Snowflake Challenge #2
Jan. 16th, 2020 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frameofmind6Now for the funsies! My fandom history…
My initial draft of this got waaaay too long, so I am offering the TL;DR highlights version for anyone who just wants the basics. : )
TL;DR Highlights
Pre-2003: No structured fandom involvement, but I got very very into several things that might have been fandoms for me if I had known that was a thing at the time. These include, in no particular order: Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lois and Clark, The 10th Kingdom, Back to the Future…
2003: Through an accident of the internet, I discover fanfiction. Specifically Ranma ½ fanfiction, which leads me to fanfiction for other animes, most notably Inuyasha and Rurouni Kenshin.
2003-2012: I spend most of my free time throughout high school and college (and a bit beyond) reading and writing fanfiction for Inuyasha, with a few side projects in Ranma ½ and Rurouni Kenshin. I also help moderate the IYFG (a fanfic competition in Inuyasha fandom) and at certain points get involved with a community that scanlates and discusses the newest chapters of the manga (until it ended in 2007).
2012: Brief but intense infatuation with Rurouni Kenshin, prompted by finally being able to read the last half of the manga. (I had read an early fan translation of the text in script form, but I believe this was when it was officially released in English.) More fanfic reading and writing.
2013: In late 2012, Rurouni Kenshin leads me to the live-action movie, which leads me to Takeru Sato, who leads me to Japanese dramas, which leads me (eventually) to Kazuya Kamenashi, Jin Akanishi, and KAT-TUN. In spring of 2013, while I’m in the middle of a break from an original writing project and actively working on a Rurouni Kenshin AU, I stumble on a KAT-TUN discussion on LJ that prompts me to start reading a story called 9 ½ Weeks by Haikuesque, “just out of curiosity.” I expect to be squicked out, but instead immediately fall face-first into gay RPF sparkleboy fandom (i.e. Akanishi/Kamenashi KAT-TUN fanfiction). My poor, ignored Rurouni Kenshin AU is, alas, never finished.
2013-2018: A Lot Of Things Happen. I read and write a lot of Akame (Akanishi/Kamenashi) fanfiction, and I start traveling to Japan once or twice (occasionally three times >_>) a year for KAT-TUN and Jin Akanishi concerts. I make friends with a bunch of other fans from around the world who also go to concerts. One of them eventually becomes my wife. : ) I co-run a fic exchange withjo_lasalle . I move to Germany to live with jo_lasalle .
2018: Guardian happens. I don’t quite count Guardian as one of my fandoms, because it and I have irreconcilable differences—but I enjoyed a lot of things about it, and I’m associated with the fandom by marriage. I occasionally dabble in writing fanfic for it, but my primary fandom continues to be Akame.
2019: The Untamed happens. OMG. A gay sparkleboy fandom that isn’t so hopelessly EMO all the time! OMG!
2020: So, now I have two Main Fandoms (Akame and The Untamed), and they complement each other very nicely. When I want to play in “it’s complicated” territory, there is always Akame. When I want to play in epically-magical-pining territory, there is now The Untamed. I still have a stack of Akame fics I hope one day to finish, and I’m currently building up a backlog of Untamed ideas, so… I’ll be busy for a while. : )
Much Longer, More Navel-Gazey Version
So, in hindsight I’m aware of a number of things that I was basically “fannish about” when I was young, but that never prompted me to make the leap into Fandom—i.e. connecting with other people to have meta discussions, write and read fanfiction, etc. A good example of this would be Star Trek. When I was around twelve or thirteen, I got hugely into Star Trek—first The Next Generation (which was in reruns by then), then the original series, then Voyager (which I know is imperfect, but it continues to be my heart’s favorite : ). (DS9 wasn’t my style plot/tone-wise, unfortunately, and Enterprise was too much of a departure from the comfortable 90s era of the franchise for me, so that was where they lost me. The reboots are, imo, not even the same franchise… >_>) I spent about three years recording and cataloguing all the episodes I could get my hands on to VHS—in fact I remember one super-intense week where Spike TV was playing Star Trek TNG 24 hours a day for 5 days straight (the “5 Day Mission”—shut up, I was really obsessed… : ), and I set up a complicated schedule involving two or three VCRs and I don’t even know how many tapes to make sure I collected all of the episodes on that week that I didn’t already have. (This was also at a point where TNG had fallen off the TV schedule in my area for a couple of years, so I was desperate to see it again. It was that pre-Youtube, pre-DVD-seasons era where my only other recourse would have been to buy individual episodes on ridiculously overpriced VHS tapes from Suncoast. I gave in to that urge only once. The episode was “Cause and Effect,” and I picked it because it was one I hadn’t seen, the premise sounded interesting, and I liked Kelsey Grammar from Frasier… ^^)
