Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls So, How long have you been an FOLC?

I don't know if this poll has been done before, but enough newbies are around that it will be nice to get an update.

I just came to the shocking realization that I've been an FOLC since 1995. We discovered the show with the season 2 climax of Clark asking Lois to marry him. Imagine our disappointment to find out that we had to wait until September to find out the answer!

And we've been involved with Fan Fic since 1997.

So, this is really a two part poll with a twist.

To find out the twist, take the poll!

James

I already answered the episode question, but as to the first Fan Fic, I know it was a Crossover or Parallel univers thing.

I think it was the one where Clark accidently gets sent to a parallel where Kal El was feared and had trashed Metropolis pretty good.

James

I answered 9 years, because the description under 10 years isn't accurate in my case - I didn't watch from the Pilot. However, I did know who Cat Grant is! I started watching about halfway through Season 1; I think my first episode was Honeymoon in Metropolis.

I didn't find fanfic until a year or so later; my first fic was one which never made it to the Archive and had something about Clark ending up in prison and Lois visiting him. The second one I read was part 1 of Debby's Dawning - I then found a couple of other sites, including those hosting some Compendiums of fic, most of which are now on the Archive. It was a couple of months afterwards that I stumbled on the Archive, which at the time had around 400 stories and wasn't updated every week.

So not quite as old as some of the old-timers around here; but not that new either.

Interesting question, James!


Wendy

I started watching early/mid 2nd season (although I do know who Cat Grant is ). First full episode that I ever was The Prankster; actually did see part of the Pilot when it first aired, but my family was big into SeaQuest at the time, so only watched pieces during the commercials...and for some unfathomable reason wasn't all that interested at the time.

I was stationed at Griffiss AFB in Rome New York when they started advertising this series and one look at Dean had me hooked, though I always griped as to why they never gave him blue contacts. Reeve and the Comics both had a blue eyed Supe, so why not Dean?

This led me to hunting down pics of Dean so I could change his eye color on my paintshop pro. I stumbled into the fanfic forum last year and got hooked on one of Wendy's stories to start with then I found the link to Anne's place and ran rampant there for a while before being refered via email to this message board.

Thank goodness for the outlet!!!!

TEEEJ

Being a collector of comics since I was eight-years-old, I started watching right from the Pilot...usually in the bedroom while my hubby watched something else in the livingroom. We taped "SeaQuest" and watched it later.

I actually found the old "afolcslife" group when it was still through onelist back in the summer of 1998. Someone on that list told me about the archive. I know I started reading the "themed" stories first, but I cannot remember which one was first. Written...yes, read...no. I do remember getting into trouble at work for printing the stories to read later... Now that's obsessed!

I watched the Pilot, so that was the first episode I saw. RL circumstances made it impossible for me to watch regularly until halfway through S2, although I watched as often as I could. Beginning with The Phoenix, I counted the days until the next episode and taped everything. Through reruns I managed to get all the episodes on tape.

The first Fanfic I read was by Zoomway on an old fic website she had that I stumbled across. I had been really upset that L&C had been cancelled and that I had lost conctact with the Krypton Club and Leah Raglan's Metropolis Club. When I found Zoom's Fanfic, I was ecstatic. Then I found TUFS, The Lois and Clark Archive and annesplace. Jude

Ok, random post that has nothing to do with this topic, so disregard unless your name is Anne Spears.

OMG, Anne, I love your sig line - I've been a huge AMC fan since I was like 8 years old but haven't been able to watch it hardly at all in the last year because of school - and am now devastated that I missed the episode that Edmund said that in - it would've had me bouncing around the house happily for days afterwards.
And since I haven't seen my muse in about a year...very relevant.

Ok, I'll stop being irrelevant now,
Jill

Well, thank goodness Wendy answered before me, because she saved me the calculation <g>. She's slightly older than me in L&C years, but only by a few months. I also know who Cat Grant is but didn't start with the Pilot. However, I don't live in Nantwich and am not married to a guy called John <bg>.

The first episode I saw in full was Home Is Where The Hurt Is, so you can see why I got hooked on the series <g>. One of the few hurt/comfort eps in L&C, and it was the first one I saw! It must have been fate . However, I'm pretty certain I saw bits and pieces of earlier eps, because when I watched them properly later on, I recognised things here and there.

I'm not sure what the first fanfic I actually read was - I have a feeling it wasn't terribly good or memorable. However, the first fanfic I *do* remember reading - and almost drooling with delight that I'd found such a fantastic read - was Chris Mulder's pair of fics, Love Beyond All Measure and Dimensions Of Loving. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're saying: hurt/comfort again. What can I say? I'm a hurt/comfort junkie <g>.

