2025 — Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 2

[angenoir]

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring a mug of some indeterminate drink. The drink is obscured by marshmallows and an orange in the mug. Next to the mug are two gingerbread men cookies. The mug and cookies are on a white background of fluff and snowflakes, and green twigs or vines around the edges of the picture. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I think the very earliest I remember really being in fandom and liking a story well enough to create my own fanfiction of it was, of all things, Robin Hood. I must have been... ten? Eleven? Creating a "children of Robin Hood" story, with a daughter of Robin, a son of Will, etc. I also vaguely remember creating a transformers spin off, and my first real story I wrote was a retelling / redo of Logan/Wolverine's origin story, except as teenagers because teenagers were cool to me when I was barely out of middle school.

But fandom and writing has always been something I've loved to do, and with practice and growth I eventually became really enamored of X-Men fanfiction while in early college. It was a weird branching for me — I was looking for something entirely different and ended up finding male slash fanfiction (lemon, is what it was called in that day and age) on a web page called LeDiableBlanc. (I'm tempted to see if that website is still up and running...)

It was home to a lot of fanfiction, all centered on Remy LeBeau / Gambit (my second or third fandom crush) and him with various other male X-Men, and it really had a formative effect on me, my writing, and what I liked to read and write. From there I fell into The Losers fanfiction, and then into Marvel (The Avengers, specifically). There were many other smaller fandoms (you can see my fandoms and pairings here, if you're so inclined) but those are the big ones that stuck with me — X-Men, The Losers, and Phase 1 and 2 of The Avengers.

(Oh my god, it's still around. I may just fall down the rabbit hole of rereading all these old fanfictions. Here is the main page of LeDiableBlanc, and here is the fanfiction page that enraptured seventeen to nineteen year old me.)