((Oh, by the way, my username/penname FrameofMind, which has been with me since middle school in one form or another, was a nod to the Star Trek TNG episode of the same name. : ))
ANYWAY. So, yes. I was fundamentally fannishly inclined from a very young age, but for a long time that just meant watching or reading certain things over and over again, and in some cases discussing them with my sister and cousins. Interests that fell into this pre-fannish category include:
My first experience actually participating in fandom came when I was about 16. One of my briefer pre-fannish encounters had been with the anime series Ranma ½, a few years earlier—but because at that time we were still in the VHS era, and that show was too racy for American TV (it would hardly count as porn in the grand scheme of anime, but the plot revolved around a guy who turns into a girl when doused with cold water, so there were a lot of slapstick scenes where, say, shirtless-dude would suddenly become shirtless-girl in the middle of a fight scene or something), I had only ever managed to see about twelve episodes of it at that time, and I’d never managed to read the manga it was based on (which hadn’t been officially translated yet). Once DVD seasons started to become a thing when I was in high school, I went looking to see if DVDs of Ranma ½ existed—and I found them, but I also found something else: Fanfiction.
YES.
See, the thing is, Ranma ½ was one of those particularly frustrating kinds of series where the whole thing hinges on the will-they-won’t-they, love/hate romantic tension of the two main characters. Add to that the fact that Rumiko Takahashi (the manga author) was PARTICULARLY EVIL about setting up arcs where the stakes would ratchet up and it looked like they were finally going to be forced to be honest with each other about their feelings, and then… something would explode, or someone would fall through the floor, or one of the other fiancées (both Ranma and Akane had numerous suitors battling for their attention) would appear and try to feed someone a love potion, and it was all brilliant and hilarious and INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING. In other words, the perfect canon for giving someone a burning desire to write fanfiction. Fanfiction, up to this point, was a concept I had never encountered before—but I already enjoyed writing (or at least the idea of writing—I hadn’t written more than a few pages of anything that wasn’t for a school assignment before that), and as soon as I realized that I could get my fix of satisfying resolutions not only through reading other people’s writing but through writing things myself, I was completely sold. I wrote my very first fanfiction by hand in a spiral notebook during study hall, and then I typed it up in the evenings and eventually posted it to ff.net. (Fun fact: fanfiction helped me finally learn how to type. : ) It was terrible, but it was also easily the best and most complete thing I’d ever written at that point, and soon I was filling multiple notebooks with ideas and pieces of scenes I wanted to turn into stories.
Around the same time I was discovering fanfiction, I was also getting into the anime series based on Rumiko Takahashi’s then-current manga series Inuyasha. Inuyasha had a lot of the same romantic dynamics I loved from Ranma ½ (a lot of love/hate, bickering, and seemingly-unrequited pining—these are, I can see with hindsight, common threads running through most of my favorite pairings : ), but it was much plottier and a bit darker, with less of that frustrating cyclical back-to-status-quo pattern and more actual character growth. Inuyasha became my primary fandom for about the next ten years, through the rest of high school and college, tapering off when I was in my mid twenties. I wrote a ton of fanfic for that series—mostly oneshots in the canon universe, but also a few novel-length AUs, and with each one I learned more about storytelling, character development, and my own abilities. I particularly remember starting to write my first attempt at romantic comedy when I was in high school. I approached it with the attitude that it would probably be terrible (at the time I thought I was only good at writing “serious” things), but that I wanted to write it anyway because I enjoyed the genre—and then I was surprised to find that it took off. By sheer comment count that story is still the most popular thing I’ve ever written, though of course that’s partly a numbers game—that fandom was big and it was at its height at the time, so nothing I’ve been writing recently would even have a shot at matching those figures. : ) In any case though, it gave me a boost of confidence in my ability to write comedy, and I think that’s made me a better writer going forward. (In hindsight I think the biggest problem with my first Ranma ½ fanfiction is that I took an insane and very canon-appropriate slapstick premise and tried to write it 100% straight-faced. It could have been so much better if I’d only seen the humor in it… ^^)
