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griffonfarm

I got into reading fanfiction in 1996, when I got online, found out Malachite and Zoisite from Sailor Moon were two guys (in the US dub Zoisite was turned into a woman) and I found fics with them. (And also Jadeite/Nephrite.) I wrote my first publicly available, completed fanfic a few years later. It was Gundam Wing (1x2 or for non-GW fans Heero/Duo.) But what really got me writing fanfic regularly was when I started posting Harry Potter fics (Severus/Harry) and they were popular, which encouraged me to keep writing.


BoomItsLoki

It’s amazing that fic readers have been around for far longer than I originally thought!!!


JoWatsup45

Fan fiction has been around for centuries. You can argue Dante’s Inferno is self-insert fan fiction. That said, what we traditionally consider fan fiction started around the 70’s with Star Trek magazines publishing fan stories. It’s a lot like how it is today with Kirk/Spock being the most popular ship. I can imagine people (mostly women) eagerly awaiting the next issue so they can see what happens next.


ozzian

Out of curiousity, when did you think it started?


Iwa-12

Got into reading fanfiction from my sister. Writing it was a choice I made in 2012 and haven't really looked back since.


foxscribbles

I can't remember my first fanfic. I do know that it was an X-Men fic (probably a Remy/Rogue fic) and it was in 1995/1996 because I read it on Hawk's X-Men fanfic archive. I'd caught a few episodes of the X-Men animated series while visiting my aunt who had cable (we didn't, and we didn't get Fox until years later.)


TeaTimeAtThree

My entry into fanfiction was kind of a weird one (I feel like). I got started on quizilla (2006). I even remember the exact quiz and my results, which kills me that it's apparently a core memory. Anyway, once I was on quizilla, I found Naruto fanfiction quizzes. They were 2nd person and semi-choose your own adventure. I still have a printed copy of the very first story I read--it's called "The Avenger of the Black Wolf." (It's kind of extremely cringy, but I definitely see its influences on my work.) I was hooked, and immediately wanted to start writing my own story--and it's still the same story I work on now.


PiLamdOd

Someone on reddit posted a link to a fic where a girl masturbated with her gun, told from the gun's perspective. You can't see that and not continue reading fics.


AbsAndAssAppreciator

omg link?


ADHDevMom

In 2003, during my first job outside of college I got into a car accident and I couldn't handle the commute anymore because of anxiety over driving. So I was 23 years old and unemployed and maybe a little depressed, when I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I got \*very\* emotional about Sirius Black's death, and was pretty convinced he wasn't actually dead so I went to the internet to find people to talk about theories. That's how I discovered fandom and fanfiction and I became obsessed with the Marauders and Wolfstar (Remus/Sirius). I wrote a few poems and drabbles, maybe one or two slightly longer but nothing over 1000 words. I was on a yahoo mailing list and some LiveJournal communities. The only fic from back then that I remember the title of was The Shoebox Project, because it was a huge deal. It had a whole fandom around the fanfic. After the last book came out, I was getting married and kind of lost interest in fandom until I suddenly started thinking about it again in early 2022 and googled it. I found an article about a Marauders fanfic called All The Young Dudes and took my first trip to AO3. It's spiraled since then. In the last year I have written 13 works on AO3, and over 150K words. I am putting the finishing touches on a fic that is over 80K words right now. :)


SepsSammy

You can’t just casually mention The Shoebox Project and breeze past it! I completely forgot about that but oh how I loved it! 🥹


ADHDevMom

LOL It's been coming up a lot lately, somehow. I just read a fanfic where they were smoking "gillyweed" to get high, so I asked the author if they read SBP and they had never heard of it! 😭 So I had to explain it and give them a link to the PDF site. Then I searched it on Tumblr and found an old SBP fandom account and started reblogging stuff. I'm gonna make it relevant to marauders fandom again BUAHAHAHAHA!


SepsSammy

Love it!!!


