rekindling old flames

Taking a break from strictly RL blog entries to talk about more fandom stuff. But it's in a more objective and meant as self-reflection and not as a flail post.

People always tell me I have too many fandoms. So let me talk about what my fandom life looks like.

Notable Fandom Milestones:

Sailor Moon

This was the beginning. Sailor Moon was my first real fandom. I watched the anime (German dub) on TV and bought the magazine that came out and then the manga and then some other magazines my sister had gotten me at comic shops, which featured Sailor Moon and related content. Sailor Moon was also the fandom I wrote my first fanfics for at the age of 8 or 9. Back then it was still very simple stuff, dialogue only - so kind of like a role play. My sister beta-read them for me and my friend, who was also into Sailor Moon back then, would read them. My sister also wrote me an English Sailor Moon fic for my birthday once. It was pretty cool and it was how I started to write in proper prose and with proper formatting as well. Since the internet was still young in this time, other stuff was very limited frst (remember Midis?) but gradually I became more and more involved in fandom and stumbled over the SMOF (was that what it was called?), the biggest Sailor Moon (and kind of general anime/manga) fan page in Germany.

I made my first online friends at this time but I have lost contact with all of them. I do still have contact with one friend, whom I met on 'animexx' the website born from the SMOF and still Germany's biggest anime/manga related website I believe.

Sailor Moon still holds a special place in my heart, even after uh 25 years (holy shit) and I am pretty excited about the new movie next year. To be brutally honest, the arc the movie is about is my least favourite (although I do like the manga one better than the anime one - the old anime that is... so since the movie is closer to the manga, I have hope).

Want to guess who my favourite characters are? Looking at it now, I think my sexuality was already starting to show back then... whoopsies.

Manga/Anime in general

Through Sailor Moon and with the start of the anime and manga boom in Europe in the late 1990 and early 2000s, I fell into the manga and anime fandom world completely. I think at my peak time I owned over 500 volumes of manga (most of which I sold for a price that was probably just 1/10 of what I paid to get them...but ergh getting them out of the house had priority at that point).

I watched as many anime as I could on TV and bought and read manga. I also made friends through this hobby at school, friends who would stay with me for the rest of my school life and are still with me now.

Fun fact, my cousin in Vietnam also loved to read manga and she had the Vietnamese version of Sailor Moon. The other manga she liked were Detective Conan and Doraemon. The latter, I mistakenly thought of as a Vietnamese comic (because it is SUPER POPULAR in Vietnam) but I found out it was Japanese later on. Other notable series that I really enjoyed during my early days were pretty much everything CLAMP (Card Captor Sakura, X/1999, Wish, ...) and then Angel Sanctuary. 

Side Note: I also started to read BL manga and watch BL anime. Like Gravitation, Zetsuai/Bronze, FAKE

[I had a blast from the past a few years back when I discovered that one of the 2.5D musical actors I liked had formed a unit with the guy who sang some of the Gravitation songs... like woooot]

Visual Kei 

Through Sailor Moon actually, I fell into Japanese music and then Visual Kei. I started out with Malice Mizer, Dir en Grey and L'arc en Ciel and well, my friends adored GACKT and Miyavi, so I got to know about them and listened to their music as well. And a bunch of other groups, too... (Alice Nine, other PS company groups, Psycho Le Chemu... and so on and so forth).

I started to dress in mostly black or other toned down colours at this time, which worried my mother a lot because of the whole thing about 'goths' or 'punks' etc. But I didn't really care about that. My sister explained it away by saying to our mother that black is also a good colour to hide, well, fat. My sister had also gained weight (after staying in America with our relatives for her study abroad) so she wasn't the most colourful person either. So uh yay.

I met some more friends through this fandom and it was for this fandom that I got to go on trips with my friends to events in Germany that were outside of my hometown (KöViT... wow...I feel so old).

Digimon

The fandom I probably wrote the most fics for back then. And the first fandom I read and wrote slash fics in (Yamato/Taichi, Taichi/Yamato aka Taito or Yamachi or what was that again). Although I also liked some of the het ships in this fandom. Ah, don't worry, it was the slashing of the older versions. Not the kids. They did grow up in Season 2.

Digimon was the fandom where I gradually switched from German fics to English fics only. I have since lost the ability to really write fics in Germany or even read them. It just sounds...odd?

 

Gundam Wing 

Down the slash rabbit hole we go. Starting from GW fandom, I think, I stopped reading het pairings lol

Another notable thing here, I don't think I ever wrote (m)any GW fanfics myself, choosing to just consume content at this point (the early days of FF.net! omg)

I also had a friend who loved to read GW fics and we talked about them at school during breaks. Our pairing preferences were also the same so that was really great lol although I guess they're pretty standard.

1x2, 3x4, 13x5 (sometimes 13x5x6), Dorothy/Relena, Sally/Une... ? Sometimes 6x9...

Weiß Kreuz

GW and WK happened at around the same time I think and with that came also the seiyuu fandom. I still love listening to some of the old WK songs and I even played Velvet Underworld on the piano (thanks to my piano teacher being cool with whatever I wanted to play).

I was pretty amused by the wonky German that was in the series lol.

I prefer the anime (1st season) over the manga... and I mostly ignore Glühen (guh changed character designs... Omi's dead-rat-hair...). Except the music for Glühen, the music is great.

Judge me but my favourite pairing is Omi/Nagi.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

I had a phase where I really liked the anime and sort of the card game for this. I even did my radio show for my internship about Yu-Gi-Oh! and the local card distribution shop and tournaments and players etc.

