#but small and selfish things are sometimes easier to worry over than such huge widespread problems

[quillyfied]

Real talk for a minute because I fucking need this:

I’ve been a fandom nerd since age eight. Formalized when I first got online at age thirteen. My first real fandom was Harry Potter. It was my personality. It was everything. It introduced me to the fantasy genre, which I still haven’t really left. It made me want to be a writer. It made me realize there are stories inside of me that I want to share, that I hope touch someone else as deeply as Harry Potter touched me. Brain chemistry-altering type stuff. Loving Harry Potter is the only thing that extended family members who don’t really know me anymore remember about me. An ornament gifted years ago from an aunt who died suddenly. Thousands of words of writing. Hundreds of hours talking about it with friends and family. Toys, stickers, notebooks, clothes, gifts from others and some bought with money I shouldn’t have spent but did because it made me happy. Core childhood memories with people I don’t talk to anymore but remember so fondly.

It took a long time to be okay with tucking away my Harry Potter things. I disagreed with JKR’s political stances the second I heard them, but I held out hope for longer than I should have. I went through the very real shame and guilt and agony of something so foundational to my sense of self having to become a private, nostalgic sort of sad love instead of the loud, joyous proclamation it had been for years. It took a long time to be okay with losing the connection it brought with other strangers who also loved this story like I do and the giddiness of common ground and common excitement with other human beings. I’m still not okay with how something I still have so much love for is now an indicator of a person’s moral quality. I’m not okay with how my love makes me sad and uncomfortable instead of happy.

I’m a fandom nerd. It’s my biggest hobby and my biggest escape and coping mechanism. In May 2019, the thriving and small Dice Camera Action fandom exploded and then crumbled because of the show’s players’ interpersonal dramas, which in turn exploded and then crumbled me. Fully took out a pillar of my mental health. I learned a lot about parasocial relationships and my own relationship with them, about the dangers of them despite their very normal and common advent.

July 2019, I found Good Omens.

You can infer the pattern: brain chemistry-altering love, thousands of words of fanfic, more money than I had sometimes spent on stickers and plushes and shirts. Creating my very first cosplay, hours and hours talking about it with friends, some very fulfilling new creative relationships. A story that gave me hope, that felt True in the way that all great stories feel when they hit the right emotional chords. I’ve found new stories since then, but Good Omens remains an anchor that found me during a time I desperately needed it.

July 6, 2024.

Real people are more important than fandom. Obviously. I don’t think that’s ever truly in question.

But goddammit, fandom is people, too. Fandom is community. It’s the driving dopamine-sharing communal experience that has shaped my life for twenty years now. There is something in me that pushes back against the idea that the stories that have shaped and affected me so deeply must now be cast aside because their creators are unworthy, and at the same time, I have a hard time enjoying art knowing something on this magnitude taints it. It’s almost religious, in a way; avoid the appearance of evil, cast aside the unclean thing, repent for the sin of loving something made by a bad person.

Fuck you, my love doesn’t require repentance, art and artist can have some degree of separation and what I do and enjoy is nobody’s business.

Fuck you, how dare you give even verbal support to a monster by giving their work, and by extension them, the gift of your attention.

I don’t know how I’m going to handle this one yet, because the situation is more complex than JKR’s. There is still information coming out (more victims coming forward, I think more journalistic investigations under way), and Good Omens wasn’t just NG’s work, not the book and not the show. I’m in mourning. A little stuck and paralyzed. I’m not ready to put away and privatize another love that gave me such joy to be open and proud of. I resent the feeling that I need to or I will not be a Good Person.

In the meantime the bills need paid and my antidepressants need taken.