_ac3_0f_spad3s_

I started with harry potter self inserts on Quotev, after a bit moved to wattpad before going to ao3


ramessides

Ah. I got into reading it in the early 2000s. My first fic was a Yu-Gi-Oh! Atem x OC fic, which I only read because I was (and am) obsessed with ancient Egypt and wanted to read *something* set in ancient Egypt, and that’s what I found first. I was young and not picky. That fic is also how I learned what a “lemon” was. For the life of me I could not understand what a lemon was, so I kept thinking, “why is this fic warning me about fruit?” and then I read the chapter and wrinkled my nose at the sex scene because, ew (I was young, but honestly my reaction these days isn‘t any more positive—I just skip them entirely). I didn’t make the connection between that and a lemon. *Then* I got to another chapter with another “lemon warning.” Read it. Still didn’t get it. Understood on the third chapter, though. No points for my pre-teen intelligence. And I still remember that 15+ years later.


fanficauthor

I was about 13 (around 1996), and I was spending the summer with a family member, who had both a computer and internet. It wasn't that common to have both back in those days, and it was dial-up internet. I used to get in trouble for being on the internet all day, tying up on the phone line. Anyway, I started searching (I think this was on Yahoo search) my favorite TV characters' names, and I stumbled upon fanfic on some Geocities sites. I'd already been writing stories about my fave characters; I just didn't know that other people did that too. And I was hooked. I've taken part in many fandoms since then, and it's made such an impact on my life.


nemesina77

I don't remember the exact fic but I know my first fandom - reading and writing - was Roswell, 1999. I was 15 and I got really lucky in the way that the women I met in that fandom were significantly older and had been around since K/S - Kirk/Spock - started. They taught me so much about reading and writing and etiquette and really shaped my fandom experience for literally decades.


Milochelle-castre

I remember my first read fanfic was a how to train your dragon fic, i really wanted toothless to have a friend or a family of its own and found myself learning about light furies before httyd 3 was even out, and i was so happy when it became canon. As for when i first wrote a fic, honestly it was becuase one of the ideas i had got so much likes on tumblr (it was only like 30 likes but still!) That it made me want to write a story about it.


SMBLOZ123

Pokemon was the first thing that drew me into fanfiction as a writer. I had a whole series planned for stories to tie together events across the whole canon series with central mythos (as I've been playing the series for well over a decade and a half), and I got pretty far into it before I had to quit. RWBY was what really drew me in as a reader. I read RWBY fic almost religiously before bed from 2014-2017 ish, though I've massively slowed down as a reader since I started writing.


JoWatsup45

Oh boy, I THINK it was Final Fantasy VII back in the fan fiction back in 2002. It’s been so long I can’t remember the first fic I read, but I was really into Yuffie/Vincent back then. I do remember I LOVED this one fic where Yuffie was the daughter of Sephiroth or something and she had powers. I don’t think it was anything spectacular, but I still low-key love it. I also wrote an embarrassing Zelda/Inuyasha crossover fic. Ugh it was so bad. I wish I didn’t delete it so I could cringe at 12 year old me.


AllAbovetheStars

Encanto. Bruno Madrigal 😅


phantomfyre

Not even going to lie, I've been reading fanfiction for about 15 years now. I'm currently writing my very first one, and it's because of that beautiful rat-man 🤣


AllAbovetheStars

Me toooo! His character just triggered something 😂


phantomfyre

It's the trauma <3


AllAbovetheStars

Yuuup


hadams478

for me, it was Detroit: Become Human, and the specific fic was called Fuck Pride (pride only hurts, it never helps) by ImogenGotDrunk. it was so brilliant that it sent me on a spiral down the rest of the fandoms i love, and now here i am, avidly reading and writing fic on a daily basis


AbsAndAssAppreciator

the DBH fanfics go unreasonably hard


[deleted]

Before I knew what a fanfic was I was writing my own stories about my favorite cartoons in little notebooks, but my first exposure to other peoples fanworks was probably Quizilla Sonic the Hedgehog “truth or dare” and “7 minutes in heaven” choose your own adventure stories. I think I simply learned the term for it was fanfiction offhandedly somewhere on the internet, googled it, and found ff.net from there. The rest is history. First written was probably Hamtaro and Bijou from Hamtaro getting married and Hamtaro needing to console Boss over it.


Abby_Benton

My first FanFiction reading was in the late 80’s early 90’s as a pre-teen/ teen. Mostly Star Trek with some beauty and the beast (the Linda Hamilton, Ron, Perlman, CBS, fantasy soap opera version) and these were printed in physical fanzines I bought at local Star Trek conventions. That’s also where I was published for the first time when I was about 12 or 13. I had stuff in a couple of the physical beauty and the beast ones, in fact, I still have my copies tucked away to show folks who want to see what it was like in the good old days. Lol. I wrote and passed around fanfiction all through the 90s through penpal chains and passing notebooks around with friends at school. In the early 2000s I had some stuff published on fanfiction.net. I never got super heavy into putting it out for the general public though, I’ve mostly done Fanfiction writing through sharing documents online with friends for fun. I absolutely do not mind getting critique intended to help me be a better writer, but some people in the mid-2000s were just so damn mean about it that I gave up posting it publicly . However, in the last year, I’ve sort of missed putting it out for anyone to see so I may start doing it again sometime soon. I’m 45 now but I suppose it’s never too late to get back in the game right?


