My history with reading fanfic
Dec. 15th, 2024 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neremanthIn my next post, I’m going to talk about my first fic. Before that, I wanted to talk about my experience with fanfic up to that point, which was as a reader, in order to provide some context. I’m focusing here on what fandoms I read in, and very broadly what kind of fic, and what devices I read on, but I may or may not make another post in the future which is more about how fanfic helped me understand my sexuality (which is only briefly touched on here).
I first heard about fanfic probably in my early to mid twenties, but I didn’t get round to checking it out until my late twenties. At that time I was a regular reader of the webcomic xkcd, and was in the habit of visiting the associated forum to see what other people had to say about each comic as it came out. The 15th March 2010 comic Porn For Women had a reference to fanfic (in the hover text), and someone in the forum mentioned Archive of Our Own as a place to find it. I took a look out of curiosity, not really expecting it to be hugely my thing, but thinking maybe it would be funny and/or hot.
I started off looking at Sherlock Holmes fics, because that was the first fandom that occurred to me which I was familiar with and which there might be fics for. I had a friend who half jokingly and half seriously shipped Holmes and Watson, so that was probably why it was the first one I thought of. I don’t remember if there was much non-shippy Sherlock Holmes fic, or T- or G-rated shippy fic, at that time, but I think I was only interested in the porn. I was a little surprised to find that I found it quite hot. I’d thought M/F would be more my thing, but there were plenty of Holmes/Watson fics that did it for me (indeed, more so than a lot of the M/F stuff I found when I branched out later on).
I enjoyed what I read enough that I visited the site pretty frequently after that. I was able to identify my particular kink through reading Holmes/Watson fic: this was the first time I was seeking out erotic material, as opposed to consuming stuff when it happened to come my way, as sex scenes in published fiction for example, and the ability to search and associated need to work out what I wanted to search for combined with the larger volume I was reading led me to work out what it was that the scenes I found most arousing had in common with each other.
I don’t remember exactly when or in what order these happened, but some time probably within the first six months:
•I decided to check out some F/F fics, not expecting them to do anything for me (I thought I was straight), but just out of thoroughness and curiosity I suppose. I’m sure I wasn’t looking in the Sherlock Holmes fandom for those; most likely it was Harry Potter fic, but I can’t remember for sure. Anyway, that was what led to my discovery that I was sapphic.
•I started reading Harry Potter fic. Some of what I read was shippy, and some was porn, but I didn’t initially have anything I particularly shipped in that fandom, so to begin with I largely read gen stuff, or was reading shippy fic for other aspects of the plot. Later I was actively looking for fic for various ships, largely femslash, alongside still reading gen, although I was more in a position of enjoying a whole lot of ships than of shipping anything more than anything else. Then I discovered Ginny/Luna, which was my only Harry Potter ship at the time (I have a couple more now that I ship to a somewhat lesser extent than Ginny/Luna). But there weren’t that many Ginny/Luna fics, so I was still reading plenty of other ships too. In terms of gen fics, I enjoyed canon divergence; there were plenty of fics around where people either changed something early on (e.g. Harry being sorted into Slytherin) or were writing their own plots for the next book before it had come out.
•I stopped reading Sherlock Holmes fic, once I realised why more and more people seemed to be writing the same version of a modern AU and it was clear I wasn’t going to be able to find fics based on the book in among all the fics based on the TV series. (I’m not sure whether that was a case of me not realising there were separate book and TV fandom tags because I’d always just searched under the umbrella tag, or whether there was only the umbrella tag back then, or whether the separate tags existed and I knew about them but people writing for the TV fandom tagged the book fandom too often enough that, given the TV fandom was so much larger, they swamped the book-based fics.) In any case, I’d mostly been into this fandom for the porn, and now I knew what my kink was it made more sense to just search for that, and hope to find something from a fandom I was familiar with, and failing that to read fandom blind.
