Meme from homais

[faerykat]

So, Jon posted a meme in which he chooses 7 interests listed in a friend's profile, and said friend goes on to post with explanations of each interest. Here are mine, below. Feel free to comment here and I will be happy to talk about more interests from my profile, ask you about yours, or both.

Comments

[homais]

And I thoroughly enjoyed reading your answers.

If I may try to inspire some, ahem, compulsive theorizing, I have heard a similar narrative to yours about fanfiction from others (and I've told it to myself once or twice before - I went through a phase with it a couple of months before I met most of you guys. Bet you didn't know that). It's a subset of imaginative literature, but what does it do, what does it provide, that seems to be so important to people who are kind of lost? I mean the question honestly. I have only the vaguest idea myself.

And queer culture. Exactly what is this culture? What community? I might argue - sometimes I do argue - that there's no such thing as a queer community. For a geographic metaphor: the community is less a country than an archipelago, but the rest of the world has only heard of one or two islands. Given the relatively high levels of acceptance for queerness (at least in the circles we move in) such that we don't necessarily need to band together so desperately, do you think there's a queer community in any meaningful sense anymore? Or, perhaps, tell me about your island in the archipelago.

[ladypimpernel]

Ooh, interesting question about the fanfic. I, too, have had my biggest fanfiction phases at the most lonely and left out times in my life. The first time I read a lot of it was when I first met the hall people, but still felt weird and left out. Becca and I both read tons of it in London, and I read a lot of it when I first moved to CA, had nobody but Mark, and was lonely all day. I always thought of it as just something mindless to pass the time and make me forget I was sad and lonely, but with this trend, I'm starting to wonder.

Maybe it has something to do with the participatory nature of the form? Anyone can contribute, anyone can comment. And I've always compared waiting for updates on a popular fic to being a reader of the serial novels of the Victorian era. You and a massive number of others, in a makeshift internet community, all waiting together for something exciting, and experiencing the story as it arrives in parts. I'm not sure of any of this for sure, but these are my vague, procrastinatory thoughts...