Iiiiii'm in the moooood for waaaaaaank...
Feeling particularly low-toned today, despite having gotten a decent amount of sleep and doing fairly well at [thing I do that I don't talk about in fannish public anymore for fear of hazardous levels of RL wank]. Thus, some random rant/rambling I've been meaning to do for ages.

I remember my first Escapade, some five or so year ago, and driving home afterwards, how I felt like I'd never seen so many brilliant, beautiful women all in one place before. I felt high on fannish energy and enthusiasm. I felt like I'd finally found someplace where I belonged.

So how did I get from there to "why the fuck did I ever give a shit what any of these aberrated assholes think?"

(Okay, that's not exactly a comparison between like objects since I've never hated anybody I've met at a con - to the contrary, some people I thought were jerks online turned out to be cool in person, but you know what I mean.)

(Oh, wait, I met Te at a con once, but I didn't hate her at the time, because I didn't realize what a hypocritical, psycho twat she was until several months later. But anyway...)

I guess 95% of my enchantment with fandom went swirling during the first go-round of RPS wars, back in, oh, 1999 or so. (Damn, that long ago?) Suddenly all kinds of people whom I thought were cool and open-minded were acting like judgemental, homophobic, hypocritical holier-than-thou jerks. Suffice it to say, fandom didn't feel quite so much like home anymore. And I'm sure the anti-RPS crowd would say that I brought all the bad feelings on myself for writing the eeevil, eeevil slash about poor defenseless celebrities who aren't attention whores at all and would be scandalized, scandalized at the thought of themselves in a same-sex couple despite the fact that they camp it up with their same-sex friends in front of the whole fucking world, but what-evah.

Four of the remaining five percent died of terminal annoyance during the whole fandom_wank debacle. And the most off-putting thing about the repeated TOSings of FW and my personal journals wasn't that it happened at all, it was that it could have been worse. That if I weren't as scrupulous as I am about not having identifying personal information on the net, I could have had some fucking psycho fan(s) calling my house, calling my job to try and get me fired, calling the TIPS line and telling the FBI I'm a terrorist, or any other fucking hideous thing, and all because I encouraged people to stick pins in a few overinflated BNF egos and have a laugh about the stupid fucking shit fans find to fight about.

You know the funny part? I'm still not sorry for any of it. If I had the last five years to do over again, I would have done it the exact same way (except I would have saved all of my LJ comment notifications instead of just most of them). Because I don't think it's ever a bad thing to know the truth about people, even if the truth is that they're assholes. And because even amidst all the wankery, I still managed to meet a lot of cool people who have made my life that much more amusing/interesting for their participation in it.

That 1% of my enthusiam that's still there is what keeps me going to slash cons and reading the fannish things my journal friends post. I like seeing people at cons and reading their squeeing over various obsessions. I just don't have the gumption to do any squeeing of my own anymore. And I think I've finally, over the last few months, come to accept that fandom is something I used to be into.

...

Next time: why fandom is like Scientology.