pedantic!

i really love fanfiction. in these past few weeks of endless thinking about what i was going to do, what helped me the most was fanfiction. other things helped, yes. i rewatched hot fuzz three times in a week at one of my lowest points when i had stopped eating properly. and the youtube videos i watched were also somewhat helpful. but when i started reading fanfiction again, it was really different. at first, it was your run of the mill binge; there was a ship i liked, so i read all the good fics for that ship. it's the same as when i read rwtw fanfiction back in the day. i would eventually stop, and the fics wouldn't leave that much of a lasting impression on me. i would move on.

i didn't stop reading, though. i read so much fanfiction. greats like passerine and heal thyself. so many hot fuzz stories. a number of mid stories i dropped not even a quarter of the way through, or gritted my teeth and finished because i wanted to know how things would wrap up.

the last fanfiction i read cannot easily be found online anymore, but i was able to get a copy. it was 75k words, and i sped through it from sunday to tuesday. and god, where to begin? i first read it in late 2021, when my life was a little bit unusual. i remember it, the bugs flying towards my dim laptop in a room by the sea, the strangeness of this image of me reading a fanfiction in this town in the middle of nowhere filled with people that could probably not wrap their heads around what i was reading. to rediscover this fanfiction in 2025 and read it with such a hunger was so interesting, because in between 2021 and 2025 was so much. and yet, this fanfiction perfectly sandwiches those two points in my life, and finishing it this second time made me think, huh, despite everything, it's still me. despite the hospitalization and the treatment and the grad school and the election and the following resignation, despite all the relationships i made and likely fucked up grandly with that email i sent on monday evening, still keiji sat in that motorbike behind osamu, the first inkstains of dawn breaking over their heads. still i saw in my mind's eye the sun rising over the outskirts of osaka.

it makes me think about this march, and how i will be standing in kamakura imagining percy and nico and the nodding buddha bobble heads from 16 years ago. it makes me think about my train pausing at natori station, miyagi in july 2024, me considering stepping outside and looking for the park tobio and shouyou ate taiyaki at.

it makes me think about my first job, my decision to go to grad school for biology, my career that i endeavor to despair over in these next six months. and how my last shining moment of undergrad was researching about introgressive hybridization between wild boars and domestic pigs in fukushima, a topic i chose for class partly because just months ago, i was trying to write a story of the characters of haikyuu and the 2011 disaster.

i don't know what it means, that i have these memories and thoughts regarding stories that occupy such a small sliver of existence. a nagging thought comes to mind: it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. i mean, i guess. but maybe, like the person to whom that was said, i don't dwell. maybe i get up, and i carry. i carry these fanfictions with me throughout life in both conscious and unconscious ways. they make me smile at the sight of an open train door, or a warm pastry. they make me look forward to year 2030 or so, when the last few chapters of haikyuu get animated. and they teach me understanding, respect, compromise, patience, and love.

i'll eventually move on from that motorbike and that mango milk and that nonexistent episode of chef's table. i'll probably go back to school later in the year, graduate with this insignificant degree, then use the credentials to pursue something tangentially related and with a lot more sense to me than the path i had been telling myself to go on. but right now, in the middle of the disaster that is my life as of january 2025, i will think about fanfiction. i will think about its place in my life. i will think about a future in which the act of writing and the act of science are deeply intertwined. and i will insist that i can make it my reality.