That’s Not For Me

I have such a tricky time navigating fandom on the internet, especially watching people become totally enamored of a thing when I just don’t see “it.” There was a point when I would get very annoyed and want nothing to do with someone else’s obsession, but I try really hard to temper that revulsion with “it’s not for me.” I also do what I can to mute references to things, just so I’m not transferring my annoyance of a thing onto a person who loves it, because everyone is allowed to like different things.

Then there are the times when I love a thing and at some point something changes and I can feel my connection to it sever, and it’s no longer for me. The transformative nature of fanworks sometimes makes it a bit easier to taper off from something. In my CSI days, I started picking really obscure ships and getting into them, because they were things that weren’t going to keep getting jostled by canon. But inevitably, there was a point when even that couldn’t sustain my love of the show. Plus, the characters I was watching for were gone, and with fewer reasons to keep coming back, I eventually stopped.

The only other time that my connection to something can get so immediately disrupted is finding out something about it behind the scenes or beyond the scope of the initial book, TV show, or movie. The first time I encountered this was after reading Ender’s Game. I didn’t get into reading much science fiction until I was an adult, and when I came across that book, to say I loved it felt like an understatement at the time. It was the first time I’d read something that had a harder edge of science to parts of it (it wasn’t just space technology magic), and I loved how so much of it was approached. I was also a bit destroyed at the end, because I had gotten so caught up in the story, in the progress of the game, that I fully missed so much as a hint that it was really happening. I ended up reading the next book in the series, and starting another series by the same author. I appreciated so much of the world building, I liked how the characters talked to each other, and there were just aspects of the worlds I wanted to inhabit, which is almost always the thing that will truly sell me on a book. So, 3 or 4 books in with Orson Scott Card, I fatefully went to Google, and then I found out… some stuff.

I think in the aftermath of learning his views on homosexuality and same sex marriage, the first thing I felt was shame. I had spent money on his books, I had financially supported someone who I felt would not like me if he met me, because of who I am, and who I love. Not just that he wouldn’t like me, he was opposed to me living my life in my own way, and was actively involved with an organization opposed to my ability to (at the time) some day have the right to get married.

Shame has a lot of power over me. I fear it. It keeps me from things. Shame kept me in the closet for a very long time, and here it was, suddenly tied to this thing I had loved and enjoyed. It felt ugly in a way I hadn’t anticipated. That feeling lingers with me, and sometimes a tendril of it just reaches up and tickles at the back of my brain as if to say “remember that time you unknowingly supported a bigot?”

It’s that tendril that probably made my choices when it came to Harry Potter and JK Rowling more instantaneous than I initially realized. I can’t say exactly when it happened. I saw her saying and doing things online that were at first troubling, then outright problematic, and then I think she posted that essay and it was something we couldn’t really hand wave away anymore. It didn’t seem like it would be so pervasive or terrible at first, but every time I’d hear about her, she would be saying or doing something just slightly worse than the time before.

Sometimes I’m sad about it. I liked being a Hufflepuff. I liked having this cultural language with a huge swath of the internet, watching people sort characters from other fandoms into Hogwarts houses and emphatically agreeing or vehemently opposing their choices. I liked that Hermione got to be a smart girl who stood up for herself. I liked the mystery of the school, the Room of Requirement, the Chamber of Secrets, all the tunnels, the Marauder’s Map. There were so many great and interesting things. It feels silly to admit, but there’s part of me that wanted an owl arrive with a letter someday, because I felt like I fit so poorly into the life I was living at times; just having something to show up and explain those differences would have been such a relief. Harry Potter and Hogwarts were an escape for me, until they weren’t.

I admire the people who are able to enjoy the fandom in spite of its creator. There are whole chunks of fan lore that exist as almost fully-realized canon to the fandom, things that JKR didn’t contribute beyond creating the characters. The fandom could be so much more queer too, which was refreshing in the same way my penchant for shipping obscure CSI pairings kept me interested. I wasn’t ever that invested in online fandom, but as a cultural touchstone, Harry Potter sort of felt like it had permeated every corner of the internet for a while there. It had become a common language, of sorts.

Now, there’s just something that gets in the way of really engaging with it anymore. For a while, I would still watch videos of someone making a Harry Potter themed thing, but eventually even that became difficult for me to enjoy.

There was a point where my wife and I were watching a video from a Youtuber we regularly followed and they were going to do something Harry Potter themed, and my first thought upon discovering the premise of the video was basically “that’s still a thing?” Somewhere along the way, I had packed up all of my interest in this series I used to love, and labeled it as “entirely irrelevant, everyone has moved on” only to discover it wasn’t actually everyone who had come to that conclusion.

I think the realization I had come to was “that’s not for me.” Literally, it was off limits to me because of who I am. Nothing about that statement is true, even if it feels true to me. Still, it felt a bit like someone had installed an electric fence around this place I used to visit, and I had to hop the fence to get in. There’s no gate, there’s no avoiding that jolt of pain, if I want to go back.

I’ve spent a lot of time grappling with the idea that “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” this year. It’s next to impossible to be fully informed about the impact of every dollar I spend and its potential repercussions. But, will I knowingly put money towards a thing that’s going to support a TERF? Will I engage with content that’s going to contribute to royalties for that TERF? At this point, no, I can’t do that, and I generally wish other people would stop too. Is that fair? Is it something I can demand of others? No, I can’t. I can only control what I do.

It feels immature to say, but it hurts my feelings, when people know what’s been said and done, and they decide nostalgia is just more important. The last seven years has been a lot of people yearning for “the good old days,” choosing to ignore all of the racism, sexism, homophobia, and just general abuse of those in the minority, that went on unabated at that “ideal” time. In a way, all of the bullshit when the new game came out earlier this year is just more of the same.

I’ve spent the past 6 months trying to make sense of my thoughts and feelings on this subject, and the only thing I ever come back to is its complexity, and how difficult it is to convey anything concisely. It’s made me hold grudges. It’s made me resent people online who I used to love. It’s made me sad. It’s also been next to impossible to find a silver lining in all of this. It’s feels a bit like when The Suck Fairy visits something, but in this case, it’s beyond that. I see echoes of it in everything that’s happened with Twitter recently. There’s this framework where all the good stuff used to be, but now it’s just covered in rotting garbage with someone trying to tell me “it’s as great as it’s always been!” when I know that’s objectively not true.

I don’t like that so many things I used to love and enjoy seem to crumble with time. I suppose part of that is the reality of life though. Nothing stays perfect forever. I also saw a quote from Maya Angelou today: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

Perspectives change, life goes on, and you gain more experience and it’s pretty much impossible to look at something the way you did when you were 15, 25, or 35. I know better about some things now, I’m sure I’ll know better about other things in the future. Hopefully other people will know better too.