Inuyasha was also the first place I got involved with fandom infrastructure. Ranma ½ fandom was pretty dormant by the time I stumbled into it, but I entered Inuyasha fandom at its height, when there were multiples LJ comms and fan groups running weekly/monthly/quarterly fanfic prompts and competitions all the time. (For some reason Inuyasha fandom was heavily into “competitive” fanficcing—I never encountered the idea of a non-competitive fic gift exchange until I entered Akame fandom. But that’s skipping ahead…) For a number of years during college I was one of the moderators running the InuYasha Fan Guild fanfic competition—my first taste of a) how much work fandom can be (we ran four competitions a year, and there was a lot of admin involved in collecting, organizing, and screening all the nominations), and b) how fandom group dynamics sometimes result in relatively minor differences of opinion being blown up into massive arguments. (Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of fun! But I do sometimes wonder if thirtysomething!me would have been better about calming some of the arguments that twentysomething!me poured fuel on… >_>)
As my involvement with Inuyasha fandom waned (a process that started when the manga finished in 2007 and accelerated after the Final Act extension of the anime finished in around 2010, though I was still finishing up some of my longer stories and posting the occasional oneshot as late as 2012), I had a brief but intense infatuation with Rurouni Kenshin—which I had known as an anime for a long time, but I think it was at that point that I finally managed to read the entire manga series. That grabbed me hard for a year or so. During the 2010-2012 period I was also making a more concerted effort to do some original writing (because I had just graduated college with a musical theatre degree and the knowledge that being an actor probably wasn’t for me after all, and my efforts to get a job in the publishing industry had been squashed by the recession, and I figured if I had a shot at making a living as an author, this was my chance to find out), so when I wrote fanfiction it was more of a side thing than a main interest. I got 2/3 of the way through a first draft of an original trilogy, and I thought maybe I could make this work, keep my original writing at the forefront and the fanfic stuff on the back burner and eventually get something published—but then, in the spring of 2013, Akame happened.
I should probably say at this point that up until 2013, every ship I had ever shipped, and every story I had ever written or read, had been het and 100% fictional.
Akame was neither.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about: Akame is a name-smush of Jin Akanishi and Kazuya Kamenashi—two Japanese pop stars who were the frontmen of a six-person group called KAT-TUN. Kamenashi is still part of KAT-TUN, but Akanishi left the band to go solo in 2010. (He also got married and had a kid in 2012. >_>) So by the time I found them, the “canon” was this story of two guys who had apparently been close friends as teenagers, had clearly had a rapport with each other for a long time, but had become mysteriously standoffish with each other for a number of years in their early twenties, and had finally gone their separate ways. The fanon that filled in the gaps was chalk full of all the bickering and pining and love/hate dynamics that had always been my personal catnip, with the added (unexpected) bonus of hot sparkleboy porn and gay panic (Kamenashi is often assumed to be gay and unable to be out for career reasons, while Akanishi is often assumed to be somewhere on the bi-to-confused spectrum). This, for me, was a revelation on multiple fronts. I had always been more into “pretty” guys, but up until this time that meant, like, Brad Pitt. Still basically your average American white dude with the broad shoulders and square jaw, just the slightly softer, more metrosexual variety. But jpop guys like Jin and Kame were different—they were beautiful in a way I hadn’t previously realized that men could be beautiful, and I loved the way they (especially Kame—Jin has always wanted too much to be an average-American-dude, sadly, though he was amazing at the idol thing while he consented to participate in it) played in this sort of gender-bendy space in terms of fashion and mannerisms. Like, I both found Kame very beautiful as someone to look at, and also wanted to raid his closet.
(In hindsight it should probably not be so surprising that this was my first step towards realizing I wasn’t straight. : )
Anyway. It’s hard to explain, and it seems a bit perverse considering that Japan isn’t exactly tops on gay-acceptance, but coming from American culture where female pop stars all wear slutty pants and glitter and male pop stars all wear baggy clothes and have women in slutty pants and glitter dancing around them, I just… found it SO SATISFYING to discover this world in which the dudes also wore slutty pants and glitter.
