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theplaguebeast · 4 years

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A Long Ramble On My Experience Reading Nothing But Fanfic For Over A Year

So, my entire Adult Journey Through Fandom (as opposed to my Teen Journey Through Fandom, which started around 13 and petered off when I was 19) began because summer 2019, after I moved back in with my grandparents and left the state I’d spent the last ten years in behind (along with almost all my possessions excepting my cats, my wolf pelt, some clothes, and some misc stuff including the entire Lord of The Rings series in paperback) I went to Archive of Our Own (AO3) on my shitty phone that didn’t actually function as a phone because that costs money, and went to the Fallout 4 section (because I have played that game to DEATH AND BACK, modded it to death and back too) and started reading. Because it was literally the first fandom I could think of.

And then, one day, as I was reading Piper/f!SS I thought ‘What’s another Media I Have Consumed’ and for whatever reason, Legend of Korra came to mind which is wild because I watched it when it came out and then NEVER touched it again. I did wind up rewatching it after reading probably around 100 Korrasami fics, but I watched it BECAUSE of the fics.

Then, and I think I hopped onto this because a bunch of writers who wrote Korrasami also wrote them, I fell into Clexa. And I’d watched.... like five seasons of The 100? IDK, whatever it was that season-dumped on Netflix in like 2017. And WHOO BOI did I stick around there for a LONG TIME. We’re talking 90 pages of my AO3 history (20 fics per page yo) of JUST CLEXA.

Thru a similar mechanism I started reading Supercorp, and here is where I come back into my ‘I don’t even GO HERE’ tendency, because you see I still have not seen a single episode of Supergirl but you bet your ass I have read literally about a hundred fics for it.

Then, again, via authors-who-I-liked-writing-for-other-fandoms-than-how-I-found-them I read a hefty pile of SwanQueen (which, RIP y’all OUAT fucked y’all huh?) and that’s a show that I had really honestly TRIED to watch but guys... The only thing going for it really is that it’s the better Live Action Beauty And The Beast and that’s sad on a number of levels.

Then Pitch Perfect caught me up and I HAVE seen the first movie (and jesus if that het romance wasn’t shoehorned in) but also ONLY the first movie but that didn’t stop my consumption of those fics.

At some point I strafed thru the Glee fandom and rediscovered Faberry which I don’t recall ever actively shipping Back In The Day but you BET YOUR ASS I thought they were both SUPER GAY when the first couple seasons were airing, which is also the last time I watch it at ALL.

And from there, AGAIN this has ALL happened because I kept checking out other stuff written by authors I like, I started reading Sansa-shipping Game of Thrones fics. Now here is a Very Important Thing to Know: I started with Sansa/Margaery, and you might have seen earlier my discovery that I fell into reading other Sansa ships via Sansa/Ellaria/Oberyn.

Before that point, even as a teenager, I shipped ZERO heterosexual couples. NONE. NADA.

Also, I had not watched Game of Thrones past season 4. (Some of you may be aware I watched and liveblogged watching the whole series recently. Do not do this thing.) I still spent seven months reading almost exclusively GoT fanfic. I’ve bought the books. I’m in MULTIPLE discord servers for GoT fan shiz.

And I also fell into checking Other Works By This Author I Like, except now, because I will read a fic featuring Sansa with literally anyone because it’s interesting to me, I started also reading het ships.

And so I wound up reading A Bunch of Zutara, and I had seen Airbender back when it aired and also... at some other point. But I did not rewatch it when it came out on netflix because holy shit Korra retroactively makes me so mad about both series now that I really think about Katara okay guys? Because I’m not okay. I’m mad. Whatever.

Somehow I wound up BACK in the Once Upon A Time fandom, by the way, but this time with Rumbelle (remember when I mentioned Beauty and the Beast earlier? HI) and man it’s interesting to see two sides of a fandom like that lemme tell ya.

And now, to the present, where I’m reading Bethyl fics for The Walking Dead, which I saw like three seasons of and mostly remember as ‘that show with the zombies where I got mad that no one could ever actually catch a fucking break for more than five minutes’ which is, for the record, WHY I stopped watching. And the extra funny thing is that I didn’t really author-hop for that one I just went ‘hey i know vague things about this IP let’s read stuff’ and Bethyl was just... the first ship I clicked on? And now I’m fucking Team Delusional and I DON’T EVEN GO HERE.

I need to REALLY DEEPLY HIGHLIGHT the fact that out of EVERY fandom I have listed, BEFORE I got into them I only finished/kept up with TWO of the shows and the one video game, ONE fandom has made me make myself watch the series it’s based on (and I’ll read the books as soon as they get here I’m not paying for fast shipping y’all), and EVERY OTHER ONE I know of from watching like three seasons on average.

(This is not including the fandoms where I checked out like five fics, went ‘I’m bored now’ and left. There’s like five of those I think???)

So what I’m saying is that I get a basic understanding of a piece of media and then throw it away and go check out the fan shit because it’s more entertaining to see what everyone’s doing with the toys the media provides. Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice And Fire is a fucking anomaly on every single front, literally every other fandom I have, there is The Ship That Happens (well, OUAT gets two, but they’re not mutually exclusive so WHATEVER) and then pretty much every other ship ranges from ‘whatever’ to ‘fuck off’.

But fucking Sansa Stark, man.

Anyways I’ve got 350+ pages (that’s over 7,000 fics yo) of AO3 history since June 19 2019 because quarantine changed zero percent of my lifestyle. If I can do math (debatable) that’s 15 fics a day every day, on average for nine-ish fandoms but the vast majority is GoT/ASoIAF.

Tune in fking WHENEVER when I finish the project my brain has decided will happen (THANKS HYPERFIXATIONS) where I’ve got the full data for all of this bullshit so I know how many words of whatever fucking ship I’ve read.

#current life #Past Is Prologue #Pondering #fandom

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