Fandom Didn’t Ruin My Writing. It Built It.

The Problem Started with Stargate SG-1

I was a stay-at-home mom with a newborn when Stargate SG-1 quietly rewired the way I understood storytelling.

At first, I blamed Richard Dean Anderson. I grew up watching MacGyver, so Jack O’Neill already felt familiar before the Stargate even opened. Sarcastic. Emotionally repressed. Funny enough to distract everybody from noticing the grief underneath the jokes.

But what hooked me wasn’t the science fiction. It was the emotional realism underneath it. The characters felt like people carrying entire lives beneath the dialogue.

Sam Carter mattered to me immediately because she was brilliant without apologizing for it. She never made herself smaller to make other people comfortable, and as a woman who spent years trying not to sound “too much,” I noticed that instantly.

Daniel Jackson hit differently. He felt lonely in a way I recognized before I fully understood why. He knew things that mattered, but people dismissed him anyway. There was something painfully familiar about that.

Extending Stories Instead of Rewriting Them

Then there was Jack and Sam.

Nothing huge happened between them at first. That was the point. Everything lived in implication. A glance lasting slightly too long. A conversation interrupted at exactly the wrong moment. Affection buried underneath professionalism because neither of them could acknowledge what was happening.

Episodes would end, and I would still be mentally sitting inside them afterward.

What happened after the camera cut away? What conversations never made it onscreen because television had forty-two minutes and several explosions to squeeze into each episode?

That was the beginning of fanfiction for me.

I wasn’t trying to replace canon. Most of the time, I loved canon exactly as it was. I just wanted to stay inside the emotional aftermath longer than television allowed.

I wasn’t rewriting stories. I was extending them.

At the time, I didn’t realize I was also teaching myself pacing, restraint, subtext, and emotional tension. I just knew I cared more about the conversations after the explosions than the explosions themselves.

Sherlock Holmes Ruined My Ability to Ignore Subtext

I loved Sherlock Holmes long before Sherlock existed.

I devoured Arthur Conan Doyle stories because I loved observation and the idea that tiny details mattered if you paid enough attention. Romance never interested me much in those stories.

Then Benedict Cumberbatch showed up in a Belstaff coat looking like somebody engineered Sherlock Holmes specifically to emotionally destabilize fandom communities.

Suddenly, I cared very much.

What fascinated me about Sherlock and John wasn’t necessarily romance at first. It was the intensity of the connection itself. Every conversation felt layered. Dialogue happened on the surface while an entirely different emotional conversation unfolded underneath it.

Sherlock sharpened the way I thought about intimacy in fiction. It made me realize how much affection can exist through observation alone. Somebody remembering your habits. Somebody noticing details that everybody else overlooks. Concern disguising itself as irritation because vulnerability feels too dangerous.

Apparently, I Like Emotionally Repressed Idiots

By then, patterns in the relationships I gravitated toward were becoming difficult to ignore.

Jack and Sam revolved around the conflict between duty and desire. Sherlock and John were emotionally constipated idiots circling each other for years. Oliver and Tommy in Arrow felt like unresolved emotional damage wrapped in expensive jackets.

Nobody communicated properly. Everybody loved fiercely. Most of them would rather fake their own deaths than have an emotionally honest conversation.

Which, in hindsight, explains a great deal about my writing.

I kept gravitating toward characters who protected people badly while loving them deeply. Characters who could survive monsters, war zones, torture, apocalypse-level disasters, and emotional devastation, but would completely short-circuit if somebody asked them to discuss their feelings honestly for five consecutive minutes.

Apparently, that became my literary brand somewhere along the way.

Then Supernatural Came Along and Made Everything Worse

Or better. Emotionally speaking, hard to say.

Supernatural affected me differently because I almost never felt the urge to write for it. That surprised me because by then extending stories had become instinctive for me. Episodes ended, and my brain usually just kept going automatically.

Supernatural didn’t work that way.

I wrote one crossover involving Doctor Who and Metatron called “How the Doctor Got His Wings,” which still sounds vaguely unhinged when I say it out loud, but beyond that, I mostly absorbed Supernatural rather than expanded it.

Part of that is probably because the show already operated at maximum emotional volume. Grief, sacrifice, loyalty, guilt, protectiveness, trauma, and humor masking pain already filled every available inch of narrative space.

Found Family Started Feeling Real

And underneath all of it sat found family.

That was the part that lodged itself permanently in my brain.

“Family don’t end in blood” eventually stopped sounding like dialogue and started sounding true.

