#sparkledogs

you know what? Growing up in the hetastuck fandom fucking ruined my fandom experience. there was such a pressure on us in "cringe" fandoms to be "one of the good ones" that I internalised a whole slue of unwritten fandom rules... or sometimes they were written but like... some examples of things i notice i still subconciously hold myself to: - OCs should not be directly connected to canon character - OCs should not be in any way interfere with established plot - do not push against established worldbuilding, it is not to you to expand the world - self insert bad - you can ship canonxcanon, but canonxoc or selfshipping is taboo. you know what this led to? a whole lot of OCs that feel like background characters. normallest people a-fucking-life in the universe. uniqueness is scary and might piss people off so keep it limited...etc etc. fandom shackles. and I have been trying to cast them off. i tried to make a sparkledog. ended up with a neon orange fox and a fear of "what if he's too much", he didnt even have wings or horns or anything. and wow, orange fox, we've never seen those. /s I want to selfship! it seems so fun! there is characters that i want to crawl onto and claim as mine, but there is a deep nested fear in my heart that the moment I do that, post about that, everyone around me will go "ew" and hate me, and I... I cannot overcome that fear. It's been drilled into me as the hard rules of fandom, things you cannot break without becoming Cringe :tm: and as much as people say cringe culture is dead, my fear of it is not.