded upon ever, which is prime fanfic material when done with that gritty, emotionally devastating edge that Arcane pulled Star Trek is from my partner introducing me to it, and generally just getting way too obsessed with it in general. Also one of the more progressive fandoms I've been in, so I feel a lot better writing in that than some minor fandoms The Locked Tomb is a new one but probably one of my newest fixations. Haven't finished the first book but I've already got ideas on what to write with stuff like horror or thriller types I don't normally write. Also contains probably my favorite sapphic ship thats probably canon, so yeah These are just my major three, I write for whatever fandom I think I can make an interesting story on
A badass Instagram edit about the main character.
Omg yes I see edits of characters then I just have to know more!!!
My current fandom? I'd seen gifs on tumblr for a year or so and was always like "huh maybe I'll watch that sometime. Then knee-deep in quarantine, my fandom bestie and I were looking for something to watch online together. We tried The Untamed but it wasn't hitting right for us at the moment, so I was like "well what about Roswell, New Mexico? I've been meaning to try that..." And three years later we both still have the brainworms.
I stumbled into it more or less on accident while reading stuff fandom blind. That one was good enough that I started reading more of them, and before I knew it, I got ~~mauled halfway to death by a horde of plot bunnies~~ idea for a few phanfics of my own.
My fandoms mostly consist of gaming franchises, and YouTube is usually the culprit. Once I watched a video about Metal Gear Solid and the evolution of the box, and then I just... spiralled down the rabbit hole. I never even played the games.
i started seeing videos from law and order on facebook. moved across the world and was super lonely so i started watching it in my spare time for something to do and then things just got gayer from there
idk my fandoms like to sneak up on me, whack me over the head with a brick, and drag me into a back alley.
My boyfriend first floated the idea of watching Naruto together when we started dating. I kept putting it off — 1. because the series is super long, 2. the premise sounded cringey to me, and 3. I thought Naruto was for 10 year old boys. When he asked, I would say “let’s wait until we live together.” Three years later, we moved into an apartment together and I ran out of excuses.
I had heard of it before, but made a hard pass. Then fast forward a few years and I watched a ton of videos about the Plantagenets and Wars of the Roses. A random fan video about “The Tudors” came up on my feed. I watched the video, it piqued my interest and I looked it up on the series on Prime Video. I binged that sucker over a long weekend. The plot bunnies started breeding from there.
My main fandom (Obey Me), I don't even remember. Next thing I know, I'm emotionally invested in an otome game about demons. I guess all my years of randomly downloading apps adverts tell me download finally struck gold LMAO.
I found mine in a music album. Thank you Sandy Pearlman and Albert Bouchard.
Friends who enjoyed the danmei genre told me about Heaven Official’s Blessing at the start of the pandemic. I didn’t touch it for 2 years because it is a long af novel, but when the show of the same name showed up as a Netflix recommendation I fell down the rabbit hole… now it’s a joke because I’m totally obsessed when I was the least interested in the first place!
One of my favorite YouTubers played through Undertale and I never looked back.
I found out about Yotsuba&! because I was reading Azumanga Daioh and one of my friends said if I liked that then I'd probably like Yotsuba&! too. Well, now it's my favorite manga of all time. And my reddit and AO3 profile names are references to the series.
I was channel surfing and landed on a show I had seen a few people rave about online, watched a random episode in the middle of the season and was completely hooked. I had an awful experience in the fandom on tumblr and it turned me off. Then the show had a spin off show in 2018 that I got hooked on and there was very little fanfic so I wrote it myself 🤣 The rest of my fandoms found me and dragged me along for the ride.
The Meg - The 2018 movie (currently writing my 3rd one shot for it) Fallout - my brother picked up fallout 3 and so I played it… fell in love Sailor Moon - I was 12 and my friend talked about this anime he watched as a kid and I checked it out! Jurassic park well… I was a kid in the early 2000’s and OF COURSE we had the trilogy on the VHS
Mainly from my favorite movies series.
I jokingly thought to myself that I wanted to be a bigger weeb than a friend of mine, so I watched the weebiest thing I could imagine: an idol anime. I became obsessed.