I had also (coming from a musical theatre background) always had a lot of gay male friends around me, and I had a habit of falling in love with guys who turned out to be gay, so it slightly troubled me that I felt like I could never get invested in gay romance as a genre. I had always assumed that it wouldn’t/didn’t work for me because there was no female character present for me to identify with—but when I stumbled across my first Akame fanfic (9 ½ Weeks, by Haikuesque) and started to read it, just out of curiosity, I discovered relatively quickly that that assumption was bullshit. (And, really, I should have known it was bullshit. I’d been writing het romance for ten years, and not purely from the female perspective. Did I really think myself incapable of identifying with the male characters I was writing…? O.o) What I hadn’t realized was how freeing it would be to read and write a m/m pairing and not have to worry about how this or that action or movement or bit of dialogue reflected on my feminist principles. I mean, yes, there are yaoi tropes that basically make one of the dudes “the girl,” and hey if that floats your boat, more power to you—but for me it was just really nice to be able to make decisions about how these characters should interact based on their personalities and the needs of the story and my own “I feel like writing so-and-so on top this week” whims without having to run them over with a fine-toothed comb and see if my principles were reflected in my decisions or not. It’s like that thing where, if you’re a straight woman getting married to a man, there’s always a moment where you have to decide what you’re going to do with your name, and no matter what you choose it makes a statement of some kind—either you’re reinforcing the default, or you’re rejecting it. Writing het romance felt like that. But when I switched over to writing gay romance (and indeed, when I eventually got gay-married : ), suddenly I didn’t have to worry about that anymore, because there were no defaults. Everything was fair game, and could mean whatever I wanted it to mean.
So, yeah. Akame fandom was a time of great changes in my life. I went from writing mostly-chaste (because ff.net) het romances about anime characters to writing very not-chaste gay romances about famous Japanese sparkleboys. I switched from writing everything in past tense to writing everything in present tense. I started getting involved in more fandom conversations, traveling to Japan for concerts, meeting up with other fans in person and forming friendships that bridged the gap between my fannish life and my real life. I went from thinking I was straight to realizing I was bi. I got my first proper full-time job as a web programmer. I met my wife (who, incidentally, is half of Haikuesque, who wrote the story that originally pulled me down this very long rabbit hole… : ). I moved to Germany.
It was A Lot Of Things.
I also, in my opinion, made a few more leaps forward in terms of writing ability. I think in general it helped a lot to be writing in a space where I was dealing with real people in the real world most of the time. Even to the extent that that was technically the case with some of my AUs in the past, the fact that the characters came from canons that involved magic and heightened abilities always meant I had leeway to draw from those things when I wanted to. And although many of the earlier AUs I wrote did place the characters as adults, I think I learned a lot about writing adult characters as adults in the process of writing Akame. Not to mention the fact that writing gay romance for a change forced me to reexamine some of my defaults in terms of romantic tropes and character interactions and notice when I was leaning on conventions that were old or tired or didn’t fit. And forging closer relationships with other fans also means I now have a network of people close to me who are good writers, so that’s been great for getting immediate feedback and pushing myself to do better.
In any case, Akame and KAT-TUN were my primary and exclusive fandom up until 2018 when several of my friends started watching Guardian. My relationship with Guardian is complicated for reasons that are hard to explain without spoilers, but suffice it to say that I enjoyed a lot of things about it, and I’ve written a few stories for it, but it’s never quite made it to Official Fandom status with me (althoughjo_lasalle and several other friends are more involved with it than I am). The main positive takeaway for me with Guardian was the introduction to Chinese dramas in general, and I’ve seen several at this point that I’ve really enjoyed. Most notable among them is The Untamed, which (unlike Guardian) has definitely achieved Official Fandom status at this point. I’m still in the early stages of brainstorming fic ideas and starting to find my way through writing these characters, but after so many years in the emotionally complicated Akame fandom (which I still love so much and still want to write for, though things have quieted down there these days), it’s really nice to be playing in a 100% fictional closed canon again. It’s nice not to have to worry that someone’s going to do something to throw a wrench in one of my plots, or feel like I’m racing against time to finish writing something before things change again and it’s out of date. Having an established sandbox with defined parameters takes a lot of the stress out of coming up with ideas, and I’m really looking forward to having time to play more with these characters and their unique dynamics.
(Well. I say unique. I think it’s no coincidence that this is yet another pairing that’s all about love/hate and bickering and pining. We all have our things… ^__^)
My initial draft of this got waaaay too long, so I am offering the TL;DR highlights version for anyone who just wants the basics. : )
TL;DR Highlights
Pre-2003: No structured fandom involvement, but I got very very into several things that might have been fandoms for me if I had known that was a thing at the time. These include, in no particular order: Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lois and Clark, The 10th Kingdom, Back to the Future…
2003: Through an accident of the internet, I discover fanfiction. Specifically Ranma ½ fanfiction, which leads me to fanfiction for other animes, most notably Inuyasha and Rurouni Kenshin.
