Fandom has been a hard thing for me lately. I still feel fannish, but the last few years have been a time of realizing just how little organized fandom and I actually gel. I feel like my organized fannish experience has mostly been characterized by investing energy into understanding the kinds of things that other people care about without fandom as a whole ever investing the same kind of energy into the things I care about (which, I mean, that's totally fair, if they're just not interested in those things? but it gets old!). And while I do know from experience that there are plenty of individual fans out there who get fannish in the same ways I do (usually on the edges of fandom, the "barely-fannish"), it's gotten much more difficult to find them since fandom as a whole has become less interested in having complex, multi-threaded conversations about fictional characters.

I think I will always get emotionally invested in fictional characters--other people's as well as my own--and I will always want to write and talk about them. But I'm not sure fandom-as-a-community is actually for me in the long run.

-J