to tell my story: a hamlet fanfic, The Welders
Here's my story:
I got a LiveJournal in 2002, but my fandom history goes back much further than that. I was writing Star Wars fanfiction before I really understood that that was a thing people could do, and participating in Dragonriders of Pern RPGs on Prodigy message boards that I was definitely too young to participate in, oops, sorry about that, mom. I rediscovered fandom slowly during college, finally able to see the bigger picture of the communities of fans that were out there and were dominating LJ (as us cool kids called it). Being a fan means loving something, but fandom, I learned, meant connecting with people who cared about the same things I did, and those people became my friends online and then in real life. And if you met someone out in the world who you discovered was also in fandom, it was like suddenly discovering someone from your hometown- you had a shared language and reference points, and knew where the best places to go for coffee (AUs) would be. Like most…
I got a LiveJournal in 2002, but my fandom history goes back much further than that. I was writing Star Wars fanfiction before I really understood that that was a thing people could do, and participating in Dragonriders of Pern RPGs on Prodigy message boards that I was definitely too young to participate in, oops, sorry about that, mom. I rediscovered fandom slowly during college, finally able to see the bigger picture of the communities of fans that were out there and were dominating LJ (as us cool kids called it). Being a fan means loving something, but fandom, I learned, meant connecting with people who cared about the same things I did, and those people became my friends online and then in real life. And if you met someone out in the world who you discovered was also in fandom, it was like suddenly discovering someone from your hometown- you had a shared language and reference points, and knew where the best places to go for coffee (AUs) would be. Like most…
