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[anax]

Come on, you didn't think this would end with my last post, did you?

Of course you didn't. You know me better than that.

My intent with this post is thus:

I mentioned this in the last one, but I will go over it in more detail here. I said that it was perhaps not surprising or ironic that asingulargirl and sutlers were the ones who decided to be the fandom quality

Comments

[hieronymousb]

I liked ASG a lot. We were friends, or at least, I considered her a friend. We were LJ-married, and we talked more or less every day on AIM and in PM on IRC. I tried to help beta her fics and give constructive criticism on her writing. I also recced her stories in my LJ and recommended her as a judge of contests, because I trusted her opinion (in particular, I recommended her to Mikke as a possible judge of the Scimitar Smile contest). When she left the fandom and the CoE, I tried to be a good sport about it. I was dismayed, of course, but I figured, hey, that's life, fandoms change and sometimes people move on.

However, some of the things that I've heard she has said about me and the chat since her departure ... bothered me. A lot. I've given the matter more thought than I really should have. I've wracked my brain wondering what her motives and feelings were all along, whether she felt the CoE was not supportive of her new fandom and whether she perhaps felt the chat and its members had become hostile to her and this was some reactionary hostility, or whether she felt I pushed my own interests on her too much (I've considered that I may have, though ASG was, in FmA fandom, someone who seemed to express interest in everyone's ideas and pairings, and at no point did she tell me she was bothered by me gushing about mine). I wondered if at some point I had stepped out of line with the constructive criticism I had tried to give her. I don't know. I may never know. To be honest, I can't even remember some of our exchanges, but I do remember that at no point did she express the displeasure with the chat that she seems to have expressed later.

I haven't been talking about this in anyone's LJ because to go into the specifics of these things said in private would be a violation of the privacy of the person who told me about them. So I still won't say the specifics. And I don't know what else she said, though I heard she said "more inflammatory things"--frankly, I don't want to know. I wonder, does/did the ASG I liked actually exist, or was it all a front she put forward? Did she really come to the CoE with the intent of saying all the right things, cozying up to the FmA BNFs, getting support from them, and only caring about them in so far as it was beneficial to her? If so, I suppose it worked frustratingly well, because at one point, a great many members of the chat liked her and considered her a good friend. It is sad that she apparently did not think the same of us, but c'est la vie.

I have to ask myself--am I motivated to participate in these posts due to grudge left over from what I described above? I suppose it is possible that this is an internal factor. But if anything, I think it goes in the other direction. I think respect for the friendship we had is what has kept me from lashing out or being more vitriolic than I have been. When I have considered someone a friend, it is hard for me to completely submit to the idea that I was wrong about them as a person. There's a part of me that still wants to believe that somehow, it was all just a big misunderstanding. But my gut tells me that's not the case, and all logic I've seen agrees. I find it unfortunate, but I've said my piece. My conscience is cleared. Unless something new and pressing turns up, I'm pretty much done here.