2003-2012: I spend most of my free time throughout high school and college (and a bit beyond) reading and writing fanfiction for Inuyasha, with a few side projects in Ranma ½ and Rurouni Kenshin. I also help moderate the IYFG (a fanfic competition in Inuyasha fandom) and at certain points get involved with a community that scanlates and discusses the newest chapters of the manga (until it ended in 2007).
2012: Brief but intense infatuation with Rurouni Kenshin, prompted by finally being able to read the last half of the manga. (I had read an early fan translation of the text in script form, but I believe this was when it was officially released in English.) More fanfic reading and writing.
2013: In late 2012, Rurouni Kenshin leads me to the live-action movie, which leads me to Takeru Sato, who leads me to Japanese dramas, which leads me (eventually) to Kazuya Kamenashi, Jin Akanishi, and KAT-TUN. In spring of 2013, while I’m in the middle of a break from an original writing project and actively working on a Rurouni Kenshin AU, I stumble on a KAT-TUN discussion on LJ that prompts me to start reading a story called 9 ½ Weeks by Haikuesque, “just out of curiosity.” I expect to be squicked out, but instead immediately fall face-first into gay RPF sparkleboy fandom (i.e. Akanishi/Kamenashi KAT-TUN fanfiction). My poor, ignored Rurouni Kenshin AU is, alas, never finished.
2013-2018: A Lot Of Things Happen. I read and write a lot of Akame (Akanishi/Kamenashi) fanfiction, and I start traveling to Japan once or twice (occasionally three times >_>) a year for KAT-TUN and Jin Akanishi concerts. I make friends with a bunch of other fans from around the world who also go to concerts. One of them eventually becomes my wife. : ) I co-run a fic exchange with
jo_lasalle . I move to Germany to live with jo_lasalle .2018: Guardian happens. I don’t quite count Guardian as one of my fandoms, because it and I have irreconcilable differences—but I enjoyed a lot of things about it, and I’m associated with the fandom by marriage. I occasionally dabble in writing fanfic for it, but my primary fandom continues to be Akame.
2019: The Untamed happens. OMG. A gay sparkleboy fandom that isn’t so hopelessly EMO all the time! OMG!
2020: So, now I have two Main Fandoms (Akame and The Untamed), and they complement each other very nicely. When I want to play in “it’s complicated” territory, there is always Akame. When I want to play in epically-magical-pining territory, there is now The Untamed. I still have a stack of Akame fics I hope one day to finish, and I’m currently building up a backlog of Untamed ideas, so… I’ll be busy for a while. : )
Much Longer, More Navel-Gazey Version
So, in hindsight I’m aware of a number of things that I was basically “fannish about” when I was young, but that never prompted me to make the leap into Fandom—i.e. connecting with other people to have meta discussions, write and read fanfiction, etc. A good example of this would be Star Trek. When I was around twelve or thirteen, I got hugely into Star Trek—first The Next Generation (which was in reruns by then), then the original series, then Voyager (which I know is imperfect, but it continues to be my heart’s favorite : ). (DS9 wasn’t my style plot/tone-wise, unfortunately, and Enterprise was too much of a departure from the comfortable 90s era of the franchise for me, so that was where they lost me. The reboots are, imo, not even the same franchise… >_>) I spent about three years recording and cataloguing all the episodes I could get my hands on to VHS—in fact I remember one super-intense week where Spike TV was playing Star Trek TNG 24 hours a day for 5 days straight (the “5 Day Mission”—shut up, I was really obsessed… : ), and I set up a complicated schedule involving two or three VCRs and I don’t even know how many tapes to make sure I collected all of the episodes on that week that I didn’t already have. (This was also at a point where TNG had fallen off the TV schedule in my area for a couple of years, so I was desperate to see it again. It was that pre-Youtube, pre-DVD-seasons era where my only other recourse would have been to buy individual episodes on ridiculously overpriced VHS tapes from Suncoast. I gave in to that urge only once. The episode was “Cause and Effect,” and I picked it because it was one I hadn’t seen, the premise sounded interesting, and I liked Kelsey Grammar from Frasier… ^^)
((Oh, by the way, my username/penname FrameofMind, which has been with me since middle school in one form or another, was a nod to the Star Trek TNG episode of the same name. : ))
ANYWAY. So, yes. I was fundamentally fannishly inclined from a very young age, but for a long time that just meant watching or reading certain things over and over again, and in some cases discussing them with my sister and cousins. Interests that fell into this pre-fannish category include:
- Star Wars (the original trilogy)
- Star Trek (TOS, TNG, and VOY)
- Lois and Clark
- Back to the Future
- The 10th Kingdom
- Harry Potter
My first experience actually participating in fandom came when I was about 16. One of my briefer pre-fannish encounters had been with the anime series Ranma ½, a few years earlier—but because at that time we were still in the VHS era, and that show was too racy for American TV (it would hardly count as porn in the grand scheme of anime, but the plot revolved around a guy who turns into a girl when doused with cold water, so there were a lot of slapstick scenes where, say, shirtless-dude would suddenly become shirtless-girl in the middle of a fight scene or something), I had only ever managed to see about twelve episodes of it at that time, and I’d never managed to read the manga it was based on (which hadn’t been officially translated yet). Once DVD seasons started to become a thing when I was in high school, I went looking to see if DVDs of Ranma ½ existed—and I found them, but I also found something else: Fanfiction.
