Happy Birthday, AFF!
Today is the One Year Anniversary of the Animorphs Fan Forum! So, to celebrate, I’m going to tell everyone out there on the world wide web the story of how I became an Animorphs fan, along with a touch of AFF’s history.
I’d always eyed the Animorphs books in the library… intrigued by the cover pictures. Of course, I never actually picked one up and read it, but I would occasionally pull the books half-way off the little rotating rack and gaze at the covers. That was back when I was… what, eight or nine?
Anyway, one day about a year ago, I was day-dreaming about animals, and the morphing thereof. From somewhere, the memory of those shiny, appealing book-covers came bubbling up into the forefront of my mind. Now, at this point I had an exponentially more substantial set of resources, (namely Google), with which to locate information, so I turned those resources towards finding more about the Animorphs.
I of course spent a considerable amount of time poking around on the Scholastics Animorphs sight, and when that resource was exhausted, I turned to Wikipedia. I read every last plot synopsis for every single Animorphs book. But that wasn’t enough. By that point I was hooked; I needed to read the real books.
Of course, being a sixteen year old and going down to the kid’s section of the library to check out books can be just slightly embarrassing, and it was quite some time before I plucked up the courage to do it. When I finally did check out the first ten books, I told the librarian that it was in my sister’s name. (I still feel guilty about that…)
I read the first ten books about five times each, till I had them practically memorized. By the time the three weeks were over, I was sincerely in love with Jake, Rachel, Ax, Marco and Tobias. (Even back then I hated Cassie…). I had to read the rest of the books; that much I knew. But I also was unable to bring myself to go to the library and check out the next books. So, I did what I should have done all along.
Of course, the Google search for “Animorphs” “Ebooks” “free download” lead my on quite a long and drawn out chase, leading most often to a free download of some new book by K.A.A., not the Animorphs. Finally, Google lead me to RAF. I registered there, but since I gave a dummy email address, I was unable to validate my account. Thus, I continued searching until I found it: The Animorphs Fan Forum.
I registered, and immediately downloaded all the ebooks. (We didn’t have the five post requirement back then.) As I was reading them, however, I came up with more and more nitpicks, (or KASUs), that I simply had to find out if anyone else had ever thought of them before. So, I returned to AFF, and, after posting my favorite character, I went right to work with my list of nitpicks.
I remember well those early days, when it was just me, Ellimist, and Darkflame posting in the Coffee Lounge and the discussion area. (Believe it or not, when I first joined, there were only four games in the Coffee Lounge: Choices Game, Count to 1,000,000, Ban the Person Above You and Guess Who Will Post Next.) At that time, we had just over 1000 posts, with some 200 members.
Well, a lot has changed in a year. Today, we have the number of members that we did posts when I first joined: 1275 members total. We now have nearly 26,000 posts, along with some 800 topics. And I myself, the Animorphs fan of less than a year, am an Admin on the Animorphs Fan Forum. (Yeah, go figure).
Anyway, we all owe a lot to Ellimist, Darkflame, and the other founding members of this forum, who started out as a Orkut group with a vision. And the one year anniversary of AFF is certainly a huge reason to celebrate.
So, now that the boring speech is out of the way…
LET’S PARTY!!!