Countdown to small gifts 1/7: Introductions!

[smallgiftsmods]

Welcome, folks! Every year at small gifts, we start off the holiday season with a week's worth of discussion posts. It's a chance to get to know other participants (or say hi again), meet our readers (hi, readers! we love you!), and while away the hours before December 1. We'll have one topic per day until November 30.

Today: introductions!

1) Leave a comment letting us know who you are as a fan. (Leave your Tumblr name/AO3 name as well as your DW name, if they're different.) How long have you shipped R/S? Are you a reader? Writer? Artist? Crafter? Do you participate in any other parts of Harry Potter fandom? Are you active in any other fandoms right now?

2) Say hi to someone else!

Comments

[nerakrose]

i think so, yeah! when i joined fandom it was mostly on national (danish) message boards (this was around 2003 lol) and i didn't write fic as i was still writing original stories at the time, i did fanart and graphics and discussions and off-topic discussions, etc. (i didn't start writing fic until 2006 when i was...18? math is hard). shortly before i joined fandom at large i'd finished writing my first ever novel. it was terrible for many reasons but i was unhappy with it for one reason exactly: it was a love triangle because i didn't know at the time that one could be poly and that not having to choose was allowed. you can have both! so i felt i had to kill off the girl so the two boys could be together, when what i REALLY wanted was for the main character to have BOTH. but it wasn't allowed! etc. i struggled with that a lot. (i ended up deleting the novel off my harddrive a year later because i couldn't stand knowing it existed. :'D) at the time i was also a closeted trans gay boy and struggling with it because at the time i also didn't know that gender could be fluid + i was dealing with a lot of the 'compulsory heterosexuality' that comes with being socialised as a woman etc etc.

joining fandom at that age meant i suddenly had access to all kinds of queer stories, made friends (all of whom turned out to be queer), unlearned a lot of toxic bullshit (not all at once, mind), and also, over time, managed to slot the pieces of my identity together in a way that made sense, and that i'm comfortable with. so yeah, i'm about to turn 30 so i have spent half my life as an active participant in fandom at this point, and i honestly wouldn't trade it for the world. it's given me SO much.

puremuslin sounds like something a dedicated housewife whose favourite novels are jane austen might choose as a username :'D they wear a lot of muslin dresses in those novels, is my impression :'''D i like your meaning for it! though my brain still can't let go of the impossibility of a plumage of ruins... XD

[ruinsplume]

at the time i was also a closeted trans gay boy and struggling with it because at the time i also didn't know that gender could be fluid + i was dealing with a lot of the 'compulsory heterosexuality' that comes with being socialised as a woman etc etc.

When people talk about literature being meaningful (or, as part of that discussion, complain about how no one reads anymore)

exhibit A is like what you said here:

i suddenly had access to all kinds of queer stories, made friends (all of whom turned out to be queer), unlearned a lot of toxic bullshit (not all at once, mind), and also, over time, managed to slot the pieces of my identity together in a way that made sense, and that i'm comfortable with.

Like, you got that from LITERATURE. And of course the community and friendships that go with fanfic; the fandom itself. But there is no fandom without the stories. Stories are so powerful. I'm 20 years older than you but had a really similar experience a couple of years ago, where entering fandom made me realize how starved I was for queer narrative and queer community and queer self-recognition...all of which I had really lost for a while there. Finding it again involved changing some things about my physical presentation in the world and making a much more concerted effort to be OUT and not just "out." And like you said, I managed to slot pieces of my identity together in a way that made...more sense, if not perfect sense.

I forget which famous writer said these wise words: "A first novel is like a first pancake. You have to throw it out." Onward!

[nerakrose]

Yes, the stories are really key here! My local library had FIVE gay books on the shelf, as in, those were what I could find in the database with the "homosexuality" tag, and of those five only three had actual gay main characters and only one could be said to be positive. I was really hungering for..more. Just more. In hindsight I'm really impressed that my tiny local library had that much but I also really hope that there's a LOT more to go around these days. I just found out the other day that Adam silvera is a popular YA author in Danish translation as well (he was at BogForum in Copenhagen, even!) which I'm really happy about - I haven't read his books (yet) but I'm glad they're in libraries all over th country. I could've used them, back when...

Anyway, yes. :) stories are powerful. And I'm really glad that fandom exists not only to provide me with stories to read, but also as an outlet for me to pour my own stories into. It means a lot to me when I put something out there that's maybe a bit more personal than I'd like to admit, and readers can see themselves in it.

[museinabsentia]

Oh my god, I relate to this sooooo hard. Fandom helped me work myself out, too. Finding my way into fandom and finding out there were so many more options than I had originally thought there were. It took me until I was 30 years old to figure out that you could be asexual without needing to also be aromantic and that's why I was so damned uncomfortable with myself... because I was in fact one and not the other. Fandom and the people I met through it (as well as a lot of fic exposure) helped me come to terms with that about myself and I am much healthier mentally for it.

[nerakrose]

I'm glad fandom has been such a positive experience for you as well :) I consider myself demi on both the sexual and romantic spectrums, but lately I've been thinking I'm probably actually ace. Writing a bunch of fics about demi and ace characters (as well as reading them!) has definitely helped me figure that out.

[museinabsentia]

I honestly had a fandom friend mention the ace spectrum in a fic I was doing beta work for and didn't want to look unaccepting by not even understanding, so I went and looked it up and then read the article like six more times like, holy fuck there's something that explains me!

Of course, now I totally headcanon Harry as ace.

[nerakrose]

!! I'm glad it worked out :D

I'm writing Harry as ace in my H/D Big Bang fic. :)