This is what fun looks like.
I keep seeing people in the tags saying things like, “Guys, why are you worrying about Gigi posting personal videos to the official Pemberley Digital page/Bing being a med student/Jane disappearing from the face of the earth and not contacting Lydia/nobody watching Lydia’s videos? This is supposed to be fun! Have fun!”
For those of you who are saying things like that, I say in response…
I mean, I can’t speak for anyone else on the tags, so I won’t use the word “we,” but I think that what you’re seeing is that some people have fun with a work in a way that is different from the way you have fun.
Nobody says, “Wow, it’s so much work to make a gif! Come on guys, why are you doing it?” Even though I suspect that for a lot of people, making a gif would not be fun. Or, “You know, people write for a living. That’s hard work—just don’t put out fan fiction and have fun and enjoy this!” Even though writing is not fun for a lot of people, either. We can accept, though, that it is fun for the people who did it. If it wasn’t, they probably wouldn’t do it.
For some people, analysis is fun. Some people like thinking about whether things make sense, and inventing reasons why it might, and arguing about whether it works for us.Testing the limits where we’re willing to suspend our disbelief is fun. Speculating about what might happen is fun. Trying to make sense of things that don’t fit together is fun.
Some people make gif sets. Some people just watch the episodes. Some people tweet the characters. Some people write fanfic. Some people slice clips out of the videos and set them to music. We all have fun in different ways, and that’s okay.
What looks like painful overanalysis to you is my version of a complicated fan video. This is how I engage with things I enjoy.
It might not seem like fun to you, but then, it doesn’t seem fun to me to accept Bing as med student uncritically while the back of my brain is screaming aaauuughhh no. To me, that sounds like the opposite of fun.
Please do not tell me that I should change the way I enjoy things.