#Next up I'll delve into my memory of deviantArt

[biffelderberry]

so I recently applied to volunteer with AO3 and part of one of the questions was related to fandom and my history with fandom. I normally say I’ve been in fandom for 12 years. 12 years ago, I was bugging @voldiebuns before a color guard practice because I was boreed, and she handed me Loveless and told me to read it and leave her alone. So whatever, I read it, and from there got dragged into fandom. I’m not really sure how Loveless lead to FFn and fandom in general, but it’s definitely a marked point in time as when I really realized that there was this obsessive group on the internet. It’s also when I learned about Slash and Yaoi (which is what the cool kids called it back then.) 

I remember us getting our moms to drop us off at Borders (god I miss that store) and we would go through the manga section looking for manga. I remember binge watching 18 episodes of Kuroshitsuji while home alone and being afraid to turn around. I remember @voldiebuns,  @magickallity, and I  writing 20 minute fanfiction challenges. 

But none of that is even the point of all of this, because I also remember 2 years before reading Loveless, finding a little site called Quizilla. Quizilla was designed to be a quiz hosting site, as it’s name would suggest, but it had a thriving fanfiction corner. And the fanfictions were glorious, by the way, almost all of them were either Harry Potter self insert fic - where you could date either Harry, Draco, Fred, or George, vampire stories or gratuitous porn. And you think the porn on AO3 is bad? The porn on Quizilla was glorious. it probably shaped a lot of who I am today... which might be a bad thing? Most of it was either straight or lesbian, and it was all trashy and poorly written. One in particular I remember was a girl who in the previous story had had sex with her best friend at a slumber party, seducing the guy working in her parents back yard and having sex with him in the pool. He lined her up with the water jet and... yea. I read that 14 years ago. It made that much of an impression on me. 

Anyways, Quizilla had little user functionality built in, and it was certainly not designed to be a fanfiction archive. But there’s something about fandom that just builds itself in whatever corner of the web it can. And that’s something that I think a lot of the newbies in fandom don’t realize. We have something so great in AO3, it’s a space built for us, by us. Quizilla had a very shitty search function so really the only way to find even readable stories was to go through the top 10. Which was our version of reviews/rating. You wanted to be in the top whatever you could. 

There was a forum I was on, I don’t know if it was the official one. I hope it was deleted with quizilla in 2014, because I was a little shit at 13, as most people are, and there are things I know I said that I want to remain hidden.

OH I forgot the best part of Quizilla!! Banners. Banners were such a weird thing. Basically for your story to be a legitimate story you had to have a banner. I think it’s why I cringe when I see stories with banners on AO3. I just associate it with Quizilla and that part of my life. They would be images done up to look like the book cover for the story and they were... I mean it was early 2004, what do you expect from a bunch of teens and tweens? 

I just. When we talk about recent fandom history, we talk about FFn, and Adult Fanfiction, and LJ. But let’s bring Quizilla into the history of it all too.