The experience of fandom, especially in the age of the internet, is one of binge reading: most new fans, upon discovering fanfic, gobble it down. The first story you read is usually an eyebrow raiser; shocking, maybe a bit embarrassing. “What is this craziness? Do people really do this? I don’t think I like it. Are they all like this? Let me just look at one more …” And then the next thing you know, it’s four in the morning, it’s three days later, it’s ten years on. You are at your friend’s house, and the floor around you is covered with zines. You are on the internet, and you haven’t showered in days. Your browser history is a dreadful embarrassment. You’ve read roughly forty-five thousand stories, some of them amazing, many of them terrible, and you now have all sorts of opinions about tropes and genres. You have developed a particular taste in fanworks. You really like femslash, or hurt/comfort, or cavefic, or long, plotty gen. But I guarantee you this: no matter what you like, and no matter how much there is of it–there isn’t enough of it.
And so some readers (and some of you) will start to write. You’ll write the thing you want to read, because how hard can it be? You can do better than that story you read last night. And that other story you read was okay–except, you know what would have been really good? You know what would have been great? This. This is gonna be great.
– Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (ix-x)
i wish more people spread around the quote from a 1998 yoshiyuki tomino interview where he talks about how boys who only build gunpla are fake gundam fans and the true original fans were girls who write fanfiction
Secondhand embarrassment stems from self-hatred – you’ve been punished or have punished yourself for behaviors the other person is exhibiting, and you have to a greater or lesser extent accepted that that punishment was correct and deserved. This means that other people deserve the same kind of corrective action and it bothers you when it’s not enforced.
Fighting secondhand embarrassment therefore involves interrogating your own past. What did you do that this person is reminding you of? What happened to you as a result? Did you actually deserve it? What motivations did the other people involved have for correcting your behavior, and were they justified in doing so?
If you are able to develop empathy for your past self – an understanding that either you couldn’t have known better or that the correction you got from others was disproportionate or entirely unnecessary – you will be better able to direct that empathy at others. The root of all shame is your own shame and the root of all sympathy is the ability to forgive yourself.
The first time Merle actually tries preaching to someone and he fails so bad that by the end of it he’s trying to convert them by telling them god’s going to run them over with a train
just moving along like everyone else 