Fanfiction Paranoia

"If winners get to write history, what do losers write? Fanfiction." - Princess Elnore of Ragnaboards.

I remember clearly why I never really got around to reading written works on the net until late 2003, even though I first got online some five years earlier. I was actually around fourteen at that time when I discovered the internet, eager to see anything related to my favorite animated series.

I remember being a fan of Gundam Wing at that time.

There was this one site that I visited for pictures of the Gundams (robots from the series) and I found the site real cool. So I kept on saving them to my pc when I noticed this tiny link on the side of the screen that said "Fiction".

Being the naive e-moron that I was, I thought it was some sort of free copy of official additional storyline for the series. I thought, hey, I've seen the whole series but I want to know what happened before or after those events so I might as well read this.

So there I was reading the whole thing. The story was pretty quality for my standards at that time (probably because I only knew basic English then) and I thought the battles were rather flashy. Cool, I thought. It's not exactly visual, but at least I get to use my imagination.

Somewhere in the middle of the story, after around 30 minutes of reading, two heroes in the story, Quatre Winner and Trowa Barton got trapped in this room. Which was strange - since they weren't even supposed to go there. I began to suspect that somethign weird was about, but I thought, hmmm - yeah. I should read anyway.

As it turns out, after being trapped in the room, the two "heroes" decided to have a change of heart and help find each other's real self. By change of heart I mean change of sexual preference from women to men. ANd by "find each other's real self" I mean anally copulate.

I remember taking a long shower after reading that section. I remember crying myself to sleep. It was like taking candy from strangers and being kidnapped and shit, against my will. I felt tricked and decided any story written on the net will be any of the following:

a) a scam
b) about two men having sex
c) a scam involving two men having sex

It wasn't really until I got into Ragnarok Online's message board that I started reading again, mainly because Riina, a good friend of mine thought this would be the best therapy to cure my recently acquired phobia of anything fan-made.

And it's all good I suppose.

But I still cry myself to sleep sometimes.