I also discovered Harry Potter fic on or through other sites. There was one I remember which had listings posted by the authors/recommendations posted by other people which linked out to the fic itself hosted elsewhere (most often LiveJournal); it was divided by genre (named after locations in Hogwarts) and was essentially a forum with (in the case of the romance fics) a thread for each ship to post the recommendations under. (Something that particularly sticks in my mind is that among the various things not allowed was bestiality, which was fair enough, but there were two exceptions: Aberforth/goat and anyone/Giant Squid, which seemed bizarre even though I can sort of vaguely see the rationale.) Communities, challenges and kink memes on LiveJournal were also good sources of fic.
All my reading at this time was done on my laptop, because that was the only device I could really access fic on. I didn’t get a smartphone till 2016, and while my phone did technically have the ability to access the internet, with a tiny screen and limited memory it wasn’t really good enough for doing much at all, not to mention it couldn’t connect to wifi and data was relatively expensive with the pay-as-you-go provider I was with at the time. I would have liked to be able to read in a more comfortable position than sitting in front of the computer (in bed would have been ideal), and also on public transport or out and about, but that just wasn’t an option at that point. I remember when AO3 introduced the download feature I was thrilled because, even though I would still need to be reading on my laptop, this meant I could download PDFs in advance to read in my hotel room in the evening when I was at a conference, without having to worry about getting my laptop connected to the hotel wifi (and potentially pay to do so).
Then in 2011, during the brief window of time after I stopped boycotting Amazon for one reason and before I started boycotting for another, I got a Kindle Keyboard, and that was an absolute gamechanger. (The choice of this over any other e-reader was also partly influenced by an xkcd comic, which mentioned the fact that some models included a mobile internet connection, with unlimited use and no payment after the initial purchase price, which I thought was very cool.) It was amazing to be able to read wherever I wanted — on trains, in parks, and yes, in bed. Although it did come with an “experimental” browser, which I certainly did get some use out of, that was pretty slow, so I would access AO3 from my laptop, find a bunch of fics that looked like I might enjoy them, and download them all and transfer them to the Kindle. Of course the downside to that was that the Kindle only showed the titles and authors, and while I could arrange things into collections, it would be prohibitively complex to have them cover even all the different tags (whether ship, category, rating, character, or additional) I was interested in, never mind the possible combinations of those. So it wasn’t always the easiest to locate whatever I was in the mood for at any particular moment; and I probably didn’t actually get round to reading half of what I had on there. But still, I was just very happy to have portable fanfic.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning that at this time I rarely bought new physical books; I would sometimes buy second hand, but not all that often. I was a student again, and so couldn’t afford to splash out. Once I had the Kindle, I only bought a handful of ebooks for it, again for budget reasons, but also because it wasn’t that long before I was boycotting Amazon again and I hadn’t yet discovered how to buy from other vendors and convert the file. So fanfic and public domain works from Project Gutenberg were really all I was reading on there. That is probably part of the reason I read so much fanfic; and later on when I could afford to buy books again (provided I didn’t go too wild) I certainly went through phases when I would read that and not any fic (well, maybe some porn now and then, but apart from that) for months or even over a year at a time. But it’s definitely not the whole story; I love fic in its own right (and I’m the kind of person who goes through phases with everything anyway).
In 2012, I read Homestuck, and as soon as I’d caught up to the latest update, I headed to AO3 for the fic. I like to let updates accumulate for a bit for things like webcomics, so I can binge read rather than just getting one page at a time as and when they come out, so I would do that, then go to AO3 and download a whole lot of fics, and then read those while I let some time pass before my next binge read. That way I avoided spoilers; although as fandoms go Homestuck tends to be less spoilery anyway due to the large proportion of AU fics. I shipped Rose♡Kanaya, but again I wasn’t just looking for that. There were some ships I enjoyed more than others, but few I’d try to avoid, and I went more by whether the premise appealed to me. I think Homestuck was probably where I first encountered fic written in the second person, and that did feel a little odd just for the first one or two (in a way that canon, also in second person, didn’t), but it quickly came to just seem normal, and indeed for Homestuck fics (not for other fandoms) I soon found that third person was what seemed slightly odd and took a little getting into whenever I found one. Homestuck was also, I think, where I first realised that fics can be as well written as, or even better than, published fiction. That’s certainly not to say there aren’t fics like that in other fandoms, because there definitely are. It’s just where I first came across them.
