![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's prompt Number 7 for the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sunshine_revival, and the carnival/fair theme continues, this time with one of the rides that you can usually see from a distance. (And one of the ones that always makes me nervous when it stops and I'm not on the ground.)
As I have detailed in other entries, and at least once in a December Days series, my entry into fandom was probably at about the same time as most people who get into it, around the age of ten. That's the earliest known evidence I have, anyway, of written fic that's crossovers between the Batman '66 universe (the Adam West Batman) and various other things of my reading and game-playing experiences. However, as a relatively isolated person in a community where things like discussing the various plots and minutiae of Star Trek characters and episodes would get a "oh my god, you nerds, knock it off (so I can go to sleep)" or people who wanted to ask you impossible questions and then proclaim themselves the winners of nonexistent debates, the fandom part of me was mostly confined to online forums of webcomics and role-playing old games. Also Subreality, whose conceit was that all the various incarnations of all characters, whether official or otherwise, all exist in a different dimension, where they have downtime between their various fic/canon adventures, and interact with each other in various ways. (Kielle made a great concept, things got expanded, and then when she passed on, the community fragmented somewhat, but still there.) Stuff that if I had the fandom language them that I do now, I would have realized how much I'd already been participating in fandom when I finally got clear examples of it when the Potter phenomenon arrived, and things like Twilight after it, where suddenly YA fiction was a fertile ground for both materials to be fannish about and online and very visible fannish communities being fannish about them. On LiveJournal, on Dreamwidth, on tumblr. (And plenty of other places, too, especially for artworks, like deviantArt.) This coincided with the greater acceptance and the beginning of widespread licensing, dubbing, and visibility to the anime and manga fandoms, too. (They'd been there before, of course, but again, this is when they hit the mainstream and the bookstores just started carrying translated works.) That's about the time where I recognized that the fandom communities existed, although I'll admit that it would take longer, and with more introspection and prompting, before I realized that all of these things I described earlier were also part of fandom, but hadn't necessarily described themselves as such. So with the animation renaissance, the explosion in popularity of YA, and the massively interconnected network of the Internet being available to just about everybody, whether on dial-up or on broadband connections at university, and associated abilities like file-sharing, webcomics, and all the rest of that, fans also came to the forefront, because it was now a lot easier to find someone who was interested in the same things you were interested in, and have a conversation with them in the spaces that places like LiveJournal and forums afforded. At this point, I'm still orbiting this big explosion of fandom rather than thoroughly diving in (or so I believe) because I'm not deeply in any of the prominent fandoms that are going on at this time, even if I'm keeping up with my reading of the Potter series and I at least got my way thorough the first Twilight to confirm that I wasn't fond of it (and I found the baseball section laughably wrong), but so that I could find useful things to recommend to people who were looking for more like it.
Not that surprisingly, from the perspective of the future, what followed soon after were the crackdowns, the Warriors for Innocence, the Strikethrough, the Boldthrough, the various purges, and the founding of the OTW and the Archive of Our Own. And all of those things coming to big forefront, even though they, too, have been part of fannish history. And a great irony that so many people rallied around the idea of Hogwarts as an inclusive place, only to have their creator tell them not just that they're interpreting the text from the wrong perspective, but that she's actively going to put her wealth toward hurting them and trying to make them disappear. Which she continues to do even to the days of this post and beyond. There was also the backlash against people for liking YA, and especially the kind of YA that Twilight (and Divergent, and plenty of other "teen girl put into a situation where she has to fight for her life, but also, she's got plenty of hot boys who are interested in her" stories) represented, especially when the Twilight fanfic "Masters of the Universe" filed off the serial numbers, changed the names to protect the copyrighted entities, and then republished itself as "Fifty Shades of Grey," opening up an entire new front on the culture war about "oh, noes, women are reading trash novels openly and we are all doomed because they're not picking up Serious (written by men) Literature." And also having a lot of people in the kink community smack their foreheads and do their best to explain to us that kink culture is not at all like what's portrayed in those books, even if there's some amount of using terminology from them and at least mimicking some of the practices that go on there.
