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The Fic That Hooked You: And How Bad Was It?

I don't remember the name of the first fanfiction I read, but I remember two things about it: it was a Percy Jackson fanfic attempting to predict what was happening with Percy during The Lost Hero, and even the shit-taste me of seven years ago thought it was shit after the second read.
 
My first contact with fanfiction was usenet newsgroups, those didn't really hook me (mostly due to it being hard to find stuff you liked), but a few of the X-rated Star Trek stories warped my sexuality forever.
What really hooked me was one of the Ramna-Wheel of Time crossover stories, which lead me to Rakhal's Ranma fanfic index.
 
THE story that made me start reading fanfiction was Nobody Dies while in college.

Now that I think about it, things started to go wrong from that point on forwards...
 
It was back in my first year of college, that was in 2005.
Cannot remember the title at all, but it was pretty good for those days. If I ever found it now then it would be pretty crap, I know that.
It was likely a Final Fantasy, Naruto or Bleach story since those were what I was reading or playing at the time.
 
I started out as a bit of a booksnob. I judged fanfiction to be a third rate waste of time to write, yet alone read.
Then one day I was researching some literary terms while working on a short story, and I stumbled into TvTropes. From there, I ended up getting caught in the insidious web that is tropes.
At some point I had snuck a drink after school, and was browsing, when I found Pusakuronu's Dungeon Keeper Ami. Then I found out that some of the commenters from DKA's add-venture posted on this site called spacebattles, and from there to sufficient velocity, and then finally QQ.
 
I first heard the term fanfiction when I was but a lad of 15, when some girl I never spoke to tried to get onto ffn while at the high school library and I happened to get curious and googled it when I got home. Then I lurked around for a bit, and eventually made an account. The first story I actually put on my favorites was Lelouch of the Revolution, though after a quick glance I do think it's held up over the years. I got into fanfics shortly after I finished Code Geass for the first time and was in the mood to get back into the world and see what ideas other people had.
 
The early 1990s, I honestly have no idea what the first 'fic I ever read was. Probably Sailor Moon or Ranma though as those two fandoms generated massive amounts of 'fic at the time
I remember an age before the big archives, before Fanfiction.net, before Ao3, before TVTropes, before SpaceBattles or Stardestroyer.net, before the world of modern fandom. Stuff like Geocities pages, USENET groups and the FFML were all there was.

It was a different time, to be sure. Before shame and peer pressure could stop an SI writer from going completely batshit over the top, before fanon was much of a recognized concept.

I can't say what the first 'fic I've ever read was, but I do know the oldest 'fic I still have a copy of is based on the Sailor Moon dub, features Sailor Mercury becoming a vampire, and is roughly 3 million words long. Well, assuming I get it off the old external HD it's on.

TonalArchitect said:
I notice adjective!character, and quickly nope the fuck out of there
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I hate that descriptive technique with a passion. It's like an omen of asinine writing.
Adyen said:
At least you didn't start off with Undocumented Features. That's pretty much THE wanking SI fic. Though they've gotten... somewhat better? I'm not even sure if what they built is a definition of better or not...
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The utter shamelessness of Undocumented Features is it's crowning glory, once they started reigning themselves in I lost interest and I'd been following their madness since it first rolled out.
Aleh said:
(anyone have copies of Twisted Path, for instance? I do... in my own offline archive).
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WANT! Please! No SI in the last decade has been so utterly without shame or self awareness as good 'ol Twister!
 
Hooo boy. The first fanfiction that ever really hooked me (like the second or third that I read) was a Teen Titans fic with 272 chapters and 2.6 million words called These Black Eyes, which starred (according to the author) an angsty, over-powered Gary Stu of a sixth Titan. It got darker and darker as it went, and I eventually stopped reading five chapters before the end. The author also had an utterly horrific tic of using y in place of certain vowel sounds (examples of such include the words wyrd, wyld, and I think at least one instance of whymsy).

I've been thinking of doing a Let's Read of it, which prompted an epic quest to figure out how to download fics off of Fanfiction.net that didn't involve manually copying every page (it's a motherfucker of an ordeal). See, I remember enjoying it quite a lot in the beginning, and even now I remember some points where Noir (yes, really) actually rose above the status of Gary Stu and became an actual decent character with flaws and failures and so on. So I feel like going through it again to check, and if I'm going to reread something that vast to find out if it was terrible I might as well make a project of it, no?
 
I think the first fanfic I've read was swedog's "Children of the clan" HP fic set after death of Voldemort but before the epilogue. Aside from making Harry stronger in magic than any other mage, it was pretty good. It had Harry dealing with his trauma of being unwanted orphan, dealing with the aftermath of the battle, just generally focusing on social peoblems that his power boost couldn't solve.
 
wayne82444 said:
I did mention I don't mind cliches, just that it was full of them, right? I actually still like Make a Wish too, just hard to read without seeing the cliches everywhere now.
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The way I understand it, a good bit of the clichés in Make A Wish are pretty much only clichés because other fics adopted them from that one popular story.
And there aren't really even that many, because the fic is so old that many of the HP fanfic clichés didn't even exist yet. I totally stumbled at the name "Laetus Lovegood" when re-reading it recently, before remembering that Xenophilius Lovegood's actual first name wasn't revealed yet that far back (it shows up in book 7, IIRC).

