What are some highlights, milestones, and significant events of your H/D fandom experience? These could include communities or people, events or experiences, works (your own or someone else's), conflicts or celebrations, etc.
For a while I was deeply involved in the fan following of what, at the time, were considered the seminal Drarry fics--Irresistible Poison, Love Under Will, Cassie Claire's work (oh, do I regret that), and Maya's works. These were yahoo groups and chats discussing the fic, writing one-shot fics based on these works, etc. I myself wrote fic, but was not considered popular or a BNF, but I did become very close to Aja, eventually becoming real life friends when we got together to attend the premiere of the first film, and having a romance of sort, more physical than emotional on her part, which deeply impacted my enjoyment of the ship for a while because she was, well...awful. But through her I had a backdoor glimpse into all the drama that was going on at the time with the Inner Circle *eyeroll* I sadly do not have those emails or chats any longer, as they were on my yahoomail and aol which are long, long lost. I got to hear all about her being Cassie's "secret friend" because Stacey hated her. Which is funny, because I was Aja's dirty little secret too. Like, we'd role-play Drarry together every night for hours, but she'd never acknowledge my fic or promote it, even though she was a BNF. Damn, I clearly still hold a lot of bitterness over this, lmao. I do think of the end of that era, particularly around the time that Maya was writing, as sort of a golden time for Drarry. We were nearing the end of the books, and all of us were sort of breathlessly hopeful that JKR might redeem Draco near the end, that there might be some Drarry interaction--obviously not explicit, but something that showed them as being sort of friendly or at least not straight up antagonistic. And then all of us talking about how what Maya wrote was way better and more compelling than what JKR did.