Homestuck was the bulk of the fics I read between 2012 and maybe 2020. For the first few years I read a lot of fic, and then after that I’d alternate between phases of reading fic and reading other stuff. I did sometimes read from other fandoms. I was still often reading fandom blind for my kink, and I had a brief St Trinian’s phase and a brief The Thick Of It phase. Besides that, I’d occasionally look for fic for other fandoms after I’d just watched/read canon, sometimes with a view to actually reading some and sometimes just out of curiosity as to what people had made of it, but in practice when it was the former I’d download some fics but by the time I’d put them on my Kindle the moment would have passed. (I’d do that a bit with Homestuck as well: there’d be a shiptease in canon and I’d get the urge to see whether people had written fic for that ship in response.)
From 2020 to 2024 I was mostly reading published fiction (largely as ebooks). I’d still read Homestuck fic from time to time, but I wasn’t as into canon following the conclusion (which I finally found time to read in 2019) and the Epilogues, both of which soured me a bit on it. I also had some single-fic (or single-series) dips into other fandoms: somewhat randomly a Riverdale one I found in the spring of 2020 when I suddenly craved fic that dealt with the COVID quarantine (I’ve never seen the show so I was fandom blind for that one), and a rewrite of Twilight by someone involved in the sporking of the original that I’d enjoyed. (Sporkings and other things I downloaded from webpages and turned into ebooks were the third category of things I read on my Kindle.) In 2022 I started reading Harry Potter fics again, although mostly just ones I saw recommended: it wasn’t that I set out to look for Harry Potter fics (if I’d wanted that I still had a bunch already downloaded that I either hadn’t read yet or had read so long ago I might as well be reading them for the first time), but just that I kept on seeing people mention particular fics and thinking they sounded interesting, and quite a few of those were in collections of people’s favourites on AO3 and I got to looking to see what else was in there. (I’d also been soured on canon for Harry Potter by JKR’s TERFery — I tried to read the books again separating the art from the artist and stalled in the fifth book — but for some reason my level of interest in fic was higher than for Homestuck after that happened.)
It was also in 2023 that I started reading fics on my phone (which may not be unrelated to my reading Harry Potter fic again - it’s much easier to follow a link to a recommendation and start reading when you’re doing all that on one device). I was still reading on my Kindle when I got my first smartphone in 2016, and that phone didn’t have a huge amount of spare memory and what there was I was already using for other things, so I couldn’t install an e-reader app. I could have read fics in the browser, but I just wasn’t in the habit of doing that. When that one broke and I replaced it, I had a lot more memory to play with and put an e-reader app on there (ReadEra, which I highly recommend) intending it would be a back-up for the times when my Kindle broke (the screen does crack every couple of years or so, making it unusable till it’s replaced) or if I didn’t have it with me. But of course it’s a lot simpler to keep reading on the same device rather than switching, and I always had my phone but had to remember to bring my Kindle if I wanted it, and the Kindle was bulkier than the phone, and I was always worried about breaking it if I took it anywhere, so I quickly ended up just using the phone. It’s also a lot quicker to organise my downloaded fics with the app than with the Kindle, because while the Kindle was quick enough to respond while actually reading a fic or book and turning the pages, when doing anything else with it there was often a delay of as much as half a minute between pressing the button and the action happening. I do miss the e-ink screen, though, particularly reading in bed or out and about on a sunny day. I do vaguely mean to get back into using it at least some of the time.
