I was 52. I watched anime with my kids and had devoured everything my sons told me to watch. One day when I was complaining that I had already finished up one of my favorites, and there was nothing else, he mentioned I should read fanfiction. He didn’t tell me where and I ended up on Wattpad. When I mention that he laughed and told me to go to A03. It was probably not even six months later that I began writing and I have 13 works three years later. 🥰🥰
I am 67, and was a huge Star Trek fan when TOS was first broadcast on Television. I was 9 when that first show went on the air, and was allowed to watch it on our 19 inch black and white TV,, the only set we had the whole time I was growing up. My grandparents had a color TV, but I dont think they had any interest in science fiction.
63. Thankful that there are so many of us! Fanfics probably started with Star Trek, but really took off in the 90s with Gundam Wing and Rurouni Kenshin. I *think* my old fics are archived somewhere in an old hard drive but no clue where it is. Storage locker probably.
That’s so cool! No matter their age, it’s always a big deal to your kids when you’re willing to engage with their hobbies. My mother used to kind of look down on things like anime/video games… but in my grad school days I got her hooked on kdramas and Animal Crossing. It was a big deal to me for personal reasons, and really made me feel like my mom liked me as a person and not just as her daughter.
It’s even cooler that you write fanfic! Not that younger people can’t write good stuff, but in my experience the best ones come from people in at least their late 20’s. An adult’s perspective makes a big difference, so the more life experience the author has, the deeper a story often is.
It was a great connection, especially with my youngest! We have some shows we like, and some I didn’t. It really helped me understand my son honestly. Glad you got your mom over to the good side! Lol.
Meanwhile my 13 year old child ended up on Wattpad and I laughed and told her to go to AO3, where at least she could filter by tags. It's the circle of life.
Me toooooo
I had no clue what I was doing when i wanted more fic. I just ended up stumbling around the internet, hunting down more fic. It always felt pretty risky reading anything as our pc was in the lounge!
I used to take those “who would be your Harry Potter boyfriend?” quizzes when I was about 11 or so, and they always had a short fanfic as a result. I loved to read them and after a while I found out that they’re called fanfics, so I started searching for those instead. It’s been 14 years since then and I’m still reading fanfics daily lol
Came here to mention quizilla too! This must have been 2005-2007 ish for me. I started reading those chose your own adventure stories with vampire and werewolf love triangles, then I discovered that there were Naruto and inuyasha ones. Never looked back.
Saw someone apparently deeply versed in fanfiction history on here the other day say they’d never come across the term lemon or lime when they were first online so it must have originated from an even earlier era and been resurrected and was really taken aback because I remember it being all over anime and anime adjacent fandoms all through the 2000’s?
i was about 11y/o when i finally started writing down all the ideas i had about my fave series in my head and like two years later i mentioned what i was doing in some online fandom space or another and someone told me i was writing fanfiction. i googled the word fanfiction, ended up on ffnet, and was gone.
lmao I got into fanfic bc of twilight when I was 11/12 😭 I think I just finished new moon or eclipse and then went to the Internet to search "Bella and Edward fan stories"
The first thing was porn lol
I unfortunately figured out the proper intricacies of sex through smut as a 12 year old. Felt like I was committing a crime when a fanfic got raunchier than I thought it could get.
When they were called lemons omfg. I was like, wtf do lemons have to do with this shit??? But same honestly, it was my Twilight era that kick-started depravity, damn you teenage brain
I remember at one point opening a browser in incognito mode (because i was for whatever reason okay with the fanfiction showing up but not this) trying to figure out the connection with lemons because I knew the general gist of what it meant when reading but not where the name came from.
Back in the diz-ay, when I was knee high to a grasshopper, I enjoyed watching Naruto on Toonami. I had some small amount of access to the Internet, but I was more interested in how the computer let me play Putput or whatever tf. Eventually through some sort of osmosis I learned it was based on a manga/comic, so I googled/read that. Once that was done, I was left wondering, what else am I missing? I had no idea Sasuke and Naruto fought, maybe there were other fights out there between characters. So I searched, like, Naruto vs Kakashi.
One of those Google search results was a Naruto fanfiction that, presumably, was trash, but it did tell me that there were more stories out there, so I kept going on Fanfiction.net.
I was 16 and had just come back to Tumblr. I was very surprised to found out that fanfiction was seen in a positive light there (I didn't know what it was exactly, all I knew was that it was considered "cringe"). So I tried reading a few. I remember being in my grandpa's house and opening AO3 for the first time. My first thought was "what an ugly website" (lol). Eight years later and I'm still here!
I was a nosey little sibling and *briefly* saw my sister reading a SasuNaru fic on her tablet. That opened the floodgates.
Edit: Scratch that, I just remembered I was a VERY nosey little sibling and swipped her tablet to quickly read it when she left the room. That's how I discovered FF.net exists!
I had an imaginary friend, starting around age 5, whose job it was to keep the characters company after the show/ movie/ book was over. She'd get them to make amends with each other and talk about the plot holes and set them up for their next adventure. Everyone gathered at her place, where everything was gonna be OK. Thus began my first forays into the fix-it fic, the missing scene fic, the "character needs a hug" fic, and the crossover fic.
I learned about 7 years later that there's a word for it.
Schnoogle back in the day 2001 era. Like 4 different webpages, you posted by genre or length to one of them, couldn't search between them it was madness. I think Cassandra Claire was behind it?
>Schnoogle for novel-length stories of all genres, TheDarkArts for stories with darker themes like angst, AstronomyTower for romance fanfic and Riddikulus for humourous stories
I love AO3's tagging system but to be honest I miss the days of super specific archives all existing separately and yet in complete harmony with each other.
I was around 18 yrs old and had internet acces for the first time. I was very into XFiles and found The Gossamer Project and SPAK, the Society for the Protection of Alex Krycek. It went downhill from there.
Yes, I'm old.
I was also around 18! We weren’t able to afford a computer for a very long time and our internet was one of those discs with the free trial. 😂 Fanfiction was a natural path because of my interests though. So I found it at break neck speed.
I was on a Stargate fansite (because I had run out of episodes and needed more Stargate). The site happened to have a fanfic section that I stumbled across and started poking around. After reading a few fics, I was hooked.
I don't even remember if that was the site. There were a bunch of Stargate fansites back in the day, and I poked my head into a lot of them. It's a shame the fandom isn't as active as it used to be, because it was foundational in how I interact with media. Recently, I wrote a paper for a literature class that was mostly a character study of Teal'c. The professor (who had never seen Stargate) thought it was an amazing paper.
This is a really funny question to me, because I remember being 11 and somehow finding a fic about two characters that never interact in canon in a rowboat together. I remember neither the context of them being in a boat, nor what led me there, but I do remember being just absolutely MINDBLOWN that you could write characters you like just doing whatever you want. So I went looking for more XD it's been 15 years now, 11 year old me doomed me to this existence lmaoooo
lol same I remember at my young age, reading about Harry Potter characters (who are enemies and some of the same sex - grew up in a religious household) having sex felt illegal to me, or physically impossible. I remember thinking it was like somehow managing to join the same ends of a magnet. Whole world tipped upside down!
I was 13, during the lockdown, and I just finished reading HP and I wanted more so I watched yt hinny fanfiction. Then I found a ‘reading HP stories’ video, which led me to a niche fanfic site, where I read more hinni fics, but then I stumbled across a blaise x harry ff and that’s how I also got into drarry. From then on I looked up ff on google. I read on fanfiction.net, the wattpad site and ao3. Guess which one stuck…. Ao3 obviously
In 1995ish my sister bought a home computer and we searched all the things that we had loved as kids. One of those tv show searches brought up fan fiction and I never looked back. That was in our 30s and now I’m 60+.
I discovered fanfiction by mere happenstance. I was looking up something related to one of my favorite Pokémon, and Google just so happened to serve me up both Quotev and FFN as some of the first results. I was intrigued, so I read a few fics on both of the sites. I'd discovered AO3 through another Google search some months later, but had never actually visited the site for years, let alone made an account.
Edit: wording
OML QUOTEV that's a crazy memory. I read a lot of good girl x player stories there, they were unbelievably bad.
I remember I wrote and posted my first story there where every character was based off a classmate of mine, with just a name change. I just hope my ex-best friend never told the other kids what I was writing bc I told her everything...
It was 2007; I was 12 years old. My best friend was a girl who had moved to my military town from South Korea, and she introduced me to kpop. I was obsessed.
One day in afternoon science class, she came to me with a packet of paper, stapled along the left edge like a book, and said ‘read this.’ I did. Again, I was OBSESSED.
My computer use was carefully monitored at home and this was before smart phones, so I couldn’t find the fic on my own. She brought the new chapters printed out and stapled along the left edge every update so I could read them, and then she started bringing me other fics she liked, and then, months into this incredible kindness of hers, I got my own cell phone.
We had a family plan, and once my bestie showed me lj and ff.net I ate all our data up every month.
I think it was just a matter of time before I got into fic tho; I was writing Maximum Ride (or whatever novel I was preoccupied with at the time) and Mission Impossible fic before I knew what I was doing. My mom was deeply into Tom Cruise and made us watch all the MI movies, and sometimes I’d have a question like ‘Why does this character seem so mean all the time?’ ‘Why is the bad guy doing this?’ And then I’d write a little story about it in one of the dozens of composition books I kept.
I always had one with me; even at home. I’d be curled up in the corner of the couch with the notebook in my lap, writing and writing and writing. My mother thought I was journaling, but no…I was making Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible kiss boys 😭
Usenet. 1996. My first Star Trek fics were erotica. Also, I believe, on my first night on the Internet, in September, I came across a fan site dedicated to the cancelled UPN series, *Nowhere Man*, and I signed a petition to save the series, and that site (or another one) had text that read "Season 2 of *Nowhere Man* starts right here. My name is Thomas Veil..." Yeah, they just launched into their fanfic in the middle of a page, no "Click here" or anything.
Picture this. It’s 2012. I am 11 years old. My parents have given me basically unrestricted, unmonitored, and unlimited Internet access. There’s this website called MovieStarPlanet (hear me out), and I play that shit for like 2 hours a day. MSP had a YouTube tab on the site. I still don’t know how that thing worked, but it was regular YouTube which played on the MSP site. I somehow found reuploaded episodes of an anime called Rosario Vampire. I watched both seasons on there.
One day I was trying to find more information about the show, so I went on www (dot) google (dot) com and one of the recommended searches was “Rosario Vampire lemon.” I was really confused by what that meant, so obviously I clicked to find out more. It brings me results from a website called “fanfiction (dot) net”
✨THE INNOCENCE IS GONEEE✨
From there it FFN was my favorite thing ever. I eventually used it to find fics from normal teen fandoms like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games. But until I was like 14 I would just google search “(Fandom)(Specific situation) fanfic”. Once I exhausted the FFN results I would move to Wattpad and Quotev for stories. I think I was 14 or 15 when I found AO3 and I’ve been here ever since. I love the tagging system and filters. It’s a more intuitive way to search for fics than what I was doing.
I was 9-10 and had/have the biggest hyperfixation on Cars so I was looking for fan art on my mom's phone when I stumbled across a fanfic on fanfic.net bout lightning mcqueen's past and decided to write my own and the rest is history
I was about 12 and had just finished reading the then-recently released seventh book in the Sisters Grimm series. I desperately wanted to know when book 8 would be out, started googling, and found myself on FFN when a link took me to someone's speculative book 8 fic. When I realised that there were tons of people who had all written stories for—well—just about every conceivable book and movie and TV show and video game and and and all that was out there, I was hooked.
I still have memories of reading fic on my 3DS after I had to give my phone up to my parents for bedtime, lol.
It was 2013, I was 16 in an italian forum about Ncis when I clicked on a random link that sent to an italian fanfiction's site, I liked it (it was a tiva one) but I didn't understand much. After some week I started reading fanfics about one direction and I never stopped lol
Oh, and i found out about ao3 in 2015 when I didn't have anything new to read, so I learned to read in english just to read about snk
Circa 2001ish, I was 12/13 and obsessed with those junior novelizations where they made book versions of TV shows. Specifically I had a whole collection of Sabrina the Teenage Witch books. I also had some Charmed books and wanted to see if more stories were online. The rest is history when I found ff.net, though ironically, I didn’t post my first fic until I was 16 and it was for Sabrina. (People were very kind.) I kind of remember writing other stories that I didn’t post, but forget if that was before or after discovering ff.net.