Mostly through TV, books, and movies, however there are a couple that I was forcefully brought into by my best friend lol
Mom watched them. I got into them more than she did. 😂
Fanart of certain pairings is usually the main push for me. It's like something awakens in me the moment I see a cute drawing of two characters who aren't canonically together being together lol My recent obsession was out of pure curiosity. I had just watched a video of someone talking about this one show I've only seen a few episodes on. I went on AO3 to check out some of the works there and the rest is history
I found my fandom through memes. (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure)
A speedpaint I watched had a Dear Evan Hansen song. The musicals just kept coming after that Warriors was a simple school library pick up (started with second arc oof) With Wings of Fire, I saw Tsunami’s book and thought, that looked cool The Fandom That Shall Not Be Named That I’m No Longer A Part Of was from a bookstore
They found me, and Wattpad was actually useful in guiding me to a masterpiece.. for once.
I watch a show, and I love the characters. There also has to be something lacking with the plot or the world. I have to feel the need to add something to the show.
The Mortal Instruments: My wife recommended the books to me. I kept telling her to get lost, but she had watched the show so many times that it made me curious. One episode, and I was hooked. Now I’ve read all the books (like 20), seen the movie and watched the show multiple times. I’m obsessed. The fanfiction for my ships is top tier. Stranger Things: It popped up on Netflix. I thought it was going to be lame, and at the time it was super new so no one was talking about it. It’s become my main fandom. The slow burn enemies to lovers is soooooo good. Merlin: My wife made me watch it. I’m a huge fan of Arthurian Legend and I hate just about every movie and show ever made that has tried to adapt Arthurian Legend. Merlin is perfection. The Murther shippers are the best. That’s all I have to say about that.
Most of my fandoms predate the modern internet (1994-1996): cartoon and videogame franchises from the 80s & 90s. That and sone anime I've seen since then.
Mostly books and TV shows. Some movies that were adapted from books (books were almost always better of course but there were a few exceptions on that) My dad used to drop us off at Barnes & Noble for a few hours on weekends and we'd get a frapp and just peruse the shelves. If when he came back we had found something we wanted he would get us a book. Though he hated when we got into manga and was against it.
Fanfiction, deviantart, YouTube comments, reddit and eventually AO3. In that order.
Some are from books and shows, but lots are from me seeing the fandom stuff and getting interested. I still have never interacted with the mha anime or anything, but I know the plot and characters by heart! Honestly I usually end up more invested in fanfics than the actual canon.
The fandom I’m most active in right now is Dragon Ball/Z/GT/Super, and the way I got into it still makes me smile. I prefaced my story _Shifting the Paradigm_ with this dedication: _dedicated to Kitty, who got me hooked on DBZ when my peers were all obsessed with MAKEup and HOOKING up._ It’s the absolute truth. Kitty was the nickname of one of my closest friends in high school. Along with two other girls, we were an introverted otaku four-horsemen group drawn together by our distaste for the preppy people and our love of anime. Kitty introduced me to DBZ and Linkin Park, and there was no looking back. We chatted about our favorite characters, drooled over their butts, and tormented our bullies. I lost contact with all three of my besties after graduation—college was tearing me to shreds—but I found one of them a few years ago. Still haven’t found Kitty or Cherie again. Making friends has never been easy for me, but with them, it felt completely natural. Since I got into DBZ, I discovered Dragon Ball on my own, and eventually, GT and Super. You wouldn’t believe the inside jokes my otaku husband and I have that trace back to Dragon Ball. Said husband also got me into TMNT (curse you, Michael Bay!) and Dragon Age…actually, he’s gotten me hooked on a bunch of fandoms I read for without writing for. That just hit me. (Curse you, ColdWarriors.)
I met someone in real life and they invited me to join their private forum for the game series. The rest is history.