And then in 2024 I played Ace Attorney, and before I even finished the first game I was shipping Phoenix/Edgeworth and heading over to AO3 to find fic of them. It wasn’t the first time I’d ever shipped anything that strongly — I have a bunch of ships scattered across random fandoms — and it wasn’t even the first time I’d wanted to read fic for something I shipped. It wasn’t always the case for all of my ships that I would want to read stuff for them, but it certainly had happened before. In those cases, though, it usually turned out that there wasn’t much, if any, fic for them, and what there was mostly didn’t particularly hit the spot (for me). This time, I struck gold. They were by far the largest ship in a decent sized fandom, and the majority of the fics I read were what I wanted. I have read some Ace Attorney gen fics, and have looked a bit for other ships in the fandom, but overwhelmingly I’ve been working my way through the Phoenix/Edgeworth tag (in reverse chronological order). That’s the first time I’ve been so focused on one ship in any fandom.
By this point, I’d started mostly accessing AO3 using my phone’s browser. Again, it was simpler to download stuff and have it on my phone right away, rather than downloading on a computer and then transferring over (although I do periodically back up the downloads from my phone to an external drive via my computer). I went through a phase where I’d read anything under about 5K words in the browser initially and then decide if I wanted to download it, and with anything longer than that to begin with I’d start reading and download if I wanted to continue, but then I moved to just downloading longer fics before starting to read because it was a pain finding where I’d got to in the downloaded fic. But since I was downloading almost everything I read anyway (a fic has to be pretty bad, and also not so bad it’s good, before I’m sure I’ll never want to read it again), and since for some reason downloads from AO3 don’t work for me on mobile data, only on wifi (though browsing the site still works fine on mobile data) so that if I read a fic while I was out and about I wouldn’t be able to download and close the tab right away but would have to remember to do it later, and since sometimes I’d be on a train passing through a remote area with little mobile signal or would temporarily be without internet for some other reason, after maybe six months of that I switched to just downloading everything in advance again.
And then to my surprise I actually started writing Ace Attorney fic myself (mostly not centred round Phoenix/Edgeworth though that is often somewhere in the background). But that’s a story for another post.
I first heard about fanfic probably in my early to mid twenties, but I didn’t get round to checking it out until my late twenties. At that time I was a regular reader of the webcomic xkcd, and was in the habit of visiting the associated forum to see what other people had to say about each comic as it came out. The 15th March 2010 comic Porn For Women had a reference to fanfic (in the hover text), and someone in the forum mentioned Archive of Our Own as a place to find it. I took a look out of curiosity, not really expecting it to be hugely my thing, but thinking maybe it would be funny and/or hot.
I started off looking at Sherlock Holmes fics, because that was the first fandom that occurred to me which I was familiar with and which there might be fics for. I had a friend who half jokingly and half seriously shipped Holmes and Watson, so that was probably why it was the first one I thought of. I don’t remember if there was much non-shippy Sherlock Holmes fic, or T- or G-rated shippy fic, at that time, but I think I was only interested in the porn. I was a little surprised to find that I found it quite hot. I’d thought M/F would be more my thing, but there were plenty of Holmes/Watson fics that did it for me (indeed, more so than a lot of the M/F stuff I found when I branched out later on).
I enjoyed what I read enough that I visited the site pretty frequently after that. I was able to identify my particular kink through reading Holmes/Watson fic: this was the first time I was seeking out erotic material, as opposed to consuming stuff when it happened to come my way, as sex scenes in published fiction for example, and the ability to search and associated need to work out what I wanted to search for combined with the larger volume I was reading led me to work out what it was that the scenes I found most arousing had in common with each other.
I don’t remember exactly when or in what order these happened, but some time probably within the first six months:
•I decided to check out some F/F fics, not expecting them to do anything for me (I thought I was straight), but just out of thoroughness and curiosity I suppose. I’m sure I wasn’t looking in the Sherlock Holmes fandom for those; most likely it was Harry Potter fic, but I can’t remember for sure. Anyway, that was what led to my discovery that I was sapphic.