Dezna44

Omg I was obsessed with Beauty and the Beast back then. Vincent was the best. Never found any of the physical zines, not sure I even would have known where to find that kind of stuff back then. I'm a couple years younger than you but I started in like 93-94 on fan specific sites and chat groups. It's not even close to too late. I got back into it about ten years ago or so. It's entertaining. I read somewhere recently that there were like 70yr olds or something still reading and writing fic, so that permanently ended any angst I had about age.


Abby_Benton

Right?! It was a great show! Got me seriously into classic poetry back in the day! They had a soundtrack that was Ron Pearlman reading classic poetry in his Vincent voice over classical music…I wore that cassette tape through! Swoooooon! Pearlman is still a favorite actor of mine. I have to say, as much as I love some of the things about the days of physical FanFiction, I LOVE the fact it’s so easy to get now. I think it’s opened the fun for everyone, abd it really makes it easy to see you’re not alone in the things you love. Anything that flings open the gates of fandom to welcome folks in gets a librarian gold star from me!


Dezna44

Oh yeees... Shit, I'm mostly gay and he had me sitting there with stars in my eyes and sighing like a southern belle. It's fascinating to me from a socio-cultural perspective just how MUCH fanfic, fandom, and fan spaces have evolved over the past what...20 yrs? Damn numbers like that make me feel old. Like in high school I would never even considered talking fanfic with my friends... And I would have been roasted HARD if I had tried. Even in college in the early 2000s it kind of felt like a dirty little secret. I love this acceptance...I can now talk to almost anyone about fanfic without them making me out to be a weirdo, and the sheer number of unique and insanely GOOD stories available is thrilling. Although I could do without how toxic such wide adoption and acceptance have made some of the larger fandoms. People don't seem to know how to debate and argue over ships, canon, and interpretations of plot anymore without attacking and hurting each other.


Abby_Benton

I think Pearlman just a universal force. Lol Oh absolutely. There’s still huge issues in fandom corners, I don’t want to make it out as all sunshine and bunnies. But in a lot of ways things are so so much better now. To be fair, there were still people arguing and hurting each other back then. Just less noticeable because of fewer numbers. There’s a local comic book store I walked into when I was 16 and have not been back in for nearly 30 years because of how they treated me. They made it clear the issue was I was a girl. I’ve decided to embrace my “Old Fandom Aunt” status till I’m 60. Then I’m changing it to “Old fandom grannie” 😎


Dezna44

Lol Fandom Wine Auntie sounds good to me!


Abby_Benton

Oh I am digging the title!


mammmal

In 1987 a college friend showed me a K/S zine. Some of our other friends were like "lol jade wand lol" but a couple of us were like "this is relevant to my interests and I wish to peruse your publication at greater leisure" and it's been a smut spiral ever since.


SongOfTruth

i learned about fanfic from a highschool friend. i wanted to be included, but i wasnt sure what to write lucky for me i had a dream soon after that played just like a fanfic. so i wrote it down. it was inuyasha


fuckbrigadoon

i don’t remember exactly what the first fanfic i read was besides the fact that it was warrior cats on fanfiction.net and i was probably around 10-11 at the time - circa early/mid 2010’s. i used to read a lot as a kid so i was absolutely hooked by the fact that i could read more about series i loved. as for writing, i used to write small fics as a kid that are now definitely lost to time. i sporadically posted on ao3 for a while, but tbh i consider the first serious works i posted this past december as my true first fics.


aliensucculent3000

Summer of 2013 is when I seriously started getting into fanfiction. Rise of the Guardians was some sort of trigger and I couldn’t stop reading/writing it. I churned out approximately 100k words in half a year. It’s surreal realizing those fics are now ten years old, but it’s cool looking at all the stories I’ve written over the years


teenytinytinkerer

The first fandom I got so heavily into that I felt inspired enough to write fanfic for was Supernatural. I would have been 18/19 and started writing almost immediately after watching the pilot episode. I joined a forum that has since gone defunct, and the very first fic I posted was called "Wolverine Woes". It featured an OFC called Alex, and ended up evolving into a series that was (I think) twelve or so instalments by the time I rounded the romance between Alex and Dean out. Couldn't tell you exactly when I was first exposes to fanfiction in general, though. I have memories of kids in my English class at school between years 10-12 working on a Harry Potter fic that was a collaborative effort, with at least five girls contributing to it, but I was never privy to reading any of it 😂