Anyway, good questions, James - nice idea to repeat them for the newbies.

Yvonne

Well, I saw the pilot when it was first aired, but I wasn't hooked yet. My husband was (is) a big comics fan, so he watched the show, and I'd see bits and pieces here and there, but I didn't get hooked until I channel-surfed across the last third of Tempus Fugitive. So I guess that's nine years.

I discovered fanfic pretty much immediately -- the concept wasn't new because I'd already been buying fanzines for Blake's 7. I was already an online fan for Babylon 5, and the same CompuServe forum had a section for L&C, filled with very warm & welcoming FOLCs (that's where I met Paul -- hi, Paul!

Most other details, however, have blurred together into one general impression of enjoying the hell out of myself <g>

PJ

I didn't answer the poll because I needed an option for "Born Again FoLC" <g>.

I did watch the show when it was first run, right from the Pilot although I wouldn't have been able to recall it if asked until after I started rewatching the shows. I gave up sometime right after the wedding argh - remember rolling my eyes when Lois ended up with amnesia. I just couldn't take the will-they/won't-they dragging out as they were doing. After that, I caught episodes here and there but didn't go out of my way to watch them. And it never even occured to find any kind of fandom on-line, so I wasn't an official FoLC back then.

Then, this past summer, I started watching the shows in syndication. And I clearly remember the first one of those that I caught - A Bolt from the Blue. I thought "Oh yeah, this is a great show. And doesn't Dean look cute?" After about a month, I went searching for websites and found the archive.

The first story I read was Kathy B and Demi's "When Friends Become Lovers" immediately followed by LabRat's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" With a double whammy like that, I was hooked. Wrote my first story a week or so later and never looked back.

Lynn

Well, I voted for 7-8 years. I did see some eps in seasons 1 & 2, but I wasn't a regular viewer. I was torn between L&C and SeaQuest, and my parents liked SeaQuest. So we watched that together, and I only caught pieces of L&C.

At the time, I was very active on CompuServe. I hung out in the chat rooms, posted in several of their forums, exchanged emails with a bunch of people... Anyway, one of those places was the L&C section of the SciFi Media forum, where Pam was the Chief. (Hi Pam. ) We talked about the show and the eps and such, and after a while, someone (I think it was Pam, but i'm not 100% certain) pointed me to Rhen's ficlist. I signed up for it, and that was when I really got hooked on the show. This was around the middle of season 3.

Fic fascinated me, and FoLCs were really cool. I guess it's not surprising that my first fic came only a couple months later. I was an active writer for the next year or so, but then I graduated high school, and, around the same time, the ficlist disappeared. I wrote one more story and got a BR through the archive. She got caught up by RL issues and took months to get back to me. By the time she had, the archive had gone from offering a BR referral service to the current GE system. So, when I sent the story back, I went through another editing process, this time with my first GE, Wendy. (Hi Wendy. )

At the time, I was reading every new story as it hit the archive, and I was excited to notice that the story counter was approaching 1000. I asked for my new story to be held the extra week, so it could go up with that milestone batch.

Shortly after that, though, I drifted away from the fandom, too caught up in campus life to keep up with the archive.

I drifted back in the next year, discovered IRC and the MBs, and was more active than ever. I drifted back out to the fringes a time or two since, but I've always kept my foot in the virtual door.

I have no idea what the first EP I saw was, and I can't remember the first fic I read, either. I sort of watched the show from the beginning, but I've only really been a FoLC since season 3. Except that I haven't always been a FoLC during those 8 or so years. Or, well, I have, to varying degrees. But maybe I wasn't, for those few months? I don't know.

I stick by my answer. 7-8 years. Sort of. Mostly. On and off. Ish.

Paul

P.S. For comparison purposes, I'll point out that Pam posted a similar poll a while back. You can find it here.

What? There was ever a time without Lois & Clark? Wow, I cannot believe it's been 10 years. My mom always liked the Superman movies, and I'd seen the old tv series in black and white, so I started watching Lois & Clark as soon as the Pilot came out. I was hooked by the second or third episode. A few months after it went off the air, I remember doing some surfing just to see if they had ever talked about a Season 5. That's when I found the TUFS series, and it was great. I wanted more fic, so I started looking through the FAQs and it pointed me to the L&C Archive. I popped in and out of IRC and the Yahoo list a time or two, but I officially delurked when I found first the Archive boards, and then these boards a short time later. I'm a message board addict.

Fun poll!
JD

This is really an interesting question.

Well, I, for my part, watched the show right from the beginning. I still remember watching the pilot with my family and we all were hooked. We made it together through season one, after that they somehow stopped watching it, but I was as obsessed as ever and it only got worse after that cruel cliffhanger at the end of season 2. I watched every single episode and pretty much every rerun of the whole series in Germany. When I lived in the US for a while I was thrilled that they still aired the show. Watching the original (English) episodes was almost like watching completly new episodes.

