Love this! It's wonderful to read your story and everyone else's.
My intro to slash was totally offline. I was in middle school and a few friends got really into LoTR. Every day at lunch it was all "blah, blah gay hobbits" "yada yada elf-fucking" and I just assumed the books were just (strangely, anachronistically) full of same-sex love for the first few weeks. Then realized these friends were writing and trading this stuff and started asking lots of questions and they told me all about the wilds of the internet. I never got into LoTR but figured it couldn't be the only thing there were stories about. I was right! And there was Xena femmeslash and Buffy slash and some Buffy/Spike shipping (the moment when your fanfic OTP becomes canon is a special moment. I remember it vividly.) But my fic-reading tapered off pre-college and there was about a 10-ish year hiatus.
Then one day I caught my bff/then-roommate guiltily reading HP fic. I don't think she expected me to respond with "OMG I had forgotten about this!!! Point me to the good stuff!" She did, but was more of a Harry/Tonks or Harmony shipper, and while the fics were good and I could see how it worked in those scenarios and I LOVED being back in the HP universe, the pairings didn't click for me. Largely because fanfic had (with the spuffy exception) always been gay, and that's what I wanted, what felt like my fic home.
I was drawn into Snarry first. I liked Snape's snark/intelligence/taciturn-ness against Harry's optimism and that they had this shared experience of going through the war, but I'm not a fan of chan and bought that Harry would respect and appreciate Snape, but not really that they would end up boning. But then there were Snarry authors who also wrote Draco/Harry and I started to wonder. I was a little skeptical at first but was also on a major femmequixotic kick, had read all her Snarry and Snaco on Skyehawke and would follow her writing anywhere, so gave it a shot. And it was like the heavens opened! All the things I loved and wanted from the dynamic but without the chan and the snape-specific baggage, and everywhere I looked there was so much good writing and smut (your gif...yes. exactly.) and all these tropes and variations on the theme and so many more stories to be told and it just seemed like an amazing wonderland. And it still does!
no subject
My intro to slash was totally offline. I was in middle school and a few friends got really into LoTR. Every day at lunch it was all "blah, blah gay hobbits" "yada yada elf-fucking" and I just assumed the books were just (strangely, anachronistically) full of same-sex love for the first few weeks. Then realized these friends were writing and trading this stuff and started asking lots of questions and they told me all about the wilds of the internet. I never got into LoTR but figured it couldn't be the only thing there were stories about. I was right! And there was Xena femmeslash and Buffy slash and some Buffy/Spike shipping (the moment when your fanfic OTP becomes canon is a special moment. I remember it vividly.) But my fic-reading tapered off pre-college and there was about a 10-ish year hiatus.
Then one day I caught my bff/then-roommate guiltily reading HP fic. I don't think she expected me to respond with "OMG I had forgotten about this!!! Point me to the good stuff!" She did, but was more of a Harry/Tonks or Harmony shipper, and while the fics were good and I could see how it worked in those scenarios and I LOVED being back in the HP universe, the pairings didn't click for me. Largely because fanfic had (with the spuffy exception) always been gay, and that's what I wanted, what felt like my fic home.
I was drawn into Snarry first. I liked Snape's snark/intelligence/taciturn-ness against Harry's optimism and that they had this shared experience of going through the war, but I'm not a fan of chan and bought that Harry would respect and appreciate Snape, but not really that they would end up boning. But then there were Snarry authors who also wrote Draco/Harry and I started to wonder. I was a little skeptical at first but was also on a major femmequixotic kick, had read all her Snarry and Snaco on Skyehawke and would follow her writing anywhere, so gave it a shot. And it was like the heavens opened! All the things I loved and wanted from the dynamic but without the chan and the snape-specific baggage, and everywhere I looked there was so much good writing and smut (your gif...yes. exactly.) and all these tropes and variations on the theme and so many more stories to be told and it just seemed like an amazing wonderland. And it still does!