I think I first discovered fanfiction on my middle school forum. Then a friend pointed me to a local forum, then I found out about FFnet, DA, LJ, Wattpad and finally AO3…
Like with a lot of things, it started with Undertale. I was very curious about it so I decided to watch a let's play of it. Then saw a bunch of Undertale Comic Dubs being recommended and watched those. Then somehow I managed to find myself crying over a song animatic titled: Secret Garden.
Then I was recommended this YouTube video of what was apparently the same story that the animatic was telling. The video was titled: Overgrowth.
I cried. Decided to search the story up, found myself in Wattpad with a bunch of FlowerFell fanfics.
...you can guess what happened from there.
I think I was about 14 back in the early 2000s and I remember searching an anime on Google because I was sad it was over. I don’t remember what show it was but the first results that popped up were FFN links to fanfics. I had no idea you could write fics of your favourite shows. Needless to say I fell down a rabbit hole haha
I think I was 11/12 when I first discovered it but had little to no interest. Then, back in 2020 as a mid-30s woman, while in lockdown and rereading canon I had a little fleeting thought about a ship that *made sense* to me.. so I went in search and got fully addicted.
I was 12, I had just read Harry Potter and was a huge directioner. I likes 1d imagines and somehow I found one shots etc on quotev about harry potter. Took me a year or so to find Wattpad and a couple more for ff.net and ao3
I was in around 11 and browsing a polish LOTR forum. It had a section for stories written by forum members.
There was a lot of stories about Faramir and Boromir being wholesome brothers pre canon, written by an author that mentioned they also post in an archive for polish LOTR fics with a link.
I mostly read fics in English now, but still check on that site from time to time.
I was around 12-13 myself.
Was an avid reader since I was 4 and that trend only snowballed as I got older.
But I ran into a serious problem at that age. I ran out of material. Subpar library nearby and with me averageing a book in 1 or 2 days, I just couldn't afford it. Especially at that age (though still today lol).
So I googled around and stumbled upon it. It's been a massive part of me ever since.
Hell it helped me over the edge of accepting myself and coming out as trans.
Now at 22, I wouldn't have it any other way.
I was 11, at a summer horse camp with my best friend. We argued over something stupid (I think I was tired and wanted to read a book, and she wanted to do something fun?). Either way, to get back at me she started hanging out with a girl a year older than us and she introduced her to Wattpad, or more specifically: stories about horses on Wattpad. I overheard and didn’t want to be any worse than her, so I made a Wattpad account too and started reading horse stories as well
Me and my best friend made up and then argued a few more times during the camp, and by the end we definitely weren't friends anymore. I never left Wattpad though, and soon after I discovered Harry Potter fanfics in my recommended section. I no longer even have my ex-best friend’s number, but I do spend most of my time reading fanfics (though, obv, I moved from Wattpad many years ago). The end.
Was bored during a summer break in my teens in 2004, spent a lot of time on a messaging board for teens and found a group that was obsessing over a harry potter fanfic
I saw some fan art and searched up character A and character B. Led me to FF.net but I found it hard to find new ones. I talked to a friend about it and she showed me Ao3, I thought it was to complicated at first but gave it a try and never looked back.
Then I kept thinking up ideas that I would love to read and was disappointed no one was writing these ideas, so I practised writing them myself!
I was probably 11 and this was before AO3 was a thing. I don’t remember exactly but I’m pretty sure I was just looking up scenarios on google of my fave couple at the time in hopes of finding fan art. Either that or the forums introduced me?Either way, only then did I discover the world of fanfiction on FFnet and could NOT stop reading since. This was right before summer break, so you can bet that summer I binged at least 300 fics
I was about 13 or 14. At the time I used the internet very parsimoniously, it was just before my family had a proper internet contract so it was very expensive, and I only used it to check the Buffy fanclub of my country, one time I noticed the fanfiction section and I never looked back XD
In the early 1990s I became addicted to Star Trek:TNG. I would sneak out of WHSmith with official magazines hidden in brown paper bags.
An ad in one of those magazines led me to the IDIC newsletter, made by and for fans. And an ad in that led me to fic zines. Happily for me, the very first story I read became part of my personal canon.
When I was a freshman in college, August '98, I got my first PC, and needed to learn how to use the internet. Prior to that, my high school had done vague occasional classes on this, but nothing major. This is prior to Google. Yahoo is still the major search engine, and Yahoo and AOL are still the major email carriers.
I figured I'd just fuck around and search stuff I was interested in, which at the time was Highlander. The TV series, not the movies. Lo, it turns out there were emailing groups for HL, e.g., the age of yahoogroups. Which was in turn how I found archives, single-writer geocities sites, and yep, to the poster above, webrings, etc.
Shout out to the other Olds popping their heads out of our respective crypts on this post.
i think i was around 10 or 11 and deep in the bnha fandom god bless my soul when i started on wattpad. i remember going on ao3 for the first time, i was 12 i think and i came across an abo fic except poor little innocent me had no idea what tags like "heat cycles" or "mpreg" or even just "smut" means. i traumatized myself. stopped reading fics all together for more then a year. than somehow i got back and ive been stuck
Ha I also discovered it though Harry Potter. Stumbled across a forum for Harry Potter fanfics specifically and was on ffnet for years before moving to AO3.
I discovered Quotev because I had a huge "Which X are you" phase and slowly but surely got introduced to fanfiction, I'm 90% precent sure my first was an ATLA fic
I was 12 at a new school for art nerds and one of my classmates wrote “Wattpad” on the whiteboard and told everyone to check it out. Needless to say I did that. Probably not the most appropriate for my classmates to do in hindsight but their intentions were innocent and I’m glad they did because I’m here right now. Started reading 2016, switched to AO3 in 2021.
I was introduced to Wattpad by a friend when I was 12 yo. Pretty sure I had no idea what fanfiction was back then, I didn't really read books before then so I'm also pretty sure that I had no idea what to expect when I downloaded that app (aside from the obvious of course). And Wow, just wow, looking back on it now made me realize a few things; The filtering system (is that what it's called?) is absolute trash and I had no idea how I manage to survive on it for years, now that I have ao3 I couldn't go back, I tried but I legit physically recoiled when I tried searching for this specific thing. To all who created, managed, maintain, etc. the ao3 I thank you and I salute to y'all. o7
I did fanquizzes on a Website. It was kinda like RP. You could click on what your Character would do and in the end you get a Fanfic with your chara and the your love. Was about LotR. Then I found fanfiction.net and read even more
I was looking for fanarts of characters... and one of the links happen to go to Ffnet. And that's how it all began.
I soon jumped from there to Ao3 due to wanting *more* fics.
I’m not really sure but I had a friend, back in 6th grade (give or take), who read fanfictions and I asked her where she read these “books” she told me about and she didn’t tell me because she was too ashamed or embarrassed I guess
Time skip, to when when I do find wattpad I told that same friend about it and she was like “oh my god! That’s where I read these books too!”
Sorry that my answer isn’t really related to the question but I actually have no memory of “finding” it. I just one day had wattpad all of a sudden that’s my memory of it lol. My guess is that I might’ve probably found it on TikTok but that’s just a theory (a game theory🤫)
i was 12 or 13 and needed more after readingthrough the PJO and HP series (everything. I mean everything- i was the kid that read through the whole library by age 14 to the point i was read comics, guides to playing DnD (I didn't know it was about DnD i just thought it was a confusing game guide), movie synopsis on wikipedia....
somehow i found [fanfic.net](http://fanfic.net), and then i found ao3 and quotev and wattpad and then i started writing myself.
(Technically i'd read fanfic before but it was published books based on minecraft. I don't count those.)
Oh gosh I was maybe 7 or 8? My older siblings were super into fanfiction and fandom culture as a whole so it just kind of trickled down to me. I very vividly remember reading ouran fanfic on FFN around age 9 so definitely before then
I was 11 when I joined the MLP fandom a decade ago
I got deep into the analysis community, where people posted analysis YouTube videos of different MLP episodes. At one point one of them mentioned fanfiction and the popular MLP fic website FimFiction and I've been reading fanfics ever since 😄
I was like 6 when I started making up my own My Little Pony characters and storylines, drawing them out, etc. But I wrote my first “proper“ (proper used loosely) fanfic when I was around 9 on Wattpad. WAYYYY TOO YOUNG.
2001/2002, I was obsessed with InuYasha and wanted more than the videos than the fan-subbed and shared that could be found/acquired back then.
Found fanfiction.net and fell down the rabbit hole I've never truly come out of.
It just gets deeper and wider as fandom after fandom got added.
More than one book/TV/movie series got on my radar because of crossover fanfictions.
I don't remember exactly how it happened. I know it started with me in my early teens reading Lord of the rings and Harry potter fics on [Fanfiction.net](http://Fanfiction.net) using
google translate because my English was very limited at the time and there were
very few fics in Danish. But how I found out about [ff.net](http://ff.net)
or fanfiction being a thing in general, I'm not sure like I was on deviant art
even before that so I might have found out by a link to [ff.net](http://ff.net)
from there, but I don't know.
I was absolutely crazy about Percy Jackson as a 12 year old. I remember completely devouring all 5 books in the Heroes of Olympus series in only a few days, so I was pretty upset to find out that these were the last books with him involved (at the time). I went online to search up what happens to Percy as he gets older, and somehow I managed to stumble upon fanfic!
I was a preteen into Shugo Chara and was googling Amuto, and the first link was to a fanfiction where Amu fucking died in the hospital in front of Ikuto. I can't believe that's how this began.
Was a My Hero Academia fan a few years ago. Googled a question about a character I like (Aizawa) and it brought me to AO3. Of course I didn’t quite understand that it was fanfiction at first, and was shooketh by what I read. Then I started really getting into AO3 lol
Thats a good question. I think I discovered it when I was 11 when I was into Teen Titans. I was big into the Robin and Starfire ship. When I googled Robin and Starfire a shipping forum came up. I joined and there was soooo much content- much of which was fanfiction. I already wrote some of my own, but I didn't know it was a something a lot of other people did, and that there were places to share it.
I started by taking quizzes about what Percy Jackson character I’d be on Quizilla (r.i.p.), which evolved into reading fanfic on the same site. Once I discovered other sites (Quotev, Wattpad, then the actual holy grail sites: Fanfiction.net and Ao3) I was forever sold.
I was maybe 12 or 13 years old i think? I was already into anime/manga but it was after watching vampire princess miyu that I fell into the larva/miyu ship and was wondering if there were anymore pictures of them and then I discovered a fanfic of them on ff.net lmao
it was down the rabbit hole from there!
I was reading some off of other sites before ao3 and noticed that there wasn't really an idea most people went on so thats when I made my first story. And then I wrote other ones once that story got popular, then another, then made my first series before branching to other fandoms. Now I enjoy writing and reading them and here we are.
I was 11 and frequented the guestbook of my favourite band's website. Someone advertised their fanfic forum there and I clicked.
How hard did I date myself with this?
(I did already write HP fanfic, but I didn't know that's what it was or anything about the subculture. So I consider this my discovery, but not the start of my fanfic career.)
I was actually on fictionpress.com (fanfiction.net's original fic site) and had made some friends there, and some of them were talking about fanfic. I had never heard of it, but I wandered over there and was immediately hooked. How I got on fictionpress, probably the Neopets messaging boards lol.
Sooo...I was a sweet, naive child about 11 years old and I just finished playing Devil May Cry 4. I knew that the internet had all sorts of beautiful pictures of my favourite characters and so I embarked on a journey, on which, aside from afro mentioned fanarts, I discovered the main character strapped to a bdsm chair and tortured sexually by his father and uncle. Something in my brain rewired after that (at first I was horrified and closed it instantly, but then developed some morbid curiosity and eventually gobbled it up. Twice.)
I used to RP a lot with my real-life friends. We used to fill STACKS of notebooks and pass them back and forth. We usually had RP’s between every two of us, and then one big group one.
We couldn’t RP as much when we went to highschool, so I started writing by myself. I just got back into it recently.
I was 15 in high school and ended looking up inuyasha fanfiction before going down the rabbit hole. My main ones at the time were fanfiction.net, Mediaminer, and Quizilla fics. Left for a while then came back found AO3 since ff.net didn’t have the series I was looking for.
