I look at fan art for fandoms/ships I used to be obsessed with and it's this weird nostalgia
Which I think is hilarious because One, the early hardcore days of any given fandom are...kinda rough on the rest of my life, let's be honest; and Two, fandom is so spread out anymore and dissolves into massive discourse so quickly that it's actually kinda hard to enjoy it the way I once did.
(I say that like there wasn't discourse around the k/da server within a month of my starting it--I was coming off one of the worst months of my life so that hit particularly hard at the time. And then later on some dipshit pressured a bunch of long-timers to leave the server out of fear of being harassed. Ugh. Anyway.)
I loved Arcane and would love for more friends of mine to get into it, but I also know I muted a caitvi server I was in fairly quickly because 99% of the members were under the age of 25 and were fresh off the spop fandom and they just do fandom differently than I do. It felt like the "how do you do, fellow kids" meme, and I also knew that once word got out I was a "proshipper" I'd be...side-eyed at best? (For a while I was dipping back in on occasion just to look for good fanart, though. Might do that again at some point.)
(There was apparently at least one more caitvi server of older people that knew each other from Locked Tomb fandom, but ...they all knew each other so I wasn't invited. Alas.)
(Speaking of fandom being spread out more these days. Discord servers for fandom come in two flavors: everyone's invited, which means they quickly become unpleasant/filled with discourse/monopolized by people with bad social skills; or they're invite-only which means if you don't know someone in it willing to invite you, you're screwed. It's shitty but them's the facts.)
I wish I'd felt obsessively fannish about OFMD the way so many of my friends did. ;_: I enjoyed it! I look forward to season two! But it didn't become an all-consuming thing for me, and as so many of y'all know, you can't really control hyperfixations. I'm not the one controlling the on/off switch.
The irony is I do have a hyperfixation right now, my Camino next year, but it's not a fannish hyperfixation so it's not the same. More than half the fun of any fannish hyperfixation is being fannish with other people, that giggly squeeing thing of injokes and meta and fan art and shipping that makes me giddy, plus The Feels I get from good fan art.
I mean, I do get Feels from photographs of spots on the Camino I'm going to be walking through, but it's not fannish! It's a very different kind of Yearning.
Also forums/etc for the Camino are totally not the same thing as fandom forums/etc. Discussing how much you like seeing Character A get railed and how is just not the same as discussing which albergues are better and arguing over whether to use trekking poles.
Also reading tons of Camino memoirs is SOOOO not the same thing as reading fanfiction, bahaha. Although if you often get that feeling of "I want something just like what I just read, but not what I just read," getting into Camino de Santiago memoirs might be for you, lolol
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