Iris: Wisdom and Hope

This week's prompt for Sunshine Challenge is Iris, which can represent wisdom and hope, among other things.

In this vein, I've migrated some of my fics from 2012 onto AO3. They are for a fandom that I haven't thought about in years and is very heavily associated with that era of the Internet. I won't be linking them here because I've anonymised them (they are VERY embarrassing nowadays), but it did get me reflecting a bit on where my fandom journey started and where I've ended up.

I was recently reading a fic published to FFn (which I have since archived due to how difficult it is to access these days), and I have no idea how anyone took it seriously as a fan fic site. Not only did it not trust you to use your own HTML, it erased any words that had special characters in them, and you couldn't even tag pairings until, like, 2015! And if something inspired you or you wanted to link off-site to fan art, you had to space out the url so the almighty FFn filter didn't delete them. All this to prevent spam links from being posted.

There's also the fact that you can't copy/paste from the site, which must have made reviewing a nightmare. Luckily, you actually can copy/paste if you use the mobile site, which is what I did to archive my old fics.

Anywho, it's stuff like AO3 and the OTW that gives me hope for the future of fandom. It's a space that we made for ourselves. We own the servers, and no one can tell us what we can and can't do on them (aside from, like... the law). We fund it ourselves, and we keep it afloat with our donations. I can't begin to tell you how much I love it. And yes, I know the OTW has been in hot water lately for being slow to react to concerns of its users of colour (and hopefully that can be sorted out quickly and efficiently), but considering where we started? It's such a gift. I appreciate it so much.

This time has also given me the opportunity to reflect on how I've grown as an author. These fics are... really bad. Baby Sunset couldn't keep track of a plotline to save his life! But they're also just really special. I used to just be able to sit around and frantically type out a fic on my iPod Touch and post it once I got home from school. (Side note: I actually used to email the entire fic to myself in order to post it on my family computer, since I didn't have my own laptop until I was in high school. I'd use FFn's shitty built-in rich text editor to make it work. It's honestly amazing anything I wrote made it to that site.)

I recently opened up to a good friend about how I was feeling a lot of shame around my fics. My 25th birthday is looming over the horizon, and I always thought that I'd have written something Big and Important by then. But the opposite of shame is pride. I am proud of how far I've gotten since 2012. I'm proud that I've continued doing something that I love. I'm proud that I've managed to make some really good friends from my time in fandom! And that pride is what's going to keep me going. You haven't seen the last of me!