While I'm still working my way around these things, I'm taking part in some fun commentaries, making speculative fanfiction in the comments of those commentaries, and eventually, yes, I do decide I'm going to pick up an AO3 account and start posting things there. Mostly because I needed one to participate in an exchange, and after the first thing I wrote didn't flop, then I keep going on from there, as new fandoms come into existence and old ones get revisited, and at this point, I'm participating in a much more familiar format, on a specific website that's much more understandable as participating in fandom culture. And also, you know, starting some of my own longer-form read-throughs and reactions, and other kinds of things that are definitely fandom-participation, but on the meta side more than the fanfic side. I still haven't joined tumblr, mostly because I see from the people who have about how much of a functioning website it is, and I'm primarily a text person instead of a drawing person when it comes to how I interact with my fandoms. I still get to see a lot of the fun things from it, but it's not my style, and I know better than to try and get involved there.
If most of this sounds impersonal, it's because while there are a lot of things that I have definitely taken useful things from, and characters that I like, characters I write fiction for, and characters that I identify with more than others, because their struggles and situations ring familiar to me more than other characters might, the way that I interact with fannish characters, media, and the like is primarily focused on their role in the story, how well they fit into the narrative, and whether they and the narrative serve each other well. There's a lot of units, either discrete or combined, about stories and their characters, plot points, universes, etc. that I'm keeping in mind with the way that I interact with stories. Some of that is my professional training trying to put things into units that I can then use for recommendation to others based on the things that they like and would want to see in stories and characters, but some of it is also that I was never really encouraged or required to identify with characters, or to experience them as proxies for myself, or to evaluate them as a question of whether they represent my identity in a positive, negative, or otherwise more personal way, and whether the people around me will try to relate to me as they think they would relate to the character. I have always had the privilege of detachment, and that probably says more about what I look like and what my upbringing was like than many of the other things that I've written about myself.
Having that detachment keeps me from getting too invested in something. I also think it might stop me from enjoying things to their fullest, because there's always that reservedness about a piece of media, the analytical part sticking around, and that part of my younger self who is worried that if I get enthusiastic about something to a big degree, everyone around me is going to think that it's cringe to get that involved, or cringe to specifically get involved with that thing too much. Or that being involved in that kind of media is saying something about me that will cause problems with my parents and I will somehow end up excluded and without a support structure like some of the people I've been reading online about who get kicked out of their households because they couldn't hide being the person they were around others. I can't imagine that if that were the case, that I would have been able to hide it in any kind of meaningful manner, but the calculations that were going in my head had a lot to do with what was coming up in prominence in the online and the news world, and a lot of that at the time was about people being hurt for various things that were innate parts of themselves, or for things that they had an interest in that made the people around them mistrust them and try to hurt them for. Or because someone was fed up with how they had been treated by others and lashed out in violent and lethal revenge.
It certainly doesn't help that as time goes on, some creators end up being much less people to be fans of, some actors turn out to be very different than some of their characters (or exactly like them), and some works that received critical acclaim at their outsets are reviewed later on, when there's less rose-colored glasses regarding them or more known about the creators themselves that makes it easier to see some of the things in their works that reflects much less nicely on them. I realize that with the advancement of time and the changes of attitudes, things that we think of as being perfectly normal will likely be panned by our descendants with the faint praise of "a product of its time," and that the inevitable decay of things from popular to historical shouldn't prevent anyone from enjoying things that are there, but it's hard not to think about that kind of cycle when the time it takes for the cycle to complete is much shorter than it was before, we have many more ways of collecting and preserving the evidence of bad behavior, and that we have had enough examples of people behaving badly that we're less likely to shove it under the rug and pretend it isn't happening for forever and a day. It still might take longer than the victims of predators would like to hold predators accountable, but it's definitely happening with more regularity than it was before, rather than the grand majority of people being missing stairs that people all know about and all avoid, but nobody can or is willing to bring to accountability.
The other thing that seems to have happened at an accelerated pace is the conglomeration and acquisition of various studios and companies down into small groups that basically control everything through their wholly-owned subsidiaries and imprints. Books, television, movies, magazines, and other media formats all seem to have to consolidated into a very few number, even if those number have many, many facets, and those number seem to be most interested in protecting profitability. There's often a burst of innovation that puts a new player on the map and allows the medium to move forward, or shows to the people who count dollars that there's a market for this kind of work, but after some amount of time, the people who innovated are absorbed into one of the bigger, more conservative entities, and they become an imprint that's known for putting out the same kinds of things that they were once famous for innovating on. It produces a really odd situation where studios are putting out things where they are reasonably confident we're going to make profitable, because we liked it well enough the last time we saw it, restricting the available space for something new and innovative, or even just something that's not following a specific formula all the way through, possibly with some cosmetic tweaks, and also an entire horde of people who are looking for something "disruptive" in their innovation in the name of profits, or who might be hoping that enough time has passed from when something was out of vogue (for very good reasons) might have come back into vogue, or at least shed its disreputable reputation, and therefore can be used again (sometimes with some cosmetic tweaks to make it less obvious.)
