Snowflake Challenge, Day 5

[kelly_chambliss]

I didn't do the Challenges for Days 1-4, because I'd either done them before or they made me uncomfortable or whatever.

But today's sounds fun, so here goes:

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. How did you come to fandom, why did you choose your fannish name, do you have more than one secret identity?

(I do think I've written this story in some form at some time in the past, so do skip if you've already heard it.)

Since childhood, I have regularly fallen in love -- platonically and at a distance -- with older women. Sometimes, they are people I actually know: teachers and supervisors and my 7th-grade school bus driver, to name a few. Sometimes, they are people I will never know, like historical figures and celebrities and fictional characters.

Sometimes, they come from television shows.

"Sherman, please set the Wayback Machine to 1998."

"Sure thing, Mr Peabody! Here we go. . ."


In 1998, I became obsessed with the character of Captain Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager. She was the first female captain to star in a Trek franchise, and though the series had all sorts of flaws in terms of storytelling, characterization, sexist assumptions, etc., it was still a fascinating exploration of women and power. I admit, the look of Janeway (as played by Kate Mulgrew) also fascinated me; I'm a sucker for women with strong cheekbones and jawbones.

Once I fell for Janeway, I did what I always do when I become obsessed by something new: I research the hell out of it. Research is incredibly sexy to me; I would often rather do it than eat. Before the paving of the Information Highway, my research mostly took place in the old-paper-scented stacks of libraries and in used bookstores and in the bookish quiet of library reading rooms.

But by 1998, a new option had appeared: the internet. At that time, the online world was pretty new to me; my backwater of a school hadn't even gotten email until 1996, our internet access was wonky dial-up, and I had no access at home at all. Search engines were erratic, crashes were frequent. Nonetheless, I entered "Kathryn Janeway" into a search engine (was it Google then? can't remember) to see what I could see.

Among the many hits was something called the "JetC Index." I clicked on this, and lo! It turned out to be a huge number of fanfics based on the Janeway/Chakotay pairing (known as J/C or JetC), the most popular Janeway pairing going (as I found out later). There were hundreds of stories, all in alphabetical order and with movie-style ratings.

I had vaguely heard of "fanfiction" of the Kirk/Spock variety, but I'd never seen any, and I'm not sure I was completely clear on what it was. (Later, I realized that I'd created fanfic of my own as an early teen, when I was obsessed with Billie Burke as Glinda in The Wizard of Oz and told my friends stories about her. [Damn, if only I had gone ahead and written Wicked.]) But I sort of got what "JetC" was about, so I clicked on a couple of stories and started reading.

When I found my first explicit sex scene, I immediately back-buttoned, thinking, "What? I can't read this! It would be like spying on my friends."

This feeling lasted for about three minutes. Then I reopened the file and read on. Then I read some more. And more. I wasn't even really a fan of Janeway/Chakotay, but fanfic was like a drug. I couldn't stop and didn't want to. I began to learn the fanfic terminology and some of the tropes, began to find writers I liked, began to read scholarly analyses by Henry Jenkins and Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith.

I did more searches and found other pairings: Janeway/Paris, which has that older woman/younger man dynamic I'm so fond of, and some (but not much) Janeway/Seven femmeslash.

It wasn't long before I felt the itch to write some fanfic of my own. But I didn't really know how to create a website, I wasn't interested in writing J/C (too het, too canon[ish], too mainstream), and I didn't know any other ways to post. (I hadn't yet found the major Trek fanfic newsgroups, ASC [alt.startrek.creative] and ASCEM [alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated].) But I did know a site called JuPiter Station, a massive Janeway/Paris archive of fiction, art, screen caps, and on and on. It had clear instructions for posting fic (as long as it was J/P or gen with a heavy Janeway-and-Paris presence). Since I liked that pairing anyway, I wrote a very tame, canonical, derivative J/P fic and posted it. And got a nice review.

That was the end of life as I had known it.

I wrote more, posted more. Somehow I found the "Star Trek" page at About.com, edited by a woman named Julia who taught at Tulane University. At the bottom of the page, Julia noted that she hosted a "Star Trek Chat" every Thursday night. With a little nervousness, I tried it. And adored it. Here were like-minded, smart, savvy people who loved the things I loved. I went by the name "TrekTalker," which the group shortened to TT, and I met wonderful friends. They were helpful and so kind to the newbie. They told me about the newsgroups and what trolls and sock puppets and beta-readers were.