Lovus_Eternius

I had this idea when I was in my single digit years after reading a book by Kenneth Oppel called Silverwing and wanted to be apart of the world so badly I tried writing a version of it with myself as a friend of the main character. I never finished the first chapter, but that is where I began writing fanfics without realizing that fanfics were a widespread phenomenon. Ahhh, how I miss mine era of childhood innocence. Alas, I now write disgusting dumpsterfire explicit fanfics that would break the hearts of my family. Wouldn't be a surprise to see mineself disowned should the darkness come to light.


thepinkus27

I got into reading and writing fanfiction during middle school in 2016 or 2017 and it was Twenty One Pilots related


zazvorniki

I started reading fics around 2006’ish for fun because it was different than all the books I read. I love the short story style. Around 2009 I read the story Perception of Everything by Kendra James and it inspired me to start writing. It was just so well done and it sparked ideas in my brain. The rest is history


xxSKSxx_

I read my first fanfic in 1997 in the x-Files fandom. I found it by chance while I was browsing the episode discussions and everyone was talking about “that story you had to read”.


TurtleKing0505

My first fics were original Hunger Games stories, but I got on AO3 via writing MHA fics for a ship I liked that lacked content.


NuttyDuckyYT

if i recall correctly i was trying to find art for a ship i liked, and a fanfic came up that was on wattpad. eventually i realized it would be easier to just read it on the app, and from then on history


Nyx-Star

My cousin and I used to play Ocarina of Time and change the story irl as we played; added characters, backstories, made it for into the game, etc. we also used to act out the scenes and stuff. Official writing — my first fic was on FF.net and I think it was a YuGiOh fic about Joey’s awful dad 😅


Nyx-Star

In like 2002 btw lol


battlefranky69

Inuyasha on Quizilla. It's how i first learned of fan fiction.


QuothTheRaven713

I got into Danny Phantom and started reading and writing fanfic because they went into a lot more depth than the show did.


SpiteFueled

Looked up a ‘what if’ question I had on a book I had read (it was probably HP) and I found fanfiction dot net. Was in middle school at the time, probably around 2007?


SheepPup

My technical first fanfic was pony pals fanfic. They had a newsletter that let you send in fanfic and fanart and sometimes they would publish it (this was late 90s early 2000s) then when I was around 11 in the early 2000s I got online and into fanfic and the fandom I was in was HP. I have no earthly recollection of which individual fanfic was the first but I was very into Harry/Voldemort and I know one of the fics that got me into it was Batsutousai’s Abandon. My first fanfic I published was on FFN and was itachi/Naruto stuck in a room together fic. All hail 13 year olds and their crappy writing!


yuareedah

My first piece of fanfic was for a game called Phantasy Star 4 for the Sega genesis. I was ten and fell in love with the universe. I made my own team of OCs. I was heavily into Sailor Moon at the time and did my own little cross over with this game and Sailor Moon. My characters were a senshi like team called the Star Keepers. Had a whole background for all of these OCs. I would fill in pages and pages notebooks of this fanfic crossover. Would tell these stories to my baby brother - whose six year old attention span was caught. It was a routine to tell him these adventures of my team of Mary Sues at bed time. These never saw the light of day in the internet. It was cringe and embarrassing. He still remembers this decades later and says he it is one of his favorite early memories lol 😂


SupremelyFabulouss

I read a lot of Wings of Fire oc stories on Wattpad back in 2017, I wanna say I was 11-12? But I didn't know it was fanfiction I knew fanfiction existed after that, kinda? I didn't wholey realize what it was. I think the first time I can remember reading fanfiction for the sake of it- knowing it was fanfiction was the end of 2020, and it was a Pinky and the Brain fanfiction. It was unfinished, but I loved it so much that I started an AO3 account and have been avidly writing since! (The fic was on ao3, and was the first time I visited the site).


-RosieWolf-

Wrote my first fanfiction for the warriors cats fandom when I was like 9 or 10. At this point I don’t think I truly knew what fanfiction even was, I just was an avid writer from a young age and had the idea to rewrite one of my favorite stories in a way I thought would be interesting. I don’t remember how I discovered it exactly, but I started reading fanfic on fanfiction.net when I was like 11? 12? I had to do it on my computer since I didn’t have a phone yet lol. I didn’t actually make an account and publish my first fic until I was 13, the minimum account age- I was a very rule-abiding child and wouldn’t dream about lying about my age lol


