The first fandoms 🌻
I still remember the first time I stumbled into fandom. It was 2003, and Harry Potter consumed nearly every corner of my imagination.I barely knew how to use the internet (I had just entered high school, please) and after wandering through blogs that collected interviews with the author, I found my first fanfic: an attempt to guess what the next book would be like. In this version, Harry lived with Sirius, safe and loved, the way I secretly wished canon would allow. It was raw, written without paragraph breaks, full of mistakes, but it was also the first time I realized: people out there live with the same anxiety as me. I'm not alone in my imagination.
From there, I wandered. I discovered The Lord of the Rings fandom and read stories that stretched across the ages of Middle-earth, stories that spoke of girls more similar to me (or how I wanted to be) than what I found in the books my age and among the few other girls in my class. There is one fic, in fact, that I still return to every few years like a ritual—proof that some stories never truly leave you, because, even though I'll never be that girl, I learned a lot from her about what I wanted and didn't want to be. Over the years, I continue to discover what that well-crafted self-insert is and isn't.
But soon enough, I found myself immersed in the Saint Seiya yaoi community, and that was the place where I truly learned what fandom could be. The passion, the intensity, the friendships that grew around shared obsessions—it felt like discovering a hidden country where I finally belonged. In a fandom whose canon was foreign to me and that I never got to read or watch!
Those early fandoms shaped me more than I could have imagined. They taught me not only how to write, but how to share, how to connect, and how to fall in love with stories in a way that was deeply personal and endlessly communal.
Without a doubt, the world of fanfics has shaped me.