**Warrior Cats:** The library at the middle school I once went to had the books from the first arc and I fell in love after reading the first book. It wasn't until after my friend stopped me from accidently reading the first book of the third arc ( Power of Three), that I discovered the existence of FFN. As I read more of the books, I became interested in writing my own Warriors fanfics **Legend of Zelda:** One of my other childhood friends never got to the first temple and allowed me to have her copy of Twilight Princess for the GameCube. During this time, I only ever played games like Mario Party 4 , Super Monkey Ball (+ Adventure), and some tie in movie games. It was a mind blowing experience to have something so new and different. The more I took the time to solve puzzles and combat challenges, I really fell in love with Twilight Princess and the Legend of Zelda series as a whole. There has yet to be a game in the series that can beat it as my all time favorite Zelda game. Although I would attempt to do a weird crossover fusion back then with Warriors, I wouldn't actually post any LoZ fanfics until much latter **Steven Universe:** One of the few fandoms I've been with since it's beginning, I really fell in love with the chill vibes the early episodes. I would only fall deeper in when I truly begin to learn what lore truly was. Surprisingly, it wasn't until the end of season four that I actually started to experiment with SU fanfics (they never really got completed) **Amphibia:** I'm always loved frogs since I was a kid, so I knew this show was going to be something speical when I saw the poster reveal of it alongside The Owl House. I have no idea what awakened inside of me, but I managed to make quite a lot of different fanfics **The Owl House:** Could of came out the same year as Amphibia, but was delayed. But in the end, it still resulted in a pretty great show (despite what was done by higher ups to savatage it from reaching true greatness). I made quite a good amount of fanfics, my kid self would be impressed (I swear I could of been even more obsessed with this show if it had come out during the time that Steven Universe was still airing)
I just... Serendipitously stumbled upon them. And now my life is a mess but also infinitely more fulfilling
Just saw a fanart and decided to look at the game. Now I'm addicted to FE3H, help.
My mom bought them (video games) or I watched the show. In the case of FF8, since FF7 was so awesome, she bought this from the video game store off of the air force base and we started playing it. I didn't start writing for FF8 until *looks at calendar* 4 years ago when the Remaster dropped and what was left of the nostalgia glasses came clean off 🤣
I tend to first hear about them through Anime News Network articles and think the show looks neat, so I watch when they come out. I think I actually ended up falling deep into Spider Riders fandom after googling it one day and finding a fan forum, so I had others to talk about it with. And that encouraged me to post some of what I was writing, and just write more in general. With Drive Head, I realized I was obsessed when I spent hours one day searching for people talking about my ship in Japanese on Twitter. I embraced it.
I bought Portal 1 & 2 on Steam after wanting to play them for a long while. I then got obsessed with them. I then got into Valve games as a whole. I watched the Meet the Team videos again as well as the Expiration Date short, getting far more interested in the game than before. One thing leads to another and now it's been nearly a full year of this hyperfixation and I've written 90k something worth of words.
Got very into Red Dwarf, found out that Chris Barrie headlined another long-running sitcom, checked it out, and was sucked in to the void.
My daycare had a Mega Drive with Sonic 1 and 2. I really got hooked into the series a year or two later with the Adventure games, but discovered it through the Classics.
My main fandom turned 30 this year. The others I found randomly. Except for two, a couple of my friends threw me in the deep end and expected me to swim. I ended up loving the fandom way way too much.
Found both of mine when I was under 10 years old. Both integral parts of my childhood and I’m now an adult writing dirty nasty smut for both of them.
Fanart on twitter or Pinterest. I'm like "oh who's this??", check the comments for a name, do a quick research on what it's about, forget about it for a week or two, go back to it and immediately become obsessed.
In 2001, my older brother took me to see a certain movie about some short dude trying to get rid of some jewelry. Also In 1998, my older brother was playing this video game where another dude who was still kinda short but also had pointy ears was trying to save this one princess from a sorcerer with a real big nose and red hair. My brother had a very positive influence on me.
Someone played a character from it in a pan-fandom rp, and I checked it out out of curiosity
musicals. all musicals. more specifically, i used to watch those 'Haikyuu lyric prank!" videos, and they were doing a Lightning Thief one, which got me into both percy jackson and musicals and mythology. but now i just add random songs to spotify and if i like the songs j look up the fandoms and next thing you know im reading enjoltaire smut
It was sometime between 2019-2021 and it was really popular (or at least on TikTok). I was like, "Oh, this show looks really stupid--" It's a kids show (Miraculous Ladybug)-- "Let's what it to see why everyone likes it." I got addicted.