YES.
See, the thing is, Ranma ½ was one of those particularly frustrating kinds of series where the whole thing hinges on the will-they-won’t-they, love/hate romantic tension of the two main characters. Add to that the fact that Rumiko Takahashi (the manga author) was PARTICULARLY EVIL about setting up arcs where the stakes would ratchet up and it looked like they were finally going to be forced to be honest with each other about their feelings, and then… something would explode, or someone would fall through the floor, or one of the other fiancées (both Ranma and Akane had numerous suitors battling for their attention) would appear and try to feed someone a love potion, and it was all brilliant and hilarious and INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING. In other words, the perfect canon for giving someone a burning desire to write fanfiction. Fanfiction, up to this point, was a concept I had never encountered before—but I already enjoyed writing (or at least the idea of writing—I hadn’t written more than a few pages of anything that wasn’t for a school assignment before that), and as soon as I realized that I could get my fix of satisfying resolutions not only through reading other people’s writing but through writing things myself, I was completely sold. I wrote my very first fanfiction by hand in a spiral notebook during study hall, and then I typed it up in the evenings and eventually posted it to ff.net. (Fun fact: fanfiction helped me finally learn how to type. : ) It was terrible, but it was also easily the best and most complete thing I’d ever written at that point, and soon I was filling multiple notebooks with ideas and pieces of scenes I wanted to turn into stories.
Around the same time I was discovering fanfiction, I was also getting into the anime series based on Rumiko Takahashi’s then-current manga series Inuyasha. Inuyasha had a lot of the same romantic dynamics I loved from Ranma ½ (a lot of love/hate, bickering, and seemingly-unrequited pining—these are, I can see with hindsight, common threads running through most of my favorite pairings : ), but it was much plottier and a bit darker, with less of that frustrating cyclical back-to-status-quo pattern and more actual character growth. Inuyasha became my primary fandom for about the next ten years, through the rest of high school and college, tapering off when I was in my mid twenties. I wrote a ton of fanfic for that series—mostly oneshots in the canon universe, but also a few novel-length AUs, and with each one I learned more about storytelling, character development, and my own abilities. I particularly remember starting to write my first attempt at romantic comedy when I was in high school. I approached it with the attitude that it would probably be terrible (at the time I thought I was only good at writing “serious” things), but that I wanted to write it anyway because I enjoyed the genre—and then I was surprised to find that it took off. By sheer comment count that story is still the most popular thing I’ve ever written, though of course that’s partly a numbers game—that fandom was big and it was at its height at the time, so nothing I’ve been writing recently would even have a shot at matching those figures. : ) In any case though, it gave me a boost of confidence in my ability to write comedy, and I think that’s made me a better writer going forward. (In hindsight I think the biggest problem with my first Ranma ½ fanfiction is that I took an insane and very canon-appropriate slapstick premise and tried to write it 100% straight-faced. It could have been so much better if I’d only seen the humor in it… ^^)
Inuyasha was also the first place I got involved with fandom infrastructure. Ranma ½ fandom was pretty dormant by the time I stumbled into it, but I entered Inuyasha fandom at its height, when there were multiples LJ comms and fan groups running weekly/monthly/quarterly fanfic prompts and competitions all the time. (For some reason Inuyasha fandom was heavily into “competitive” fanficcing—I never encountered the idea of a non-competitive fic gift exchange until I entered Akame fandom. But that’s skipping ahead…) For a number of years during college I was one of the moderators running the InuYasha Fan Guild fanfic competition—my first taste of a) how much work fandom can be (we ran four competitions a year, and there was a lot of admin involved in collecting, organizing, and screening all the nominations), and b) how fandom group dynamics sometimes result in relatively minor differences of opinion being blown up into massive arguments. (Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of fun! But I do sometimes wonder if thirtysomething!me would have been better about calming some of the arguments that twentysomething!me poured fuel on… >_>)
