Snowflake Challenge #1 & #2: How Mei Found Fandom

[meilan_firaga]

I may be cheating a little bit to make this work for me and my brain, but I'm combining the first two challenges for snowflake_challenge into one post and also using it as my first Fannish 50 entry for 2025.

Snowflake Challenge #1 - Update your fandom information. 
I completed this one on January 1st and updated the Snowflake Challenge community on that day, but I never actually posted about it here. I did a full overhaul of my profile both on here and at Meilan_Firaga on AO3. I also did a big edit on my DW pinned intro post. There are still probably some things that could use an update (looking right at you, gift preferences post), but I'm happy with how these three places reflect my current fandom involvement now.

Snowflake Challenge #2 - In your own space, talk about your fannish origin story.
This is the part that I'm using for Fannish 50 today as well. I think a lot about how I got involved in fandom, but I've never actually sat and wrote it all down before. I'm closer to 40 than 30 these days, and I don't think I realized just how long of a history I have with fandom before both on my own and as a member of online communities. This is bound to get wordy, so for the sake of saving everyone's Reading Page I've put it all behind the cut below.

How Mei Found Fandom
I usually cite Final Fantasy VII as being my first fandom, and when it comes to online stuff that is certainly true, but I definitely gave my heart and soul as a fan for other IPs long before I entered the diesel-punk world of Cloud and his companions. I was born in 1988, which means I was around for the original run of Star Trek: The Next Generation on network television. The neighbors next door to my childhood home had a teenage son and no cable. Mom used to let him come over and watch new episodes at our house. I can remember sitting on the floor with him while Mom sat behind us on the bed and we all watched it together. I can't actually tell you how old I was when this was happening. It's one of my earliest memories. 

Commander Riker was my first crush, which is super hilarious when you realize my partner is a 6'2" man with dark hair and a full beard. One of these days I'll get him in a Starfleet uniform, lol.

I have some vague memories of other fandom things before I really got into the internet. There was a creative writing project in first grade where I wrote a story about a cat and dog living together that was--in retrospect--absolutely a gender-swapped version of Ren & Stimpy. I went super hard into learning about the rainforest a couple years later because I wanted to be in the movie Ferngully. My mom pulled me out of school when Star Wars returned to theaters in the nineties to make sure I got to experience it the same way she did in the seventies. (A memory I treasure so much that when Rise of Skywalker was in theaters I took her to see it to recreate that experience.) I kept a journal about the character I as playing in Pokemon Blue on the Game Boy. Like all good baby goths, I was <i>in love</i> with a villain from an 80s fantasy film (Tim Curry as Darkness in Legend for me, though I probably would have been equally as obsessed with Jareth if I had seen The Labyrinth before college). Scamper the Penguin sparked a lifelong obsession with those adorable flightless birds.

Final Fantasy VII, though, was what brought me online. Frank Verderosa's truly epic fanfics were what introduced me to the medium of fanfiction. I found his works right as he was starting to put the first chapters of The Mind Slayers online at the end of 1998. My time on the internet was limited, so I spent what time I had lovingly copying and pasting Verderosa's stories into a Rich Text file. When Mom would tell me I had to get offline so she could use the phone I would switch to reformatting those text files. Size 8 font, minimal line spacing. Then I would print them out roughly ten pages at a time and put them together like a book so I could read them offline. I still have most of those printouts to this day. In seventh grade I took my first real stab at writing fanfic. It was absolutely terrible self-insert. Vaguely disguised versions of me, my cousin, and my best friend got sucked into the game and took the place of our favorite characters. It was over thirty pages long, and I submitted it for my creative writing story at school that year. It got a Distinguished (highest rating), which I find extra hilarious looking back because even by seventh grade standards it was bad, lol.

That same year I designated a notebook for a Gundam Wing self-insert my bestie (at the time--we don't speak now) and I were "writing together". Truthfully, I was the only one writing things down, but all the story beats came from conversations we had late at night during slumber parties. We joined marching band together and would spend the bus rides discussing one story or another from FF7, FFX, Gundam Wing, and Digimon--all the fandoms we shared. I still have that completely battered Gundam Wing notebooks with pages upon pages of my messy middle school print handwriting. 

Through those fics I discovered Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal. By the time I was in high school I was posting FFX and Harry Potter fanfic for the whole world to see. Actually, almost all of the fic from that time is still up on my FF.net profile. I've never been the type to take fics down after I've put them out in the world. I made friends in chatrooms and exchanged my MSN and Yahoo messenger IDs with people to talk fic and the cool fanart we found online. Gaia Online became a thing and I had a whole new sandbox to play in. I had two close friends in high school that I talked different fandoms with. One of them I still keep in touch with, and even though we mostly follow different fandoms now we still have our old standard to fall back on when we see one another again.

College led to conventions (and what would eventually become my career). It was like watching the fandom world expand right in front of me, and I never looked back. I cosplayed, ran panels, met artists, and even stepped up to help run conventions so I could be a part of bringing the magic of shared fandom spaces to others. 2025 marks 27 years since I've been involved with fandom online and 18 years since I started participating in conventions and other fandom events. I swear, it feels simultaneously so much shorter and so much longer, but I wouldn't change it for the world. My fandom preferences change, but the joy of fandom never goes away.