But they weren't really Janeway fans. Janeway, like Minerva McGonagall, turned out to be something of a niche taste. Most of the people on Julia's chat were het fans of Paris/Torres or slash fans of Paris/Kim or Paris/Chakotay. The one Janeway fan was, of course, a JetCer.

Then one night, someone named Boadicea12 showed up. She was funny, witty, and clever; I was immediately drawn to her. Not only was she a major Janeway fan, but she didn't care much for J/C. She liked femmeslash. She told me about a couple of Janeway-centric Yahoo groups (where a lot of Trek fandom was located in those days). In those groups I found some of the absolute best Janeway writers ever, including Boadicea12 herself. (I'm still friends with some of them -- *waves to nandamai and aabbey.*)

I read more. And wrote more. I attended the Thursday night chats faithfully. They usually ended around 10:00 pm, but Boadicea and I got in the habit of staying to continue the chat after everyone else left.

Eventually, we were spending the entire night, every week. I'd go through my Friday classes in a sleep-deprived daze. I became more and more attracted to Cea, and she to me. About six months later, we met in person and have since lived happily ever after.

In 2001, Voyager went off the air. Coincidentally, fandom began to migrate from Yahoo and the newsgroups to Live Journal. In no time, it seemed, VOY fandom as I had known it virtually disappeared. My Janeway obsession began to lessen, too. I stayed in vague touch with the Trek world for another couple of years, but finally I drifted away. I'd started an LJ account but rarely used it, and I suppose I thought I was done with organized fandom.

Ha.

If you are not bored into a stupor and actually fancy hearing about my tumble into the HP world, you can read that enthralling tale here. (Many of you old-timers have already seen it.)

As for fannish names, I have only the one; it's the name of an OC from an unpublished fic (not fanfic) I once wrote.

Comments

[pauraque]

Everyone who does this says their story is boring, but I actually love reading them!

We were probably about a hair's breadth away from meeting in VOY, since we were reading in a lot of the same places. I came at it from a bit of a different angle, since I was initially a Paris fan, and was reading tons of Paris/Kim and Paris slash rarepairs. But I'm a sucker for the older woman/younger man dynamic too, so when I realized Janeway/Paris was a thing, I was all for that! From there I discovered and fell hard for Janeway/Seven, which I guess was the first time I was really into a femslash pairing. (My other primary fandom at the time was X-Files, which was always rather light on femslash due to the paucity of female characters.)

I wish I had written in the fandom when it was all fresh in my mind. Well, I wrote a little, but didn't post, just read and reviewed. There's still a small fandom for it (it gets written and read avidly in multifandom fests and pan-series Trek fests) but I don't think I remember canon well enough anymore, and there's too much to do a rewatch. Though, on the other hand, I'm not sure I watched all the way to the end of the series in the first place anyway... I was always more of a fan of the fic than the show!

[kelly_chambliss]

I love reading others' stories, too, but I'm always afraid mine will be boring or TMI /g/.

I bet we did cross paths, at least briefly or tangentially, and just don't remember. I got into the VOY fandom just as Seven was entering the picture, and initially, of course, there was very little J/7 fanfic. That's why my partner says she started writing -- because no one was producing the stories she wanted to read, so she just had to write them herself. Then a J/7 Yahoo group sprang up, which was both good and bad: it made for more J/7 stories, but a lot of them were pretty bad -- sentimental, 1950s-het-style romance and fluff. (As my partner once said, it was like little girls making up stories with Barbie and Ken, except that they only had two Barbies.) But there was some top-notch fic, too.

At one point, I think I could honestly say that I'd read every J/7 story available. A couple of them achieved legendary status -- remember Gina Dartt's "Just Between" series? Talk about being like a 1950s het romance! (IMO, anyway; I know a lot of people really loved it, and I can see why -- well written, and it treated the female characters seriously). And that lactation one, by Tenderware?

And I agree -- the fic tended to be much better than the show.

[pauraque]

like little girls making up stories with Barbie and Ken, except that they only had two Barbies

Oh man, that is so true. At the time I was a much younger and less discerning reader (I mean, we were all younger! but I was actually a teenager) and I think I swallowed a lot of melodrama that I wouldn't now, but sometimes even I would give a J/7 fic the side-eye for being too saccharine. (Not that the same thing didn't exist on the maleslash side. It totally did, in truckloads!)

Of course, with the way the show was written sometimes, doing better than canon was kind of a low bar...

[delphi]

I loved reading this! I dearly want to believe it was the Alta Vista search engine you used, because that's the one that introduced me to Voyager and X-Men fanfic on my very first visit to the internet. :D