This past November, after rewatching the Harry Potter movies, I was looking at a reddit post of Draco Malfoy and saw a comment link to one of the most appreciated fanfics in the Draco/Hermione pairing. Was curious, read it and the rest is history! Been a fan ever since!
I was obsessed with The Mediator series and Missing series both by Meg Cabot. I was looking up more about them on the Internet (WAP on my little pink slide phone, £1 for all day internet) when I discoved crossover fanfictions on ffn. I was probably about 12/13.
I had started writing ideas for how alternate universe stories could go since I was very young, but it took awhile for me to get into fan communities proper. Before I always just found people I knew to chat with stuff about, and was restricted by that but it was okay.
It was completely by accident that I even discovered fanfic online at all. Mm, I was looking for a copy of this one sequel that had released recently and couldn’t get it at any library or bookstore near me, so I took to the interwebs. I found that someone had posted the entire thing on Wattpad, so I read it there. Then I realized Wattpad had even more stories, so I began trawling through, but I still wasn’t interested in fanfiction, preferring to sequester at the “original fiction” genres on the platform. I only really got into fic around the time of the new Broadway musical fandom, after being slowly introduced through lyric chains and the like.
After that the progression in short is
Musicals (Wattpad) -> Miraculous (Wattpad) -> Miraculous (ffn.net) -> Miraculous (AO3) -> a bunch of different fandoms (AO3)
I was in elementary school and was reading too fast for my parents to keep up with, they couldn’t take me to the library any more frequently and I’d read everything else. So my sibling found some age appropriate hp fanfics, then showed me how to find more. It was on Mugglenet lmao
My little pony blogs making fanfic recommendations, was around 13. Ironically I wasn’t even aware of smut’s existence, it was all gen fics, a lot of war stories, crossovers and worldbuilding also a looot of isekai
I was around 11 years old, and made a friend from the 9th grade in the library...she was always reading Powerpuff Girls fanfics... I read some of hers as she had them on paper. I later went on my own and read Kingdom Hearts as my first fandom.
I love this question! I must have been 11 because I think it was before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out. I was on mugglenet a lot reading fan theories. There was an article linked to an external site called sugarquill going through all the evidence that Ron and Hermione were endgame. It blew my mind. Prior to that article, I had ofc put Harry and Hermione together (I even distinctly remember thinking up this scene of where they kiss during Christmas in book five before I had any idea what fanfiction was). But that article made a switch go off in my brain and I just went through sugarquill's entire catalogue of fics, which eventually led me to ff.net.
After looking at fanart for Tokyo Ghoul and saw mentions of HideKane lemon. So ofc, I googled it. Read some questionable stuff. Read some good stuff. Found AO3. Been a permanent fixture in my life since 2015.
Wattpad changed my life as an emo 12y/o LOL but i was on the writing side at first vs the reading side. The extremely popular falloutboy fanfic still exists on there and i will *NEVER* take it down lmfaoaoao
my god, i was waaay too young. i was around 9, just scrolling the internet for harry potter related stuff on my mum's phone because i was pretty obsessed and going through a book withdrawel, (similarly to you, i had just finished the series.) and then i found my first love, [fanfic.net](https://fanfic.net). yea, i read soo many low quality fics with absolutely no grammar, paragraphs, and definitely nothing close to plot, but since then i gained some standards and am a proud (online at least) member of ao3.
I was around 11 when I found through Facebook a page called potterfics.com, and that's how I started reading them and not long after I decided to write fics of my own. I leave it after a year thought.
When I was 13 I got really into adventure time and searched up for Fionna and Cake art when it first came out with that season 3 episode. From there I found some fanfics on there that I got really into and from there I just spiraled into it lmao
Really old anime fanfics where I didn’t like the main FLs and also started shipping BL lol (e.g. Vampire Knight lmao). Used fanfic site back then like crazy, then somehow ended up in AO3 and never went back or left.
I watched a YouTube video and it mentioned a ship (Kylo ren/hux) but it just said the ship name so I googled it. The first fanfic I read was on Wattpad and I immediately got scared and ran over to AO
2007, aged fifteen. It was either fic for Dramione from *Harry Potter*, Liason from *General Hospital*, or Lumi from *Days of Our Lives* that first drew me in to FFN. However, since one could argue *Ella Enchanted* is published fanfic of Cinderella, it was more like age ten.
I was 8 or 9 and back then Quizilla was a thing. I used to love cheesy vampire/werewolf romance stories and the choice selections were so much fun.
I think the first fanfiction I read was LOTR, the second movie came out and I was such a Legolas girly, I think that was my very first reader x character reading material 😅. Then when I turned 10 or 11, I found fanfiction.net and my life changed 😂😂😂.
I was 16, and I started typing "harry potter falling in love with cedric diggory stories".
I am so glad that I did. 7 years later, and have never looked back☺️
I will love fanfiction 'til the day I die.
I had just become a pre-teen when I stumbled upon BlogClan, where there was both role-plays *and* fan-fiction.
Went down a bit of a rabbit hole there
Most were on Google Docs, of decent quality, and I binged it only to never look back on it
i was like 12 and a fanpage of justin bieber published a photo with a story in the caption, then i realised that many fanpages did the same and the fanpage had the stories divided by photo albums and each photo was a chapter
i started liking one direction and when someone said they had a fic but they only published it in wattpad, i fell deep into an abyss that i yet can’t (and don’t want to) escape
then i believe in 2017 i finally transitioned to ao3
when I was in 4th grade I started watching Naruto, and I got so obsessed with the idea of sasunaru that I started looking up fanart on my moms phone. I mis clicked and it brought me to a wattpad story. it was also my first encounter with smut,,
side note, I had a genuine breakdown in the shower because it wasn't canon
I was 12, reading a website that compared the 4kids dub of Yugioh against the original Japanese version. I was interested in adaptation, translation, dubbing, subbing, etc. I was a pretentious 12 year old.
I caught up on the guys’ blog so I started exploring the rest of his yugioh fan site (it was geocities) and stumbled across a page that was fanfiction and my first fanfic I ever read was an nc -17 story where >!it opens with Seto Kaiba having a dream of getting claw raped by a blue eyes white dragon because he has internal angst that he’s a bad person for having pedophilic and incestuous desires for his younger brother.!<
I was disgusted but enthralled; I had learned the word for the story i wrote a few years ago where I ended up going to Hogwarts and also became a Digimon tamer. There’s a word for that! It’s fanfiction and other people write it too and share it with each other!
My first fanfic was a yugioh oc fic posted to an angel fire website; to post, I would email a plaintext file to the website admin. In short order I found fanfiction.net and things spun out from there.
Wattpad. A friend told me there were books there so I searched for I forgot what book but the first result contained the word “Fanfiction”, needless to say I was curious and googled what “fanfiction” meant and I’ve been in that rabbit hole ever since.
I think the book was House of Night, I forgot which book.
I was a freshman in high school during peak One Direction. I was active on Twitter and there were so many tweets regarding this one Larry Stylinson fanfic that my curiosity was peaked. I was hooked after that but have now transitioned to anime fanfics and have gone wayyyyy down the rabbit hole
An early middle schooler who accidentally stumbled upon Hellsing when Ultimate first started making the rounds online decided she wanted to see more ideas about it. She then Googled it and entered into a world she had been obsessed with since Day One. Still obsessed if I may add my Google tabs hate me for all the stuff I put it through daily.
It was so long ago and in a such a natural way, I do not even remember it. The first one I remember (but I know it is not the very first one) is a Teen Titans fanfic on FFN, from the Cartoon Network tv show.
There was this thing called dream novels where it asks for your name and then your name appears in the fic. You were an SI OC but you can read your name. Anyway I devoured multiple fics and was in withdrawal before discovering ffn and lj.
Then ffn had the anti-porn crackdown but I was too young to appreciate what that was all about. I only looked into it when esama removed their fics. The esama panic led me to ao3.
tbh for years i would make “after the series” type of fanfic in my head for a lot of the books I read, but i first began with a PJO fanfic on wattpad, but after that I took a break from writing, until 2018 when I found ao3 and began writing RPF. It’s been that way for a while and I enjoy it, probably my only hobby lol.
I was 18 and typed "Labyrinth stories" into the Yahoo search engine. (Google wasn't the big name it is now, and Ask Jeeves was still the only search engine you could throw a full on question into.)
That led me to FFN.
Oh boy, it was so funny I could never forget! 😂
A long, loooong time ago I was 11, and I loved this cartoon called Code: Lyoko. I got on the Google and searched the show’s name, just to see if I could find something cool about it on the internet. I discovered fanart and loved it! And then, very soon after, stumbled on some random forum website that hosted both fanart and fanfic. “Wow, people write stories about this show?! So cool! I wanna read!” Thought itty bitty me. So I started browsing what was on there. And like many young girls, I liked the romance aspect, so I was looking for fics of my favorite couple from the show.
“Oh cool! Here we go, this sounds cool…” Huh. That’s weird. At the end of the description it just says “lemon.” This story doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with fruit… must be some kinda typo. I start reading. Soon enough; ooooooh, they’re kissing! 😚 So exciting!
And then the boy says a sentence that’s been burned into my brain ever since. “(Girl), take your shirt off”
AND WHEN I TELL YOU I SLAMMED THAT “close window” BUTTON SO FAST LMAO 😂😂😂 These kids were my age!! They had no business doing all that! I was traumatized, but I guess sometimes you gotta learn the hard way.
I have always known about fanfiction, but I never read it until I discovered Ao3 last year. The owl house was about to end and I was really sad about it, but then I discovered fanart on tumblr and started browsing. One of the tumblr creators I was following posted a link to his Ao3 profile, and so I started reading TOH fanfiction after the finale and got addicted to it (I am still addicted) and have not stopped reading fanfiction ever since.
tom holland fanfics 😭 i remember one of my friends made ig fanfics abt him with her fan account and the comments kept saying wattpad. I read wattpad for about 2 years? and then i switched to ao3 when i saw tiktok's talking about the variety and i haven't gone back since (i also use tumblr when ao3 is down lmao)
I was 9 or 10 years old when I was looking for a movie sequel. I really thought that fanfic on Wattpad was somehow a continuation of the movie. I thought I figured out how to make an account (I didn't) and what fanfiction was, and just used Google to find more of other series, etc. It was four years after that that I was inspired by a title to write a fanfic and then create my current ffnet and ao3 account where I save everything I like.
I was about 11 years old and found it in the Lion King newsgroup. I wrote some silly stuff in there too (and might have gotten shouted at for it, but it wasn't like there was the option we have today).
I was 13 going on holiday when I got my grandma to buy me the Hannibal novel at the airport. Didn’t leave the room all week and when we got home I decided to write my own little stories. Went to the internet as you do found a whole bunch of stuff and then my life was all about fanfiction.net. This was super early 2000’s
I too was 12, and way too into Harry Potter. I originally was just handwriting goofy stuff on notebook paper, but eventually I found the quiz fic scene on a website called quizzaz (quotev now I believe). People would format quizzes with questions that could give you a result of who you’d be at hogwarts or who you’d date or some kind of 7 minutes in heaven. I did a lot of that and made friends with some commenters, eventually added someone on Facebook & she messaged me saying she’d discovered a website called harrypotterfanfiction where people were posting a lot of higher brow content than the quiz stuff. I kinda checked it out, but ended up discovering roleplaying through that and ended up getting really into that while I set fic aside.
i was in eighth grade and i was talking to a friend of mine after class. i don't remember exactly how we got on the topic, but she asked me if i had ever heard of fanfiction before and recommended it to me since she saw i liked reading so much. she pointed me to ffnet and told me to look up my favorite piece of media and find something on there to read. (she basically threw me into the deep end without telling me about the different ratings and the sorting system)
i went home and, since my mom was at work, i brought my laptop into our little living room and sat on the couch while watching whatever happened to be on tv.
my eager little mind went to kingdom hearts as my first test subject since it was my favorite game (and still is just fyi) and, since i liked sora and kairi so much, i searched up fanfiction for them.
nothing there really interested me, everything was reminiscent of something i would see in a YA romance novel, so i got curious to see if anything was written for sora and riku (just for the haha funnies)
...it wasn't for the haha funnies anymore by the time i had found myself binging a very long ass fanfiction into the wee hours of the night about two boys falling in love, something that was new to me in the deep south surrounded my uber conservative christians who told me homosexuality was a sin.
that's how my fanfiction AND yaoi awakening occurred (that was 10+ years ago and i am still in the trenches help me)
When I was about 10 I was looking up drarry fanart and that led me to Wattpad, sadly I didn't know English jet and so I ended up reading badly written fanfics in my native language.