Around that same period, I had moved in with two close friends, Steve and Kevin, and I think that changed the way I understood relationships too. I was suddenly watching people choose each other every day in ordinary ways that mattered more than dramatic speeches ever could.

Cooking dinner together. Building routines. Taking care of each other consistently.

Once I recognized that kind of chosen family in real life, I started seeing it everywhere in fiction too.

And honestly, it’s all over my writing now. People protecting each other badly. Loving each other sideways. Characters who would throw themselves into danger for somebody else but cannot discuss their own feelings without behaving like emotionally compromised raccoons.

The Internet Was a Very Strange Place to Learn How to Write

The fandom internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s was absolute chaos.

And I say that affectionately.

Everything felt fragmented in a way that somehow made communities stronger. You had FanFiction.net open in one tab, LiveJournal communities in another, and message boards dedicated entirely to analyzing fictional eye contact in yet another.

Then Tumblr arrived and made everybody collectively worse.

Somebody could post a blurry screenshot of Sherlock looking mildly sad, and the internet would spend the next week emotionally spiraling about it.

Ridiculous? Completely. Fun? Absolutely.

You saw the same usernames constantly. The same people reacting to episodes together every week. The same fandom jokes resurfacing until they practically became another language.

Learning to Write in Public

Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, I accidentally became a better writer.

Not because anybody formally taught me anything. Fandom readers simply notice everything. They know immediately when dialogue feels wrong, or characters suddenly stop sounding like themselves just to force a plot point into existence.

People forgive questionable science and dramatic coincidences. They will even forgive unresolved sexual tension stretching across geological time periods. Emotionally false character writing, though? Absolutely not.

So I started learning pacing and emotional payoff in public without realizing that was what I was doing.

Readers waited months for updates if the emotional tension felt earned enough. Sometimes years. Even now, people still occasionally ask if I’m ever going to finish my SG-1 epic “You Can Call Me Sir” or reference Sherlock one-shots I barely remember writing because I originally posted them after getting emotionally attacked by television at one in the morning.

At the time, none of this felt serious. I wasn’t thinking about developing a literary voice. I was mostly frustrated because the episodes kept ending just as the emotional fallout was finally getting interesting.

Writing the Emotional Aftermath

That was always the real problem.

You spend an hour watching characters survive grief, betrayal, impossible decisions, or years of unresolved tension, and then suddenly the credits roll before anybody processes any of it properly.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting there thinking, “Emotionally speaking, these people are absolutely not fine.”

So I wrote the aftermaths. The quieter conversations. The emotional cleanup television usually cuts away first.

Then my father died in 2010, and for a while, the continuation disappeared completely.

I still watched shows. I still hovered around fandom spaces occasionally. But the instinct to extend stories stopped. Episodes ended, and my brain simply let them end there.

That frightened me more than I admitted at the time because writing had always existed somewhere in the background of my life.

Then suddenly there was static instead.

When Fiction Went Quiet

People love the mythology of the tortured artist. Movies about writers always seem convinced that emotional devastation automatically produces genius-level work.

That has never really been true for me.

Depression doesn’t make me write beautiful longing and romance. Mostly, it makes me tired. Anxiety makes my brain loud in all the wrong ways. Grief flattened everything emotionally for a while until fiction felt unreachable.

What changed during that period wasn’t my need to write. It was the type of writing that surfaced.

My nonfiction voice became sharper and angrier. Less interested in yearning and much more interested in honesty.

A lot of my later writing about chronic illness, survival, frustration, and exhaustion came from that shift. Fanfiction usually came from fascination. Nonfiction tends to arrive carrying a crowbar.

Both versions are still me.

The Stories Never Really Left

Eventually, fiction came back quietly.

When I started commuting to Walter Reed by train every day in 2012, something about the rhythm reopened the creative space in my brain. I would sit there listening to music, staring out the window, replaying scenes from shows in my head, and eventually, characters started talking again.

I would say not literally, because that sounds medically concerning. But creatively, sometimes it genuinely felt that way.

My emotional continuation came back.

And when I look at my writing life now, I can trace so much of it back to fandom.

Not because fandom created me as a writer. I was already writing stories long before any of these shows entered my life.

But fandom changed the way I understood emotional storytelling. It taught me to pay attention to aftermaths, restraint, silence, subtext, and the things characters cannot say directly.

Most importantly, it taught me that stories don’t really end once they matter to people enough. Sometimes they keep unfolding quietly in the background long after the credits roll.