•I started reading Harry Potter fic. Some of what I read was shippy, and some was porn, but I didn’t initially have anything I particularly shipped in that fandom, so to begin with I largely read gen stuff, or was reading shippy fic for other aspects of the plot. Later I was actively looking for fic for various ships, largely femslash, alongside still reading gen, although I was more in a position of enjoying a whole lot of ships than of shipping anything more than anything else. Then I discovered Ginny/Luna, which was my only Harry Potter ship at the time (I have a couple more now that I ship to a somewhat lesser extent than Ginny/Luna). But there weren’t that many Ginny/Luna fics, so I was still reading plenty of other ships too. In terms of gen fics, I enjoyed canon divergence; there were plenty of fics around where people either changed something early on (e.g. Harry being sorted into Slytherin) or were writing their own plots for the next book before it had come out.
•I stopped reading Sherlock Holmes fic, once I realised why more and more people seemed to be writing the same version of a modern AU and it was clear I wasn’t going to be able to find fics based on the book in among all the fics based on the TV series. (I’m not sure whether that was a case of me not realising there were separate book and TV fandom tags because I’d always just searched under the umbrella tag, or whether there was only the umbrella tag back then, or whether the separate tags existed and I knew about them but people writing for the TV fandom tagged the book fandom too often enough that, given the TV fandom was so much larger, they swamped the book-based fics.) In any case, I’d mostly been into this fandom for the porn, and now I knew what my kink was it made more sense to just search for that, and hope to find something from a fandom I was familiar with, and failing that to read fandom blind.
I also discovered Harry Potter fic on or through other sites. There was one I remember which had listings posted by the authors/recommendations posted by other people which linked out to the fic itself hosted elsewhere (most often LiveJournal); it was divided by genre (named after locations in Hogwarts) and was essentially a forum with (in the case of the romance fics) a thread for each ship to post the recommendations under. (Something that particularly sticks in my mind is that among the various things not allowed was bestiality, which was fair enough, but there were two exceptions: Aberforth/goat and anyone/Giant Squid, which seemed bizarre even though I can sort of vaguely see the rationale.) Communities, challenges and kink memes on LiveJournal were also good sources of fic.
All my reading at this time was done on my laptop, because that was the only device I could really access fic on. I didn’t get a smartphone till 2016, and while my phone did technically have the ability to access the internet, with a tiny screen and limited memory it wasn’t really good enough for doing much at all, not to mention it couldn’t connect to wifi and data was relatively expensive with the pay-as-you-go provider I was with at the time. I would have liked to be able to read in a more comfortable position than sitting in front of the computer (in bed would have been ideal), and also on public transport or out and about, but that just wasn’t an option at that point. I remember when AO3 introduced the download feature I was thrilled because, even though I would still need to be reading on my laptop, this meant I could download PDFs in advance to read in my hotel room in the evening when I was at a conference, without having to worry about getting my laptop connected to the hotel wifi (and potentially pay to do so).