As my involvement with Inuyasha fandom waned (a process that started when the manga finished in 2007 and accelerated after the Final Act extension of the anime finished in around 2010, though I was still finishing up some of my longer stories and posting the occasional oneshot as late as 2012), I had a brief but intense infatuation with Rurouni Kenshin—which I had known as an anime for a long time, but I think it was at that point that I finally managed to read the entire manga series. That grabbed me hard for a year or so. During the 2010-2012 period I was also making a more concerted effort to do some original writing (because I had just graduated college with a musical theatre degree and the knowledge that being an actor probably wasn’t for me after all, and my efforts to get a job in the publishing industry had been squashed by the recession, and I figured if I had a shot at making a living as an author, this was my chance to find out), so when I wrote fanfiction it was more of a side thing than a main interest. I got 2/3 of the way through a first draft of an original trilogy, and I thought maybe I could make this work, keep my original writing at the forefront and the fanfic stuff on the back burner and eventually get something published—but then, in the spring of 2013, Akame happened.
I should probably say at this point that up until 2013, every ship I had ever shipped, and every story I had ever written or read, had been het and 100% fictional.
Akame was neither.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about: Akame is a name-smush of Jin Akanishi and Kazuya Kamenashi—two Japanese pop stars who were the frontmen of a six-person group called KAT-TUN. Kamenashi is still part of KAT-TUN, but Akanishi left the band to go solo in 2010. (He also got married and had a kid in 2012. >_>) So by the time I found them, the “canon” was this story of two guys who had apparently been close friends as teenagers, had clearly had a rapport with each other for a long time, but had become mysteriously standoffish with each other for a number of years in their early twenties, and had finally gone their separate ways. The fanon that filled in the gaps was chalk full of all the bickering and pining and love/hate dynamics that had always been my personal catnip, with the added (unexpected) bonus of hot sparkleboy porn and gay panic (Kamenashi is often assumed to be gay and unable to be out for career reasons, while Akanishi is often assumed to be somewhere on the bi-to-confused spectrum). This, for me, was a revelation on multiple fronts. I had always been more into “pretty” guys, but up until this time that meant, like, Brad Pitt. Still basically your average American white dude with the broad shoulders and square jaw, just the slightly softer, more metrosexual variety. But jpop guys like Jin and Kame were different—they were beautiful in a way I hadn’t previously realized that men could be beautiful, and I loved the way they (especially Kame—Jin has always wanted too much to be an average-American-dude, sadly, though he was amazing at the idol thing while he consented to participate in it) played in this sort of gender-bendy space in terms of fashion and mannerisms. Like, I both found Kame very beautiful as someone to look at, and also wanted to raid his closet.
(In hindsight it should probably not be so surprising that this was my first step towards realizing I wasn’t straight. : )
Anyway. It’s hard to explain, and it seems a bit perverse considering that Japan isn’t exactly tops on gay-acceptance, but coming from American culture where female pop stars all wear slutty pants and glitter and male pop stars all wear baggy clothes and have women in slutty pants and glitter dancing around them, I just… found it SO SATISFYING to discover this world in which the dudes also wore slutty pants and glitter.
I had also (coming from a musical theatre background) always had a lot of gay male friends around me, and I had a habit of falling in love with guys who turned out to be gay, so it slightly troubled me that I felt like I could never get invested in gay romance as a genre. I had always assumed that it wouldn’t/didn’t work for me because there was no female character present for me to identify with—but when I stumbled across my first Akame fanfic (9 ½ Weeks, by Haikuesque) and started to read it, just out of curiosity, I discovered relatively quickly that that assumption was bullshit. (And, really, I should have known it was bullshit. I’d been writing het romance for ten years, and not purely from the female perspective. Did I really think myself incapable of identifying with the male characters I was writing…? O.o) What I hadn’t realized was how freeing it would be to read and write a m/m pairing and not have to worry about how this or that action or movement or bit of dialogue reflected on my feminist principles. I mean, yes, there are yaoi tropes that basically make one of the dudes “the girl,” and hey if that floats your boat, more power to you—but for me it was just really nice to be able to make decisions about how these characters should interact based on their personalities and the needs of the story and my own “I feel like writing so-and-so on top this week” whims without having to run them over with a fine-toothed comb and see if my principles were reflected in my decisions or not. It’s like that thing where, if you’re a straight woman getting married to a man, there’s always a moment where you have to decide what you’re going to do with your name, and no matter what you choose it makes a statement of some kind—either you’re reinforcing the default, or you’re rejecting it. Writing het romance felt like that. But when I switched over to writing gay romance (and indeed, when I eventually got gay-married : ), suddenly I didn’t have to worry about that anymore, because there were no defaults. Everything was fair game, and could mean whatever I wanted it to mean.