Which leads us to the text in the prompt and the additional part I put on the cut text of the entry. (There was a point, I promise!) "That which is old is new again. Often because that which is new is disappointing." In the context of things like Neocities sites, newsletters, character shrines, and the rest, in the prompt, the "old" in this case is building things that are not meant to be monetized, and in some ways may actively resist monetization efforts. They're clearly products of amateurs who may or may not have much more than the basics of HTML and CSS to develop their fan sites with, or who make their art and then display it in simple galleries on personal websites and character shrines. (Or who may be borrowing the expertise of friends or templates and making them their own.) Who use webrings to link between sites that have similar interests, rather than trying to figure out SEO and getting to the top of the rankings to fight with the advertisements, the malvertisements, and the LLM-generated slop that is being pushed on people who are trying to use search engines for their intended purposes. It's a process that focuses more on the content of the thing than on the presentation of the thing, or at least not in the sense of focusing on the presentation of it to make it look like it's a slick corporate website. There's also been a renaissance in developing tutorials on how to write HTML and CSS and to build these kinds of simple sites so that fannish joy can be spread without the intermediary of a specific kind of corporate style, or as a backup space to put all of your works in case there's another purge at the place that you're usually at and they decide that your content is no longer acceptable to the advertisers or the payment processors.
I also think that there's a fair number of people also dropping out of trying to find new fandoms to be part of and trying to spend more time keeping their older fandoms alive. Some of that comes from the near-infinite channels in which people can find new fandoms, even if many of those channels are tendrils of the giant conglomerates. With technology like the Internet, AO3, and the general decrease in cost of the technology used to create things, people have been doing just that, partaking in the oldest traditions of all in telling stories they have in their heads and putting them out for other people to see, hear, and enjoy. That's delightful, and we're glad that people are engaging in that most human of impulses. However, it also means that even if we account for the idea that many, if not most, of the things we encounter in our journey are not going to be to our taste, that percentage that makes it through the is going to be massive, and we have to either adopt a behavior that tries to keep up with the firehose, jumping from new thing to new thing almost as soon as the old thing is done, or while juggling several of the other old things, or we have to admit that there's noway we're going to be able to see, read, hear, and experience all of it, and we need to slow down and appreciate what we have for as long as we want to before going on to the new thing. Or to only juggle a few things on our plate and finish something before adding another thing. So I'm seeing a fair number of people stick on some of their older fandoms, or jump at the chance to talk about them over whatever new thing it is that they're also keeping an eye on. Perhaps because they're hoping for some more fans to talk about it with and who will crate fanworks for it so they don't have to do it all themselves. (Or squee about it again to the friends that they have and who have heard it many times before.)
Which makes me wonder if more people are coming to fandom in the way that I was, careful about being seen as too enthusiastic or cringe, trying to maintain that bit of separation, or whether it's still about diving in head-first into the various things and then realizing you need to come up for air about the time the current is trying to pull you further and deeper in. I'm not sure which of those approaches is "better," if there is a "better," because I think we need both of those approaches to make some fandoms last a lot longer, but I also wonder if my own reticence in getting involved in fandom, and in thinking of things more as media to analyze and the interesting bits being about how characters might work within or against their world and whether they would be better-suited to other places, has denied me some of the clear joy from other people who have been having a grand amount of time playing with the characters and putting them in all kinds of situations and writing about their obvious liaisons, even if they never happen on screen. I'm familiar with the two cakes theory, but not seeing as many people who approach things the way I do has made me wonder whether I'm still the weirdo, even though I've realized and settled farther into being part of fandom in general (and have admitted that I've been at it for longer than I thought I was.)
(See? There is a point. I probably need an editor to get there, though.)
sunshine_revival, and the carnival/fair theme continues, this time with one of the rides that you can usually see from a distance. (And one of the ones that always makes me nervous when it stops and I'm not on the ground.)When I see this prompt I can't help but think about how what was once old is new again with the rise of neocities websites and newsletters becoming more prominent in fandom. Like a blast from the past, I'm finding character shrines, fanfic archives, game blogs, and maybe it's inspired me to make my own site as well c:
Whether you started with secret mailing lists or only discovered online fandom this year, we all have a journey to call our own. It only feels appropriate our last prompt of the month is...
