The FanFair

A Worldwide (& Wattpad) ARMY

A Worldwide (& Wattpad) ARMY

Confession: I love BTS.

Another confession: When I first heard of real-person fanfiction, I was slightly horrified.

Another confession: Fast-forward several years, I am now a (proud?) BTS fanfiction writer.

Shall I explain? If you're interested, keep reading. Grab a snack, this is going to be one long explanation.

Growing up – and now – I was that nerd that never stopped reading. C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe were some of the first books I ever read on my own. I read several Percy Jackson and Harry Potter books in one day. To help me to cope with a friend breakup in high school, I read an entire trilogy of books in two days. I got into heated arguments about pieces of fiction with other students in my AP Literature class. I'm an English major.

However, for my entire childhood, I never thought that I could become a writer. As far as I was concerned, writers were mythical beings, spinning stories out of thoughts like witches spinning straw into gold. I always did well on writing assignments in school; for example, in seventh grade, we were given an assignment in which we were to write a mystery story. My classmates wrote stories that were a few pages long about a piece of cake going missing. I wrote a 20-page long murder mystery. But that wasn't writing. Writing, as I knew it, was an art form.

But then, shortly after my freshman year of high school, I became enlightened with the discovery of a little thing called "fanfiction". (Let's just say that I had a bad habit of not replying to my friends' text messages because I was too busy reading Golden Age Chronicles of Narnia fanfictions.)

Suddenly, my mindset about writing changed. These people were writers, weren't they? And if they could do it, couldn't I? After working up a lot of courage much, much later, I eventually wrote a short fanfiction. When I posted it on the website where I had been drugging myself with Narnia fanfictions for months upon months, it got a pretty nice reception in the form of a few comments. I was feeling pretty good about myself – hey, maybe I can write!

And then, I went through a traumatic experience, and I forgot about writing. I distracted myself from the memories of what had happened that night by binge-watching television shows, burying myself in AP classes – most notably AP Psychology - and signing up for extracurriculars. I didn't write anything involving fiction for a very, very long time.

Also during this time, I had another moment of enlightenment. Due to the enormous amount of homework required for an advanced psychology class I was enrolled in, I tried to find music that I could listen to while also focusing on the seemingly millions of key terms. One of my friends introduced me to the wild world of a Korean pop music genre called "K-pop". From then on, I spent hours upon hours watching intricate and amazing MVs for various groups, such as U-KISS and BOYFRIEND. The two of us spent so much of our time talking about different K-pop songs, music videos, biases, and whatever else we could find out about the genre. Everyone else around us thought we were crazy, but I was happy. It is worth mentioning here that while I love K-pop, I am also a metalhead. Seriously. In the morning I put on my floral skirts and dresses and apply my soft makeup while listening to Bring Me The Horizon literally scream about drug addiction. So to announce that I love K-pop, with its synchronized dancing and beautiful men wearing effeminate makeup, was enough to make my father question my sanity.

Fast-forward a good long while. I was in my first-ever Creative Writing class, and lo and behold, it was forcing me to write. And I was doing alright at it. My instructor, someone that I really cared about and admire to this day, even told me I had talent.