December daily: First fandom

jelazakazone prompts: First fandom. What got you excited and revved up about it? Were you surprised to find yourself falling into fandom?

Still a few spots left to ask a question!

The zine I mentioned yesterday was a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" zine, and TNG was the first show that ever inspired me to go looking online for slash. I didn't find much, though -- I was interested in Data/Geordi, which was all but nonexistent. (I fondly remember some lovely Picard/Q, though.)

My first true fandom -- the first fandom for which I joined mailing lists and bookmarked archives and fangirled authors -- was "Star Trek: Voyager." I read many pairings indiscriminately, het and slash and femslash, but in my heart I was a Paris/Kim girl.

The most amazing thing for me was discovering that I wasn't the only person who took her favorite characters around in her head with her all the time, and talked to them, and spun out more stories for them -- I hadn't made up that hobby -- there were more of us -- and we could share!

I take for granted, now, that when I fall in love with characters, I can come here and find them again. I ought not to do that. When I'm in that awful position of No More Canon, Canon All Used Up; when the canon is clumsy or simplistic or just plain wrong; when the canon is giving me insipid romances that bear no resemblance to reality plus a friendship that has all the elements of a really great romance except for the actual romance ... well, I ought not to take for granted that the characters can have more life, or a better life, here.

(That makes them sound like immigrants. "Give me your tired, your poor, your chiseled cheekbones yearning to rub up against other chiseled cheekbones ...")