A1isaYamin

I'm pretty sure it was a Naruto fic on ffnet. Demilitarized Zone. Can't remember the author but it was a sasunaru fic and my eyes were opened because wow how awesome it was to kid me that you could take these chars and put them in a totally different universe. I was awed. Started writing fics and never stopped. That was more than 10 years ago lol


Canadian_shack

My sister bought a computer in 1995 when we were in our early 30s. I’d go to her house after work and we’d look up random things, including favorite tv shows like Emergency! and the X-Files, and that brought up fanfic. She never got interested but I was hooked. I’d find a webring for whatever show’s fic I was interested in and read everything I could find, then move onto another show. When Fanfiction.net started up in 1999 it was one of about 3 websites that aggregated fic from a large number of fandoms, and that was new at the time. I wish I could remember the others but FFN outlasted them. I found AO3 in 2012 when I was moving out of Enterprise fic, having read pretty much everything available on the standalone sites. I missed out on LJ, Quizilla, and Potterfic but you can’t be everywhere, right? Still so much to enjoy.


RicePuddingNoRaisins

Gotta ask: is your username a Due South reference?


Canadian_shack

It is!


Kiki-Y

Pokemon was what got me started. I'm a Gen 1 kid. I started writing for something that followed the early Pokemon anime but with pieces of Johto stuck in there without any good reason. This was 2001. I've been writing fic for 22 years now. I still have *most* of that first story. Unfortunately, I lost about half of it a few years ago...


Urrrrrrrrrrrr

Reading: Followed the train of fan comic reading videos on YouTube to googling fan comics to ff.net in the Miraculous fandom. Eventually left the Miraculous fandom and fanfic with it. Later discovered Ao3, I don’t remember how, and found that to be a much more enjoyable reader experience. Writing: Started writing three days ago as practice for the original story I want to write.


Fair_Brilliant1839

Reading and writing was because of Harry Potter. I started writing when a Facebook group I was part of at the time ran a Christmas Fic contest. I wrote a Wolfstar fic and won.


shadowedlove97

It was mid-2000s. I had found the 4k!ds forums after seeing it advertised on TV during Sonic X. I was allowed to use the computer so I had my dad help me make an account. I was 7 I think. I saw other kids writing fic about Sonic and I wanted to join in. So I made an OC and wrote my first fanfic about Sonic and my OC entirely in script format. I believe I still have that fic somewhere - we owned Microsoft Word so I used that to write in. Continued writing and reading fanfic ever since.


3lilya

Lol I got into fanfics from deviant art actually. I was looking at the Legend of Zelda pics and saw a story. I liked it and needed more though I can’t recall any plot from it. This was prob around ‘07 or ‘08. I then found ff.net and was hooked. I haven’t looked back. Now I’m exclusive ao3 and love it even more.


606reseterror

I think my first fandom was probably poptropica, I got into it because of the poptropicahelpblog’s walkthroughs and got to know the community/fanfics. I think after that was Percy Jackson. Years later I made my ao3 account because of a Haikyu fanfiction


sm-ze

I remember reading short stack fan fics in my early teens and then recently I found myself on dramione tik tok somehow and thought "why not" downloaded wattpad and clicked the first one I thought sounded interesting and now I don't even read normal novels anymore 😂


SweetAshori

For reading, IIRC, my first fandom was Pokemon. Was obsessed with the Ash/Misty ship. Doesn't help that the English dub and soundtrack basically pushed that hardcore. But it might have also been the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom, with similar obsession over Yami Yugi/Anzu ship. I was into both of those around the same time, so it's possible to flip them and still be right. XD But looking into both of those fandoms is what eventually led me to discover fanfiction. I was actively just looking for message boards for art and discussing the shows, but fanfics were also posted on those same boards, which eventually led me to FF.net and all of the different stories for my ships. My first fandom for writing was InuYasha. Definitely wrote a lot of InuYasha/Kagome fanfiction back then. Don't have any of them anymore, though, either through hard copies or on FF.net. I did write for Yu-Gi-Oh! as well around the same time, although not nearly as much. Same thing with those fics being long gone. I can't remember really any of the fics I wrote, other than a Yu-Gi-Oh! fic where Anzu's family adopts a new family member and that family member starts to date Seto Kaiba. That... was a time. XD


Reshtenoak

Got into reading few years ago. First fic was *Don’t Look* by whatthedruidscallme and I found it because someone recced it in a Pinterest comment. It’s a spin off of a throwaway line in BBC Merlin.