Challenge #7:
The Ferris Wheel
Journaling: Life in fandom goes through ups and downs. Reminisce about the "wild ride" of your time in fandom or in other online communities.
Creative: Create an image or a photo with the theme "let's go for a ride".
As I have detailed in other entries, and at least once in a December Days series, my entry into fandom was probably at about the same time as most people who get into it, around the age of ten. That's the earliest known evidence I have, anyway, of written fic that's crossovers between the Batman '66 universe (the Adam West Batman) and various other things of my reading and game-playing experiences. However, as a relatively isolated person in a community where things like discussing the various plots and minutiae of Star Trek characters and episodes would get a "oh my god, you nerds, knock it off (so I can go to sleep)" or people who wanted to ask you impossible questions and then proclaim themselves the winners of nonexistent debates, the fandom part of me was mostly confined to online forums of webcomics and role-playing old games. Also Subreality, whose conceit was that all the various incarnations of all characters, whether official or otherwise, all exist in a different dimension, where they have downtime between their various fic/canon adventures, and interact with each other in various ways. (Kielle made a great concept, things got expanded, and then when she passed on, the community fragmented somewhat, but still there.) Stuff that if I had the fandom language them that I do now, I would have realized how much I'd already been participating in fandom when I finally got clear examples of it when the Potter phenomenon arrived, and things like Twilight after it, where suddenly YA fiction was a fertile ground for both materials to be fannish about and online and very visible fannish communities being fannish about them. On LiveJournal, on Dreamwidth, on tumblr. (And plenty of other places, too, especially for artworks, like deviantArt.) This coincided with the greater acceptance and the beginning of widespread licensing, dubbing, and visibility to the anime and manga fandoms, too. (They'd been there before, of course, but again, this is when they hit the mainstream and the bookstores just started carrying translated works.) That's about the time where I recognized that the fandom communities existed, although I'll admit that it would take longer, and with more introspection and prompting, before I realized that all of these things I described earlier were also part of fandom, but hadn't necessarily described themselves as such. So with the animation renaissance, the explosion in popularity of YA, and the massively interconnected network of the Internet being available to just about everybody, whether on dial-up or on broadband connections at university, and associated abilities like file-sharing, webcomics, and all the rest of that, fans also came to the forefront, because it was now a lot easier to find someone who was interested in the same things you were interested in, and have a conversation with them in the spaces that places like LiveJournal and forums afforded. At this point, I'm still orbiting this big explosion of fandom rather than thoroughly diving in (or so I believe) because I'm not deeply in any of the prominent fandoms that are going on at this time, even if I'm keeping up with my reading of the Potter series and I at least got my way thorough the first Twilight to confirm that I wasn't fond of it (and I found the baseball section laughably wrong), but so that I could find useful things to recommend to people who were looking for more like it.
Not that surprisingly, from the perspective of the future, what followed soon after were the crackdowns, the Warriors for Innocence, the Strikethrough, the Boldthrough, the various purges, and the founding of the OTW and the Archive of Our Own. And all of those things coming to big forefront, even though they, too, have been part of fannish history. And a great irony that so many people rallied around the idea of Hogwarts as an inclusive place, only to have their creator tell them not just that they're interpreting the text from the wrong perspective, but that she's actively going to put her wealth toward hurting them and trying to make them disappear. Which she continues to do even to the days of this post and beyond. There was also the backlash against people for liking YA, and especially the kind of YA that Twilight (and Divergent, and plenty of other "teen girl put into a situation where she has to fight for her life, but also, she's got plenty of hot boys who are interested in her" stories) represented, especially when the Twilight fanfic "Masters of the Universe" filed off the serial numbers, changed the names to protect the copyrighted entities, and then republished itself as "Fifty Shades of Grey," opening up an entire new front on the culture war about "oh, noes, women are reading trash novels openly and we are all doomed because they're not picking up Serious (written by men) Literature." And also having a lot of people in the kink community smack their foreheads and do their best to explain to us that kink culture is not at all like what's portrayed in those books, even if there's some amount of using terminology from them and at least mimicking some of the practices that go on there.