Then in 2011, during the brief window of time after I stopped boycotting Amazon for one reason and before I started boycotting for another, I got a Kindle Keyboard, and that was an absolute gamechanger. (The choice of this over any other e-reader was also partly influenced by an xkcd comic, which mentioned the fact that some models included a mobile internet connection, with unlimited use and no payment after the initial purchase price, which I thought was very cool.) It was amazing to be able to read wherever I wanted — on trains, in parks, and yes, in bed. Although it did come with an “experimental” browser, which I certainly did get some use out of, that was pretty slow, so I would access AO3 from my laptop, find a bunch of fics that looked like I might enjoy them, and download them all and transfer them to the Kindle. Of course the downside to that was that the Kindle only showed the titles and authors, and while I could arrange things into collections, it would be prohibitively complex to have them cover even all the different tags (whether ship, category, rating, character, or additional) I was interested in, never mind the possible combinations of those. So it wasn’t always the easiest to locate whatever I was in the mood for at any particular moment; and I probably didn’t actually get round to reading half of what I had on there. But still, I was just very happy to have portable fanfic.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning that at this time I rarely bought new physical books; I would sometimes buy second hand, but not all that often. I was a student again, and so couldn’t afford to splash out. Once I had the Kindle, I only bought a handful of ebooks for it, again for budget reasons, but also because it wasn’t that long before I was boycotting Amazon again and I hadn’t yet discovered how to buy from other vendors and convert the file. So fanfic and public domain works from Project Gutenberg were really all I was reading on there. That is probably part of the reason I read so much fanfic; and later on when I could afford to buy books again (provided I didn’t go too wild) I certainly went through phases when I would read that and not any fic (well, maybe some porn now and then, but apart from that) for months or even over a year at a time. But it’s definitely not the whole story; I love fic in its own right (and I’m the kind of person who goes through phases with everything anyway).
In 2012, I read Homestuck, and as soon as I’d caught up to the latest update, I headed to AO3 for the fic. I like to let updates accumulate for a bit for things like webcomics, so I can binge read rather than just getting one page at a time as and when they come out, so I would do that, then go to AO3 and download a whole lot of fics, and then read those while I let some time pass before my next binge read. That way I avoided spoilers; although as fandoms go Homestuck tends to be less spoilery anyway due to the large proportion of AU fics. I shipped Rose♡Kanaya, but again I wasn’t just looking for that. There were some ships I enjoyed more than others, but few I’d try to avoid, and I went more by whether the premise appealed to me. I think Homestuck was probably where I first encountered fic written in the second person, and that did feel a little odd just for the first one or two (in a way that canon, also in second person, didn’t), but it quickly came to just seem normal, and indeed for Homestuck fics (not for other fandoms) I soon found that third person was what seemed slightly odd and took a little getting into whenever I found one. Homestuck was also, I think, where I first realised that fics can be as well written as, or even better than, published fiction. That’s certainly not to say there aren’t fics like that in other fandoms, because there definitely are. It’s just where I first came across them.
Homestuck was the bulk of the fics I read between 2012 and maybe 2020. For the first few years I read a lot of fic, and then after that I’d alternate between phases of reading fic and reading other stuff. I did sometimes read from other fandoms. I was still often reading fandom blind for my kink, and I had a brief St Trinian’s phase and a brief The Thick Of It phase. Besides that, I’d occasionally look for fic for other fandoms after I’d just watched/read canon, sometimes with a view to actually reading some and sometimes just out of curiosity as to what people had made of it, but in practice when it was the former I’d download some fics but by the time I’d put them on my Kindle the moment would have passed. (I’d do that a bit with Homestuck as well: there’d be a shiptease in canon and I’d get the urge to see whether people had written fic for that ship in response.)
From 2020 to 2024 I was mostly reading published fiction (largely as ebooks). I’d still read Homestuck fic from time to time, but I wasn’t as into canon following the conclusion (which I finally found time to read in 2019) and the Epilogues, both of which soured me a bit on it. I also had some single-fic (or single-series) dips into other fandoms: somewhat randomly a Riverdale one I found in the spring of 2020 when I suddenly craved fic that dealt with the COVID quarantine (I’ve never seen the show so I was fandom blind for that one), and a rewrite of Twilight by someone involved in the sporking of the original that I’d enjoyed. (Sporkings and other things I downloaded from webpages and turned into ebooks were the third category of things I read on my Kindle.) In 2022 I started reading Harry Potter fics again, although mostly just ones I saw recommended: it wasn’t that I set out to look for Harry Potter fics (if I’d wanted that I still had a bunch already downloaded that I either hadn’t read yet or had read so long ago I might as well be reading them for the first time), but just that I kept on seeing people mention particular fics and thinking they sounded interesting, and quite a few of those were in collections of people’s favourites on AO3 and I got to looking to see what else was in there. (I’d also been soured on canon for Harry Potter by JKR’s TERFery — I tried to read the books again separating the art from the artist and stalled in the fifth book — but for some reason my level of interest in fic was higher than for Homestuck after that happened.)
