That’s not to say that they can’t be microcosms of society in the best and worst ways as well. Some fandoms are super intense: communities where you have to bring your A-game to every message board and fan video or you can just GTFO. Some are easy and breezy or at the very least big enough where you can find a corner that doesn’t terrify you.
But despite that intensity, there are dozens of reasons why fandom is a beautiful place. We’ve talked about them a lot here on That’s Normal, and even warned you about shipping, fandom drama and balancing your fandom life with your real one.
Fandoms have been known to forge life-long friendships, break down barriers and blaze new trails. I wouldn’t be writing this post on this site right now if it weren’t for the power of fandom.
But those positives … are NOT what this post is about.
When Fandom Breaks Your Heart
There are times when the intensity of fandom becomes too much. When something you enjoyed and obsessed over takes over your life and you have to step away. Sometimes, fandom hurts.
Friends that you thought you made turn on you. A pitchfork mob finds your hidden, anonymous twitter handle and goes after you. A Big Name Author Fanfic writer decides that your review warrants a TweetLonger™ tirade. Most of us have been there.
When fandom turns on you, you have to be able to step back, take stock and remind yourself that fandom is a small part of your life, but it’s not your REAL life. It’s not the people you’re inviting over for Memorial Day BBQ, and that matters in the grand scheme of things.
When Real Life Breaks Your Fandom Love Affair
True fax: I have a secret twitter account. If you didn’t know me in my second life in the Twilight fandom, I will most likely NEVER tell you what it was (because I probably complained about you on there, and I don’t want you to ever see it). It was a VERY very happy place for me for several years. A secret identity that functioned as a creative outlet, a complaint department and a psychotherapist.
But if anyone if my real life had ever found it, my life would have imploded dramatically.
If my mom had EVER known
As much as we like to think that fandom is as fandom does, that it’s a fun by-product of our lives, the people we know in real life who are looking on from the outside will never see it like that. There will always be judgement, and that’s hard to swallow.
When real life encroaches on your fandom party, it can be truly devastating.
Imagine for a moment: your boss finds your secret AO3 account, checks the time stamps of your updates (as if any boss is that savvy) and realizes you’ve been writing menage Raven Cycle fanfic during office hours. That’s a problem.
Imagine: Your conservative PTA group finds your semi-anonymous twitter account and starts a “prayer circle” over your obsession with that dude from the Star War. You don’t even find out about this until the Muffins With Mom breakfast when no one wants to eat your pumpkin chocolate chip confections that are usually a total hit.
This type of judgement: insidious, pervasive and incendiary can be the worst kind. You knew that your sister/neighbor/kid’s friend’s mom/school principal was not going to be into the newest update of OMGCheckPlease, but that doesn’t mean that you expected them to practically lynch you for loving it. The truth is, you hoped and prayed that they would let you just … do you, and when they don’t, it HURTS.
What To Do About Fandom Bruises
Be you. Be WHO YOU ARE no matter what. I used to try to make apologies for loving Twilight, for reading fanfic, for writing it, for traveling 100s of miles to meet fandom friends. But those apologies were relegated to the people in my life who didn’t care to understand that aspect of who I was. The first time I ever told a group of RL friends that I was meeting someone I had “met on the internet” they LITERALLY stopped in their tracks in concern. The woman I was meeting lived in our city, had mutual friends that worked at the same private school I worked at, was married, and had been emailing me for over 4 months. What did I care again what the women who had been in my wedding party said about her? OH yeah.
That girl was AWESOME. Our dinner date was hilarious, full of fun tidbits about other online friends, and tons of talk about our mutual fandom. In short, it was WAY more fun than the dinner I had had a few nights before with my naysaying friends.
I learned that night, and in the 9-hour road trip I later took with that girl to meet OTHER fandom friends, and that happened to be one of the funnest weekends of my life, that just because someone loves you, knows you, works with you, was in the room when your kids were born, knew your parents in 1995, does NOT mean that they get the WHOLE of you. And it doesn’t mean that you have to do everything the way they would do it.
Want to have a girls’ weekend in LA that includes ONLY people you met on an Outlander blog? DO IT. Want to explore that bicurious aspect of Locke Lamora that Scott Lynch never touched on in the novels? That’s smart. DO IT. Want to be on twitter every chance you get dissecting the newest celebrity appearance and what it means for your ultimate OTP? YOU DO YOU. Because, you don’t owe your RL friends that part of yourself. You may owe them other things, but you don’t owe them full understanding of your fandom life.
If you need to take a step back, do so, but know that no matter what anyone else says, fandom is not some aberration in your character that needs to be dealt with. It’s not some goofball pasttime that you should be ashamed of. When you love something enough to obsess over it, it becomes a little bit of you who you are, and if they people in your real life can’t handle that, well….
FANDOM 5EVA.
Have you ever been bruised by your real life finding out about your fandom?
