LJ Idol Week 9: Keep Calm and End This Meme
Part One: Frodo Lives!
It’s called Fandom.
It’s basically an addiction at this point.
You are obsessively enthusiastic about certain characters and stories.
You can’t stop even when it affects your well-being.
Even when you know you should.
Even when you are thinking, this isn’t even really making me happy anymore.
Other people doing it too tell you this is how it works, so it’s okay…
But unlike an addiction to hard drugs or hard drinking you can’t really explain it in a way that makes any sort of sense.
You decorate your room with posters and references only you understand and get weepy when a song on the radio makes you think of a certain character.
You spend an entire summer reading almost nothing but male/male slash (that means sex) based on fictional characters rewritten in all sorts of the most amazing and interesting scenarios and realize that it’s truly the Rule #34 of the internet that if you can think of it there is porn of it.
Whenever someone asks what you are reading you say, The Hunger Games and almost get caught in the lie when you have still only read the first chapter over a month later. It’s like candy that will rot your brain but for you it’s a quick and easy fix.
You go for long stretches where you stay away. Sometimes for even months at a time until the night you’re up until two in the morning reading that one “Space Pirates AU fanfic” and are strung out at work the next day and then spend hours reading comments on forum boards when you get home.
You search the internet looking for just the right fan inspired t-shirt to wear in public hoping you might someday run into someone who says, “You do the thing too!”
Maybe you can form a support group. It’s like a book club. A really twisted book club.
You have a dream that you are standing in a giant round room that is like a library of your absolute favourite fan written works in small paperback editions and categorized on shelves. You’re excited and also confused because this is the wing of the gorram akashic records you get to visit?
When you are awake you applaud yourself for resisting digital hoarding and have a pretty good memory anyway and then think, shit if this is what your mind palace looks like you’re screwed.
You resign to read something different and reach for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
You wonder why you immediately start writing your own rule 34 reinterpretation of it in your head. It’s called a plot bunny you’re told. They hide under the bed. Aren’t they cute?
Part Two: Kill Your Television!
I recently started accidently stalking this cute boy who lives in my neighbored; he’s a clerk at the bakery and the deli. I’m sort of doomed. I write a million different scenarios in my head. I long to be Rory Gilmore but I’m much too old now and I was once told by the director of my college drama program that while I was indeed a talented actress I was not pretty enough to play the ingénue.
I am Rajesh Koothrappali with a vagina.
I’m in a relationship with my kindle and my pillow. I don’t have time for cute people.
Did I use the word cute already? That’s bad writing.
It is though. It’s all so damn cute. It’s a meet cute.
It’s chic lit.
It’s wanting to interrupt my best friend when she says she loved the “Shades of Grey trilogy” to tell her that Anastasia Steele was raped and is in an unhealthy and abusive relationship but hey I could email her plenty of links to much better written BDSM erotica if that’s something she’d be like, interested in…or whatever.
I get stoned and invoke the spirit of the beat poets and consider buying a vintage typewriter and taping every damn word I write all over walls of my little room in the boarding house in some sort of fight for authenticity.
Remind me to tell you about the time I was dosed at a party and hallucinated for hours and then ended up in the hospital. At one point I thought I was Jesus, I’m not frelling kidding.
It’s maybe, kind of, sort of, believing in The Matrix forever after that.
It’s reading Vigilant Citizen and listening to Creepy Pasta podcasts.
It’s: how do you feel about gay male love stories being written by women?
It’s all the things you’d never admit to in polite society.
Does that even exist anymore?
It’s writing down everything because there’s a story in there somewhere.
It’s keeping calm and carrying on no matter what happens.