Is there a piece of media from your youth or childhood that you wish you were encountering today, as a grown-ass adult, so that you could interact with it differently? Or just, wish you were older when you'd seen/read it so your fannish activity about it would be different?
Wow, another amazing question.
There's a lot of media from my childhood that I think I'd love if I were encountering for the first time today. Both Star Wars and Star Trek, for instance, were experiences that I was far too young to really grasp the implications of (I was like 5 or 6 when the A New Hope was in theaters) until I was much older.
If I'd hit Star Wars like 10-12 years ago I would've written SO MUCH Luke/Han fic -- but instead my neighborhood friends and I played Star Wars together (I was always Leia and my best friend was always Luke and when he spoiled the "they're siblings" thing for me after Empire came out I was SO UNBELIEVABLY MAD AT HIM) and those are memories (vague as they are, 40+ years later) that I don't think I'd want to give up if someone offered to erase Star Wars from my brain so I could come back to it fresh.
I do wish I'd encountered fanfic earlier in my life, though. I didn't actually get into reading fanfic until... 2013? Ish? I know I didn't try my hand at writing fanfic until 2014. But before that there were so many things that I got so unbelievably excited about and at the time I had no idea what to do with that energy and excitement. I had crushes on a ton of fictional characters (most of them really embarrassing to think about now 🙃) that could've been channeled into a stupid number of terrible marysue writer-insert fics. Though to be fair, I'd already written a stupid number of terrible marysue writer-insert fics about my D&D/RP characters, so...
Fanfic Writer Friday!












