![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What do you do if you’re alone in a fandom? If you can’t contribute anything of actual value? If nothing you have to say is ever good enough to provoke genuine spontaneous enthusiastic responses; either nothing at all or maybe forced polite ones at best? If the stuff you’re interested in isn’t what most other people, the “real” people, are interested in? If the people who are maybe the closest to your own interests are in a little circle of their own friends that they’ve been in for a decade or more and there’s no way into that because they don’t look at anything outside of it, or if they do, there’s never been any evidence, thus, nothing you did was ever enough to merit a mark of their attention?
(NB I’m not suggesting I should somehow be let inside the friendship itself. but that feeling of “foregone conclusion that you will never even be considered because you weren’t already there at a time when you barely even knew the thing existed”… where the alternative is “yes, they have looked, but it was all so worthless to them they decided to say nothing at all”… well.)
And between all these things you can never acquire that “man, that was awesome!” back and forth feedback loop that keeps things going?
I know the answer is “git gud; if you were worth paying attention to, people would pay attention to you” but being alone especially when nominally the idea of the thing is “hey let’s all play together” is seriously just one of the worst feelings ever. “No one wants to play with you.”
(I would have said that in my current fandom that “let’s all play together” is not actually the underlying assumption and it’s way more a meritocracy than I had ever experienced before in other fandoms, but as I write this, before my eyes I am seeing unfold a thing of “hang on haven’t I said something pretty much just like this? Why is this good, people saying ‘OMG LMAO THIS IS PERFECT’, and when I said it, it wasn’t?”)
The fact that this has happened to me more than once means the common factor, and thus the problem, is me, but how do you keep living with your best never being good enough?
(NB I’m not suggesting I should somehow be let inside the friendship itself. but that feeling of “foregone conclusion that you will never even be considered because you weren’t already there at a time when you barely even knew the thing existed”… where the alternative is “yes, they have looked, but it was all so worthless to them they decided to say nothing at all”… well.)
And between all these things you can never acquire that “man, that was awesome!” back and forth feedback loop that keeps things going?
I know the answer is “git gud; if you were worth paying attention to, people would pay attention to you” but being alone especially when nominally the idea of the thing is “hey let’s all play together” is seriously just one of the worst feelings ever. “No one wants to play with you.”
(I would have said that in my current fandom that “let’s all play together” is not actually the underlying assumption and it’s way more a meritocracy than I had ever experienced before in other fandoms, but as I write this, before my eyes I am seeing unfold a thing of “hang on haven’t I said something pretty much just like this? Why is this good, people saying ‘OMG LMAO THIS IS PERFECT’, and when I said it, it wasn’t?”)
The fact that this has happened to me more than once means the common factor, and thus the problem, is me, but how do you keep living with your best never being good enough?
no subject
Date: January 21st, 2025 05:47 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: January 21st, 2025 08:31 pm (UTC)From:Unfortunately this fandom is too small to have its own fests. It's Yuletide-eligible, having a mere 186 complete fics in English on AO3 when I checked a couple of days ago, but while it was nominated a couple of years ago, either it was not offered or not requested by anyone who signed up (or both) because there were no fics written for it. (I can't nominate it myself because I can't fulfill the writing requirements for the exchange.) What I'm contending with here is a branch of the fandom that is not very transformative, unless you make fangames, which are celebrated but very difficult to make (nearly impossible to do so alone), and which tends to regard fanfic as kind of a low pursuit and sometimes uses the term as a pejorative (whichever game you like least in the series is "just fanfic", that kind of thing); and then there's a little cluster on Tumblr which looks inward to itself and never leaves notes on my posts there or reads my fics on AO3; and then a group on the only active Discord for it that I feel very left out of because their interests are different than mine and the whole way I got into the series in the first place was very nonstandard, so they just have a lived experience that is the same as each other while I am alone with mine. And it's not like they wouldn't talk to me but I often feel they are talking past me. They wouldn't agree if I said so, but a social hierarchy definitely formed in that server in the time since it was created in April 2022 and I am not in with the "real people". So it is me in the sense that I can't break into television: what I say and do just does not pique their interests.
And the quality standards overall just feel like the fandom has a much higher bar for anyone to even give a crap than Harry Potter did, or my peeks into Doctor Who. (Though when I say this has happened to me more than once, the other time was Harry Potter; I would think at first that I was in a group of friends who all interacted with one another, but over time it would become apparent that I was "not enough" and did not fit on the "inside". Although at least there I still get kudos and the occasional comment on my old fics to this day, because the fandom is/was so large that there are still people floating around involved in it.)
no subject
Date: January 21st, 2025 09:57 pm (UTC)From: