I’m not sure exactly how I found fanfiction, but I seem to remember it being related or immediately time-adjacent to a period where I was very into early scripts for movies I liked. Sort of the same thing, a different take on an existing universe, I guess. I had access to a parent’s company printer, so I would print out fanfiction stories and read them like a book. (I know this sounds wasteful, but the alternative was reading them on a CRT monitor where if the dialup connection crapped out between chapter links I was screwed!) This was back in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, so if FFN was up by then, I didn’t know about it, and was reading things from Geocities sites, boutique video game/RPG-specific sites run by individual people, etc. Weird to think back to then, it wouldn’t be for years later that I started writing my own fics.