DE: First Love

[yakalskovich]

 This went around on tumblr, so it might be fun to ask here as well.

Tell me what the first thing/fandom you loved uncontrollably was. What made your small child heart explode with happiness, what universe did you play make believe in?

Basically, asking for your first fandom -- not as a semi-grown fan getting into the transformative works scene, but the ur-fandom of your childhood or youth.

I, unfortunately, must say 'Winnetou'; 'The Hobbit' and Teja's canon only came after that.

Comments

[never_promised]

Oh god. Okay.

When I was, what, four or five? Maybe six? I had the hugest crush on Darth Vader. My first true love.

I think original Doctor Who, maybe a couple years later, was probably my first foray into imagining self-insert OCs.

Oh man I'm forgetting Black Beauty though!

(given what i'm logged into, please imagine these confessions being made by henry v)

[yakalskovich]

As far as I know, you weren't the only small person with a huge Darth Vader crush. Interesting people come from those! ;-)))

[bjornwilde]

[I think Henry needs to read the Black Beauty series in bar now. /enable ]

[hot_water]

I wanted to marry Vader at age eight. It crushed me when my parents said no.

[i_am_your_host]

Transformers, the original series. I was obsessed with the cartoon and the toys. Not being terribly spoiled, I wasn't allowed to collect everything (I only had/still have maybe 6 or so), but it was indeed a glorious day when I got Optimus Prime in all his tractor trailer glory.

After that, it was Ghostbusters, the movie and the cartoon. My first cartoon crush was Peter Venkman. What, he was snarky and had cool hair.

[yakalskovich]

Completely understandable!

[varadia]

The My Little Pony show in the 80s! Oh god I was 3 and 4 years old and obsessed. I would play pretend Ponies with Bradley in pre-school. I was a pegasus pony once, and was so tall I smacked another kid in the top of the head when he ran by me while I was flying. WHOOPS.

(Also if other kids wanted to play house I would play, too, but I wanted to be the pet MY LITTLE PONY, because why would you want to be anything else????)

[yakalskovich]

Oh yes, that happens -- some fans start really young! My littlest nephew is like that about some underwater explorer cartoon.

[shinyhappygoth]

My first fandom (that I can recall) that really fit the fandom pattern was Animaniacs in middle and high school, but the first thing I remember being fanatical over, mostly in the form of reading it out loud to my parents whether they wanted me to or not, starting at about age 6? Dave Barry.

[yakalskovich]

Awww -- kids do have some interesting tastes. At least it was good humour.

[bjornwilde]

I can never pick just one...Star Wars, definitely, Godzilla, Fantastic Four, Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, and the Dragonriders of Pern. Do Micronauts count? I loved them before the comics.

[yakalskovich]

Star Wars seems to be a really enduring love for some people.

[inlovewithwords]

Gosh, I'm not sure. If you don't count Barney (shut up), I think the answer is almost certainly Power Rangers. I only watched, like, the first couple seasons--through the Pink and Yellow rangers getting replaced, maybe?--but I had some Power Ranger-themed parties. I had such a huge crush on Tommy Oliver. (I was like three or four, okay.)

I think hard on the heels of that--like, I remember seeing them all around the same time--would have been the old Keaton Batman movies and Star Wars. Loved them to death. I had a crush on Luke.

OH! And when I was around the same age I always wanted to watch Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman and Mom would never let me, but I loved it and didn't know why.

. . .

So, uh, I have some terrifying consistency, I guess?

[yakalskovich]

Yes, you probably have! Very terrifying.

(Says the person whose main Milli-charrie is her favourite from fandom no. 3...)

[have_no_mercy]

I was a young'un when MLP started along with the Smurfs, Strawberry Shortcake and Cabbage Patch Kids. But I'd say my first real fandom was Jem and the Holograms. I still have all the dolls.

[camwyn]

The Black Stallion books. Or, rather, horse racing in general, with the Black Stallion books in specific. My most common game I played with my grandfather was 'Twinkletoes and Sparky', both of whom were champion racehorses, and Grandpa taught me how to read the racing pages of the newspaper when I was maybe seven or eight. All kinds of stuff about the racing world and its rules and past champions, too. The books were a great consolation for the fact that by the time I wanted to be a jockey I was already several inches too tall and several pounds too heavy.

