#exsiste

if your professional or personal life could suffer IN ANY WAY due to your activity in fandom (I know a few people with homophobic families/environments who definitely hide their identity on the internet because of the high queer content they produce for their fandoms), then it's obviously a good idea to keep your fandom activity entirely separate from your non internet life.

but I think if you know people who are enthusiastic about any sort of fictional media, whether they love movies or loved harry potter or really like game of thrones enough to read the books and you would feel comfortable talking to them about your fandoms? then I think talking to them about fandom is fine and will not set you up for future embarrassment. BUT if it’s just random people you’re not super close with, or coworkers, or your parents…probably hold back. not just because it’s embarrassing, but because for non-fans, it can get boring really quickly to hear someone fangirl endlessly, or slightly alienating for them to be bombarded with a sub culture they have no frame of reference for.

like if someone is not a Fan (ie, is not involved in any type of fandom etc) they probably don’t want to hear about your fangirl tendencies anyways. I’M GENERALIZING OBVY like some people might be SUPER INTERESTED IN IT despite never having heard of it, and it’s up to you to decide the level of potential interest someone has and whether it’s appropriate or not to continue discussing your fandoms with them.

(sidenote: make sure it is at least 80% a discussion, and not just you blabbing at someone because for a lot of people, that’s boring. this goes for people who are even in the same fandom as you!!!! like even if someone reads the same comics, it’s not guaranteed that they will care about your ships/fics/etc, so make sure the tone of the conversation is balanced and you are not coming across as an insensitive dick who is boring your conversation partner to tears by being unable to realize they HAVE NO INTEREST IN ANY OF THIS SHIT.

I might be projecting a bit here. moving on.)

also talking about nsfw/slash/ships/fics in general with real life people...depends. I guess don't assume everyone reads fic/interacts with fandom in the same way you do, because that can lead to awkward situations? I'd say waxing poetic about your otp to random people and telling them about how you've written a 273-chapter epic about them is going to be embarrassing to your older self, but idk, el james exists and has somehow not set herself on fire out of shame, so there are always exceptions. that might be due to her millions of dollars though.

the point is, fandom culture is becoming more mainstream and acceptable, but most aspects of it are still seen as bizarre by the general population. see: all the reality tv shows that portray cosplayers as some kind of exotic strange bird to be gawked at and mocked. so any talk of it in public has to be handled delicately. it's not necessarily about embarrassing yourself and the people you're talking to, it's more like...consider yourself the ambassador for fandom. you don't know if the person you're talking to has every encountered this before, so you want to give them a good impression of the community that you love and represent!!! they're a friendly alien and you're trying to convince them your community is not full of axe murderers. or something. this kind of got away from me?