creepypasta and the concept of found family i

As someone who has been in a lot of online fandoms, I never really mention my first-ever fandom to any of my friends, mostly because of that gut feeling of 'they just won't get it'. However, yesterday I shared some stories with a friend, and she was well surprised at how many things I went through during the time I spent in said fandom, yet she was also surprised by how fondly I talked of interacting with some strangers on the internet.

Therefore, I decided to write about my experiences in the .... drumroll (seriously play a drumroll) .... Creepypasta fandom. I'm pretty sure a lot of people on here are/were Creepypasta fans, and if so I'd gladly read any comments about similar or even majorly different experiences :)

First of all, I discovered Creepypasta by installing a very infamous app, Wattpad. I won't delve into how I even ended up downloading Wattpad such a long time ago. However, I will want to note that Wattpad back then (2015-2018) used to be way less corporate; it was more of a niche app for weirdos. Definitely not what it is today, either way. 

Shortly afterwards I started reading a lot about all of the Creepypastas: Jeff, Slenderman, Ben, the Jacks, Sally.... basically nearly all of them that were ever created. I started making friends too. Since I usually commented on anything I read, I was bound to get a lot of friendly replies.

A thing that really surprised me back then was how many Romanian Creepypasta fans actually were out there. There were definitely somewhere in the hundreds. I was excited to meet so many people that spoke the same language as me, lived in the same country as me and overall knew all of the struggles of being Romanian and living in Romania. I don't think I've ever felt as connected to my compatriots, and yes, I am aware that sounds like such an exaggeration. 

It didn't take long for me to start what would end up making me as involved as I was in the fandom: writing. Looking back, it wasn't a surprise at all that I ended up loving writing, since I've always been a huge bookworm and I've always loved creating characters in my head and making up stories for them. The premise for the story I was writing was very basic, your average run-of-the-mill Mary Sue story. The protagonist was very obviously me, with a few alterations: I was way older (ironically I was about the age I am now), I wore fashionably emo clothes (my mom was still forcing me to dress up how she wanted back then), and I had dyed purple hair (the effects of LaurenZSide on society... I still love her). 

The story was essentially just: One day I listened to too much Skillet and decided to run away from home, ending up at a very peculiar mansion in the woods, which belonged to .... Slenderman! Apparently, I killed some people on the way too, yet unsurprisingly I felt no remorse at all. How was I going to adapt to living with a bunch of other serial killers, in a huge mansion in the woods?

As you can most likely guess, it didn't end up being too hard "living" like that, since I was, at the end of the day, a barely preteen kid who listened to Skillet and Three Days Grace and watched FNAF animations way too much. 

This ended up being way longer than I thought, so I'll definitely divide it into two parts, even if no one ends up reading it. I'm doing this to recount a lot of memories that I haven't really shared with anyone, ever.