[yakalskovich]

I think I read those, too, in the hazy early years when I read 'horse books'...

[onceaviking]

Hmm, Sølvpil I think. A cartoon about a young Native American chief. As far as I can tell it hasn't made it outside of Scandinavia and Belgium.
Oh, he was dreamy. And Månestråle, the female protagonist, was pretty and awesome when she kicked people in the face. She knew Asian martial arts.
It's complicated.

Later, erm, Dragonlance? The translations are horrible, so I had to get better at reading English quickly :)
I did it for Tanis.

[annalalaith]

Heh, Dragonlance. My grandma gave me my cousin Jake's copies of those books when I was about 13. I have since named a cat Tasselhoff and by is it fitting.

[harryhotspur]

I saw The Road to El Dorado eight times in theaters as a kid. Which is a record I still haven't matched. And before that, my preferred make-believe setting was The Land Before Time movies. ...yeah, I dunno.

edit: OH and my sister and I definitely spent a summer calling each other Satsuki and Mei and looking for Totoro in the woods.

[yakalskovich]

We did have a number of 'Land Before Time' characters in Milliways at one point! And Totoro, of course, is a timeless classic.

[bcgphoenix]

I was so omnifannish as a kid that I don't actually remember what my very first uncontrollable love was. It might've been Quantum Leap? Or maybe Roundhouse, that Nickelodeon sketch comedy show that was a precursor to All That? I was also a Nintendo loyalist from the very first NES, so Mario and Luigi joined me on my make-believe playground adventures a lot.

(Somewhere, my six-year-old self lipwobbles at my recent defection to Playstation.)

My first proper fandom experience, though, was Animorphs. I started reading the books maybe six months before my family got its very first internet hookup, so naturally, the first thing I searched for in this great glorious new world was "Animorphs." If you looked hard enough, you could probably find the terrible preteen fanfic I wrote and some of the chatlogs from my favorite IRC channel. Twenty years later, I'm even still in touch with a couple of the people I met in that community.

[dejah_thoris]

*cough* PS4?

[aberration]

Sailor Moon... but specifically the Italian dub. I have the series in Japanese but still occasionally search for Italian dubbed episodes on YouTube.

[sunbaked_baker]

Ages 4-7 were spent roleplaying on the playground as Power Rangers (I most often claimed Green. Tommy was probably my very absolute first fan-crush, and this all led to a lifetime of having a soft spot for bad guys on redemption arcs), Mario Bros characters, and random off-brand MLP unicorns (the main game was to come up with the longest, most ridiculous magical sparkly name ever for your character. Along the lines of "Princess RainbowGem SparkleMist Moonpeach the Magnificent" and such). Loved it all, but at that age I wasn't really aware of being a fan. Just that I loved it and couldn't wait to see what happened next.

The first time where I uncontrollably loved something and knew I loved it overwhelmingly was the Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper, at age 10-13always. It was the first book series that I insisted my best friends read so I had someone to gush about them at (being at an age/time when the internet access was something highly regulated in our home). My all-consuming love for the series infected just one of my friends, and this led to our first foray into fanfiction, too! Wacky, novel-length self-insert crackfic, mostly, if you'll believe it. :D

Then when I was 13, my mother bought me the first two Harry Potter books, and the world was never the same.

[yakalskovich]

OMG, yes, 'The Dark Is Rising'. I read the first of the books in German as a teen, then got the omnibus edition somewhat later in English (I think when I was 17 and in Winchester all by myself), read it all with great enthusiasm, and got the books in German for my little sister, who proceeded to love them with equal fervour. We were both more or less grown up when Harry Potter started, but we really got into it from book 3 onwards, when I walked into a bookshop in Wiesbaden with the Little Lady, age 1, in her buggy, and happened on a queue of fans and a very tired Jo at the signing table -- back then, she was still doing actual book tours! Add to that the fact that my mum runs the school library in her school (she's retired from teaching now, but still runs the library) and my family has a history with children's and YA books, and we were all over Harry Potter like wildfire. The Little Lady and her littler brothers all grew / grow up with it; the middle brother is the greatest fan, but also loves Tolkien, where his favourite charrie ist Gollum, for some reason. He's quite the little small-g goth; he wanted a bow and arrows as well as many black t-shirts and hoodies for Christmas. /ramble

[never_shall_yield]

The A-Team forever and ever, amen.