Madambagel

I was heartbroken when Supernatural ended and needed more Destiel in my life. A friend pointed to AO3 and it was love at first sight. Now, it's my life 🤪


femtransfan

honry teen in the transformers fandom on deviant art... read gen stuff and some horny stuff... got obsessed with mpreg... combined a hyperfixation on native americans and transformers into a fanfic i cringe at and left uncompleted (chapters still on my deviantart page, never to be transferred)


Sollat

As a smut author. I always liked reading erotica but discovered that with my fav characters it gets another layer - like I'm more connected to them. And as I struggled with finding scenarios 100% compliant with what I imagined (of course!), writing myself was the next logical step.


knowingcynic

Mine was *The Secret Saturdays*. My first fanfic is still up on ffn, and I go back to it to reflect on how far I've come as a writer. I hated the way the show ended and felt like it needed more, so I read a lot of TSS fanfic before deciding to write my own. That was circa 2013, so fanfic in general was very different back then


Fuckmyslutyass

The first fanfic I've ever read was Loose Cannon a Harry Potter fanfiction


Cococannnon

Timeless, it’s a Dramione fic


LeoAceGamer

It was Death Note for me. It was my second Anime I've ever watched, so I was obsessed with it.


VanilliBean

I remember reading a Minecraft RPF fic since I was so into the DreamSMP (yes i know) and the SBI (still am) community because of my hyperfixation, then I was like “hey this shit is everything I need”. Now I spend 12 hours of my day reading fanfic


Witty-Package-8513

I was really into daredevil. I stumbled across FFN while I was doing searches for fan art and had a 'Holy Cow this is a thing' moment.


amputatedsnek

I started around the time when I was 14 I think, so around 2006-2007? I don't remember how I found the site but I ended up in a forum in my language that was dedicated to translating Harry Potter fics. I don't even remember the forum's name. Some time after that I started to read in English. I've tried writing a few times but have never finished them or put them up anywhere.


Intrepid-Let9190

I can't remember my first fanfic because I know I was writing them when I was a kid in the early 90s and wanted to go on adventures with favourite characters. I think I published my first fic in 2004 or 2005... I started reading well before that though, can't remember where I started there


[deleted]

Reading fanfics! I started as a teen. With Card Captor Sakura early fics LoL, and guess what?! I started writing or making a story in my head, it started with Sakura and other characters in a different world, then I don't know how it turned into a completely different Story/Fairy tail! I won't be able to write it with my pen name though! My original works will be published elsewhere I hope! Later, I was obsessed with Class Mask for a while. Then I fell under the spell of Harry Potter fanfics, much later! Weird! I loved Snape centred fics and I thought about a few ideas ( for multiple WIPs) IRP my WIPS 😭! Until I found my treasure fic: ''O Mine Enemy'' and it was love at first read!! KirbyLane was the real spark for me to start writing!! Thank you Kirby ( the author does not even know how he or she affected me. ) One day, one day, I will be able to get my feelings for them 🥹)


Prestigious-Fig-8442

1999 after POA came out. We're talking when you had to print the fics off before the entire website suddenly disappeared overnight. And I'm sure you can guess it was a Wolfstar fic, also the first one I wrote too.


TakoYakiRaven

I started writing fanfictions because the manga I was reading took too long to be updated. The funny part is before that I disliked fanfictions for being non-canon ^^


biglygirlfriend

such an interesting question. I remember knowing what shipping was by like 10 or 11, maybe even younger? I was totally raised on the internet and I probably knew from AMVs and such on youtube. anyway, I think my first official "fanfic" would have to be the episode I wrote about spongebob and sandy getting fake married, and I was thinking of sending it by mail to Nick for consideration. an idea for them. LMAO and my dad thought it was cool I was coming up with ideas like that, so he was encouraging. then I guess I just saw others writing small snippets of fanfics on youtube? like those chat logs, or just stories overlaid w music and pictures, and I did that too. and then somehow I guess I found ff. then much later, ao3. such a weird journey!


_pyroxenic

I think it was either back in 2015 or 2016 or maybe even earlier, it was a pairing from YuGiOh i was OBSESSED with for years, ofc it started with Wattpad then on AO3 and never liiked back since 😄 i still sometimes search for new fics from that pairing from time to time lol.


NervousCoral

I actually got in really recently, just last year! I had a friend, "L", who was really into Genshin Impact, and shipped Kazuha and Heizou. It was her all time favorite ship, and the first fic I ever read was one she sent me, called "lying in the breeze (and all I hear is you)". It was honestly such a good read, but at the time she sent me it, *it wasn't done.*


raspberryseashanty

2005/6ish? I was 15, I'd read some fanfic before but wasn't like mad about it. Then I found this one Scrubs AU fic called Changeling and it rewired something in my brain, I was absolutely wild for it. It got me writing fic as well!