About a year ago, I finally discovered fanfiction. I'd never heard about it before and stumbled accidentally over the L&C Archive while surfing the internet. I don't remember the first story I ever read, but I'm almost sure it was one of the TUFS. Ever since I'm pretty much totally fanfic-addicted and spend way too much time on the computer, while I should do other (more important???) stuff like studying and doing other assignments for my classes... :rolleyes:

Oh well, I really wonder if this obsession is ever gonna bate

Julia

Great poll!

I watched the Pilot the day it aired, and was hooked from then on. I must admit that the pull right off was the sexy stars. (I was 13, gimme a break!! Dean... *drool*) I never missed an episode. I grew out my bangs and rocked the Teri bob for a while. It wasn't till the ripe old age of 22 that I got the S3 Teri cut. (Yes, Tank!!!! ) At one time I had 10 different Superman shirts. My walls were covered in Dean and Teri from posters and mags like "Tiger Beat." Man, I was a cool, 13-year-old.

At one time there was an e-fanclub on AOL. Anyone else remember this? I don't remember much about it but I think the first fanfic I read came from them. My friend and I actually composed fanfic (if you can call it that - I call it badfic!!) during the duration of the show. Weird to think on it now. Then for years, I was an on-again, off-again reader of the archive.

I'm so glad I've finally de-lurked and written some recent stuff!

-Wanda Detroit

I've been a FoLC since I was about 7. Which means... 1995. I only discovered fanfic two years ago when I was searching the internet for some info about L&C and came across this "Unaired Fifth Season." Of course, at first I though it was actually shot and just unaired, but still read all the text files. Then it dawned on me that it's unaired... well... because it's fanfiction (not that I knew what that was).

There was a link to the archive on the page where I got TUFS, but I didn't stay there for more than 2 minutes because I didn't think there was much more to write about. I didn't realize you could write out of sequence.

Then, in summer 2003, I rediscovered the archive when I came across Amanda Lane's 'funny parts' section on her website . I was curious about one of the stories, so I searched the internet for it using keywords and found it to read the whole thing. That story was, by the way, Zoomway's 'Counter Clark-Wise.'

This time I stayed. A month or so later I found the boards through the link on the front page of the archive, and signed up.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Julie

ROTFL, I have to comment on the hair thing. Coincidentally, I did have the Teri bob for a number of years (and I still do when I don't grow it out so much), but anyway it used to irk the heck out of me that my family all had Teri-colored hair, while mine is really light brown. (Hey I was like 13 at the time when I realized all of this lol.) I swear I'm the mutant in my family when it comes to looks.

JD

I was about 8 or 9 when it first came on air here in Australia. I wasn't hooked on it straight away but I do remember that the first episode that I ever saw was the Pilot because I saw it advertised on the TV and I thought this seems interesting I watched it on and off during the first and second seasons. It probably wasn't until around when their realtionship began to develop with the rivalry between Scardino and Clark that I started to watch it more regularly and became really hooked from the point when Clark proposed the first time. As for the first fanfic I don't quite remember which one it was, but I had done an Internet search on Lois and Clark and came across the TUFS website and discovered that heaps of people loved Lois and Clark as much as I did through one of those fics. I then discovered Zoomway's boards and got really annoyed to discover that I never got the chance to watch the episodes beyond Lois and Clarks in the fourth season. Ooh! Channel nine makes me mad and no I don't live in some remote area of this corner of the Earth with restricted access to TV I really am from Sydney.

I guess I'm a FoLC for about five or six years now. I don't quite remember it exactly.

When the show first aired here, I watched bits here and there and I was pretty much hooked. Unfortunately, that was at a time I didn't have my own TV and VCR, so I missed more than I saw of it.

When it finally came on in the reruns, I started to watch everything and tape a lot. So my first ep I saw completely must have been the Pilot.

At the end of the reruns I started looking up information on the Internet. Back then, we still had dial-up and I was only allowed to be online for very short periods, so it took me a while to find fanfic. But when I did, I was completely hooked. The first story I ever read was by Wendy. The title escapes me right now, but I still remember thinking it was unfinished and that I wanted more. So you can say I was addicted right at the beginning.

After that, I read from the archive for about a year before I found my way to the message boards. It took me nearly a year to delurk, but the rest of the story is history. And look where I am these days.

Saskia

Interesting question!

