I first read this book in the seventh grade. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I had randomly googled the actors of the move one day, then found myself sucked into The Outsiders fandom. My fandom spaces were limited to Wattpad and Youtube, at least until I used Amino for a bit a few years later (RIP). Wattpad was much more user-friendly at the time, and it was also painfully heterosexual. Little me didn't even entertain the idea that you could ship two people of the same gender together, I thought that this app was all the fandom had to offer me. I'm not gonna pretend like evrything I read on there was bad, though my favorites seem to have been deleted, or maybe are just hard to find under the piles of AI garbage that Wattpad keeps promoting nowadays
Cut to the year 2019, I was nearing the end of my junior year of high school, and lightning struck. You see, about those favorites I mentioned, one of them was a story called "The Beauty and The Hoodlum," an OC x Dallas Winston fanfiction. I did not like Dallas Winston, even though I understood the point of his chracater, he was the violent, mean, misogynstic asshole of the group--I had yet to acquire a taste for charcters like that. It really didn't help how a lot of fanfic writers wrote him, and this was because their child brains didn't understand him! "The Beauty and The Hoodlum" did, the writer found the balance between making Dallas charming and cruel, making him stick out amongst the cookie cutter "bad boy" box he was always placed in. That fanfiction made me realize that there was so much potentional to Dallas Winston, i wanted to get inside his psyche, I wanted to write a prequel about him. I still have those docs saved, teenage me wasn't a bad writer, if I do say so myself. It started out to innocent, I just wanted to understand Dallas more, so how the fuck did we end up here?