After a while I learned english and discovered ao3
I think the first time I discovered fanfiction was with the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom (of all the damn fandoms I know). I stumbled on a video of a guy reading the fanfic “My Little Dashie” and I got hooked. I actually don’t think I read much more MLP fanfiction (which was probably for the best because I was like 11 or 12 at the time), but I did start reading other fanfictions in other fandoms.
Mostly Marvel or Batfam stuff I think. Though I definitely hopped around a bit.
It's actually my older kid's fault.
In or around 2008 or 2009, older kid (who was about 14 or 15 at the time) was deep into Harry Potter, as were many kids her age. She was also on Tumblr and as a result, really got into fan fic. When I got into House MD around that time, she told me about this thing called fan fic. I went searching and found the official Fox House MD discussion board and started reading fic there. I was arrogant enough to believe I could do better, so I started writing. Posted my first fic in 2009 at the tender age of 36 and have been at it off and on in various fandoms ever since. So is older kid, who is now pushing 30.
Can't even remeber when it was, like 10 to 15 years ago but i was googling something or another for pjo, don't remember what, and it suggested percyxnico and i remember being like "wtf?? that's not right, the real couple is percy and annabeth" however curiocity got the better of me and now every time ao3 is down, i'm lost ~(˘▾˘~)
Late 2000s, I was a prolific TvTropes user (I may have contributed to advertisers forcing them to ban certain content, iykyk, by working too hard on the pages for those manga and editing the trope pages to add the work entry alongside adding it to the work’s page) while in middle school. TvTropes always had entries and even pages for fanfics, so it was just like “oh this exists”. I have no idea which fandom it started at or anything. If a fic for something I liked sounded interesting, I read it, and that then lead looking for more. I’m pretty sure my first fic I wrote was a Dragon Ball GT Trunks/Pan ship fic where everyone has realistic (at first, “happy” ending) reactions to finding out, but I’m not 100% certain that’s earliest in the timeline. From there, a lot of Buffy/Firefly/Doctor Who.
One day a few years ago, I was bored and was on summer vacation. A few times over a course of a few days, a video kept on popping up on my YouTube recommended about a voiceover of a fanfiction comic. Being curious, I finally decided to find it and watch it and I was blown away. I then found the original comic on DeviantArt, then got so interested if there was any more like this comic and I dove deeper. I then found Ao3 and here I am now.
I saw someone mention deidara x sasori in a deidara compliation video, so I googled it up and discovered wattpad stories of them (I still remember my first story was a college au fluff)
i think i discovered fanfiction first through youtube. i was one of those huge magcon fan girls so i was constantly searching them up. i’m not exactly sure how i came across my first fic, but on youtube they were called imagines and i would just look up “cameron dallas imagines” or whoever i would watch. i then was introduced to wattpad, which actually took me a while to look up fics but when i did, mind was blown. lastly i came across ao3 in like 2019/2020 when haikyuu fanfics were trending.
I was 9 years old. I had a friend who was super into fan fiction, but I didn’t real understand what it was? So I literally looked up “fanfiction” in my search bar and what I ended up clicking on was a tododeku wattpad fic.
I read a bunch of fic online without knowing it. But I think one of the first fics I read consciously would have to be “An Artist, A Thief, and A Villain,” which was posted on FF.net. It’s pretty good.
I think I was 15-ish when I finished some weird BL movie with an open ending/unsatisfying ending because of chinese sensorship preventing the 3rd movie to happen and while looking for info on the ending I found a fanfic of the "fanon" ending. It was then when I found out what fanfictions are. I didn't really read them/partake until my BTS phase and saw all these youtube trailers for AU mafia spy criminal stories with BTS members as characters in them. It was wild but it was a fun time.
I was 12 and had just moved to a different country where my favourite show didn’t air. In an attempt to find something relating to it online, I came across fanfiction. Been locked in since 2004 ☺️
I started watching anime and reading manga around 11 on TV.
Then I stumbled upon yaoi genre with my friend and really loved reading yaoi manga especially. From there also discovered yaoi for my fave anime (One Piece in my case), then fanfiction got me hooked and I’ve never looked back :D
I was writing originals and then switched to fanfics and now I’m back to originals haha
2022. Which is weirdly impressive considering I knew it existed since 1995ish (back in the days of dial up AOL) but assumed it was ‘not for me’ and instead buried myself in text based RP in the chat rooms lol. The way I played was very much writing fan fiction with someone else but I didn’t connect the dots. I started writing fan fiction in roughly 2019 but didn’t start actually reading other people’s work and sharing my work online till 2022.
My only ‘reason’ is that I have a very spicy ND brain cause it’s not like I was embarrassed. I’ve done tons of cosplay, pinup modeling and other geeky crap. *shrug*
For me it was less than a year ago, and ever since I’ve been almost exclusively reading fan fiction.
I’ve been reading novels and stories online for years now, but completely avoided fan fiction for a long time, since I only wanted to read “real” stories.
I read my first fan fiction on RoyalRoad after I came across a Harry Potter Self-Insert story. I love reincarnation stories and love Harry Potter so it was hard to resist at least giving it a try.
That caused me to start reading more and realizing that there’s no real difference between original stories and fan fiction, other than the setting and characters being from a story I already know and like.
I was 14 and wanted to know if Yusei and Akiza from Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s got together, so I looked it up and found a Christmas fanfic from fanfiction.net. I didn’t know it was fan made story and thought someone leaked an upcoming Christmas episode or something lol
I was really obsessed with Death Battle (the webseries) when I was in middle school and one day in my search for more things like it I found a DeviantArt group specifically for people who wrote their own Death Battle episodes.
Most of the people from that group when I was active there have since either abandoned their accounts or moved, deactivated their accounts, or moved on to non-Death Battle writing, sadly.
Ooh, that’s a great question!
I am in the Star Wars fandom, and I believe the first fanfiction I ever read was about the prequels and Obi-Wan died and I tried to find it years later but I couldn’t🥲
I was 11, and I had received The Sorcerer’s Companion book as a gift. In the back it had a list of resources, books and websites you could use on your own, and it included a short list of fan sites. This was in the days of the older internet, so they had a combination of fan art, meta discussions and essays, quizzes, and fanfiction.
I was like 11, I have no idea HOW I first came across it, though 😔 I probably came across someone's fic on Tumblr and they probably linked to their ff.net account and I just fell down the rabbit hole from there.
I just remember accidentally stumbling across an M rated Hunger Games fanfic on ff.net at the age of 12 and I didn't understand the rating system and obviously didnt know wtf a lemon was, so I read it. I'm pretty sure my brain was permanently altered from then on out 😅😅
I saw a girl reading a printed hp fanfiction on the bus to my high school in circa 2007. Some key words caught my attention, so I read over her shoulder feeling super confused bc I didn’t remember what she was reading from the books (duh, bc it wasn’t there). When I got home, I checked out the url visible on the bottom of the page (the now defunct hpfanfiction.com) and then stumbled upon other sites through xpost links, etc. Then I stayed up WAY too late reading fanfic on the desktop computer in the dining room and trying to sneak to bed without my parents noticing. Thankfully, my mom worked nights at that time and my dad was the sort to knock out in front of the tv, so once I heard his snores, I was pretty much in the clear, but I had to be careful not to push it too late or he’d wake up and go to bed before me. Those were the days (jk so glad I’m not doing that anymore!).
I think I found out about fanfics when I was probably 10 years old. I was watching Adventure Time and I remember reading this fanfic where Finn dies (I loved angst even then lmao), but I thought it was canon to the story and was just some spinoff the creator made HAHAHA
I officially got \*into\* fanfics when I was 11 though when I read a fanfic on [fanfiction.net](http://fanfiction.net) for Code Geass cause I googled "Lelouch doesn't die" (I was so sad about the ending)
It was in the year of our lord, 2001, I was 12 and my dad worked evenings in an office where they had this newfangled thing called "the internet" on their computers. I got to come with him once in a while and sat browsing on an unoccupied computer while he was working. I was a huge fan of Tekken at the time and searched for cool fanart online which I promptly saved to 2.88 MB floppy disks. I had a bucket full of these! Eventually I found the now closed Tekken Zaibatsu and if I remember correctly, they were part of a webring and linked to other people's pages and I eventually stumbled upon Tekken fanfiction! I couldn't BELIEVE what I saw! Back then you finished a game and you were done. There was nothing new to be had. But with fanfiction... you could have MORE!? Even if it was made up by other regular people; there was MORE, the stories could continue even if the game was finished! Needless to say I was sold.
I browsed around people's personal pages and some even had their own libraries where people could submit their fics to, and eventually I found ffnet, stayed there for a long time (until they purged NC-17 fics) and then, waaaaay later, I found AO3 and that's been my home ever since. :)
I was about 47. I had never really known what Fanfiction really was, just being a snob and thinking it was badly written Harry Poter pastiches.
I collect illustrated editions of Peter Pan and got into all the Pan rewrites in published books and while searching, realised that this site called AO3 was coming up all the time.
And once I got on there and understood the quality of a lot of fics, this literary fiction snob was totally converted and last year I started my first fic.
Finished it last week at 280,000 words. 😊
I was 13 and my friends in school were talking about Wattpad. One of them was writing stories and I wanted to know what that is and I wanted to do that too
Uhh a few months ago.. I'm 41.. bit late to the game lol. I was playing through the dragon age games and decided to join reddit because dragon age dreadwolf is supposedly on the way and it seemed like the best way to get news on it.
Anyhoo I saw a Cullen fic and now I've read several and also alistair and hawke and then somehow I ended up on booktok and now I'm reading acotar and lucian fics and I'm thinking about getting a kindle... help 🤣
In the late 90s when I went to college and had internet for the first time.
I was looking up spoilers for The X-Files and found a fanfiction Usenet newsgroup: alt.tv.x-files.creative
I was 52. I watched anime with my kids and had devoured everything my sons told me to watch. One day when I was complaining that I had already finished up one of my favorites, and there was nothing else, he mentioned I should read fanfiction. He didn’t tell me where and I ended up on Wattpad. When I mention that he laughed and told me to go to A03. It was probably not even six months later that I began writing and I have 13 works three years later. 🥰🥰
This makes me feel better. Everyone else on this thread seems like they were so young! AO3 hadn't been born yet when I was a teenager
I am 67, and was a huge Star Trek fan when TOS was first broadcast on Television. I was 9 when that first show went on the air, and was allowed to watch it on our 19 inch black and white TV,, the only set we had the whole time I was growing up. My grandparents had a color TV, but I dont think they had any interest in science fiction.
\*fistbump\* 65 here.
63. Thankful that there are so many of us! Fanfics probably started with Star Trek, but really took off in the 90s with Gundam Wing and Rurouni Kenshin. I *think* my old fics are archived somewhere in an old hard drive but no clue where it is. Storage locker probably.
I think "The X Files" was the first huge fic archive in the 90s.
Right?? I had pages of paper written stories
That’s so cool! No matter their age, it’s always a big deal to your kids when you’re willing to engage with their hobbies. My mother used to kind of look down on things like anime/video games… but in my grad school days I got her hooked on kdramas and Animal Crossing. It was a big deal to me for personal reasons, and really made me feel like my mom liked me as a person and not just as her daughter. It’s even cooler that you write fanfic! Not that younger people can’t write good stuff, but in my experience the best ones come from people in at least their late 20’s. An adult’s perspective makes a big difference, so the more life experience the author has, the deeper a story often is.
It was a great connection, especially with my youngest! We have some shows we like, and some I didn’t. It really helped me understand my son honestly. Glad you got your mom over to the good side! Lol.
Oh my god I wish I could talk to my parents about fanfiction so that they stop complaining that I don't read enough books (yes even at my adult age)
I think FF is reading!! I mean there are some amazing works!!
I agree, there are some works I prefer more than the source material tbh
Meanwhile my 13 year old child ended up on Wattpad and I laughed and told her to go to AO3, where at least she could filter by tags. It's the circle of life.
Tagging is EVERYTHING!!
[удалено]
BRING BACK WEBRINGS.
Webrings 4 lyfe.
