The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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When I was a teenager I found a community of fanfic writers who I adored. They had their own shared canon and one of them was a Powerhouse of writing. Spitting out chapters longer than some books, filled with classical and pop-culture references, philosophical musings, good-vs-evil clashes, tense heroism, etc.
I would check their bio pages every day. Eventually they got a forum and I lurked there too. I watched them talk amongst each other and I wanted so badly to be their friend. A couple of problems:
They were clearly adults, and I very much was not. My parents forbade me from reading fanfiction. Obviously I ignored this directive, but I wasn't able to make an account because my parents also managed my email address.
But it would not be an exaggeration to state that this group of fanfic writers had a strong impact on my outlook today. These fanfics formed me the same way the Aeneid formed generations before me.
And more than that, I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be their friend so badly. They were the coolest people ever.
By the time I was an adult and could sign up for an account, they had slowed down publishing. I re-read the corpus of work, commented on chapters, joined the forum, but I was an interloper, an outsider. I never could explain to them just how much they meant to me. I tried not to be weird, but I think I was probably very weird from their perspective.
Around the time I created an account, fewer chapters were published. Eventually it was all gone. No more posts on the forum, no more chapters published. They all knew each other outside the forum. Maybe they moved to discord.
Ten years later, I still have dreams where I find them, they welcome my presence, and we become online BFFs.
My husband thinks it's not weird that I had a fandom interest that defined my adolescence, but the damaging part was that I thought I could be one of them. The biggest Star Trek fan never harbored delusions that they would one day be friends with Gene Roddenberry, but through the magic of the Internet and semi-public spaces I had a sense of intimacy with these people who had no idea I existed. To some extent the Internet is mostly lurkers and I am certainly not the only kid who lurked on their forum.
I think people call this a Parasocial relationship, and it is one of the dangers of the Internet that was never explained to me as a kid. I knew not to share my real name or address. I knew not to talk with strangers. I didn't know not to lurk and pine for a friendship I would never form.
I think I came out of it mostly unscathed except for the occasional twinge of sadness or embarrassment.
I feel you. I think these "scenes" just come and go. Either they blow up and the core group becomes big, famous professionals who are way too famous for a regular person to approach (like a punk band selling out to go on MTV and fill stadiums) or it just dies out all together.
I was also into fanfiction as a teenager. Maybe not as much as you, but I had a phase when I was reading a lot of it. Mostly on this one site dedicated to one show, which has since become unpopular and the site shut down. No idea what happened to any of the writers there, I assume they all just left and went their own separate ways. Oh, and I was using it with absolutely no filter. I don't think the site even had a filter. Good ol 90s internet...
When I was older I dabbled a little in writing fanfiction. Nothing too serious but I did my best. It was a fun experience, getting to express myself, seeing the view counts go up, and even getting (a few) positive comments. But it was pretty lonely just doing it on my own, and then throwing out to the anonymous internet. It definitely would have been better with a real community of peers to give me feedback, or at least let me know that there's real human beings on the other end reading this stuff.
I think about it like that rule in fight club: "If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight." Those communities don't work when there's too many onlookers just hanging around spectating without participating. There's something magical that happens when everyone is at least trying to participate, regardless of how good or bad they are. In fact, part of the charm in fanfiction is that the barrier is so low- there's tons of really bad writers writing garbage, so we don't feel shame at putting our own bad writing into the mix.
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That's strange. How did that happen?
For context, my parents started at a high baseline of paranoia and desire to control my cultural inputs. My mom forbade me from reading Harry Potter books. At first the kids shared a computer that was in a public area, eventually I received my own computer in my room so that my siblings and I could play online games together.
I discovered fan fiction when I finished reading Artemis Fowl The Eternity Code. I was very upset at the ending and I wanted to know if another book would be forthcoming. I found a forum discussing the books which had a link to fanfiction.net. Before I knew it, I found fan fiction for all my favorite books and shows.
I was a very timid reader. I recognized that I was under the age of 13 and wasn't supposed to be in most places on the Internet. I was very good at avoiding any stories tagged Romance. I only read stories rated K/K+ (equivalent of G/PG). I was the model child on the internet, studiously avoiding things that were beyond my comfort level for cursing, violence, and sex.
But there was something naughty about fan fiction itself. I knew about copyright in general terms. Most fan stories had a line up top saying "I'm not making money off this, don't sue me!" I wasn't 100% sure this was more legal than pirating a book. So I kept it hidden.
Eventually, my parents finally figured out I wasn't spending 2 hours a day playing solitaire on the family computer and was instead going to the same website every day. Because I kept it hidden, it was automatically suspicious.
My dad went to fanfiction.net and looked up a book series he was familiar with (Discworld.) He changed the filters to Rated M and Romance. It took about five minutes before I was forbidden from returning to the site.
I got better at hiding it and to this day I don't think they ever learned that reading fan fiction was one of my main hobbies as a teenager. I read library books fast enough that it was reasonable to assume that is what I was doing in my room.
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Strange to think that in a few years this space, too, will be a memory for most, possibly all of us. We'll move on to whatever (if we are lucky) and The Motte may or may not continue in some form, but not like this.
(edit: by "if we are lucky" I mean if we continue to live and have fulfilling lives where we interact socially)
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It can be quite disappointing to think about what could have been. Sometimes these types of internet communities only exist for a brief window, and then they’re gone.
Do you have any interest in writing your own fanfiction now? Maybe that could be a vehicle for forming new relationships that become valuable to you in their own way.
I've written some fanfiction, but I think I'd rather make friendships in the physical world. It's better for my kids, better for networking, better to have someone who can lend a hand in real life from time to time.
If someone in the community I lurked on reached out to me and said, "Hey, I saw your post on TheMotte and recognized that you were talking about us, would you like to join an online game together?" I would accept in a heartbeat. But I don't necessarily want to create a new online attachment.
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