It All Started On This Day, 1998I've been in the 'anime fandom' now since I was 14 and found my first Sailor Moon fanfic. That's 15 years guys, which isn't that much next to some people, but considering I only stumbled into anime on accident one winter break when I was deathly ill cut me some slack. If it wasn't Italian or Irish, it did not enter my house.

I was mostly in the Inu Yasha, Fushigi Yugi and Sailor Moon fandoms and honestly if you start your fan life in anime you're pretty much desensitized to crazy people (the tumblr anime fans created an entire FANDOM based on a 40sec commercial...won't lie this guy is my favorite).

I RP'ed (a lot)--off the top of my head I can t...

It All Started On This Day, 1998I've been in the 'anime fandom' now since I was 14 and found my first Sailor Moon fanfic. That's 15 years guys, which isn't that much next to some people, but considering I only stumbled into anime on accident one winter break when I was deathly ill cut me some slack. If it wasn't Italian or Irish, it did not enter my house.

I was mostly in the Inu Yasha, Fushigi Yugi and Sailor Moon fandoms and honestly if you start your fan life in anime you're pretty much desensitized to crazy people (the tumblr anime fans created an entire FANDOM based on a 40sec commercial...won't lie this guy is my favorite).

I RP'ed (a lot)--off the top of my head I can think of 3 Sailor Moon RPGs I was in (one of which gained me a life long friend in Kinbrae, who has put up with me for 15yrs somehow), read a lot of scanlations (when other kids were cracking the firewalls at school to look at naughty sites I was trying to see if I could tweak the system to let me look at manga translation sites like Manga Screener, Shoujo Magic and Ephmeral Dreams), dabbled in the fanfiction community (more than dabbled at one time I was the highest rated fanfic writer in the Kagome/Sesshoumaru category of Inu Yasha on Fanfiction.net) and watched badly subtitled VHS' that I found whereever I could.

When other kids my age were getting into boys, dressing up, drugs, underage drinking and school activities I was busy trying to figure out IRC so I could stealthily download one episode of anime overnight before my mom got up. I was in AOL chatrooms arguing about whether Kagome was more suited for Inu Yasha (she wasn't) or Sesshoumaru (totally was). Instead of saying 'damn' I was saying 'shimatta' in class or 'kisama' (which is sort of mother fucker) when people pissed me off.

It was a glorious time for me. My classmates thought I was insane (for a brief time it kept the bullies away), I felt pretty cool because I was in on this secret no one else seemed aware of and it kept me from doing all those other things my classmates were doing that they shouldn't be doing.

That it also alienated me didn't really enter into my brain until 9th grade when an upper classman who was (apparently) interested me thought I had rebuffed him (I don't remember this) and wrote a scathing poem as a result skewering me for my interests (that this poem was passed around the school is beyond the point--he read it out loud during creative writing class).

however I'm less in the anime fandom then I used to be. Partially because there are fewer shows I'm intensely interested in and partially because I have other fandoms I'm more invested in (Books?).

But on this day, May 18th, 1998 I found my first sailor moon fanfic, "White Butterfly by Calico Bunny. I only know this because I had apparently had the foresight to write about it in my journal XD (for the record I wasn't that into the story, but the writer had apparently rec'ed what would go on to become my favorite Sailor Moon Fanfic epic ever--Guardians of the Millennium' so it deserves all the love ever).