Fowl Love: How I Discovered Fanfic

So, full disclosure — I can’t name my first time for certain.

In my early days in fandom, so much of what I was discovering was so new that it was only retroactively that I was able to assign names to a number of things I had experienced. How many times did someone come into a forum just to be a combative asshole before I realized we were “getting trolled?” How many lighthearted exchanges did I have in-character as part of a favorite fictional pairing before I found out I was “role playing?”

So how many stories did I read about my favorite character thrown into unpredictable situations that canon would never dare before I was told that what I was indulging in was called “fan fiction?”

It’s been strange, over the last nearly 30 years, watching fanfic and all manner of transformative fandom culture become gradually and gradually more mainstream. In the mid-90s, I wasn’t opening magazines to read explainers on “the fanfic boom” or logging on-line to see celebrities sharing fanart drawn of their characters on social media — both things that, now, have become increasingly normalized.

I’m not going to start moralizing about whether or not this is “better” or “worse” — it’s simply “different.” In the mid-90s, fanfic was still more of an underground endeavor, likely in part because of the lack of a true centralized hub for fannish activity — ff.net wouldn’t exist for another four or five years, and AO3 would take another thirteen — and the fact that even non-fannish social media as we know it today was still a decade or so away. But there was this feeling of both exclusivity (which was sometimes nice) and isolation (which rarely was). Finding fandom online wasn’t impossible, obviously, but it took effort, which made the discovery of your tribe so much more gratifying.

As I said, I couldn’t definitively tell you the first fanfic I ever read, but there is, however, one fic that I always name as my first because of how fundamental it was for me as both a person and a fan.

It was around 1995 or 1996, when I was about thirteen; I was a major Disney fan, and my favorite Disney property at the time was Darkwing Duck. I can’t recall if, on that day, I had gone off in search of Darkwing content, or if it came as simply a happy accident, but one afternoon, sitting in my parents living room and logged into AOL on our oversized HP Pavillion, I stumbled across Kim McFarland’s personal webpage.

A Revelation

Kim McFarland, going by “NegaDuck9” on AOL, ran a personal site — back when they were truly personal, and quite a hot commodity — known as “The NegaPage,” which became special to me for several reasons.

First of all, it was weirdly in-tune with several of my biggest hyperfixations at the time, with subsections devoted to Rocky Horror, the musical Cats, Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast and The Brak Show, and, of course, Darkwing Duck. As a nerdy, socially awkward, neurodivergent kid attending an incredibly small neighborhood school (a K-8 school with a cumulative student body of 108), I had yet to find anyone in my real life — minus my younger sister — who shared any of my interests, let alone four of them.

Secondly, Kim was an adult. Like, an adult-adult. I don’t think I was ever able to suss out her exact age, but by her own accounts, she was managing and directing Rocky Horror shadow casts as far back as 1990, so at the absolute minimum, she was in her late-20 at the time. At 13, I was genuinely of the horrified notion that at some point in my life, the “adult” switch would flip, and all the silly, goofy shit that made me happy and brought me joy and (in some ways) defined me would suddenly just — stop. They would just become, abruptly and without explanation, meaningless relics of a bygone era that I would be forced to move past. To see Kim, a grown adult, absolutely reveling in these shared interests without a shred of shame or self-conciousness — just pure, unabashed and unironic enthusiasm — changed my entire perspective on adulthood.

And thirdly, Kim wrote fic. More specifically, Kim wrote one particular fic that caught my eye. It was linked separately — not from her Writing Page, nor from her Darkwing Duck subpage, but as its own link, right on the main page. Billing itself as an “infamous” series, showcasing “a side of DW you won’t see on the Disney channel,” I was — obviously — immediately drawn in.

The series was called “Ducks to Watch Out For” (which I would only, years later, realize was a play on Allison Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For”), and the only part publicly available was a brief introductory chapter, culminating in the revelation that the secret organization Darkwing worked for had stumbled upon the secret that he and his male sidekick, Launchpad, were lovers.

This… was…

Different? Thrilling? The first time I had really considered that the characters I loved could be portrayed as more fully fleshed out, including having things like sexualities and intimate relationships — especially queer intimate relationships? And that it was okay to write about it? That it was okay to explore it? I was not brought up in an egregiously conservative home, but topics like sex and sexuality — especially anything that deviated from traditional cisgender heteronormativity — were not exactly topics of frequent conversation. Finding this story felt like being granted permission for something — being granted free reign to explore this topic with other like-minded people.

It felt like a rite of passage.

A Rite of Passage with an Age-gate

It wasn’t exactly high tech, but in order to gain access to the juicier chapter of “Ducks…,” I would have to email Kim and tell her I was over 18 (which, to her credit, is about as good or a smidge better than the security check on bona fide porn sites these days). In my early adolescent anxiety, I could feel my heart racing as I logged out of my own account, logged into my mom’s (she used the same password for everything), and sent an email to Kim, concocting a wholly unnecessary story about how I had gotten into Darkwing Duck by watching the show with my kids after school and how I was intrigued by this whole new side to the masked mallard, wink wink — a stellar performance, overall. I should have won an award.

Thinking back, I can’t remember how I made sure I was the one to intercept the reply email, or if I had a contingency plan had I not; I just remember that, all things considered, Kim got back to me relatively quickly, and I was able to forward the email to my personal account and delete all evidence from my mom’s, with her none the wiser.

When I was sure I was alone that night, the rest of the household having gone to sleep or at least settled in their rooms, I started reading.

I didn’t realize then that I’d never stop.

I Remember the Feeling

I’ve read a lot of fanfic since then, and written, cumulatively, hundreds of thousands of words of it myself. I’ve branched out into dozens of other fandoms over the years, always favoring male/male slash, but delving occasionally into straight ships and femme-slash, too; I’ve read innumerable kink memes and trope-fests, taboo topics and pairings; attended conventions full of other fic writers and readers, and even served on panels myself. But still, that fic was special.

I can’t remember the specific content of that first fic twenty-six years later, but I still remember how it made me feel.

I remember two of the teenaged characters had a burgeoning relationship happening that never felt dirty or gross or gratuitous or exploitative; it was never graphic or written for the purpose of titillation; it felt safe, and real, and relatable. It felt like characters who I had been watching for the last five years — since I was nine — were growing up alongside me, and I was watching them fumble along just a few steps ahead of me.

So often in shows, especially animated shows, the child characters never get the chance to grow up. It was exciting to see them changing— it was even more exciting to see them changing in ways I could relate to, with awkward crushes, fumbling experimentation, complicated relationships with their parents. It felt validating.

I remember the two leads - the two male leads - being soft with each other, which is something else, at the time, you really didn’t get in the shows that I watched. Soft touches and tender words, particularly between men, were always played off as “no homo,” as a joke, or a punchline, or a misunderstanding that resulted in someone getting hit or yelled at once they became fully cognizant. As someone with a growing disconnect and discomfort with the presumptions and assumptions of their assigned gender, seeing character who, in any way, subverted those roles and expectation, was refreshing.

And I remember feeling like this opened up so much about all the media I consumed — what was going on between the characters when the camera wasn’t focused on them? What did a certain look or touch or interaction mean, if we pried just below the surface? It cemented the idea in my mind that fictional characters could have hidden depths — that their lives and motivations and preferences were all open to interpretation — and that those of us in marginalized communities could find or create representations of ourselves in a world where canonical depictions were sadly lacking.

And yeah, sure, it also taught me some stuff about sex, but no one needs to know that I learned what a blowjob was from reading a Darkwing Duck fic, ok?