October 10th will mark one month since year since I joined AFF, and I thought I'd do a few blogs on different topics over the week. Over the year, a lot of things have been learned, and a lot of things have changed.

I uploaded my first original fanfic to FanFiction.net in 2007, meaning it's been eight years since I started doing this.

I wrote anime fanfiction until I realized one day that I had the "What if...?" question about an episode of iCarly, and a personal ethical dilemma: Anime was one thing: The characters were all drawings, all fictional. In live-action TV, the characters are fictional, but the actors portraying them aren't. If I was imagining Sam and Freddie kissing, I was imagining Jennette McCurdy and Nathan Kress kissing, and it felt wrong to treat two real people like my personal literary Barbie dolls.

I got over it. Imagining their characters, their likenesses, wasn't the same as imagining the real people doing it.

As you can imagine, this time last year, having been an EXOstan for about half a year, I didn't even want to read EXO fanfiction. Live action characters were one thing, but real people not even playing a role? Imagining them doing things, treating their personas as my own, and sharing such a disrespectful act with others? It was just so... so weird and wrong on so many additional levels.

I got over it again, mostly thanks to the help of a little fic called The Boy Wore Black (http://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/675183/). It was rated M, but it was intriguing. I don't remember if I made an account just so I could read it, or if I had already made one and just not encountered a fic like this, but this was the fic that changed everything for me. It was fantastic. I left it open in a tab on my phone for weeks, waiting for the next update, before I realized the author wouldn't be updating anything soon.

I realized that when we write fanfiction, we aren't reducing humans to toys, but we are using their personas, and many high-publicity figures--K-pop stars especially--have personas that don't even fully match with who they really are. They're somewhere between reality and acting. They're a face. If I'm writing about Chanyeol, I'm writing about Chanyeol, whom I know a ton about, not Park Chan-Yeol, whom I don't know jack about. Even though now I don't really care, at the time, putting it like that justified it.

Of couse, most of us fanfic authors are "What if" people by nature, so I already had a few ideas in my head, the first of which was "what if Tao, the guy who seems to like everyone to take care of him, had to take care of everyone else?" That became the sixth fic I wrote: Hyung, I Shunk The Kids! The idea behind the first fic I wrote was a thought I'd had since the day I learned about EXO, watching M's version of Overdose: "The blonde one in the middle looks like a y 19th century doctor with shiny shoes." Lo and behold, in December, I published the first chapter of The Immovable Teacher and the Unstoppable Apprentice. It's still quite possibly my favorite fic that I've published to the site, and definitely one of my top three (the others being Hyung, I Shrunk The Kids and Who's Going Home With You Tonight?)

I'm really glad I got over it.