While I'm still working my way around these things, I'm taking part in some fun commentaries, making speculative fanfiction in the comments of those commentaries, and eventually, yes, I do decide I'm going to pick up an AO3 account and start posting things there. Mostly because I needed one to participate in an exchange, and after the first thing I wrote didn't flop, then I keep going on from there, as new fandoms come into existence and old ones get revisited, and at this point, I'm participating in a much more familiar format, on a specific website that's much more understandable as participating in fandom culture. And also, you know, starting some of my own longer-form read-throughs and reactions, and other kinds of things that are definitely fandom-participation, but on the meta side more than the fanfic side. I still haven't joined tumblr, mostly because I see from the people who have about how much of a functioning website it is, and I'm primarily a text person instead of a drawing person when it comes to how I interact with my fandoms. I still get to see a lot of the fun things from it, but it's not my style, and I know better than to try and get involved there.
If most of this sounds impersonal, it's because while there are a lot of things that I have definitely taken useful things from, and characters that I like, characters I write fiction for, and characters that I identify with more than others, because their struggles and situations ring familiar to me more than other characters might, the way that I interact with fannish characters, media, and the like is primarily focused on their role in the story, how well they fit into the narrative, and whether they and the narrative serve each other well. There's a lot of units, either discrete or combined, about stories and their characters, plot points, universes, etc. that I'm keeping in mind with the way that I interact with stories. Some of that is my professional training trying to put things into units that I can then use for recommendation to others based on the things that they like and would want to see in stories and characters, but some of it is also that I was never really encouraged or required to identify with characters, or to experience them as proxies for myself, or to evaluate them as a question of whether they represent my identity in a positive, negative, or otherwise more personal way, and whether the people around me will try to relate to me as they think they would relate to the character. I have always had the privilege of detachment, and that probably says more about what I look like and what my upbringing was like than many of the other things that I've written about myself.
Having that detachment keeps me from getting too invested in something. I also think it might stop me from enjoying things to their fullest, because there's always that reservedness about a piece of media, the analytical part sticking around, and that part of my younger self who is worried that if I get enthusiastic about something to a big degree, everyone around me is going to think that it's cringe to get that involved, or cringe to specifically get involved with that thing too much. Or that being involved in that kind of media is saying something about me that will cause problems with my parents and I will somehow end up excluded and without a support structure like some of the people I've been reading online about who get kicked out of their households because they couldn't hide being the person they were around others. I can't imagine that if that were the case, that I would have been able to hide it in any kind of meaningful manner, but the calculations that were going in my head had a lot to do with what was coming up in prominence in the online and the news world, and a lot of that at the time was about people being hurt for various things that were innate parts of themselves, or for things that they had an interest in that made the people around them mistrust them and try to hurt them for. Or because someone was fed up with how they had been treated by others and lashed out in violent and lethal revenge.
It certainly doesn't help that as time goes on, some creators end up being much less people to be fans of, some actors turn out to be very different than some of their characters (or exactly like them), and some works that received critical acclaim at their outsets are reviewed later on, when there's less rose-colored glasses regarding them or more known about the creators themselves that makes it easier to see some of the things in their works that reflects much less nicely on them. I realize that with the advancement of time and the changes of attitudes, things that we think of as being perfectly normal will likely be panned by our descendants with the faint praise of "a product of its time," and that the inevitable decay of things from popular to historical shouldn't prevent anyone from enjoying things that are there, but it's hard not to think about that kind of cycle when the time it takes for the cycle to complete is much shorter than it was before, we have many more ways of collecting and preserving the evidence of bad behavior, and that we have had enough examples of people behaving badly that we're less likely to shove it under the rug and pretend it isn't happening for forever and a day. It still might take longer than the victims of predators would like to hold predators accountable, but it's definitely happening with more regularity than it was before, rather than the grand majority of people being missing stairs that people all know about and all avoid, but nobody can or is willing to bring to accountability.
The other thing that seems to have happened at an accelerated pace is the conglomeration and acquisition of various studios and companies down into small groups that basically control everything through their wholly-owned subsidiaries and imprints. Books, television, movies, magazines, and other media formats all seem to have to consolidated into a very few number, even if those number have many, many facets, and those number seem to be most interested in protecting profitability. There's often a burst of innovation that puts a new player on the map and allows the medium to move forward, or shows to the people who count dollars that there's a market for this kind of work, but after some amount of time, the people who innovated are absorbed into one of the bigger, more conservative entities, and they become an imprint that's known for putting out the same kinds of things that they were once famous for innovating on. It produces a really odd situation where studios are putting out things where they are reasonably confident we're going to make profitable, because we liked it well enough the last time we saw it, restricting the available space for something new and innovative, or even just something that's not following a specific formula all the way through, possibly with some cosmetic tweaks, and also an entire horde of people who are looking for something "disruptive" in their innovation in the name of profits, or who might be hoping that enough time has passed from when something was out of vogue (for very good reasons) might have come back into vogue, or at least shed its disreputable reputation, and therefore can be used again (sometimes with some cosmetic tweaks to make it less obvious.)