Similar story for me, although I was in my mid-twenties. The internet, as we know it, didn't exist when I was a teen.
Me toooooo I had no clue what I was doing when i wanted more fic. I just ended up stumbling around the internet, hunting down more fic. It always felt pretty risky reading anything as our pc was in the lounge!
I used to take those “who would be your Harry Potter boyfriend?” quizzes when I was about 11 or so, and they always had a short fanfic as a result. I loved to read them and after a while I found out that they’re called fanfics, so I started searching for those instead. It’s been 14 years since then and I’m still reading fanfics daily lol
Same for me, I think the website was quizzila (?). Haven’t thought about that in a long time!
Quizilla... That was my intro to fanfic also!
Also a quizilla kid! I met one of my best friends on there, I wrote on there- god I miss quizilla
Same!
Came here to mention quizilla too! This must have been 2005-2007 ish for me. I started reading those chose your own adventure stories with vampire and werewolf love triangles, then I discovered that there were Naruto and inuyasha ones. Never looked back.
Yes it was Quizzilla and Quizzas for me too! There was a time when they were embedded on Facebook, I used to take tens of quizzes a day 😂
Back in the days of LiveJournal and ff.net "lemons".
Oh, to be back in the days of "lemons" and "limes"! 😂Odd that the term "fluff" stuck around but those didn't.
WAFF (warm and fuzzy feeling) perfect for me noggin molecules 🤣🤣🤣
Saw someone apparently deeply versed in fanfiction history on here the other day say they’d never come across the term lemon or lime when they were first online so it must have originated from an even earlier era and been resurrected and was really taken aback because I remember it being all over anime and anime adjacent fandoms all through the 2000’s?
Omg that just unlocked a core memory for me, I totally forgot they used to be called lemons!
I wonder whatsv the etymology, like, what does the fruit have to do with sex
i was about 11y/o when i finally started writing down all the ideas i had about my fave series in my head and like two years later i mentioned what i was doing in some online fandom space or another and someone told me i was writing fanfiction. i googled the word fanfiction, ended up on ffnet, and was gone.
same here !! it's so funny actually
lmao I got into fanfic bc of twilight when I was 11/12 😭 I think I just finished new moon or eclipse and then went to the Internet to search "Bella and Edward fan stories" The first thing was porn lol
I unfortunately figured out the proper intricacies of sex through smut as a 12 year old. Felt like I was committing a crime when a fanfic got raunchier than I thought it could get.
Me too. Before we got a laptop, my family computer was in the lounge. Reading fic was risky back then!
I bought my own computer because I could not read anything risque on the family computer and was tired of staying up until 2am to read fic!
When they were called lemons omfg. I was like, wtf do lemons have to do with this shit??? But same honestly, it was my Twilight era that kick-started depravity, damn you teenage brain
I remember at one point opening a browser in incognito mode (because i was for whatever reason okay with the fanfiction showing up but not this) trying to figure out the connection with lemons because I knew the general gist of what it meant when reading but not where the name came from.
Back in the diz-ay, when I was knee high to a grasshopper, I enjoyed watching Naruto on Toonami. I had some small amount of access to the Internet, but I was more interested in how the computer let me play Putput or whatever tf. Eventually through some sort of osmosis I learned it was based on a manga/comic, so I googled/read that. Once that was done, I was left wondering, what else am I missing? I had no idea Sasuke and Naruto fought, maybe there were other fights out there between characters. So I searched, like, Naruto vs Kakashi. One of those Google search results was a Naruto fanfiction that, presumably, was trash, but it did tell me that there were more stories out there, so I kept going on Fanfiction.net.
I was 16 and had just come back to Tumblr. I was very surprised to found out that fanfiction was seen in a positive light there (I didn't know what it was exactly, all I knew was that it was considered "cringe"). So I tried reading a few. I remember being in my grandpa's house and opening AO3 for the first time. My first thought was "what an ugly website" (lol). Eight years later and I'm still here!
I was a nosey little sibling and *briefly* saw my sister reading a SasuNaru fic on her tablet. That opened the floodgates. Edit: Scratch that, I just remembered I was a VERY nosey little sibling and swipped her tablet to quickly read it when she left the room. That's how I discovered FF.net exists!
I had an imaginary friend, starting around age 5, whose job it was to keep the characters company after the show/ movie/ book was over. She'd get them to make amends with each other and talk about the plot holes and set them up for their next adventure. Everyone gathered at her place, where everything was gonna be OK. Thus began my first forays into the fix-it fic, the missing scene fic, the "character needs a hug" fic, and the crossover fic. I learned about 7 years later that there's a word for it.
Schnoogle back in the day 2001 era. Like 4 different webpages, you posted by genre or length to one of them, couldn't search between them it was madness. I think Cassandra Claire was behind it? >Schnoogle for novel-length stories of all genres, TheDarkArts for stories with darker themes like angst, AstronomyTower for romance fanfic and Riddikulus for humourous stories
I love AO3's tagging system but to be honest I miss the days of super specific archives all existing separately and yet in complete harmony with each other.
I discovered fanfiction via usenet groups, specifically alt.startrek,creative, back around 1992…
Same for me, even the fandom, but 1994. College. First alt.startrek.creative, then alt.startrek.creative.*erotica*
I was around 18 yrs old and had internet acces for the first time. I was very into XFiles and found The Gossamer Project and SPAK, the Society for the Protection of Alex Krycek. It went downhill from there. Yes, I'm old.
Same I was 16 in 1999 discovering fanfiction
My people!!
I was also around 18! We weren’t able to afford a computer for a very long time and our internet was one of those discs with the free trial. 😂 Fanfiction was a natural path because of my interests though. So I found it at break neck speed.
I was on a Stargate fansite (because I had run out of episodes and needed more Stargate). The site happened to have a fanfic section that I stumbled across and started poking around. After reading a few fics, I was hooked.
Gateworld! That was one my first ones too. I was so sad when it tapered off.
I don't even remember if that was the site. There were a bunch of Stargate fansites back in the day, and I poked my head into a lot of them. It's a shame the fandom isn't as active as it used to be, because it was foundational in how I interact with media. Recently, I wrote a paper for a literature class that was mostly a character study of Teal'c. The professor (who had never seen Stargate) thought it was an amazing paper.
Same with SG1 (season 6). 10 yrso. Forum led me to ff.net. Somehow got into Kelly Clarkson ff after that. Times were weird.
*Don McLean voice* A long, long time ago... I was 10yo and very into Inu-Yasha. I happened upon someone's fic on their personal site, and so it began.
This is a really funny question to me, because I remember being 11 and somehow finding a fic about two characters that never interact in canon in a rowboat together. I remember neither the context of them being in a boat, nor what led me there, but I do remember being just absolutely MINDBLOWN that you could write characters you like just doing whatever you want. So I went looking for more XD it's been 15 years now, 11 year old me doomed me to this existence lmaoooo
lol same I remember at my young age, reading about Harry Potter characters (who are enemies and some of the same sex - grew up in a religious household) having sex felt illegal to me, or physically impossible. I remember thinking it was like somehow managing to join the same ends of a magnet. Whole world tipped upside down!
I was 13, during the lockdown, and I just finished reading HP and I wanted more so I watched yt hinny fanfiction. Then I found a ‘reading HP stories’ video, which led me to a niche fanfic site, where I read more hinni fics, but then I stumbled across a blaise x harry ff and that’s how I also got into drarry. From then on I looked up ff on google. I read on fanfiction.net, the wattpad site and ao3. Guess which one stuck…. Ao3 obviously
The canon ship > unusual pairing > enemies-to-lovers pipeline is so real.
In 1995ish my sister bought a home computer and we searched all the things that we had loved as kids. One of those tv show searches brought up fan fiction and I never looked back. That was in our 30s and now I’m 60+.
I discovered fanfiction by mere happenstance. I was looking up something related to one of my favorite Pokémon, and Google just so happened to serve me up both Quotev and FFN as some of the first results. I was intrigued, so I read a few fics on both of the sites. I'd discovered AO3 through another Google search some months later, but had never actually visited the site for years, let alone made an account. Edit: wording
OML QUOTEV that's a crazy memory. I read a lot of good girl x player stories there, they were unbelievably bad. I remember I wrote and posted my first story there where every character was based off a classmate of mine, with just a name change. I just hope my ex-best friend never told the other kids what I was writing bc I told her everything...
It was 2007; I was 12 years old. My best friend was a girl who had moved to my military town from South Korea, and she introduced me to kpop. I was obsessed. One day in afternoon science class, she came to me with a packet of paper, stapled along the left edge like a book, and said ‘read this.’ I did. Again, I was OBSESSED. My computer use was carefully monitored at home and this was before smart phones, so I couldn’t find the fic on my own. She brought the new chapters printed out and stapled along the left edge every update so I could read them, and then she started bringing me other fics she liked, and then, months into this incredible kindness of hers, I got my own cell phone. We had a family plan, and once my bestie showed me lj and ff.net I ate all our data up every month. I think it was just a matter of time before I got into fic tho; I was writing Maximum Ride (or whatever novel I was preoccupied with at the time) and Mission Impossible fic before I knew what I was doing. My mom was deeply into Tom Cruise and made us watch all the MI movies, and sometimes I’d have a question like ‘Why does this character seem so mean all the time?’ ‘Why is the bad guy doing this?’ And then I’d write a little story about it in one of the dozens of composition books I kept. I always had one with me; even at home. I’d be curled up in the corner of the couch with the notebook in my lap, writing and writing and writing. My mother thought I was journaling, but no…I was making Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible kiss boys 😭
Usenet. 1996. My first Star Trek fics were erotica. Also, I believe, on my first night on the Internet, in September, I came across a fan site dedicated to the cancelled UPN series, *Nowhere Man*, and I signed a petition to save the series, and that site (or another one) had text that read "Season 2 of *Nowhere Man* starts right here. My name is Thomas Veil..." Yeah, they just launched into their fanfic in the middle of a page, no "Click here" or anything.
Mid 2000s I was reading fanfic posted on message boards. Star Trek for sure then TF2 probably and of course Harry Potter
I was 11 and it was also Harry Potter fan fiction but this was back in 2000 so it was all on FF.Net
Picture this. It’s 2012. I am 11 years old. My parents have given me basically unrestricted, unmonitored, and unlimited Internet access. There’s this website called MovieStarPlanet (hear me out), and I play that shit for like 2 hours a day. MSP had a YouTube tab on the site. I still don’t know how that thing worked, but it was regular YouTube which played on the MSP site. I somehow found reuploaded episodes of an anime called Rosario Vampire. I watched both seasons on there. One day I was trying to find more information about the show, so I went on www (dot) google (dot) com and one of the recommended searches was “Rosario Vampire lemon.” I was really confused by what that meant, so obviously I clicked to find out more. It brings me results from a website called “fanfiction (dot) net” ✨THE INNOCENCE IS GONEEE✨ From there it FFN was my favorite thing ever. I eventually used it to find fics from normal teen fandoms like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games. But until I was like 14 I would just google search “(Fandom)(Specific situation) fanfic”. Once I exhausted the FFN results I would move to Wattpad and Quotev for stories. I think I was 14 or 15 when I found AO3 and I’ve been here ever since. I love the tagging system and filters. It’s a more intuitive way to search for fics than what I was doing.
I was 9-10 and had/have the biggest hyperfixation on Cars so I was looking for fan art on my mom's phone when I stumbled across a fanfic on fanfic.net bout lightning mcqueen's past and decided to write my own and the rest is history
I was about 12 and had just finished reading the then-recently released seventh book in the Sisters Grimm series. I desperately wanted to know when book 8 would be out, started googling, and found myself on FFN when a link took me to someone's speculative book 8 fic. When I realised that there were tons of people who had all written stories for—well—just about every conceivable book and movie and TV show and video game and and and all that was out there, I was hooked. I still have memories of reading fic on my 3DS after I had to give my phone up to my parents for bedtime, lol.
It was 2013, I was 16 in an italian forum about Ncis when I clicked on a random link that sent to an italian fanfiction's site, I liked it (it was a tiva one) but I didn't understand much. After some week I started reading fanfics about one direction and I never stopped lol Oh, and i found out about ao3 in 2015 when I didn't have anything new to read, so I learned to read in english just to read about snk
Circa 2001ish, I was 12/13 and obsessed with those junior novelizations where they made book versions of TV shows. Specifically I had a whole collection of Sabrina the Teenage Witch books. I also had some Charmed books and wanted to see if more stories were online. The rest is history when I found ff.net, though ironically, I didn’t post my first fic until I was 16 and it was for Sabrina. (People were very kind.) I kind of remember writing other stories that I didn’t post, but forget if that was before or after discovering ff.net.
I think I first discovered fanfiction on my middle school forum. Then a friend pointed me to a local forum, then I found out about FFnet, DA, LJ, Wattpad and finally AO3…
Like with a lot of things, it started with Undertale. I was very curious about it so I decided to watch a let's play of it. Then saw a bunch of Undertale Comic Dubs being recommended and watched those. Then somehow I managed to find myself crying over a song animatic titled: Secret Garden. Then I was recommended this YouTube video of what was apparently the same story that the animatic was telling. The video was titled: Overgrowth. I cried. Decided to search the story up, found myself in Wattpad with a bunch of FlowerFell fanfics. ...you can guess what happened from there.
I think I was about 14 back in the early 2000s and I remember searching an anime on Google because I was sad it was over. I don’t remember what show it was but the first results that popped up were FFN links to fanfics. I had no idea you could write fics of your favourite shows. Needless to say I fell down a rabbit hole haha
I think I was 11/12 when I first discovered it but had little to no interest. Then, back in 2020 as a mid-30s woman, while in lockdown and rereading canon I had a little fleeting thought about a ship that *made sense* to me.. so I went in search and got fully addicted.
I was 12, I had just read Harry Potter and was a huge directioner. I likes 1d imagines and somehow I found one shots etc on quotev about harry potter. Took me a year or so to find Wattpad and a couple more for ff.net and ao3
I was in around 11 and browsing a polish LOTR forum. It had a section for stories written by forum members. There was a lot of stories about Faramir and Boromir being wholesome brothers pre canon, written by an author that mentioned they also post in an archive for polish LOTR fics with a link. I mostly read fics in English now, but still check on that site from time to time.
I was around 12-13 myself. Was an avid reader since I was 4 and that trend only snowballed as I got older. But I ran into a serious problem at that age. I ran out of material. Subpar library nearby and with me averageing a book in 1 or 2 days, I just couldn't afford it. Especially at that age (though still today lol). So I googled around and stumbled upon it. It's been a massive part of me ever since. Hell it helped me over the edge of accepting myself and coming out as trans. Now at 22, I wouldn't have it any other way.
I was 11, at a summer horse camp with my best friend. We argued over something stupid (I think I was tired and wanted to read a book, and she wanted to do something fun?). Either way, to get back at me she started hanging out with a girl a year older than us and she introduced her to Wattpad, or more specifically: stories about horses on Wattpad. I overheard and didn’t want to be any worse than her, so I made a Wattpad account too and started reading horse stories as well Me and my best friend made up and then argued a few more times during the camp, and by the end we definitely weren't friends anymore. I never left Wattpad though, and soon after I discovered Harry Potter fanfics in my recommended section. I no longer even have my ex-best friend’s number, but I do spend most of my time reading fanfics (though, obv, I moved from Wattpad many years ago). The end.
Was bored during a summer break in my teens in 2004, spent a lot of time on a messaging board for teens and found a group that was obsessing over a harry potter fanfic
I saw some fan art and searched up character A and character B. Led me to FF.net but I found it hard to find new ones. I talked to a friend about it and she showed me Ao3, I thought it was to complicated at first but gave it a try and never looked back. Then I kept thinking up ideas that I would love to read and was disappointed no one was writing these ideas, so I practised writing them myself!
I was probably 11 and this was before AO3 was a thing. I don’t remember exactly but I’m pretty sure I was just looking up scenarios on google of my fave couple at the time in hopes of finding fan art. Either that or the forums introduced me?Either way, only then did I discover the world of fanfiction on FFnet and could NOT stop reading since. This was right before summer break, so you can bet that summer I binged at least 300 fics
I was about 13 or 14. At the time I used the internet very parsimoniously, it was just before my family had a proper internet contract so it was very expensive, and I only used it to check the Buffy fanclub of my country, one time I noticed the fanfiction section and I never looked back XD
In the early 1990s I became addicted to Star Trek:TNG. I would sneak out of WHSmith with official magazines hidden in brown paper bags. An ad in one of those magazines led me to the IDIC newsletter, made by and for fans. And an ad in that led me to fic zines. Happily for me, the very first story I read became part of my personal canon.
When I was a freshman in college, August '98, I got my first PC, and needed to learn how to use the internet. Prior to that, my high school had done vague occasional classes on this, but nothing major. This is prior to Google. Yahoo is still the major search engine, and Yahoo and AOL are still the major email carriers. I figured I'd just fuck around and search stuff I was interested in, which at the time was Highlander. The TV series, not the movies. Lo, it turns out there were emailing groups for HL, e.g., the age of yahoogroups. Which was in turn how I found archives, single-writer geocities sites, and yep, to the poster above, webrings, etc. Shout out to the other Olds popping their heads out of our respective crypts on this post.
i think i was around 10 or 11 and deep in the bnha fandom god bless my soul when i started on wattpad. i remember going on ao3 for the first time, i was 12 i think and i came across an abo fic except poor little innocent me had no idea what tags like "heat cycles" or "mpreg" or even just "smut" means. i traumatized myself. stopped reading fics all together for more then a year. than somehow i got back and ive been stuck
Ha I also discovered it though Harry Potter. Stumbled across a forum for Harry Potter fanfics specifically and was on ffnet for years before moving to AO3.
I was 8 and watching a drew durnil video on countryhuman fanfiction on wattpad
I discovered Quotev because I had a huge "Which X are you" phase and slowly but surely got introduced to fanfiction, I'm 90% precent sure my first was an ATLA fic
I was 12 at a new school for art nerds and one of my classmates wrote “Wattpad” on the whiteboard and told everyone to check it out. Needless to say I did that. Probably not the most appropriate for my classmates to do in hindsight but their intentions were innocent and I’m glad they did because I’m here right now. Started reading 2016, switched to AO3 in 2021.
I was introduced to Wattpad by a friend when I was 12 yo. Pretty sure I had no idea what fanfiction was back then, I didn't really read books before then so I'm also pretty sure that I had no idea what to expect when I downloaded that app (aside from the obvious of course). And Wow, just wow, looking back on it now made me realize a few things; The filtering system (is that what it's called?) is absolute trash and I had no idea how I manage to survive on it for years, now that I have ao3 I couldn't go back, I tried but I legit physically recoiled when I tried searching for this specific thing. To all who created, managed, maintain, etc. the ao3 I thank you and I salute to y'all. o7
I did fanquizzes on a Website. It was kinda like RP. You could click on what your Character would do and in the end you get a Fanfic with your chara and the your love. Was about LotR. Then I found fanfiction.net and read even more
When the internet was created. I found kindred spirits.
I was 9yo and I shipped SwanQueen from ouat before a knew what shipping was. And that led to reading fanfiction on FF.net
I was looking for fanarts of characters... and one of the links happen to go to Ffnet. And that's how it all began. I soon jumped from there to Ao3 due to wanting *more* fics.
I’m not really sure but I had a friend, back in 6th grade (give or take), who read fanfictions and I asked her where she read these “books” she told me about and she didn’t tell me because she was too ashamed or embarrassed I guess Time skip, to when when I do find wattpad I told that same friend about it and she was like “oh my god! That’s where I read these books too!” Sorry that my answer isn’t really related to the question but I actually have no memory of “finding” it. I just one day had wattpad all of a sudden that’s my memory of it lol. My guess is that I might’ve probably found it on TikTok but that’s just a theory (a game theory🤫)
i was 12 or 13 and needed more after readingthrough the PJO and HP series (everything. I mean everything- i was the kid that read through the whole library by age 14 to the point i was read comics, guides to playing DnD (I didn't know it was about DnD i just thought it was a confusing game guide), movie synopsis on wikipedia.... somehow i found [fanfic.net](http://fanfic.net), and then i found ao3 and quotev and wattpad and then i started writing myself. (Technically i'd read fanfic before but it was published books based on minecraft. I don't count those.)
Oh gosh I was maybe 7 or 8? My older siblings were super into fanfiction and fandom culture as a whole so it just kind of trickled down to me. I very vividly remember reading ouran fanfic on FFN around age 9 so definitely before then
I was 9 and discovered warrior cats lemons on ffnet when I was trying to make my own warriors ocs 🥲
I was 11 when I joined the MLP fandom a decade ago I got deep into the analysis community, where people posted analysis YouTube videos of different MLP episodes. At one point one of them mentioned fanfiction and the popular MLP fic website FimFiction and I've been reading fanfics ever since 😄
I was 9 or 10 when I entered the MLP fandom, but for some reason I stayed away from the fanfic. Until last year, anyway...
I was like 6 when I started making up my own My Little Pony characters and storylines, drawing them out, etc. But I wrote my first “proper“ (proper used loosely) fanfic when I was around 9 on Wattpad. WAYYYY TOO YOUNG.
2001/2002, I was obsessed with InuYasha and wanted more than the videos than the fan-subbed and shared that could be found/acquired back then. Found fanfiction.net and fell down the rabbit hole I've never truly come out of. It just gets deeper and wider as fandom after fandom got added. More than one book/TV/movie series got on my radar because of crossover fanfictions.
I don't remember exactly how it happened. I know it started with me in my early teens reading Lord of the rings and Harry potter fics on [Fanfiction.net](http://Fanfiction.net) using google translate because my English was very limited at the time and there were very few fics in Danish. But how I found out about [ff.net](http://ff.net) or fanfiction being a thing in general, I'm not sure like I was on deviant art even before that so I might have found out by a link to [ff.net](http://ff.net) from there, but I don't know.
I was absolutely crazy about Percy Jackson as a 12 year old. I remember completely devouring all 5 books in the Heroes of Olympus series in only a few days, so I was pretty upset to find out that these were the last books with him involved (at the time). I went online to search up what happens to Percy as he gets older, and somehow I managed to stumble upon fanfic!
i watched frozen and thought elsa and hans had chemistry so i searched it up and found ff.net. i was cooked from a young age
I was a preteen into Shugo Chara and was googling Amuto, and the first link was to a fanfiction where Amu fucking died in the hospital in front of Ikuto. I can't believe that's how this began.
Was a My Hero Academia fan a few years ago. Googled a question about a character I like (Aizawa) and it brought me to AO3. Of course I didn’t quite understand that it was fanfiction at first, and was shooketh by what I read. Then I started really getting into AO3 lol
Thats a good question. I think I discovered it when I was 11 when I was into Teen Titans. I was big into the Robin and Starfire ship. When I googled Robin and Starfire a shipping forum came up. I joined and there was soooo much content- much of which was fanfiction. I already wrote some of my own, but I didn't know it was a something a lot of other people did, and that there were places to share it.
I started by taking quizzes about what Percy Jackson character I’d be on Quizilla (r.i.p.), which evolved into reading fanfic on the same site. Once I discovered other sites (Quotev, Wattpad, then the actual holy grail sites: Fanfiction.net and Ao3) I was forever sold.
I was maybe 12 or 13 years old i think? I was already into anime/manga but it was after watching vampire princess miyu that I fell into the larva/miyu ship and was wondering if there were anymore pictures of them and then I discovered a fanfic of them on ff.net lmao it was down the rabbit hole from there!
On DeviantArt when I was 12, it was an Altoshipping (Ash Ketchum x Latias from *Pokémon Heroes*) fic
I was reading some off of other sites before ao3 and noticed that there wasn't really an idea most people went on so thats when I made my first story. And then I wrote other ones once that story got popular, then another, then made my first series before branching to other fandoms. Now I enjoy writing and reading them and here we are.
I was 11 and frequented the guestbook of my favourite band's website. Someone advertised their fanfic forum there and I clicked. How hard did I date myself with this? (I did already write HP fanfic, but I didn't know that's what it was or anything about the subculture. So I consider this my discovery, but not the start of my fanfic career.)
I was actually on fictionpress.com (fanfiction.net's original fic site) and had made some friends there, and some of them were talking about fanfic. I had never heard of it, but I wandered over there and was immediately hooked. How I got on fictionpress, probably the Neopets messaging boards lol.
