Snowflake Challenge: Day Ten

[tangeriner]

Challenge #10

In your own space, talk About A Creator/Someone Who Inspired You.

I'm riding my own (self-created) nostalgia wave here. I have very clear (... more or less anyway...) memories of how and why I got into writing fanfic about the X-Men in the mid-to-late 90s and why I am still here, decades later, reading and writing about these same characters.

Step One:
Discover sevenall's It's All In Your Head, a Psylocke-centric story that had lots of Psylocke/Archangel, which I was extremely annoyed wasn't the sole focus of the books at the time. It took me a while to figure out what fanfic was, but once I did, I started writing my own Warren-centric Psylocke/Archangel fic and finally filled that void in my heart.

Step Two:
Read the Rictor/Shatterstar stories by devilc and viridian5 at a very formative time in my life. It had not even occurred to me that this was an option -- I was an extremely sheltered teenager at the time -- but I definitely dug it, and it made sense. Soon I would be spending hours scanning comics panels as proof of their love in my basement.

Step Three:
Befriend kerithwyn, who was not only writing amazing fic (then and now) but was also generous with encouragement (then and now) and shared a mutual admiration of Warren Worthingon III (then and now). I'm super lucky (then and now) that this friendship translated into real life and, despite the distance between us, get to see her a couple times a year.