Goodness. Trying to remember my fannish origin story. Eesh.

The Very Beginning
Well, it started with X-Men. Specifically, the 90s television show. It also started with Digimon, Power Rangers, Dragonball Z, and my sister. We actually weren't allowed to watch television all that much, so we snuck episodes when we could and built our universe when we couldn't. From there, which was to me like a very early form of roleplaying (verbalized roleplaying, with each of us having different roles [I was Gambit and Logan and she was Android 18 and Sora, for example]), I began writing stories loosely based on the television shows I watched or books I read. One of my earliest attempts at fanfiction - and my only actual finished work from the age of 11 to I think about 19 or 20 - was an 'origin' story of Logan (called Solo in my fic because I was a dramatic teenager). Other ideas included cars that were bodyguards to the descendents of a royal alien line (transformers), a group of pre-teens captured and taken to a French castle and they had to get free in medieval england (Robin Hood) and a ham-fisted attempt at writing a story that wasn't too much like Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail but failed miserably at being distinctive, really.

My Chosen Pseudonym
But I suppose what I really have to thank, for my original name L'Ange Noir, was finding fanfiction on the internet. It was Gambit fanfiction, and it was him in a relationship with Wolverine, which was amazingly hot and dirty to a very young pre-teen who knew exactly what my religion said about such relationships and what my father would do should he catch me sitting on the family computer reading such sites. (I learned how to wipe my history, wipe the site from the internet file folder, and remove any cookies - if there was another way my dad could have found which site I was on, I didn't know it but neither did he.) L'Ange Noir comes from Gambit, and a very old story I had about him - in the comics, Remy LeBeau is sometimes referred to as the Le Diable Blanc, the white devil, because of his eyes. In my fanfiction story, L'Ange Noir was Remy's lover, a winged mutant with black skin. My current fanfic penname is AngeNoir, as I fell out of writing fanfic sometime in the last years of my undergraduate degree, and when I came back it was to Ao3, not the other sites I posted on. Those stories... well, I still know how they end. I remember most, if not everything, about their plots. I just... haven't completed any of them.

Defining Influences
But yeah, without that one author, Ximeria, and another archive, LeDiableBlanc, and one last author who was a defining influence on how I wrote and really started me on my worldbuilding kink, Lightning On the Wave - these three are really the beginning of my origin story in fandom.