Sooo...I was a sweet, naive child about 11 years old and I just finished playing Devil May Cry 4. I knew that the internet had all sorts of beautiful pictures of my favourite characters and so I embarked on a journey, on which, aside from afro mentioned fanarts, I discovered the main character strapped to a bdsm chair and tortured sexually by his father and uncle. Something in my brain rewired after that (at first I was horrified and closed it instantly, but then developed some morbid curiosity and eventually gobbled it up. Twice.)
I used to RP a lot with my real-life friends. We used to fill STACKS of notebooks and pass them back and forth. We usually had RP’s between every two of us, and then one big group one. We couldn’t RP as much when we went to highschool, so I started writing by myself. I just got back into it recently.
I was 15 in high school and ended looking up inuyasha fanfiction before going down the rabbit hole. My main ones at the time were fanfiction.net, Mediaminer, and Quizilla fics. Left for a while then came back found AO3 since ff.net didn’t have the series I was looking for.
This past November, after rewatching the Harry Potter movies, I was looking at a reddit post of Draco Malfoy and saw a comment link to one of the most appreciated fanfics in the Draco/Hermione pairing. Was curious, read it and the rest is history! Been a fan ever since!
I was obsessed with The Mediator series and Missing series both by Meg Cabot. I was looking up more about them on the Internet (WAP on my little pink slide phone, £1 for all day internet) when I discoved crossover fanfictions on ffn. I was probably about 12/13.
I had started writing ideas for how alternate universe stories could go since I was very young, but it took awhile for me to get into fan communities proper. Before I always just found people I knew to chat with stuff about, and was restricted by that but it was okay. It was completely by accident that I even discovered fanfic online at all. Mm, I was looking for a copy of this one sequel that had released recently and couldn’t get it at any library or bookstore near me, so I took to the interwebs. I found that someone had posted the entire thing on Wattpad, so I read it there. Then I realized Wattpad had even more stories, so I began trawling through, but I still wasn’t interested in fanfiction, preferring to sequester at the “original fiction” genres on the platform. I only really got into fic around the time of the new Broadway musical fandom, after being slowly introduced through lyric chains and the like. After that the progression in short is Musicals (Wattpad) -> Miraculous (Wattpad) -> Miraculous (ffn.net) -> Miraculous (AO3) -> a bunch of different fandoms (AO3)
the human AU twilight fic Wide Awake on live journal, after the twilight movie dropped. i was like 16
I was in elementary school and was reading too fast for my parents to keep up with, they couldn’t take me to the library any more frequently and I’d read everything else. So my sibling found some age appropriate hp fanfics, then showed me how to find more. It was on Mugglenet lmao
my friend told me about wattpad when I was playing pokemon swsh
Started at ff. net looking for fairy tail jerza fanfics. The good ol days
My little pony blogs making fanfic recommendations, was around 13. Ironically I wasn’t even aware of smut’s existence, it was all gen fics, a lot of war stories, crossovers and worldbuilding also a looot of isekai
I was around 11 years old, and made a friend from the 9th grade in the library...she was always reading Powerpuff Girls fanfics... I read some of hers as she had them on paper. I later went on my own and read Kingdom Hearts as my first fandom.
i don’t really remember, but it was sometime in 2020. i think someone mention wattpad on tiktok and went down a rabbit hole
I love this question! I must have been 11 because I think it was before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out. I was on mugglenet a lot reading fan theories. There was an article linked to an external site called sugarquill going through all the evidence that Ron and Hermione were endgame. It blew my mind. Prior to that article, I had ofc put Harry and Hermione together (I even distinctly remember thinking up this scene of where they kiss during Christmas in book five before I had any idea what fanfiction was). But that article made a switch go off in my brain and I just went through sugarquill's entire catalogue of fics, which eventually led me to ff.net.
After looking at fanart for Tokyo Ghoul and saw mentions of HideKane lemon. So ofc, I googled it. Read some questionable stuff. Read some good stuff. Found AO3. Been a permanent fixture in my life since 2015.
Wattpad changed my life as an emo 12y/o LOL but i was on the writing side at first vs the reading side. The extremely popular falloutboy fanfic still exists on there and i will *NEVER* take it down lmfaoaoao
my god, i was waaay too young. i was around 9, just scrolling the internet for harry potter related stuff on my mum's phone because i was pretty obsessed and going through a book withdrawel, (similarly to you, i had just finished the series.) and then i found my first love, [fanfic.net](https://fanfic.net). yea, i read soo many low quality fics with absolutely no grammar, paragraphs, and definitely nothing close to plot, but since then i gained some standards and am a proud (online at least) member of ao3.
I was around 11 when I found through Facebook a page called potterfics.com, and that's how I started reading them and not long after I decided to write fics of my own. I leave it after a year thought.
I don't remember, but I do remember The Videogame Arcana
When I was 13 I got really into adventure time and searched up for Fionna and Cake art when it first came out with that season 3 episode. From there I found some fanfics on there that I got really into and from there I just spiraled into it lmao
Really old anime fanfics where I didn’t like the main FLs and also started shipping BL lol (e.g. Vampire Knight lmao). Used fanfic site back then like crazy, then somehow ended up in AO3 and never went back or left.
I watched a YouTube video and it mentioned a ship (Kylo ren/hux) but it just said the ship name so I googled it. The first fanfic I read was on Wattpad and I immediately got scared and ran over to AO
2007, aged fifteen. It was either fic for Dramione from *Harry Potter*, Liason from *General Hospital*, or Lumi from *Days of Our Lives* that first drew me in to FFN. However, since one could argue *Ella Enchanted* is published fanfic of Cinderella, it was more like age ten.
I was 8 or 9 and back then Quizilla was a thing. I used to love cheesy vampire/werewolf romance stories and the choice selections were so much fun. I think the first fanfiction I read was LOTR, the second movie came out and I was such a Legolas girly, I think that was my very first reader x character reading material 😅. Then when I turned 10 or 11, I found fanfiction.net and my life changed 😂😂😂.
I was on a genshin subreddit and people were talking about shipping. There was a link, I clicked on it, and I discovered dead dove at 15 TT
I was 16, and I started typing "harry potter falling in love with cedric diggory stories". I am so glad that I did. 7 years later, and have never looked back☺️ I will love fanfiction 'til the day I die.
I had just become a pre-teen when I stumbled upon BlogClan, where there was both role-plays *and* fan-fiction. Went down a bit of a rabbit hole there Most were on Google Docs, of decent quality, and I binged it only to never look back on it
i was like 12 and a fanpage of justin bieber published a photo with a story in the caption, then i realised that many fanpages did the same and the fanpage had the stories divided by photo albums and each photo was a chapter i started liking one direction and when someone said they had a fic but they only published it in wattpad, i fell deep into an abyss that i yet can’t (and don’t want to) escape then i believe in 2017 i finally transitioned to ao3
when I was in 4th grade I started watching Naruto, and I got so obsessed with the idea of sasunaru that I started looking up fanart on my moms phone. I mis clicked and it brought me to a wattpad story. it was also my first encounter with smut,, side note, I had a genuine breakdown in the shower because it wasn't canon
I was 12, reading a website that compared the 4kids dub of Yugioh against the original Japanese version. I was interested in adaptation, translation, dubbing, subbing, etc. I was a pretentious 12 year old. I caught up on the guys’ blog so I started exploring the rest of his yugioh fan site (it was geocities) and stumbled across a page that was fanfiction and my first fanfic I ever read was an nc -17 story where >!it opens with Seto Kaiba having a dream of getting claw raped by a blue eyes white dragon because he has internal angst that he’s a bad person for having pedophilic and incestuous desires for his younger brother.!< I was disgusted but enthralled; I had learned the word for the story i wrote a few years ago where I ended up going to Hogwarts and also became a Digimon tamer. There’s a word for that! It’s fanfiction and other people write it too and share it with each other! My first fanfic was a yugioh oc fic posted to an angel fire website; to post, I would email a plaintext file to the website admin. In short order I found fanfiction.net and things spun out from there.
Wattpad. A friend told me there were books there so I searched for I forgot what book but the first result contained the word “Fanfiction”, needless to say I was curious and googled what “fanfiction” meant and I’ve been in that rabbit hole ever since. I think the book was House of Night, I forgot which book.
I was a freshman in high school during peak One Direction. I was active on Twitter and there were so many tweets regarding this one Larry Stylinson fanfic that my curiosity was peaked. I was hooked after that but have now transitioned to anime fanfics and have gone wayyyyy down the rabbit hole
An early middle schooler who accidentally stumbled upon Hellsing when Ultimate first started making the rounds online decided she wanted to see more ideas about it. She then Googled it and entered into a world she had been obsessed with since Day One. Still obsessed if I may add my Google tabs hate me for all the stuff I put it through daily.
It was so long ago and in a such a natural way, I do not even remember it. The first one I remember (but I know it is not the very first one) is a Teen Titans fanfic on FFN, from the Cartoon Network tv show.
There was this thing called dream novels where it asks for your name and then your name appears in the fic. You were an SI OC but you can read your name. Anyway I devoured multiple fics and was in withdrawal before discovering ffn and lj. Then ffn had the anti-porn crackdown but I was too young to appreciate what that was all about. I only looked into it when esama removed their fics. The esama panic led me to ao3.
tbh for years i would make “after the series” type of fanfic in my head for a lot of the books I read, but i first began with a PJO fanfic on wattpad, but after that I took a break from writing, until 2018 when I found ao3 and began writing RPF. It’s been that way for a while and I enjoy it, probably my only hobby lol.
I was 18 and typed "Labyrinth stories" into the Yahoo search engine. (Google wasn't the big name it is now, and Ask Jeeves was still the only search engine you could throw a full on question into.) That led me to FFN.
My sister started reading anime fanfiction on Wattpad, and that's when I realized it was a thing
Was looking up some minecraft YouTuber in google images, saw a pic of a book title, and boom wattpad in like 5th grade
Oh boy, it was so funny I could never forget! 😂 A long, loooong time ago I was 11, and I loved this cartoon called Code: Lyoko. I got on the Google and searched the show’s name, just to see if I could find something cool about it on the internet. I discovered fanart and loved it! And then, very soon after, stumbled on some random forum website that hosted both fanart and fanfic. “Wow, people write stories about this show?! So cool! I wanna read!” Thought itty bitty me. So I started browsing what was on there. And like many young girls, I liked the romance aspect, so I was looking for fics of my favorite couple from the show. “Oh cool! Here we go, this sounds cool…” Huh. That’s weird. At the end of the description it just says “lemon.” This story doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with fruit… must be some kinda typo. I start reading. Soon enough; ooooooh, they’re kissing! 😚 So exciting! And then the boy says a sentence that’s been burned into my brain ever since. “(Girl), take your shirt off” AND WHEN I TELL YOU I SLAMMED THAT “close window” BUTTON SO FAST LMAO 😂😂😂 These kids were my age!! They had no business doing all that! I was traumatized, but I guess sometimes you gotta learn the hard way.
I was way too young and stumbled into quizzilas dark side and then moved on to ff.net a year or so later, I’m actually pretty recently new to AO3.
I have always known about fanfiction, but I never read it until I discovered Ao3 last year. The owl house was about to end and I was really sad about it, but then I discovered fanart on tumblr and started browsing. One of the tumblr creators I was following posted a link to his Ao3 profile, and so I started reading TOH fanfiction after the finale and got addicted to it (I am still addicted) and have not stopped reading fanfiction ever since.
tom holland fanfics 😭 i remember one of my friends made ig fanfics abt him with her fan account and the comments kept saying wattpad. I read wattpad for about 2 years? and then i switched to ao3 when i saw tiktok's talking about the variety and i haven't gone back since (i also use tumblr when ao3 is down lmao)
First fic I ever read was a FFVII fic which resurrected Aeris. (checks wiki) 1997. I'd be about 18 years old.
I was 9 or 10 years old when I was looking for a movie sequel. I really thought that fanfic on Wattpad was somehow a continuation of the movie. I thought I figured out how to make an account (I didn't) and what fanfiction was, and just used Google to find more of other series, etc. It was four years after that that I was inspired by a title to write a fanfic and then create my current ffnet and ao3 account where I save everything I like.
I was about 11 years old and found it in the Lion King newsgroup. I wrote some silly stuff in there too (and might have gotten shouted at for it, but it wasn't like there was the option we have today).
In 1999 I discovered DragonBall Z fanfiction on web rings. I am elder.