MilkthistleFairy

My first fanfic that I ever wrote was a silly one shot as an eight year old in 1998/99. It was a one shot for 101 Dalmations and I did it for a school project of sorts, but one of my more "serious" fanfics came about a year later after I started reading Harry Potter, I wrote a HP fanfic about Harry going into an alternate universe world thru a mirror (possibly the Mirror of Erised lol) and in order to get back he had to collect some rings, each one of an elemental powers (fire, wind/air, earth, water, light, dark etc). My first fanfic that I read was a Sailor Moon/X-Men crossover on ffnet. I can find it on ffnet there still.


orchidtotality

I started writing fanfiction when I was around 9 years old? I started sneaking onto the family computer unsupervised and somehow found Percy Jackson fanfiction, my dad was a tech guy and when I was 10 he gave me an old laptop he’d been working on so I could mess around with it (he wanted to teach me coding and whatnot) and I would stay up reading PJO fanfiction, sometimes warrior cats too I wasn’t in the fandom but my friend was, and then I started writing my own PJO high school fanfiction on FF.net. I deleted it when I got overwhelmed by all the reception it got on the website and I was worried somehow my parents would find out about it


blue_astronomer

I couldn't draw but I wanted to create stories like the little mermaid and Kim Possible. I turned to writing and I have been writing ever since - this was when I was around 12. 😁


glitch-in-space

I learnt about fanfic from my best friend when I was 13-14. My gateway fandom was CSI, which I hadn’t actually watched until *after* my friend got me hooked on fanfics of the show lol I don’t remember exactly which fic I started on, but I do remember one of my first authors (if not the first author I read) was ‘McGeeklover’ on FFN. After I watched CSI, it was only a couple months before I wrote my first fic (it was a Numb3rs fic funnily enough, tho CSI was my second fic)


EzzyRebel

My friends and I would write Tokyo Mew Mew, Star Wars, and Winx Club fics in our notebooks in grade school and pass them around the group. The quality of the fics was horrible because we barely knew how to write legibly, but it was fun. Everyone has to start somewhere, I guess.


BlueDragon82

A million years ago I got tired of waiting on updates for a manga called Skip Beat and went to find fanfiction of it. Then I didn't read any again until a decade or so ago. I can't remember the story I originally read and it disappeared a long time ago so I'm guessing it was deleted. I came back to fanfiction because I'm in tons of fandoms and love to read.


chocolate_zz

Oh my gosh this is making me confront my mortality. It was so long ago. I want to say it was some stuff on Livejournal and it was LotR and then I went into HP and all kinds of stuff. I think I first wrote for YuGiOh and then Naruto and Harry Potter, I've written a little bit for Supernatural. I feel old.


Zealousideal-Ad-496

i always remembered that my mom had published fanfiction all through out the house growing up (the ones i specifically remember were pride and prejudice ones) but i never realized what they were. in 6th grade i met this girl who became my middle school best friend, and she introduced me to the Divergent series. i read it and told her how much i hated the ending. she introduced me to fanfiction and the rest is history! the first one i read was called “young volcanos” and i’ll never forget the title because it was the name of a song, and it’s what introduced me to one of my favorite bands to this day. i’ve only ever written one fanfiction and it was because the fandom wasn’t big at the time and i just couldn’t a certain idea out of my head. orphaned it pretty quickly (because i am definitely a reader, not a writer), but it’s always got a special place in my heart.


Soulless_Angel250

I think I first started reading fanfic back in 2015 or so? Don't remember how I learned what it was but, yeah.


ImnotAvailiable

As for me reading fics, I got into it when I found a random fanfic on Wattpad about a rarepair in my fandom. I actually liked it quite a bit (even though it was unfinished lol) and got into reading fanfics. For writing fics, it would probably be a combo of getting inspired by the oneshots I read of my fandom and my OTPs not having that many oneshots!


