When I was Seven-- Really Twelve-- Years Old

...I'd finished watching my first anime.

In that time there used to be free anime on special sites right on your laptop, just a quick Google search and heck, you even get the new Frozen movie just because.

But I suppose I can't think about fanfiction without thinking about my first exposure. Which included the need that spurned such search history in the first place.

Not that... I knew just what I was looking for.

Angel Beats by Key was an amazing show. You can say it's an opinion but also, a majority of the Internet will agree with me. Though I do admit, it was short. It was or felt, incomplete.

With such a huge, diverse cast of fun characters there was a lot to explore and think on. So many questions which never received answers. For Angel Beats it was: the reincarnation question. Where did the characters end up? Is it together? Is it apart? Who are they now? As Yuri had said in episode twelve, they've "stolen" a life now haven't they? That soul that the world believes is a wholly new person is actually someone who'd already been over the whole life thing once and moved on. And where does the baby go? Their soul that-- did or did not-- exist prior? I can't answer. And soon enough it came to me that the Internet couldn't definitively answer for me either.

A first for me, since it used to be YouTube and search engines had everything. Whatever I wanted to search up there it was. My cartoons, skits about kidnapping and anime torture compilations-- I was a strange child with little supervision on my Internet use.

So thusly I typed...

'Angel Beats Season 2'

Sometimes some other anime 'Season 2'

'Death of Hideki Hinata'

I liked the character but I never find out much about what led him to the afterlife besides a baseball game and a pop fly to second. And an older creep of a student who gave him pills.

What about his family, his other friends? Who let him base his entire self-worth and unknowingly bind his soul to some purgatory Hellscape of a school with gunslinging girls and whatever Angel is?

On a related note I also discovered Clannad. To be frank the resemblance between protagonist and male deutragonist is striking. I'd genuinely believed I'd stumbled onto his life story after the afterworld. Until I realized he was called by a different name. Moot point but true nontheless.

Nevertheless, I did eventually stumble onto Wattpad. Not knowing what it was then I was afraid of making a commitment or having to pay to read. Even so, I was able to find stories promising 'insight' into the life of Yuri Nakamura. It stuck with me as to how she died if not suicide.

I wondered about the other side characters too.

I accepted the idea that Shiina was a modern ninja girl practicing with knives, had a good father but a horrid bitch of a stepmother and died by butterfly knife to the back.

Eventually it became a tick off my viewer/reader checklist. Whatever I want elaboration on, whatever plot points or emotional beats I feel could be used with characters I search up the fanfic community.

More often than not I find stories that satisfy the types of interactions and repartee I want to see.

In my teenage years, fun reading material I didn't take so seriously became a break from my "serious" writing projects. As long as I was writing then I could fiddle with characters I already knew and settings I didn't have to create from scratch.

But like any other character or setting I became fond of what I was bringing to a screen with each tap of the keys. I felt they had worthwhile things to say, even if I didn't convey it in a very articulate or entertaining way.

Fiddling with the craft it turned out that fanfiction is no different than any other story. Now here I am, with several writing accounts, a virtual journal, and my most successful was certainly my first Wattpad account from my high school's server.

I'd say that fanfiction is an expression of passion, a love project by people for other people. There may be a better guarantee to quality when it comes to fan work, spawning it's own universes, without the lures of monetary gain or threat of cancellation. So creators may tell their own stories and even impart themselves on the page.

Any writer on Wattpad, AO3, FF.Net is a serious writer just like their fans are real, serious fans and readers who appreciate a good story and compelling character.

I may ironically be a teenage girl but I'd have to say romance is a peripheral focus of my stories. I would like to toy around with it and incorporate it more, but more than anything since it opens the door to explore so much emotion and the types of plot that can push two people forward or in the worst combinations tear them apart. No, instead I'm writing about trauma. Most often the hurt and sting that comes from fractured relationships, the bitter betrayal of a once dear, intimate friend, the path back towards light and love. Seldom in the way they had before but grown if not weary from their experience. I write about the adult influences who should be there, provide nurture and growth but don't. Who put themselves above the child. The children who are dismissed and talked down to for being children.

If anything, what I write is the feeling that's festered inside me for a long while that feels less caustic to present under Sanders Sides or a ghost boy. I just want to be heard! I just WANT to be appreciated and valued as I AM!