It was also in 2023 that I started reading fics on my phone (which may not be unrelated to my reading Harry Potter fic again - it’s much easier to follow a link to a recommendation and start reading when you’re doing all that on one device). I was still reading on my Kindle when I got my first smartphone in 2016, and that phone didn’t have a huge amount of spare memory and what there was I was already using for other things, so I couldn’t install an e-reader app. I could have read fics in the browser, but I just wasn’t in the habit of doing that. When that one broke and I replaced it, I had a lot more memory to play with and put an e-reader app on there (ReadEra, which I highly recommend) intending it would be a back-up for the times when my Kindle broke (the screen does crack every couple of years or so, making it unusable till it’s replaced) or if I didn’t have it with me. But of course it’s a lot simpler to keep reading on the same device rather than switching, and I always had my phone but had to remember to bring my Kindle if I wanted it, and the Kindle was bulkier than the phone, and I was always worried about breaking it if I took it anywhere, so I quickly ended up just using the phone. It’s also a lot quicker to organise my downloaded fics with the app than with the Kindle, because while the Kindle was quick enough to respond while actually reading a fic or book and turning the pages, when doing anything else with it there was often a delay of as much as half a minute between pressing the button and the action happening. I do miss the e-ink screen, though, particularly reading in bed or out and about on a sunny day. I do vaguely mean to get back into using it at least some of the time.
And then in 2024 I played Ace Attorney, and before I even finished the first game I was shipping Phoenix/Edgeworth and heading over to AO3 to find fic of them. It wasn’t the first time I’d ever shipped anything that strongly — I have a bunch of ships scattered across random fandoms — and it wasn’t even the first time I’d wanted to read fic for something I shipped. It wasn’t always the case for all of my ships that I would want to read stuff for them, but it certainly had happened before. In those cases, though, it usually turned out that there wasn’t much, if any, fic for them, and what there was mostly didn’t particularly hit the spot (for me). This time, I struck gold. They were by far the largest ship in a decent sized fandom, and the majority of the fics I read were what I wanted. I have read some Ace Attorney gen fics, and have looked a bit for other ships in the fandom, but overwhelmingly I’ve been working my way through the Phoenix/Edgeworth tag (in reverse chronological order). That’s the first time I’ve been so focused on one ship in any fandom.
By this point, I’d started mostly accessing AO3 using my phone’s browser. Again, it was simpler to download stuff and have it on my phone right away, rather than downloading on a computer and then transferring over (although I do periodically back up the downloads from my phone to an external drive via my computer). I went through a phase where I’d read anything under about 5K words in the browser initially and then decide if I wanted to download it, and with anything longer than that to begin with I’d start reading and download if I wanted to continue, but then I moved to just downloading longer fics before starting to read because it was a pain finding where I’d got to in the downloaded fic. But since I was downloading almost everything I read anyway (a fic has to be pretty bad, and also not so bad it’s good, before I’m sure I’ll never want to read it again), and since for some reason downloads from AO3 don’t work for me on mobile data, only on wifi (though browsing the site still works fine on mobile data) so that if I read a fic while I was out and about I wouldn’t be able to download and close the tab right away but would have to remember to do it later, and since sometimes I’d be on a train passing through a remote area with little mobile signal or would temporarily be without internet for some other reason, after maybe six months of that I switched to just downloading everything in advance again.
And then to my surprise I actually started writing Ace Attorney fic myself (mostly not centred round Phoenix/Edgeworth though that is often somewhere in the background). But that’s a story for another post.
