These are but wild and whirling words

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Someone clips it and it goes viral.

Over the next few days, Shane and Ilya's mentions start to get flooded with pictures. Mostly it's screenshots from various games they played against each other, meticulously picked through by dedicated fans to find every moment Shane and Ilya looked at each other on the ice.

Some screenshots get shared by hundreds of different people because they stand out so obviously: Shane and Ilya meeting each other's eyes during a face off; Ilya looking at Shane while his back is turned, naked longing visible on his face; Shane chasing after Ilya with a small but delighted grin.

There are also pictures from press events, award ceremonies, behind the scenes at All Stars. Seemingly any time Shane and Ilya got captured in the same frame gets dug up and shared.

Finally, a couple of weeks later, the director of Shane and Ilya's CCM commercial posts outtakes from their shoot. It's captioned 'Took a bit of digging but I knew I still had these somewhere! I had to make my contribution to the #HollanovArchives even though this must have been a while before they got together. These kids had crazy chemistry, right from the start!'

Shane hasn't responded to the onslaught yet, too overwhelmed by the (slightly terrifying) dedication of their fans as well as the fact that he now has dozens of pictures clearly displaying his and Ilya's love for each other during a time in their lives when it was so desperately hidden.

He does respond now, sharing the director's post with a sincere (and publicist-approved) caption thanking him and the fans.

This is a modern piece of classical music written in 2014 by Martin Keary.

It sounds… odd. It's difficult to describe. It evokes a feeling that is familiar, but does so in a seemingly spastic manner, without the smoothness most people are used to expecting from classical music.

To the untrained ear, this is gibberish. But Martin Keary isn't untrained, far from it. This is someone with years of study in classical music. And what's more: the comments are filled with other classical musicians praising it.

I found this video by going to his channel, sorting by popular and scrolling all the way down, which means the alienation from this piece is not uncommon. Most people simply aren't going to appreciate it. But experts do. Clearly, they are hearing something we're not. Perhaps it's a reference to other authors, or a mathematical pattern, or he's pushing a boundary in conventions of the genre in a way that seems innovative and spirited to people used to working with the writings of people long dead. I'm sure it's something perfectly explainable once you get down to it. But appreciating it requires a profoundly deeper look at the material than most people will ever give it.

So for a fanfic, I'm thinking that authors may have developed a similar sixth sense for gold. Maybe once you get used to enough poorly written fiction, you start to see through the cracks in the ore. You can see a plot line that has potential under the bad grammar. You can see a beautiful prose flow even though it's used to describe an utter nonsense plot. You can see the author's knowledge beyond the æsthetic roughness and moral dubiousness.

Think of My Immortal. It's known as the worst written fanfic of all time for a reason. But the history behind it, and the references in it, and the way it all descends into chaos is somehow, in itself, a masterpiece. Because we know this wasn't just a teen girl having a breakdown, this was written by someone who understood fanfic culture of the time so perfectly, so intricately, that they were able to distill and reproduce every single core engagement hook in it and create a work so absolutely bananas that to this day there's still debate about whether it's real or not.