I didn't even try reading Chunin Exam Day until fairly recently, for some reason. I ended up dropping it after that ridiculous author's note in chapter... 33 or 34, I think? where the author basically said that he'd try his best to add more of whatever the reviewers complain about to his story, to the detriment of literally everything else. I wasn't interested in reading a story that could change its entire tone on a whim, unfortunately.
OTOH, I did like Partially Kissed Hero, way back when, and still think Double Time Trouble was glorious crack... is it too much to hope that it will update eventually?


As for the first fanfic I've ever read... let's be honest: I have entirely no idea. There are two most likely candidates, ignoring the "something I couldn't recall at all" option, both from 2005 or so; one of them had been offline for years, but some people, including me, saved copies of the first few chapters (and a full printed copy was apparently accidentally thrown away in 2015), and the other... was so obscure that I'm not sure if anyone did save a copy (I just checked the Wayback Machine, and if it's saved there, I can't reach it).
Both were in the Porry Gatter fandom. Never heard of it? Don't worry, hardly anyone did. The main forum of the fandom closed down in 2009, and since then any fanfics from there are few and far between (though a few new ones did seem to show up lately).

More recently (2008-ish), I've started reading all sorts of stuff - of very varying quality - on Writing.com (mostly bad), UBEA (mostly half-decent), and what is now SamLib (mostly originals).
Even more recently came AH.com (2009), then FF.net (2012-ish, through Saphroneth), and eventually SB, SV and QQ. Can't think of any old shame from that period specifically - aside from Expo 1001 (who's more of a guilty pleasure).
 
january1may said:
The way I understand it, a good bit of the clichés in Make A Wish are pretty much only clichés because other fics adopted them from that one popular story.
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Yeah, Make a Wish was the origin of all kinds of HP fanfic cliches, so was A Black Comedy and Nightmares of Futures Past.
 
january1may said:
The way I understand it, a good bit of the clichés in Make A Wish are pretty much only clichés because other fics adopted them from that one popular story.
And there aren't really even that many, because the fic is so old that many of the HP fanfic clichés didn't even exist yet. I totally stumbled at the name "Laetus Lovegood" when re-reading it recently, before remembering that Xenophilius Lovegood's actual first name wasn't revealed yet that far back (it shows up in book 7, IIRC).
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If you check the thread that this one branched off of (Stories you just gave up on) you'll notice I said exactly the same thing. The post you quoted was in response to Red Sectoid commenting on said post from the previous thread. Quoted it here for convenience:

wayne82444 said:
I feel the same way about Rorschach's Blot's Make A Wish. I don't think that is so much weird as it is the nature of cliches- when something works, and works well, other people tend to borrow it for their own ideas. That leads to more people seeing it, thinking it is awesome, and using it themselves. Eventually said good idea becomes a cliche. If that happens with a lot of good ideas in a story then the story itself can go from amazing and creative into a cliche ridden piece of garbage just because of that. It is also one of the reasons I tend not to be bothered by cliches- after all, they only became cliches because they work.
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I genuinely can't remember thewhich story I first read. The first fandom was Ranma 1/2, but back then, Sailor Moon and Ranma were pretty much the only series people wrote much for.

Later on I read lots of HP, but for the last couple years it's been Worm and the occasional standout from other fandoms.
 
Shit, been over a decade now, can't really remember which story really hooked me into fan fiction.... got to either be one of TheGrums fics, durandalls ranma/sailor moon fic with the demon ranma, really can't narrow it down further...

Maybe Carrots Insertion ranma fic?
 
I'd just finished watching Fate/ Zero and was looking for more stuff to tide me over to my next distraction. I'd found a soundtrack on Youtube, and was reading through the comments when I saw a recommendation for Third Fang's From Fake Dreams. From there it sort of spiralled out of control.

EDIT: Apparently this only loaded half of the first sentence. Fixed.
 
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Got into fanfiction from Warhammer 40k. Found Confessions of a Wayward Son and then dove into the cesspit, so to speak :)
 
Of all things, what got me into fanfiction was the Balto movies. Ended finding a fansite for it, wrote a horrible fic, ended up finding Fanfiction proper, and have been hooked ever since.
 
I had to go back pretty far for this one, but waaaay back in the day I first found out about fanfiction through my disbelief that haku from naruto was a guy. I found many a story that agreed that haku was a lady and would proceed to bone naruto. This of course changed my life. Now I don't think I could stomach to go back and look at the garbage stories I read. Still, let me find a bunch of amazing writing so I'll take it.
 
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