[ceitfianna]

TaleSpin, Chip'n Dale Rescue Rangers, Batman: The Animated Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Robin Hood, Narnia I had a lot of fandoms, its hard to pick just one.

[annalalaith]

Dude those are great! I used to watch those too, but they were on before school, so I had to be really sneaky or sick to watch them. Well, not batman, that one came on after school, so I got to watch Batman and Anamaniacs.

[annalalaith]

I made my mom take me to the dollar theater like 5 times for both Land Before Time and Beauty and the Beast. My friends and I played Little Mermaid a lot, and My Little Pony. For some reason, I also loved Peewee's Playhouse, and David the Gnome. Oh and MASH, yes, I liked MASH as a kid. And Star Trek TNG and The Wonder Years. My all time favorite show was the Adventures of Pete and Pete, do you know how close we've got to getting a little Pete in Milliways?

Oh and in gradeschool, I remember I had to be Ripley from Alien, cause I was the only girl who wanted to play. I was terrified of those movies.

[sdelmonte]

Hm. I could say Scooby Doo, or those cheezy Hanna Barbera cartoons in general. I ate them up with a spoon. As well as The Flintstones. I loved the Flintstones without really getting half the jokes.

Or maybe The Electric Company. I liked Sesame Street, but The Electric Company was all about reading!! And had Jennifer of the Jungle. And a young Morgan Freeman. And Fargo North, Decoder. And Letterman, narrated by Joan Rivers. And Spider-Man. And Tom Lehrer songs! It was the best thing ever.

But if I had to pick one thing that I was head over heels for the most, it was Firestorm. I met him in an issue of Justice League, which was already my favorite comic. And we got this guy with fiery hair and a second person riding along and offering science advice, and a very colorful costume and amazing powers. He was instantly my favorite hero, ahead of Superman and Spidey. When he got his own comic, I was in seventh heaven. My fandom for him dimmed a bit over the years, but seeing him in various cartoons, and then on The Flash, and now seeing him starring on a new show (with Victor Garber as the most perfect choice for Martin Stein)? My inner 11 year old is squeeing!

[annalalaith]

I used to watch a lot of the reruns when I was a kid of Scooby Doo and the Flinstones.

[yinyangwizard]

It was the Tintin books for me. I don't remember how I got the first book (Cigars of the Pharaoh) but I wrote a first-grade book report on it - pro tip, not such a good idea - borrowed them all from the library, and was always wheedling at my parents to get me any ones in the series that I didn't have.

[jothra]

If you discount Disney movies...

Probably the Ninja Turtles. Or maybe Davy Crockett.

[vivien]

I liked fandom from an early age - Mickey Mouse was my FAVORITE (I planned to marry him. My mother was worried about what her grandchildren would look like...) I had a tribe of imaginary friends, including Peter Pan and Scooby Doo. If I liked a cartoon or movie character, I had them join my tribe. They were great pals!

However, the moment the words scrolled over my head with that fanfare going when I was seven seeing Star Wars in the original release in the theater... Yeah. That was the first time my heart swelled with fannish joy.

[not_my_sandbox]

According to my parents? Thundercats, apparently.

Let's see, what else was awesome? Transformers:Beast Wars, Reboot, Batman:TAS, Superman:TAS, Batman Beyond... I would have watched Gargoyles but it came on at the same time as Batman. Curse you Disney! Also Pinky and the Brain and Chicken Boo from Animaniacs, Freakazoid! and The Tick.

While my parents still made trips to Mexico I remember anticipating searching through Mexican TV stations to find some channel that played ♫♫CABALLEROS DEL ZODIACO♫♫ I mean Saint Seiya.

I remember Power Rangers and all the ridiculous Super Sentai and Kamen Rider inspired stuff it dragged into American kids television programming. That was fun for a while; the only one I wish had continued a bit further was Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog because... well, it was an interesting concept.

[dejah_thoris]

Tarzan, Captain Nemo, Bullfinch's mythology. I was a weird kid.