My mother devoured books, notably mystery and horror, while my older brother was into tabletop RPG’s, fantasy, and science fiction. There was never a shortage of books in my life and being able to read well was something I work very hard to do since reading was difficult for me. It was only later in adulthood did I find out I was dyslexic, so it was very hard for me to keep up with the class. Not that I couldn’t, it’s just that I was a few minutes slower when it came to reading comprehension.
I started writing the summer I began sixth grade. We had a typewriter that no one ever used and I thought it would help me keep organized as I wrote my first story. I already liked to use my imagination and play pretend even though by this time I was a bit old for it. I was heavily bullied and didn’t have friends, so I used music, and now writing, to kill time and pretend I was a hero were people liked me and I didn’t have to be afraid.
While it took me several months to finish my 12 page story, it was the very thing that I would always comeback to even though I had other interests.
When I started high school, I started my own newspaper style comic. As I got older, I rekindled my love for Sonic the Hedgehog and began a massive fan comic that I intended to put on the internet, which was just starting to become what it is now. This was about 2000 or so.
Eventually, I’ll say my junior year, my best friend introduced me to fanfiction, which she herself had just discovered. I didn’t even know fanfiction existed or would even be allowed, as I thought something like that would be a violation of copyright. But I loved the stories she would print out for me and once I was able to buy my first laptop and dial-up internet, she showed me Fanfiction.net and I went on from there with the pen-name ‘Klebkatt’. ‘Klebkatt’ contains the initials of my full name ‘Kassie L. E. Boyd’ with a corruption of ‘cat’ on the end because I like cats.
I’ll spare you the long, grueling tales of someone who had no social diplomacy or knowledge of how to act as anything other than a doormat and I’ll only note that this was my first time encountering and interacting openly with other people, even if it was only behind a computer screen. Like any 16 year old, I acted and said stupid things, some of which was because I didn’t know how to handle trolls or the silly criticism of 13 year old girls. Being so thoroughly bullied and beatened down, I bit back in ways I regret now.
One such instance was a MST3King of a story I had wrote. If you’re not familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), it was a comedy show that looked at bad movies and made fun of them while also critiquing them. It influenced a number of people to do the same in any method they could produce.
The fans emulating them were also heavily negative and mocking, as the people behind it usually had no concept or appreciation for the people behind the stories they would rip apart. This was easily the first cases of cyber-bulling. Again, I’ll save you the long details, but that was my first encounter with such a thing. I was appalled at first that people would seek others out to maliciously bully and make fun of them and I, and later my friends, acted inappropriately.
After graduating, I entered college and didn’t really know what to do with myself. How I felt emotionally started to effect how I mentally thought of myself and depression slowly crept in. I had my first suicidal thought on New Years Eve of 2004.
Eventually, YouTube took off and I began to watch a LP’er called Cloud8745. Not the best role model, I know, but at the time, I enjoyed watching his LP’s and his videos were the highlight to my day. I never stopped reading books or fanfiction, but it had gotten to the point where I did nothing with my day. I didn’t have friends, I didn’t go out except with my family. I did nothing.
Somewhere in 2009, Cloud and a friend of his posted a 22 episode reading of a story called My Immortal. I’d never heard of it and the format of reading a story blind and commenting with jokes wasn’t something I immediately associated with the MST3K style that I had been against. I would have been about 24 or 25, so I had changed a lot since I was 16. I had new opinions and new beliefs. I was a more independent woman than the closeted kid I had been.
I enjoyed Cloud’s reading so much that I wanted to do it too. I read one story called Me Against the World, and tried to emulate how I thought I should act, like purposely calling the author stupid or insulting them, but it didn’t sit right with me.
Still, I posted half of it to my YouTube channel, but never finished editing or uploading it. Two years ago, someone leaves a comment asking me where the rest of the reading was. I was very surprised, because I had mostly forgotten about it. She liked it and told me it was very funny when I apologized for it being so bad.
Knowing at least one person wanted the rest of the reading, I was motivated to take down, re-edit, and repost the story in it’s entirety. And when I was done with that, I felt that I should do the sequel.
It would be several more months before I would make another video, this time with my friend Hushicho. Again, I would try to say things that I thought I was suppose to say, but again, it didn’t sit right with me and you can here that awkwardness in the video.
It was then I decided that I didn’t want to insult the author; after all, I had been there and done what they had and I knew how hard it was to write a story, how hard it is to take comments from people who only want to insult you, and I know how you feel when you get so fed up you lash out at that.
But I also know how to write. I specifically went to college for it and took numerous classes for screenwriting, playwriting, and poetry writing. We studied how to create a plot, create characters and make them unique, how to edit, how to format, and all of these great things that a fanfiction writer, even just an amateur writer like myself at that age and poor to boot, doesn’t have access to.
So I redesigned what I wanted to do with Bad Fanfiction Theater. I wanted to use bad stories not only to entertain, but to educate. Sometimes we have nice surprises where a story is actually written well while other times there are stories we take a dislike to. It’s been so much fun to read these stories and get together with my friends and analyze what we’ve read.
Because of this, I’ve looked up tips on how to better pronunciation, analyze, and edit for the videos I make. It’s been such a joy and blessing in my life. While there may still be the stigma that will fallow me around of ‘mocking people’ when that’s what I now go out of my way not to do, I hope I can help educate a lot of readers and writers. :)