The real reason I really liked the series, though is uh yeah slash fic. Ahahaha. Also Egyptian history and mythology and all that because I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

Kaiba Seto (or Priest Seth)/ Yami Yugi (aka Pharaoh Atem) is the ship I will go down with.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer 

I...have a thing for vampires. And this was on TV. Sometimes I would watch the German dub, sometimes I'd catch an episode in English whenever our satellite caught the signal for the English channels lol

I loved Spike and Willow/Tara and was so sad about what happened to that ship in the end T_T

Harry Potter

Another big fandom and probably my first big 'non animated' fandom. Buffy was more consuming the show really and not getting involved otherwise. No fics... but HP was... the thing. The big one. The game changer, really. I fell into it before my friend did but then we both took a huge tumble, lol.

And I think HP is the fandom where fic content became a bit more 'adventurous' than in other fandoms. Let's leave it at that, I shall not go into detail about it XD

 

Lord of the Rings

Err so I moved to NZ back then and the people I met there and became friends with were really into it, so naturally I joined them. I had read the books but it had never really occurred to me to uh... go further until people introduced me to stuff and recommended things. Ahahaha.

Also yes, yes, I read standard pairings again aka Aragorn/Legolas.

 

RPS

The first RPS fics I read were for HP and LotR actors. This was another step for me on my descent into hell. But the fics I did read were few and I still enjoyed the fictional characters the people portrayed more than fantasizing about what could be going on between them IRL.

 

Prince of Tennis / Tenimyu

This is the big one. This is the one that plunged me straight into hell lol As mousi's old LJ title said: "the road to hell is paved with tennis balls". So accurate XD;

But I met some of my closest and best friends in this fandom and it's a really fun and cracktastic place to be. I still enjoy it very much and since GAKU is going to be in the new musicals, I also have a reason to go and watch more of them again.

There is just something about the series (both on and off stage).  I can't really put my finger on it. lol

 

2.5D Musicals 

The jump from Tenimyu to other 2.5D productions was...not hard. That and via Tokusatsu. But Tokusatsu and Tenimyu are super connected as well, so there goes.

To be fair, I had actually watched 2.5D stages earlier than this - SeraMyu - but things took off fandom wise with Tenimyu. I still love 2.5D now, even though it has once again taken a step back.

It was hard to stay up to date in this fandom without being in Japan, so it laid low for a while. I fell into JE in the meantime but then came back to 2.5D and stayed in it for a while (until Mokkun's popularity got way out of hand and then I rolled out further when Messiah ended).

My main fandoms in 2.5D were Messiah and Club Slazy... with stints in other franchises but mostly Messiah. Super glad I'm not into TouMyu because that would have meant absolute poverty... lol

 

Tokusatsu

Technically, this should be higher in the list if we went chronologically (and we kinda did and kinda didn't lol chaos). I loved Mighty Morphin Power Rangers when I was going from kindergarten into elementary school and went on to watch many of the series that followed until eventually switching over to Super Sentai as content became more readily available online (or when I was in NZ and they filmed stuff there and some friends got their hands on episodes from Japan).

I switched to Super Sentai only in 2004 with Dekaranger. Kamen Rider joined later on. I watched some bits and pieces of older series but none really stuck with me (though I did enjoy Faiz and Kabuto somewhat). The series that eventually got me hooked was Den-O. 

I'm still very much in this fandom and I made my dream of being in Tokusatsu come true as well. I am featured in some episodes of Lupinranger vs Patoranger, Ryusoulger and Kiramager as well as the Kiramager Episode 0 movie/special - as an extra. I was also allowed to watch things behind the scenes and even talk to crew (and cast) - among the people I was able to talk to was my favourite director, Sakamoto Koichi. The man who made Power Rangers what it was...or so they say. Great man ;-; <3

 

JE

Gahahaha. What do I even write about this? Important milestones maybe. I was among the first people to post JE fic on LJ... JE fandom is where the RPS stuff really took off and took over. And I fell from Prince of Tennis LJ RPGs into JE LJ RPGs and met a lot of my current friends. Again people who are still around and whom I love a lot (*sends love to all of you*). Some of you I even knew from PoT fandom and 2.5D fandom already lol... ah good ol' LJ.

But what got me started on JE was Gokusen Season 2. I watched it on TV the first time I came to Japan and "Akame" kind of caught my attention. Things went from there.

Fandom journey wise: KAT-TUN, You&J Groups (NEWS, K8), Johnny's Jr (Ebikisu, Ya-Ya-Yah, J.J. Express, Jr Boys, sorta HSJ, Mis Snow Man, Snow Man)

I was really really active in the fandom on LJ back then.

I also spent the most money on this fandom so far. And this was one of the reasons why I left tbh...

BUT I also made some of the best fandom memories in this fandom.

My most favourite memory is the trip to Singapore for Takizawa Kabuki. And well, it was kind of my last big thing in the fandom. I think that's a good thing. It helps to forget about the negative and maybe annoying things that made me fall out of the fandom gradually.

I still watch Snow Man stuff sometimes but I would no longer call myself a fan.

Side Note: I had to come to terms with my own sexuality during my JE fan period. I was confessed to by another girl and... it kind of scared me a bit first or more than scared, it confused the hell out of me at that point and I had to fall off the face of earth for a bit to think about things... and to come to the realization that I was bisexual.

Underground Idol Groups

This is where I am now. And if you want to know more about how I got into this whole mess, please check out my entry on my other blog HERE.