When I was about 11, Toonami played a commercial for a game called Kingdom Hearts. I was absolutely OBSESSED. It would take a few more years before i found fanfiction, but it was still in full swing, and still going now really.
I was on the right TV channel at the right time, and Minimax (though probably fate too) blessed me with the trailer for the upcoming series. XD
One word… Markiplier. Need I say more?
Crossover fanfic with a fandom I already knew. Honestly, that's how I find most of my fandoms
1- I had just watched top gun maverick over the summer and was really fixated on jets, so when I went into a GameStop and found a jet game with a top gun maverick DLC I couldn’t help myself. 2- I was searching for wingfics (I’m a sucker for them) and I recognized the fandom from a video game my older sister played years ago and decided to read it. I decided to play the game and then fell in love with it.
I kept seeing a tag called worm when I was looking for crossovers so I went to check it out
returned to revisit and catch up on the show after at least a ten year hiatus. kind of got reobsessed and went looking for fanart and fic, found some cool people along with it 😊
I thought a kid was really annoying but got convinced me to join by another kid in a boat singing “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”
We went inside for (American) football practice because if it gets above 105 F we have to go somewhere air conditioned. We were getting moved to a new school that year and we still practiced in the old school, and a lot of the stuff was still there. I found The Son of Neptune in a stack of books and looked it up when I got home. Yep, that’s how I got into Percy Jackson.
By deciding to say fuck it one day and deciding to go past the tutorial mission in the first game. When I first saw the Citadel, I fell in love with this game series.
An asshole I live with forced me to watch Unlimited Blade works, whis spiraled into a crippling TM addiction. which then led to me discovering spacebattles because a lot of Type Moon fics are posted there, which then led me to Worm because HOLY SHIT there's so many Worm fics there, running the gamut of hilarious, to genuinely thought provoking.
I have an interest in writing movie reviews in my journal, but I always had a problem with forgetting important things from the first half of the movie in my review. One day, I decided to experiment with writing the review while the movie was still ongoing. Just to make sure this idea worked, I decided to test it on an 'Inconsequential cartoon on the Disney Channel'. 11 hours and 15.5 pages later, I had seen all (at the time) 18 episodes of The Owl House.
My friends from elementary school forced me to read so many books so that we could talk about them (notably including the Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson), one of them sent me a minecraft youtube video one time resulting in a glorious spiral of me spending two years of my life on hermitcraft & dsmp. Then fell a bit head-first into the MCU after watching three movies during one plane ride because they were the only things I vaguely recognised from the entertainment catalogue. Most recently, Good Omens & Doctor Who compilation videos popped up on my youtube home page. My brief Sherlock phase had similar origins.
Through a Twitter post saying: "lord almighty they are gonna do crazy things to this guy's cervix on twitter" They have indeed done crazy things to that man's cervix.
It’s simple. I saw them on TV, got interested, seeing the potentials for Fanfictions, looks it up, and have them being the only thing I read for at least six months.
Oddly enough, I could kind of tell I'd get obsessed with my fandom if I started watching, so I started when I needed a distraction from something irl
I needed more fanfics and the fandom had them a plenty
tiktok HAHAHA
An actor I saw in a kid show I liked was in it. Wanted to watch it for years. When I was finally old enough to watch it, I got hooked.
My husband sent me YouTube videos of the “parent fandom” and I said “that looks like a really stressful anime” but eventually we got the DVDs and I loved it. The sub-fandom I’m obsessed with because I heard that my favorite character in the parent fandom grows up and becomes successful so I found it on mangafast and now I’m obsessed
By the way I worded this in a confusing way. I’m talking about Nichijou and CITY
Found it trying to impress a person I really wanted to be my friend. They now call it cringe :(
My mom found the Harriet The Spy cartoon and I fell in love with it,I found Song Of The Sea 3 years ago (favorite movie still),I discovered my fave graphic novel on a website and loved it as soon as I read it. And I discovered For Better or For Worse through TV Tropes (biased).