2026 — Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 3

[angenoir]

Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

 

I have always created stories — seeing posts nowadays about how girls show their ADHD by daydreaming, I feel so seen sometimes, because that was everything I did as a child — and I was always a big reader. As a child, my sibling and I that shared a room had something we called p-l-a-y; we had younger siblings, and at the beginning we didn't want to ask them to play with us. But it wasn't like, with toys. It was us literally pacing the room in an oval as we each had a character from a huge cast of characters and those characters would have adventures — a dnd session without a dm, if you will. Our characters came from the shows we watched, which went from digimon to the 90s xmen show to dragonball z (the veeeeery few shows we managed to sneak and watch when our parents weren't awake) to transformers. They included kids of the characters (I still remember that I created a son of Gambit called Legerdemain, which is a word I pulled out of a thesaurus that meant sleight of hand), they included our own original characters.

We strictly divided them up and we held that cast of characters and sent them on adventures every night.
I remember that fondly; I sure hope my sibling also remembers that.

We were maybe 10 and 7, or 11 and 8. Fandom was in my life that young, and my first foray into writing a full story was a retelling of Logan / Wolverine with a bunch of OCs and random difficulties, obstacles, etc. As I went through high school, I kept notebooks and each of these notebooks I would fill to the last page, each one a variation of some kind of fandom I've seen.

Fandom has always been a... safe haven, I'll say. It gave me characters I could play with, could rewrite or edit or build off of, and I have to say I think my life would look much darker without fandom. Fandom allowed me to meet one of my best friends, and fandom honestly gives me a kind of benchmark or stick to meet new people. It allows me to have something in this life that is just... happy. It lets me read stories infinitely better than any kind of story I've read in actual books checked out of the library.

(seriously, I rec this to everyone and anyone, but if you have never read Lightning on the Wave's retelling and rewriting of the Harry Potter series you are missing out. It is such a detailed, beautifully built world so much more fleshed out and so much more complex than John Rowling could have ever created.)

So I guess my love letter is to the various universes that allowed me so much joy as a child. One day I hope to return to fandom fully, and turn one of my stories into an actual published book. I have so many ideas in my head I still want to write, I just... have lost the whimsy and brightness that made it easy to write.