hi, i’m lucy
it is really odd to think about writing an introduction for yourself, particularly when it is to the general hand-wavy internet-y void rather than a specific person. doing it for someone else is a lot easier.
for example:
meet my best friend, molly. she is a giant nerd with a funko pop collection, and she is one of the smartest people i've ever met. she likes winter, when it gets dark earlier in the evening, rewatching shows and movies, reading, drawing, volleyball and her dog. she also enjoys formula 1 (her favorite team is ferrari, and she will support carlos sainz until the day she dies), and she will drink tea at literally any time of day.
see? easy.
doing it for myself feels weird, but i only have to do it once so we're going to break it down with some visual aides.
this is me (hi). my name is lucy, and this photo is pretty cool because it is my doctoral graduation day earlier this year. my thesis was on the marvel cinematic universe (one of my special interests) and post-9/11 US politics.
"that's an odd combo," i hear you say.
an integral piece of the lore is that i'm a military brat - i was born and raised on military bases, so needless to say 9/11 was pretty formative for me. when i got to college i got the chance to combine something i love (marvel) with a topic i have always been interested in (analysing the war on terror and post-9/11 global politics), and i carried that through from undergrad to my masters and my phd.
anyone else who comes from a military background will understand when i say that answering the ‘where are you from?’ question is a nightmare. one of my parents is british, one is australian, i was born in germany in an american hospital, and the first time i ever lived in the uk was when i went to boarding school (who doesn’t love a ‘bullied out of school’ origin story?).
there has always been a lot of change and instability in my life - an environment that someone with autism thrives in, obviously (/sarc) - and from a really young age i latched on to fiction as a constant that i could always rely on: i got my first spider-man comic book when i was 6 and immediately became obsessed with peter parker; i found my love for fantasy with lucy, susan, peter and edmund in narnia; percy jackson gave me an outlet for the fascination i found in ancient greece. not to get too tragic, but in the moments of my childhood and teen years when i was at my loneliest, fictional worlds were my constant companions. with the free-range internet access i had as a preteen of the 2000s/2010s i could unlock even more of these worlds with fansites, tumblr, and most importantly with the discovery of fanfiction (ff.net, you will always be in my heart).
with all that said, here’s a list of of the most important fandoms to me that you can probably expect to see at one point or another in future posts (not exhaustive, but these are the key ones)
marvel
as previously mentioned, this one has been a constant for 23 years and counting. if the fact that i wrote my doctoral thesis on marvel doesn’t tell you where i stand on it, i don’t know what else does.
grishaverse
i found six of crows in 2020 during the first uk lockdown and i was GONE. from the books, to the show, to the fact that i dragged my best friend across an ocean (twice) to go and meet the actors, this series will forever be one of the keystones of who i am because of how much it means to me. i could go on about the grishaverse for ages, but i’m going to save that for a later post.
heartstopper
this is a bit of an ‘if you know you know’, when it comes to the importance it holds.
maasiverse
if you’ve read the intro post to this blog, you’ll know that sarah j maas’ books are how i met molly…this makes them one of my favorite special interests, because they’re the reason i get to call a pretty incredible person my best friend. outside of that, sjm was my gateway back into fantasy after finding the genre a bit hard to get back into after childhood. i found it hard to find a fantasy series i really enjoyed, and after initially resisting reading ACOTAR i gave in and found a series that had me hooked, a character that made me sob with how seen i felt, and it opened the door to crescent city (my favorite sjm series)
marauders
ok. this one is a bit divisive, i’m aware, so let’s get something out of the way before we start: i do not support j.k. rowling, you will find NO support for jkr on this blog, and as far as we’re concerned the harry potter books were written by daniel radcliffe. with that clearly stated, and the transphobe’s name appearing nowhere else on this site because the community in question was created by queer people on the internet in spite of their hateful views (nothing quite like taking a homophobe’s life work and turning it into something you know they absolutely loathe), this fandom will always be one of the most important to me simply because it was my first. i found fanfiction when i was 12 (like i said, free-range internet access), and the first two fandoms i found on ff.net were the hunger games and harry potter. within harry potter, i found a lot of people writing about things that i was CONSTANTLY thinking about (what happened between harry’s third and fourth year for sirius? where did he go? did he talk to remus about the fact that they finally got to know their best friend’s son?). i drifted in and out of the fandom for a few years, until i saw a story that had just been finished…it was called all the young dudes, and it was the marauders at hogwarts. the move from passive investment to intensive obsession was a pretty quick one from there, and while it reached the natural plateau that all interests do it will be a fandom i hold onto forever for a lot of sentimental reasons (including it being the origin of why molly and i will refer to each other as ‘brother’, as two absolutely not psychologically damaged individuals who definitely don’t relate to sirius or regulus)
(n.b: i just asked molly “are we calling formula 1 a fandom?”, and she told me she was defining that as a special interest, so that’s how we’re breaking this down because she does things and i listen to her)
special interests:
formula 1
fun fact! i spent the first ten years of my life a short bike ride away from hockenheim ring, one of the race circuits in germany. i don’t remember a time when formula 1 wasn’t a part of my life - the firs time i went to an f1 race was 1998, at all of three years old, and i like to think that seeing a mclaren win at that age was formative enough that it cemented my papaya support for life.
greek mythology
for anyone not familiar with the british school system, when you’re in primary (elementary) school you do greek and roman history on an alternation for like five years (i’m serious). while the roman history wasn’t as interesting to me, i was so enamored by ancient greece. my parents are both prolific readers and history nerds so they happily encouraged this by providing children’s books based on greece throughout my childhood. when i was around 12 or 13 i got handed an innocuous little book called percy jackson and the lightning thief, and this then proceeded to take up a significant area of my brain that is still occupied by camp half-blood to this day., the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. (picture is baby lucy for halloween…this outfit was repeated more than once).
space
look, i’m autistic. this one is pretty much a part of the dsm-5.
video games
as a kid who didn’t have any siblings in the house and found it difficult to make friends, video games were a god-given solace for an autistic kid with manic depression who sometimes needed something that involved motor skills alongside following a narrative. aside from the initial gameboy handhelds i have been a loyal playstation gamer since i first got to play on my babysitter’s playstation (the OG), and with a ps5 i can be found replaying my favorite game - the last of us - or racing with f1 24.
so now you know a bit more about me. outside of my fandoms and special interests i love to find new bookstores, go to museums (because i am nothing if not a geek), try not to maim myself while i bind fanfiction and rebind books (the same finger has been stitched twice thus far while cutting cover board, but i am nothing if not stubborn), and spending time with my favorite humans.
