Lala Art

this is the MOST important scene in She-Ra

he is forgiven.

— beautiful dream. Everyone is happy and there is peace and quiet on earth…

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Once I got out of grad-school and started working, at exactly age 25, I figured it was time to get serious because I was “too old for this stuff” and frankly I was afraid of being judged. 

I sold all my comics, I stopped reading fanfiction, I stopped playing video games. All of it. It’s not that I never, ever watched anything “geeky” or spent a weekend binge-reading a kink-meme, but when I did, it was rare and I’d feel guilty about it like it was time wasted. I’d keep it all to myself, you know? And without any kind of inspiration, I eventually stopped drawing. After all, I didn’t need it for my “serious job,” so why bother? Unfortunately, my former skill is so atrophied now it’s nearly lost, but worse than that, it’s stressful now instead of the thing I loved to do for most of my life.

What was I doing instead? Well, I’d work my miserable, toxic job, come home and worry about how far behind everyone else I was, and how weird I was compared to all my colleagues. I’d go out with people and do the things they liked doing, but I only pretended to. But I’m not great at that and pretending to be someone else ate me alive. Unsurprisingly, by 31, my anxiety and depression was not in a great place, and I fuckin’ snapped. Not just because of this stuff, of course, but it honestly contributed. I quit my job and left town.

Suddenly I was completely alone, no job, no friends, and no reason to pretend to be someone else. So, I started doing all the things I’d given up. I read all the fanfiction I wanted, I bought a Playstation and an SNES and played them for hours. I bought back every comic book I loved, watched every Marvel movie I missed, and caught up on my favorite characters. I started traveling around just going to cons for the first time (NYCC, GeekGirlCon, DragonCon, etc). In fact, at @geekgirlcon and DragonCon especially, I saw groups of women who were 60+, just fucking enjoying things, and it made me feel so much better about my future. I’m not even joking, I literally cry every time I think about it, because I never realized how scared I was about aging in a world that thinks I’m already a decade too old for the things I love. Suddenly, that wasn’t so scary. 

And then I just stopped pretending that I wasn’t into this stuff. I mean all of it, even the stuff no one understand, even the stuff people openly make fun of, even smutty fanfiction. 

And look, I’m not saying this cured my depression, or that everything is perfect. For one, I picked a city that’s awful for geeks and I’m trying to figure out where to move and how. For another, I lost six years of making like-minded friends, and it’s hard to find them now because we’re all so worried about being judged and online – the space that was always a refuge for me as a loner weirdo growing up – is now apparently a Children of the Corn. But I’m happier here, actually fucking liking things, than being the unobjectionable robot woman I’m apparently supposed to be. 

This is gonna sound weird to you guys, but when I first started writing fanfic and sending stories to fanzines to be published back in 1991, in my first fandom all of the fans and writers and editors and readers I met were shocked that I was 17 because they were all in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the outlier. I was an aberration.

Wanna know when young people started discovering fandom en masse? In the mid 1990s, when AOL got their internet gateway.

All the folks who ran fannish mailing lists and conventions and published ‘zines and posted fanfic online were over 18, because email and IRC and Usenet and FTP sites and listservs were primarily used by adults because they were almost exclusively college students, government employees, and academics. And the users of gated communities like BBS, GEnie, Compuserv, and AOL all skewed older. Only Prodigy was actually aimed at kids, because prior to the mid-to-late 1990s, children weren’t getting online until they went to university.

And what kids found was the fandom that adults had built online, after being a part of it offline for decades.

Even when FFN was launched, the people who initially posted there were the same people who had been posting fanfic to the internet for a decade: THE GROWN-UPS.

I was 26.

I didn’t even know I liked tech; for my first fic, I needed a webpage, it was ugly, so I opened it to look at the code, saw my first html, and fell in love.  Now I’m an analyst who tests programs for statewide and even national use.

I didn’t know I liked people; I thought something was wrong with me, that I seemed to always say the wrong thing, that I seemed to think wrong.  Instead, it just turns out how I think is just fine; there are so many people like me and I still meet them to this day.  

I didn’t know I could make and maintain friendships, short or long term; as it turns out, not a huge problem.  I make and maintain friendships of almost two decades and still made new friends as of this year.

When my son came out to me as gay, I was ready for the question he wouldn’t ask that I had to answer right then; I love you.  Of course it’s okay. And why the fuck are you awake and messaging me at three in the goddamn morning?  YOU HAVE SCHOOL TOMORROW.  Without all the friends who told me what they needed that day for themselves, I’m not sure I would have known that was something he needed to hear.  Without my friends, I wouldn’t have known to even expect–much less how to answer–a thousand questions (at least) he had, and where to have him look for more.

(Also didn’t hurt fandom was the one place I could be sure was all the happy ending gay love stories any gay child would need to read and knew exactly where to send him.  Fuck knows the pro version still isn’t exactly thick on the ground though it’s getting better.)

When I first started, I was mentored by an older woman in her forties-fifties, and on her webpage she had a log of all this shit she’d done just in the last year; traveled to hang out with fan friends, all the fic she wrote that year, all these people she met, this wonderful life.  She posted to all these sites, and she posted to mailing lists her opinion and argued without fear or self-consciousness.

All I could think is I want to be her.

You think men just somehow magically get powerful as they pass into adulthood?  No.  They are mentored by, they get given chances to move up from, they learn from older men in their social networks, including in predominantly male “fannish” space.  Power, knowledge, opportunities move through those networks–and don’t kid yourself, they are primarily masculine networks.  By narrowing your networks to women within one or two years of your age, the “lol thirty-year-olds” rhetoric cuts you off from resources you might use to get stronger.  That’s a feature, not a bug.

Port Mafia reminds me kind of sorta to….