Which leads us to the text in the prompt and the additional part I put on the cut text of the entry. (There was a point, I promise!) "That which is old is new again. Often because that which is new is disappointing." In the context of things like Neocities sites, newsletters, character shrines, and the rest, in the prompt, the "old" in this case is building things that are not meant to be monetized, and in some ways may actively resist monetization efforts. They're clearly products of amateurs who may or may not have much more than the basics of HTML and CSS to develop their fan sites with, or who make their art and then display it in simple galleries on personal websites and character shrines. (Or who may be borrowing the expertise of friends or templates and making them their own.) Who use webrings to link between sites that have similar interests, rather than trying to figure out SEO and getting to the top of the rankings to fight with the advertisements, the malvertisements, and the LLM-generated slop that is being pushed on people who are trying to use search engines for their intended purposes. It's a process that focuses more on the content of the thing than on the presentation of the thing, or at least not in the sense of focusing on the presentation of it to make it look like it's a slick corporate website. There's also been a renaissance in developing tutorials on how to write HTML and CSS and to build these kinds of simple sites so that fannish joy can be spread without the intermediary of a specific kind of corporate style, or as a backup space to put all of your works in case there's another purge at the place that you're usually at and they decide that your content is no longer acceptable to the advertisers or the payment processors.
I also think that there's a fair number of people also dropping out of trying to find new fandoms to be part of and trying to spend more time keeping their older fandoms alive. Some of that comes from the near-infinite channels in which people can find new fandoms, even if many of those channels are tendrils of the giant conglomerates. With technology like the Internet, AO3, and the general decrease in cost of the technology used to create things, people have been doing just that, partaking in the oldest traditions of all in telling stories they have in their heads and putting them out for other people to see, hear, and enjoy. That's delightful, and we're glad that people are engaging in that most human of impulses. However, it also means that even if we account for the idea that many, if not most, of the things we encounter in our journey are not going to be to our taste, that percentage that makes it through the is going to be massive, and we have to either adopt a behavior that tries to keep up with the firehose, jumping from new thing to new thing almost as soon as the old thing is done, or while juggling several of the other old things, or we have to admit that there's noway we're going to be able to see, read, hear, and experience all of it, and we need to slow down and appreciate what we have for as long as we want to before going on to the new thing. Or to only juggle a few things on our plate and finish something before adding another thing. So I'm seeing a fair number of people stick on some of their older fandoms, or jump at the chance to talk about them over whatever new thing it is that they're also keeping an eye on. Perhaps because they're hoping for some more fans to talk about it with and who will crate fanworks for it so they don't have to do it all themselves. (Or squee about it again to the friends that they have and who have heard it many times before.)
Which makes me wonder if more people are coming to fandom in the way that I was, careful about being seen as too enthusiastic or cringe, trying to maintain that bit of separation, or whether it's still about diving in head-first into the various things and then realizing you need to come up for air about the time the current is trying to pull you further and deeper in. I'm not sure which of those approaches is "better," if there is a "better," because I think we need both of those approaches to make some fandoms last a lot longer, but I also wonder if my own reticence in getting involved in fandom, and in thinking of things more as media to analyze and the interesting bits being about how characters might work within or against their world and whether they would be better-suited to other places, has denied me some of the clear joy from other people who have been having a grand amount of time playing with the characters and putting them in all kinds of situations and writing about their obvious liaisons, even if they never happen on screen. I'm familiar with the two cakes theory, but not seeing as many people who approach things the way I do has made me wonder whether I'm still the weirdo, even though I've realized and settled farther into being part of fandom in general (and have admitted that I've been at it for longer than I thought I was.)
(See? There is a point. I probably need an editor to get there, though.)
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 04:17 pm (UTC)So you're right in that we need both. A safe distance to keep from taking things too personally or losing sleep when your ship doesn't happen or you read a fanfic you don't like, but emotional engagement to keep the love and creativity flowing,
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-29 10:29 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing!