User:Renay - Fanlore

I discovered online fandom in 1994, those bygone days where fic archives were simply lists of zip files you had to download in order to read. I never figured out IRC where most of the action was, so I eventually drifted away to write terrible fanfic for the really bad paranormal YA fiction I was reading on a atrociously designed Angelfire page until the Sailor Moon craze around 1997 when it started airing on USA and I started writing really terrible fanfic for that fandom.

In 1999 I played my first Final Fantasy game with my brand new Playstation: Final Fantasy VII. I discovered a different type of fandom when I searched it out that time, with archives and everything. Fanfiction.net was around by this time, so between 1999 and 2001 I was a huge lurker in Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, as well as the Harry Potter fandom, although I never wrote for the latter. I did write fic for the first two that is thankfully long gone, and Final Fantasy VIII was where I first wrote Seifer/Zell slash, guilty and confused country girl who couldn't figure out why she liked boys kissing but no one else did. I never really found my people, though, and from 2002 - 2004 I was largely outside fandom and only dabbling every now and then until I rediscovered people writing S/Z fic and sniffed around a little on Livejournal. Then I stumbled across newsletter communities and fell in love. I founded Final Fantasy Press and have pretty much made Final Fantasy my home base for the last few years doing projects of various quality in the different fandoms.

In 2007, I founded Final Fantasy Exchange with Sev and Ira, because we're crazy.