[PUBLIC POST] Let's talk fandom!

[ljwrites]

All right, the weekly open posts are back! This week let's talk about our fandom obsessions, or just works that we really like. Here are some possible discussion launchers, but feel free to ignore some or all of them and add your own:

- What are some of your favorite works?
- Were you or are you involved in fandom?
- How did your favorite works or fandoms influence your writing?

Go to town, folks!

Comments

[ljwrites]

The first time I ever showed strangers my fictional writing was when I started posting Harry Potter fanfic as a college student, and for a long time my fictional writing was almost exclusively fanfic. My most recent fandom obsession was Avatar: The Last Airbender, for which I wrote a bunch of fanfics including a giant 160K fic. The HP fic starred Snape while the ATLA fic was about Prince Zuko, so being obsessed with morally ambiguous antiheroes and redemption arcs seems to be A Thing for me. (Other characters I've focused on: Seifer from Final Fantasy VIII, Sesshomaru from Inuyasha, Denahi from Brother Bear. Yup, all villains at some point or morally grey in some way.)

For a long time I was content with almost exclusively writing fanfic, despite being asked by some friends and readers why I didn't write original fiction. (I did, a little, but they were drawerfics for my own consumption. One of these manuscripts is 150 pages long.) It was fanfic that ultimately inspired me to start working on original fiction, though. After I wrote the giant ATLA fic I started chafing against the restrictions of canon and wanted to try something different. Joke's on me, though, because I started working on historical fiction which is basically fanfic with a bigger and more complicated canon.

Another area of fiction that I worked on for a long time was roleplaying fic, where I would write novelizations of roleplaying sessions or character backstories. Another writer told me that I was the most communally-minded writer she knew, and I think that's a common thread through all my fiction-writing efforts: From fanfic to roleplaying fic to historical fiction, I always want to write something with relevance to specific communities whether it's my roleplaying group, a fandom, or a country. I even co-created this community of writers! :P