About Me
I had a post on my prior Tumblr, but that’s gone. So let’s recreate it, but make it better.
My first foray into fandom, long ago, was when I was a preteen. I didn’t know it was fandom, but I was a Trekkie and read all the Star Trek: TOS novels, and I decided I was going to try my hand at writing one. That attempt has been lost to the sands of time, as it was written on an old DOS computer with Windows 3.1, but I took it SRSLY. This was the early-mid 90s and I didn’t manage to find fandom at that point on the internet at school when I was a freshman in high school and first introduced to it.
Yeah. I’m old, folks.
When I was a teenager, I was introduced to Japanese anime through the Yu Yu Hakusho Poltergeist Report movie. Dubbed, which is hilarious. But that’s when I discovered fandom, because an irl friend was engaged in it. We obsessed over fics, read Gundam Wing, Sonic, Ronin Warriors, Fushigi Yuugi, and Yu Yu Hakusho fanfics. For a while we curated a website and wrote a self-insertation FY fic together. I’ve gone by Rose Thorne online ever since.
Though the friendship didn’t last, the interest in YYH didn’t fade. I’ve got a bunch of largely juvenile YYH fics out there, as well as some Gundam Wing ones. I ordered VHS fansubs of part of the Yu Yu Hakusho series via the internet from Australia. I still have those: they’re relics!
I met my ex-girlfriend on a YYH discussion forum for an archive website when we were both in high school 20+ years ago, and I’m still friends with her and several other people I met through there. For a while I curated a Yu Yu Hakusho yaoi fanfiction contest entitled Green Grapes and Lemonade, which was an in-joke between myself and her. I can’t figure out how to access that website anymore, sadly. I helped judge one of the Gundam Wing fanfiction contests for a while. I remember the inception of Fanfiction.net. I remember when smut was more than just lemon depending on the flavor of it, though I don’t remember what each one meant. I remember when FFN allowed smut.
Yu Yu Hakusho had a hold on me for over a decade. I met many people through that fandom who have stayed close friends, including my ex-girlfriend and several friends I currently write with. I visited some of them in person when I moved across country and back for graduate school. I even stayed with a couple of them overnight.
Then @chrissysky and I wrote a MST3K fic, Enma’s Torment Theater, involving the YYH characters being forced to read fanfiction (all donated by writers, and including my own) and riffing on it, with a plot surrounding it. And said friend decided we should bring in the Slayers characters.
Now, I had never encountered Slayers, but I quickly consumed everything, including the translated novels. Then I started to write. Chrissy is a Zel/Xel shipper, and holy cow do I love that ship. I met several other people through that fandom, though it was largely dead by that time. The new seasons, Rev and Evo-R, revitalized the community somewhat, and I wound up being a part of a SlayersAdult LJ community and running a Kinkfest with kinky prompts that people could write or draw. At the time I was also participating in the Springkink festival on LJ. I was pretty prolific with writing smut at that point, largely Zel/Xel. Then LJ did one of its purges and it all kind of died.
And I still write it, as I have an epic I’m trying to finish and occasional plot tribbles that like to multiply. @chrissysky and I RPed and collaborated on several fics, and we’re slowly working on turning some of the RP into fic.
One of my Slayers friends got into the Pandora Hearts manga while it was being released in Japan, and dragged me into it as well. I wrote fic and RPed in that fandom for a while, but then some toxic stuff went down and I was soured on it. I left, as did my Slayers friend, and I went back to writing Slayers.
The last few years, I was largely done with fandom, focusing on ‘serious writing’ and publishing a chapbook of poetry and poems in multiple literary journals, and on work. Because I was trying to adult. I’d share some of the links and such to my poetry, but I try not to let my online life overlap with my real life. I’ve had my fair share of online stalkers and threatened doxxers in the 20+ years I’ve been on the internet. Some folks are just creepy.
I still write and publish poetry fairly regularly, and one of my poems made it into an academic textbook recently.
In October, @norakwami, who I met via YYH 18+ years ago, got into Miraculous Ladybug and coaxed me to watch it, and it was all over. I’m back in fandom more fully, writing ML fanfiction and working on Slayers fics I’d set aside. I’m really super into Miraculous Ladybug, but some fandom drama soured it a bit. Working to get back to writing and enjoying it.
Since this is getting shared for some reason…
After this post, @chrissysky got me into MDZS/The Untamed by insisting I watch the cdrama right as the pandemic happened, and so I’ve been down that rabbit hole ever since with no signs of surfacing.
My health has, since before the pandemic, been complicated because of at least two autoimmune diseases, and combined with a number of factors that soured me on my job, I was pushing through, really, and I determined I couldn’t do it anymore if I wanted to survive late in 2022. So I’m working to get my health under control and living with my mom while I do, unable to work and some days can barely get out of bed.
What’s weird is I miss working with students as a professor, but now am the cool auncle to my cousin’s 4 kids (2-17) so weirdly I’m still up with what the younger generations are up to.
I turned 40, and I’ve been in fandom for at least 25 of those years. I’m never “growing out of it,” fam.
To add to this, it turns out the fatigue and such is long Covid, so now at least I have an answer. But my health isn’t under control yet.
About the only thing I can do is write in small doses, and I’m clinging to that. I’m still deep in mdzs, and I’ve participated for several years in a Winter Solstice gift exchange. I hope to do so again this year. I use Six Sentence Sunday and WIP Wednesday to ensure I keep writing.
Just have to keep going. I want to regain my health.