So, yeah. Akame fandom was a time of great changes in my life. I went from writing mostly-chaste (because ff.net) het romances about anime characters to writing very not-chaste gay romances about famous Japanese sparkleboys. I switched from writing everything in past tense to writing everything in present tense. I started getting involved in more fandom conversations, traveling to Japan for concerts, meeting up with other fans in person and forming friendships that bridged the gap between my fannish life and my real life. I went from thinking I was straight to realizing I was bi. I got my first proper full-time job as a web programmer. I met my wife (who, incidentally, is half of Haikuesque, who wrote the story that originally pulled me down this very long rabbit hole… : ). I moved to Germany.
It was A Lot Of Things.
I also, in my opinion, made a few more leaps forward in terms of writing ability. I think in general it helped a lot to be writing in a space where I was dealing with real people in the real world most of the time. Even to the extent that that was technically the case with some of my AUs in the past, the fact that the characters came from canons that involved magic and heightened abilities always meant I had leeway to draw from those things when I wanted to. And although many of the earlier AUs I wrote did place the characters as adults, I think I learned a lot about writing adult characters as adults in the process of writing Akame. Not to mention the fact that writing gay romance for a change forced me to reexamine some of my defaults in terms of romantic tropes and character interactions and notice when I was leaning on conventions that were old or tired or didn’t fit. And forging closer relationships with other fans also means I now have a network of people close to me who are good writers, so that’s been great for getting immediate feedback and pushing myself to do better.
In any case, Akame and KAT-TUN were my primary and exclusive fandom up until 2018 when several of my friends started watching Guardian. My relationship with Guardian is complicated for reasons that are hard to explain without spoilers, but suffice it to say that I enjoyed a lot of things about it, and I’ve written a few stories for it, but it’s never quite made it to Official Fandom status with me (although
jo_lasalle and several other friends are more involved with it than I am). The main positive takeaway for me with Guardian was the introduction to Chinese dramas in general, and I’ve seen several at this point that I’ve really enjoyed. Most notable among them is The Untamed, which (unlike Guardian) has definitely achieved Official Fandom status at this point. I’m still in the early stages of brainstorming fic ideas and starting to find my way through writing these characters, but after so many years in the emotionally complicated Akame fandom (which I still love so much and still want to write for, though things have quieted down there these days), it’s really nice to be playing in a 100% fictional closed canon again. It’s nice not to have to worry that someone’s going to do something to throw a wrench in one of my plots, or feel like I’m racing against time to finish writing something before things change again and it’s out of date. Having an established sandbox with defined parameters takes a lot of the stress out of coming up with ideas, and I’m really looking forward to having time to play more with these characters and their unique dynamics.(Well. I say unique. I think it’s no coincidence that this is yet another pairing that’s all about love/hate and bickering and pining. We all have our things… ^__^)
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Date: 2020-01-16 07:53 pm (UTC)LOL I never realized that!
I'm very glad to know this and look forward to reading your fic!
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Date: 2020-01-18 04:44 pm (UTC)Yeah, it took me a while! ^__^
I'm very glad to know this and look forward to reading your fic!
Thanks! Looking forward to seeing anything you come up with too! I've actually even posted one already. ^^ Wouldn't blame you if you missed it though, it was a last-minute addition to the deluge of Untamed fics that came out for Yuletide... ^__^
(if you're curious! https://archiveofourown.org/works/21937438)
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Date: 2020-01-18 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-22 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-16 11:01 pm (UTC)I have nothing more to add, only squee lol
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Date: 2020-01-18 04:45 pm (UTC)^__^
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Date: 2020-01-17 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-18 04:46 pm (UTC)*quietly subscribes back* ^__^
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Date: 2020-01-19 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-22 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-22 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-22 05:17 pm (UTC)