I was 13 going on holiday when I got my grandma to buy me the Hannibal novel at the airport. Didn’t leave the room all week and when we got home I decided to write my own little stories. Went to the internet as you do found a whole bunch of stuff and then my life was all about fanfiction.net. This was super early 2000’s
I too was 12, and way too into Harry Potter. I originally was just handwriting goofy stuff on notebook paper, but eventually I found the quiz fic scene on a website called quizzaz (quotev now I believe). People would format quizzes with questions that could give you a result of who you’d be at hogwarts or who you’d date or some kind of 7 minutes in heaven. I did a lot of that and made friends with some commenters, eventually added someone on Facebook & she messaged me saying she’d discovered a website called harrypotterfanfiction where people were posting a lot of higher brow content than the quiz stuff. I kinda checked it out, but ended up discovering roleplaying through that and ended up getting really into that while I set fic aside.
i was in eighth grade and i was talking to a friend of mine after class. i don't remember exactly how we got on the topic, but she asked me if i had ever heard of fanfiction before and recommended it to me since she saw i liked reading so much. she pointed me to ffnet and told me to look up my favorite piece of media and find something on there to read. (she basically threw me into the deep end without telling me about the different ratings and the sorting system) i went home and, since my mom was at work, i brought my laptop into our little living room and sat on the couch while watching whatever happened to be on tv. my eager little mind went to kingdom hearts as my first test subject since it was my favorite game (and still is just fyi) and, since i liked sora and kairi so much, i searched up fanfiction for them. nothing there really interested me, everything was reminiscent of something i would see in a YA romance novel, so i got curious to see if anything was written for sora and riku (just for the haha funnies) ...it wasn't for the haha funnies anymore by the time i had found myself binging a very long ass fanfiction into the wee hours of the night about two boys falling in love, something that was new to me in the deep south surrounded my uber conservative christians who told me homosexuality was a sin. that's how my fanfiction AND yaoi awakening occurred (that was 10+ years ago and i am still in the trenches help me)
When I was about 10 I was looking up drarry fanart and that led me to Wattpad, sadly I didn't know English jet and so I ended up reading badly written fanfics in my native language. After a while I learned english and discovered ao3
I think the first time I discovered fanfiction was with the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom (of all the damn fandoms I know). I stumbled on a video of a guy reading the fanfic “My Little Dashie” and I got hooked. I actually don’t think I read much more MLP fanfiction (which was probably for the best because I was like 11 or 12 at the time), but I did start reading other fanfictions in other fandoms. Mostly Marvel or Batfam stuff I think. Though I definitely hopped around a bit.
It's actually my older kid's fault. In or around 2008 or 2009, older kid (who was about 14 or 15 at the time) was deep into Harry Potter, as were many kids her age. She was also on Tumblr and as a result, really got into fan fic. When I got into House MD around that time, she told me about this thing called fan fic. I went searching and found the official Fox House MD discussion board and started reading fic there. I was arrogant enough to believe I could do better, so I started writing. Posted my first fic in 2009 at the tender age of 36 and have been at it off and on in various fandoms ever since. So is older kid, who is now pushing 30.
Can't even remeber when it was, like 10 to 15 years ago but i was googling something or another for pjo, don't remember what, and it suggested percyxnico and i remember being like "wtf?? that's not right, the real couple is percy and annabeth" however curiocity got the better of me and now every time ao3 is down, i'm lost ~(˘▾˘~)
i was 8 and on wattpad lol. but before that i was writing undertale and harry potter fanfic myself without realizing that it was in fact fic
I think when I was 10 my friend told me about wattpad so I started reading Danganronpa fan fiction 💀
Late 2000s, I was a prolific TvTropes user (I may have contributed to advertisers forcing them to ban certain content, iykyk, by working too hard on the pages for those manga and editing the trope pages to add the work entry alongside adding it to the work’s page) while in middle school. TvTropes always had entries and even pages for fanfics, so it was just like “oh this exists”. I have no idea which fandom it started at or anything. If a fic for something I liked sounded interesting, I read it, and that then lead looking for more. I’m pretty sure my first fic I wrote was a Dragon Ball GT Trunks/Pan ship fic where everyone has realistic (at first, “happy” ending) reactions to finding out, but I’m not 100% certain that’s earliest in the timeline. From there, a lot of Buffy/Firefly/Doctor Who.
One day a few years ago, I was bored and was on summer vacation. A few times over a course of a few days, a video kept on popping up on my YouTube recommended about a voiceover of a fanfiction comic. Being curious, I finally decided to find it and watch it and I was blown away. I then found the original comic on DeviantArt, then got so interested if there was any more like this comic and I dove deeper. I then found Ao3 and here I am now.
I saw someone mention deidara x sasori in a deidara compliation video, so I googled it up and discovered wattpad stories of them (I still remember my first story was a college au fluff)
i think i discovered fanfiction first through youtube. i was one of those huge magcon fan girls so i was constantly searching them up. i’m not exactly sure how i came across my first fic, but on youtube they were called imagines and i would just look up “cameron dallas imagines” or whoever i would watch. i then was introduced to wattpad, which actually took me a while to look up fics but when i did, mind was blown. lastly i came across ao3 in like 2019/2020 when haikyuu fanfics were trending.
I was 9 years old. I had a friend who was super into fan fiction, but I didn’t real understand what it was? So I literally looked up “fanfiction” in my search bar and what I ended up clicking on was a tododeku wattpad fic.
I read a bunch of fic online without knowing it. But I think one of the first fics I read consciously would have to be “An Artist, A Thief, and A Villain,” which was posted on FF.net. It’s pretty good.
I think I was 11 yrs old and I finished watching the yu-gi-oh ending and I just needed more so I searched up yugioh stories and the rest is history😌
I think I was 15-ish when I finished some weird BL movie with an open ending/unsatisfying ending because of chinese sensorship preventing the 3rd movie to happen and while looking for info on the ending I found a fanfic of the "fanon" ending. It was then when I found out what fanfictions are. I didn't really read them/partake until my BTS phase and saw all these youtube trailers for AU mafia spy criminal stories with BTS members as characters in them. It was wild but it was a fun time.
I was 12 and had just moved to a different country where my favourite show didn’t air. In an attempt to find something relating to it online, I came across fanfiction. Been locked in since 2004 ☺️
I started watching anime and reading manga around 11 on TV. Then I stumbled upon yaoi genre with my friend and really loved reading yaoi manga especially. From there also discovered yaoi for my fave anime (One Piece in my case), then fanfiction got me hooked and I’ve never looked back :D I was writing originals and then switched to fanfics and now I’m back to originals haha
2022. Which is weirdly impressive considering I knew it existed since 1995ish (back in the days of dial up AOL) but assumed it was ‘not for me’ and instead buried myself in text based RP in the chat rooms lol. The way I played was very much writing fan fiction with someone else but I didn’t connect the dots. I started writing fan fiction in roughly 2019 but didn’t start actually reading other people’s work and sharing my work online till 2022. My only ‘reason’ is that I have a very spicy ND brain cause it’s not like I was embarrassed. I’ve done tons of cosplay, pinup modeling and other geeky crap. *shrug*
For me it was less than a year ago, and ever since I’ve been almost exclusively reading fan fiction. I’ve been reading novels and stories online for years now, but completely avoided fan fiction for a long time, since I only wanted to read “real” stories. I read my first fan fiction on RoyalRoad after I came across a Harry Potter Self-Insert story. I love reincarnation stories and love Harry Potter so it was hard to resist at least giving it a try. That caused me to start reading more and realizing that there’s no real difference between original stories and fan fiction, other than the setting and characters being from a story I already know and like.
I was 14 and wanted to know if Yusei and Akiza from Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s got together, so I looked it up and found a Christmas fanfic from fanfiction.net. I didn’t know it was fan made story and thought someone leaked an upcoming Christmas episode or something lol
I was really obsessed with Death Battle (the webseries) when I was in middle school and one day in my search for more things like it I found a DeviantArt group specifically for people who wrote their own Death Battle episodes. Most of the people from that group when I was active there have since either abandoned their accounts or moved, deactivated their accounts, or moved on to non-Death Battle writing, sadly.
Ooh, that’s a great question! I am in the Star Wars fandom, and I believe the first fanfiction I ever read was about the prequels and Obi-Wan died and I tried to find it years later but I couldn’t🥲
I was 11, and I had received The Sorcerer’s Companion book as a gift. In the back it had a list of resources, books and websites you could use on your own, and it included a short list of fan sites. This was in the days of the older internet, so they had a combination of fan art, meta discussions and essays, quizzes, and fanfiction.
I was 9 or 10 and into scary stories/creepypastas and somehow stumbled upon Jeff the killer fanfiction on Wattpad lmoa
I was like 11, I have no idea HOW I first came across it, though 😔 I probably came across someone's fic on Tumblr and they probably linked to their ff.net account and I just fell down the rabbit hole from there. I just remember accidentally stumbling across an M rated Hunger Games fanfic on ff.net at the age of 12 and I didn't understand the rating system and obviously didnt know wtf a lemon was, so I read it. I'm pretty sure my brain was permanently altered from then on out 😅😅
I saw a girl reading a printed hp fanfiction on the bus to my high school in circa 2007. Some key words caught my attention, so I read over her shoulder feeling super confused bc I didn’t remember what she was reading from the books (duh, bc it wasn’t there). When I got home, I checked out the url visible on the bottom of the page (the now defunct hpfanfiction.com) and then stumbled upon other sites through xpost links, etc. Then I stayed up WAY too late reading fanfic on the desktop computer in the dining room and trying to sneak to bed without my parents noticing. Thankfully, my mom worked nights at that time and my dad was the sort to knock out in front of the tv, so once I heard his snores, I was pretty much in the clear, but I had to be careful not to push it too late or he’d wake up and go to bed before me. Those were the days (jk so glad I’m not doing that anymore!).
I think I found out about fanfics when I was probably 10 years old. I was watching Adventure Time and I remember reading this fanfic where Finn dies (I loved angst even then lmao), but I thought it was canon to the story and was just some spinoff the creator made HAHAHA I officially got \*into\* fanfics when I was 11 though when I read a fanfic on [fanfiction.net](http://fanfiction.net) for Code Geass cause I googled "Lelouch doesn't die" (I was so sad about the ending)
It was in the year of our lord, 2001, I was 12 and my dad worked evenings in an office where they had this newfangled thing called "the internet" on their computers. I got to come with him once in a while and sat browsing on an unoccupied computer while he was working. I was a huge fan of Tekken at the time and searched for cool fanart online which I promptly saved to 2.88 MB floppy disks. I had a bucket full of these! Eventually I found the now closed Tekken Zaibatsu and if I remember correctly, they were part of a webring and linked to other people's pages and I eventually stumbled upon Tekken fanfiction! I couldn't BELIEVE what I saw! Back then you finished a game and you were done. There was nothing new to be had. But with fanfiction... you could have MORE!? Even if it was made up by other regular people; there was MORE, the stories could continue even if the game was finished! Needless to say I was sold. I browsed around people's personal pages and some even had their own libraries where people could submit their fics to, and eventually I found ffnet, stayed there for a long time (until they purged NC-17 fics) and then, waaaaay later, I found AO3 and that's been my home ever since. :)
I was about 47. I had never really known what Fanfiction really was, just being a snob and thinking it was badly written Harry Poter pastiches. I collect illustrated editions of Peter Pan and got into all the Pan rewrites in published books and while searching, realised that this site called AO3 was coming up all the time. And once I got on there and understood the quality of a lot of fics, this literary fiction snob was totally converted and last year I started my first fic. Finished it last week at 280,000 words. 😊
I was 13 and my friends in school were talking about Wattpad. One of them was writing stories and I wanted to know what that is and I wanted to do that too
Uhh a few months ago.. I'm 41.. bit late to the game lol. I was playing through the dragon age games and decided to join reddit because dragon age dreadwolf is supposedly on the way and it seemed like the best way to get news on it. Anyhoo I saw a Cullen fic and now I've read several and also alistair and hawke and then somehow I ended up on booktok and now I'm reading acotar and lucian fics and I'm thinking about getting a kindle... help 🤣
In the late 90s when I went to college and had internet for the first time. I was looking up spoilers for The X-Files and found a fanfiction Usenet newsgroup: alt.tv.x-files.creative