I went for 7-8 years. 8 years ago, I ran into my very first Lois and Clark episode: Contact. I wasn't impressed. Still, since there were two episodes in a row on M6 (the French network, not the English motorway [g]), I watched When Irish Eyes Are Killing... with which I wasn't impressed either. So I gave up on the show, until I accidentally ran into Through a Glass Darkly and Big Girls Don't Fly; by the end of BGDF I was pretty hooked, and since I didn't know anything about the show back then, I thought it was really over and that Clark would never come back from New Krypton. I remember looking for Lois and Clark books (possible continuations or published fanfic, although I had no clue that fanfic existed at the time) in the summer. Didn't find any, and so my interest decreased until I forgot up to the existence of the show. Bad Kae, bad! [g]

One year later, one of my classmates informed me that Lois and Clark was back on TV and asked if I was going to watch it. I shrugged and said why not, and I did watch it. M6 started off with reruns, like they did every year, and so I was able to see almost all the episodes. I started taping when I went away on holiday, halfway through Season 1. I was just taping to watch the episodes when I got back; I didn't intend to keep the tape. Just like I didn't intend to stay up all night when we got back from our ski holiday, watching my Lois and Clark episodes. Honest, Mum, I didn't mean to! [bg](I was 17 and still in high school [g]). Anyway, I kept my holiday-episodes, but didn't tape any other ep. Or yes, I did tape them, but I taped over them on the next night.

Then came Barbarians at the Planet, and I was absolutely, hopelessly, desperately hooked. It's the scene in the park that did it for me. After that, there was no turning back. I started to keep my favourite episodes on tapes (BaTP/THoL, The Phoenix, Tempus Fugitive, Lucky Leon, Whine Whine Whine...) then I decided to invest my pocket money in blank tapes and I taped everything and kept everything.

I also started to collect any article I could find about the show. I made folders with tons of pictures I found in magazines. I spent every Monday evening in the magazine section of my local supermarket trawling through pages and pages and looking for anything related to Lois and Clark. I wrote summaries for each episodes and gave them ratings (yes, I was already weird that way ).

But I didn't have a clue that there were lots more to come. A year and a half later, my parents bought our very first computer. With an internet connection. Yow-sa!!!!! I found the TUFS website first, and I think my jaw hit the floor when I discovered that there were people writing stories about my favourite show. For some reason, although I had dabbled in some writing for another show I watched at the time, it had never occurred to me that I could write Lois and Clark stuff (let alone in English).

Since I was very new to the Internet (actually, very new to computers in general), I didn't have a clue about those things, so I printed out all the TUFS stories for fear they would get offline overnight. So the very first story I read was the first TUFS story.

A few days later (back then I was on dial-up and paying per minute at an extortionate rate, so I went online for about 10 minutes every day; barely believable now!) I found Genevieve's one-stop Kerth-reading site, with the 1998 Kerth winners and nominees. I read Demi's Heaven's Prisoners, Chris's Meet Me in Kansas City, Love Beyond All Measure and Dimensions of Loving.

I remember that Genevieve's website advertised 752 stories on the archive (yes, I remember the exact number [g]), and my first thought was to wonder how many ink-cartridges it would take for me to print them all. Rest assured that I didn't print them all. But I saved every single one of them onto loads and loads and loads of floppy disks, sorting them out between S1, 2, 3 and 4. No, I don't do that any more. Yes, the floppy disks are still somewhere at my parents' place. Yes, I'm a weirdo. I started to check the archive every Sunday for updates. Wendy's The House of... Lane was one of the first fanfics I read on the archive, and my first thought was, whoa, I've got to find more by this author! Hey, it was BaTP! There was also Disquiet Nights (Like Dreamers Do), by an author who left the fandom since but left us her stories under the name Shawn V.; another "whoa, I've got to find more by this author!" (uh, yes, that was BaTP, too...) More stories. More names of authors whose stories I started to devour. More and more time devoted to Lois and Clark fanfic.

And then after a month, I decided to try my hand at writing, too. There was no way my stories would ever make it out of my hard drive. NO WAY! Uh... we all know how that one ended. [g]

I'm rambling off topic now, but you're used to me doing that, aren't you? Anyway, I finally jumped in and joined IRC on the night of the Kerth Awards 1999. I had voted for my favourite stories in each category and I wanted to see what that ceremony looked like. I was very intimidated to see all my favourite authors there. Most of all I was stupefied that they all seemed to know each other. I mean, someone called "ELK" got in and everyone said "Hey Erin!" Thud! How did they know that ELK was Erin?!? If you'd told me then that I'd meet some of my very best friends through this IRC thing, I would never ever have believed it. Mind you, if you'd told me that after 8 years, I'd still be a fan of Lois and Clark, writing fanfic and spending the better part of my time with friends met through FoLCdom, I wouldn't have believed it either...

Kaethel