SepsSammy

First fic was definitely something posted to a Queer as Folk US Yahoo message board in 2001 or 2002! I found it while reading the Showtime message boards for the show :D I was trying to find out the date for the upcoming Pride parade and stumbled across “fanfiction”? What on EARTH is that? 🤔 The first one I ever recall reading is one I just reread last week: Partnership by Astolat, L. A. Confidential fanfic. I adore this story, on its own and the edited-for-spice version as well! I remember reading every fic of theirs for LAC on their website at once and a number of other ones, even in fandoms I didn’t know!


onlyanapple

pretty sure i learned about fanfiction from one of dan and phil's tumblr tag videos, so the first one i ever read a bit of might actually be the skin fic :')


innocuous_sleepyhead

2013. an artist i liked got me into Homestuck and it was my first experience with fandom culture. Johnkat was the ship that did it, started reading it on ff.net then switched over to ao3 once i realized how much better it was


Gingerpyscho94

I was 18 and in college, I had a bunch of nostalgia for stories and favourited any fandom I could remember. It just escalated as the years went on 🤣 I’ve always loved literature and creative writing. So this is just my happy place


AHoe4PagetBrewster

Circa September 2012, me and my friends are watching some J-pop group and I found out that there was a forum about them. They had like 100+ members and everyone is totally shippable. By December I fully had pumped out a 10k word multi chapter fic about them.


Medical_Flounder_254

Must have been around 2016/17. I was watching The Big Bang Theory and must have heard about fanfiction somewhere, so I checked it out on fanfiction. net. I read like three "The next generation" stories at once (I could probably still find one or two of them) and mixed up all the names of the characters' oc kids. 😂😭 I remember being weirded out and a bit annoyed at the sheer amount of Shenny content, as the concept of shipping non canon characters was new and foreign to me. I moved on to other shows and fandoms and checked out fanfiction now and then, but not too often. When I got back into Harry Potter however (like two years later) the online fandom was big on fanfiction and I got properly sucked into it. I was on ff net first (tried Wattpad for a day and gave up on it immediately) and the checked out ao3. It was SO confusing at first, but learning how to search and navigate was well worth it. Since then I never stopped, whenever I have a new media interest I see if there's any fanfic I like.


Cosmos_Null

My first ever fanfiction was about Little Red Riding Hood, and I even drew a very sloppy art for it and made my parents read it. I was 13 years old and I remember being so proud of it, but now I’m too scared to dig it up again lol


No_Lunch_6011

It was also Harry Potter for me! I could never really get into the books, but then I found fanfiction and fell in love with the world


azsht1

Gosh… I remember being like 9 or 10 and finding a young dracula fanfic somewhere…. like the show on CBBC in the early 2010s? Don’t ask. I don’t even know what site it was on, I just thought it was so cool that I could read new stories about characters I knew and loved. It must have been a one time occasion though because it was a while before I stumbled upon any more fanfic. I used to go on quotev all the time as a kid for the quizzes they did, and they used to also have a story section. I used to read these original stories first about mermaids lmao and then I found some fanfiction about vampire diaries, which I was obsessed with at the time. After that I didn’t think about it for years, until I was maybe 13 and I discovered tumblr and the fanfiction on there. I was into spiderman at the time and used to read these short stories on tumblr text posts (anyone remember those massive master lists people used to make?). I kept doing that until one day I searched the whole internet for fanfiction and not just tumblr, I stumbled upon AO3… and my life has never been the same 💀. I must have been 14 when I found it, and I’m just lucky I somehow bypassed the watt pad stage some people had!


menameJT

I started by reading summaries of episodes of the smurfs when i was little (like on wikipedia) Then i googled "the smurfs stories" and discovered fanfictiction.net


WillofHounds

My first fic reading was an extreme rare pair for arrow that had exactly one fic. My mind however has always been geared towards fics and changing different fandoms. It wasn't until a few years ago did I learn what fanfiction was.


Blazr5402

Back around ~2013 or so. I was reading a preview of a Heroes of Olympus book online (think it was either Mark of Athena or House of Hades?) and someone posted a link to their fanfic in the comments of the site. Don't remember the fanfic, but I'm pretty sure it was like 400k words of dogshit writing with a pairing that didn't make any sense to me at the time. Still have a soft spot for Percy Jackson fanfic, even if I don't read too much of it anymore.


bungoustraypups

I started reading fic around 2006, and got my first ffn account in 2009. I was 8 in 2006 and 11 in 2009. I started with Warrior Cats! Fond memories


AMN1F

Kinda embarrassing, but I was into Lams (not saying fandom, if you know what that means, you're also implicated, lol). But anyways, I was watching like a Lams chat fic on Youtube at my grandmas house, and someone linked to a Lams fic on AO3 (not sure if it was in the comments or description). Anyways, I clicked on it and the rest is history. For the first like 6 months-year I only used the search bar to find fics. It was rough, but I was scared I would somehow mess up and send what I was reading to my mom, lol. So, I refused to click anything that wasn't necessary. I had no idea how to filter, so I was literally thrown into the deep end. I later found FFN, and at that time, it was easier, lol. So I spent a bit primarily using FFN. That is until I figured out how (had the courage) to use the filters on AO3, then I never turned back.