#fandom secrets

Seen on fandom!secrets, July 16 2022:

(Image: Cover of Susan Kay's Phantom. Text reads: "I lost my virginity to this book, so yes I take it personally when younger fans shit on it".)

The comment thread includes much bafflement. LOL.

I'm so glad this community still exists, albeit much smaller than it was in its glory days.

- Nate Shapiro

Hello, Anon:

I think many Charmies keep some things a secret out of respect for Armie’s privacy. The less people know about his personal business, the better it is for him, imho. If the last 8 months have taught us anything, it’s probably THAT.

People who wish to do him harm lurk in Charmie accounts on social media, so I think it behooves us to protect Armie from those nasty lurkers by revealing as little actual information as possible in our public posts, even if we are dying to spill the tea to the world.

Knowledge is power, and sometimes it’s exciting to be the first to share breaking news about Armie or Timmy, but not everything we know is meant to be shared online. That’s what private chat groups and DMs are for.

Besides that, we can’t possibly know anything that’s going on with Armie with any degree of certainty, unless Armie confirms it, and since we’ve not heard from him for months, anything we wish to assume about him at the moment is purely speculative. We can only make assumptions and theories based on possible clues in social media posts from his inner circle.

I agreed with the anon, that I wish the same for him, to spend his birthday with his kids. Nothing in that statement says that he didn’t, in fact, spend time with his family on his birthday. But neither does it confirm that he did. I think this is the best any of us can do under the circumstances.

If antis want to waste their time obsessing over us, people they claim to hate, over our tinhat speculations, that’s their problem. Their opinion of us is immaterial to me, in the grand scheme of things. They have no power here.

What does matter to me in this situation is that an innocent man will, hopefully someday soon, finally be able to restore his good name and his ability to be the excellent father that he is to his precious children. That he’ll soon be free to live as he chooses, surrounded by all the people he loves, and who love him back.

Those are the things that matter.

from the comment thread:

I need to come clean about something since I’ve been so apparently absent here. I haven’t /not/ been drawing. I’ve just been drawing a heck of a lot of fanart, which I felt weird about and so have been posting on blogs specific to those fandoms. But you know what. I’ve been enjoying myself, and the work isn’t /bad/ and I’m actually really happy with most of it, so I’m sharing. In October I read the “All for the Game” series by Nora Sakavic at an alarming rate. The books follow a college team for a fictional sport (akin to lacrosse) but the team is made up of misfits who have a lot of issues including but not limited to drugs, abusive pasts, and family with mafia ties. Shit happens. The characters are incredibly compelling. There are canon queer relationships. I fell and I fell hard. Shortly after that (and just in time to miss the kickstarter for Year Two, much to my fucking regret) I discovered Check, Please! ( @omgcheckplease​ ). Check, Please! follows a charmingly Southern, pie baking, figure-skater-turned-hockey-player named Eric Bittle and the Samwell University hockey team- including the Canadian hockey prince/Samwell Mens Hockey Captain: Jack Zimmermann. Stuff happens. Pies are baked. Kegsters are had. Games are won, games are lost. There’s also kissing and soft tender really beautiful moments and I die inside (in the best way possible) at how inspiring the creator, Ngozi is. (Read the Comic please.) And now I watch every Red Wings Game I can and I’m gonna turn on the NHL All Star Game at 3:30 today and I regret every day I was ashamed to remember how much I liked sports once I drifted away from soccer in high-school to do theater & art.

So anyway. This is what I’ve been doing for the past few months. This is not all of it, just a brief selection. It’s fun, it’s good practice getting characterization down, I like drawing sports equipment and doing the sports related gesture drawing, it’s good. My All for the Game fanart (as well as reblogs related to the fandom) can be found on my blog @smokesontheroof​ in the “My Art” tag. I’ll also be posting anything I do related to “The Raven Cycle” by Maggie Stiefvater on that blog, in the same tag.

My Check, Please! fanart (as well as reblogs related to the fandom, as well as general hockey stuff) can be found on my blog @omgpieplease​ in the “My Art” tag.

Meanwhile, over on fandom!secrets (August 3rd 2022) - behold, a cursed image:

The comments thread made me lol. Though the first few were very generous, people offered to help spread a gofundme and donate. Others had... other things to say.

Select comments below (and, spoilers!)

from the comment thread:

  The fact that you can read your own work multiple times and feel no shame probably means it's pretty good. I can gauge the quality of my own fic by whether or not I feel shame after reading it a few times.

I like reading my writing too. Even the rough stuff that I never got around to editing. 

The secrets these days are mediocre.

I feel the same way about ONTD.