Reminiscing about my early days on fandom

Remembering all those songs and artists I discovered when I dipped into fandom for the first time back in 2011/2012, and I was reading Harry Potter fic (my first fandom) in Spanish in potterfic and fanfiction.net (and the only English I could talk was super basic plus the memorized lyrics to Adele’s Someone like you) and the most famous fic.authors had songs in every chapter or something. Not like now where people are like “oh yeah this title came from that song” or “this fic was partially inspired by this song” but honest to good guides at the start of each chapter on which songs where better for which part of the chapter with helpful dots for the sections. A bit annoying? But also I almost never regretted when I followed a suggestion.

So now I have a playlist of artists and songs that remind me of that time so strongly and they make me nostalgic… Even though in retrospective those fics I was enamored by wouldn’t hold up to the pass of time (I tried to reread one of my fave dramiones of that time and wow it feels like bad melodrama when in my head it was so poignant and serious and tragic i didn’t try again), they were vital in my growth as a reader, and offered so much…

Although at first I nopped out of fanfiction.net bc I had no idea of how to use it to even change chapters, let alone how to search for fics… And livejournal was the big unknown bc I didn’t manage English well enough until 2016/2017 and by 2018 all in it was dissapeared which makes me furious bc I coud have read lots but I arrived like minutes late to the exodus, and anyway, it’s unreasonable bc I was a dumb little teen back then but all those fics and meta that dissapeared while I was unaware on the wild wild net learning, diving deep in manga and youtube, and discovering that AO3 even existed and what in hell even was Tumblr.

New artists and also new ways of reading a story and how it didn’t matter if you took away something completely different. Also that I wasn’t strange for liking weird stuff (in various and varied senses). It inured me to ooc in the HP fandom to a degree which is totally weird in my actual fandoms today (ask me about my suffering with mdzs fic) but also made read so much I needed to use google translate to search fics in English bc I had already read my faves in Spanish. That’s how I learnt such a high proficiency in English by the way. Reading so much in Google translation and listening to so many songs that I somehow learnt the turn of phrases and common verbs in English by osmosis. The grammar was taken care of by public education.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m nostalgic for that first year or two of reading fic, when everything was new and I devoured hundreds of fics and listened to all the dumb songs and was too shy to even create an account or comment, flabbergasted by the lingo and also really charmed by the way they talked to the readers (and those betas whose function in fic I couldn’t even guess) and even the characters sometimes. It was nice.