kalpurna

Up until a little more than a year ago, I had never done anything in fandom which I regretted or which made me feel ashamed of myself.

I joined fandom when I was fifteen, almost by accident. Before I knew it fandom became my primary downtime activity, the source of dozens of real life friends. I wrote my senior paper in high school about fanfiction. I live with a fandomer. I am almost embarrassingly sincere and hyperbolic about the joy I find in fandom, the qualities I love best about it, its opportunities and the heights to which it can soar. I've watched the Organization for Transformative Works since it began with a sense that this is what we can achieve, this is what we have the incredible capacity to become. I love fandom with an abiding love.

In August 2007, I discovered bandflesh and lol_meme, in that order.

The ramifications of being anonymous are enormous. For someone like me, who gets anxious about posting comments anywhere, the anonymity freed me to say whatever I wanted whenever I wanted without fear of ever sounding stupid or insecure or disgusting or in any way abnormal. I could have hours and hours of internet interaction without ever feeling awkward or uncomfortable or concerned. It was absolutely intoxicating. When I was severely depressed I would spend literally all of my waking hours meming. I've spent 24 hour periods on the meme.

More and more as I talked to people on meme and bandflesh I found out what their fandom experience was like. Most of them had major problems with the way fandom is constructed, the social rules that rigidly shape it (don't be confrontational, don't be a jerk, don't piss in people's cheerios), the assumptions that come with it and which we so rarely question. A lot of them had never made meaningful connections with fellow members of fandom, or those connections had disappeared. When I asked, shocked by the tone of a conversation, if anyone regretted the people they'd lost from their flists switching fandoms, everyone essentially shrugged and said "nah."

Most people who have spent enough time on the meme have abandoned their livejournals entirely. The times I've been discussed on bandflesh, one of the major things people mentioned about me was that I'm much more involved in mainstream fandom than they are, and it wasn't a compliment.

What I never really understood until recently was how hard this choice was to avoid making.

I've posted before explaining a couple of the things I love about anonymity, but I never talked about the stuff I don't like. On meme and on bandflesh, what's funny and pithy and unambiguous always wins the argument. They're not optimistic about fandom - they're often flat-out antagonistic towards it. They almost never give someone they don't know the benefit of the doubt. They allow statements to pass without comment that I find revolting and simplistic and wrong (although not always - the power of the dogpile is notable).

When people think of the meme and bandflesh as being communities (hate-based or otherwise) which exist within fandom, they're seriously mistaken. The culture that's built up there is different from fandom in such basic ways that even when the two groups talk about the same things, they sound like they come from different planets.

For example, recently there was a post that made the wanky rounds on both meme and livejournal. On LJ, what happened is that people made cryptic allusions to it, and largely the annoyance expressed was concerning a perception that the original post was harshing on other people's choice of source material and being needlessly jerky about well-loved fandoms.

On meme, people linked to the post over and over, capslocking bluntly about what a jerk the person was for making it - but not because of the well-loved fandoms, which weren't mentioned at all, but because of the perceived hypocrisy of someone who primarily writes about white men suddenly deciding to complain about the treatment of women characters in her source material. The general attitude was "you're only noticing this now?"

Meme is where I go to complain about stuff that made me angry - fandom is where I go to talk about stuff that I love. Meme is where I am my most undiluted self - fandom is where I am the self that I want to present to others. Both of them are unbearably close to my heart. Both of them are part of who I am and got me through the darkest periods in my life and the most joyful.

And maybe I could have juggled those two things forever if it hadn't been for bandflesh.

For reasons of general disgust and disapprobation towards bandom, memers rarely visit bandflesh. Until after our one-year anniversary, livejournalers virtually never (to our knowledge) visited bandflesh. When I joined bandflesh there were, at generous estimate, about twenty people there.

It felt like an incredibly safe space. It felt, genuinely, like a small chat with people (memers) with virtually no fandom presence. I talked about flocked (fannish, never personal) material with the same bend in morals that I have sometimes applied to AIM chats and real life interaction - the sense that while I wasn't being strictly nice, I certainly wasn't doing anything worse than bitching with a friend about how another friend was acting. It was fun and freeing and no one would ever know about it, right? We weren't even on LJ! We were nobodies!

But unlike the meme, bandflesh had only one topic of discussion: bandom. It moved far slower than the meme, and instead of drawing people away from fandom, it began to codepend on it in a strange way. On meme, people talked about a fandom and then talked about something else. On bandflesh, people talked about fandom and then went to LJ and made communities and wrote fic and participated. People who had never before had livejournals became contributing members of fandom. And suddenly, shockingly, we discovered that we weren't as obscure as we thought we were. The stuff we said to each other wasn't only heard by each other. And the "small" violations of trust I had committed were actually enormous.

I was wrong and I will always have been wrong and I regret it deeply.

I have broken friendslock. I acted unforgivably and indefensibly. I hurt people I like and respect, and I behaved in ways which were, objectively, awful. It hasn't happened in a long time, and I don't intend to do it ever again, but there's no earthly reason anyone should believe me about that. I violated trust that was placed in me. It wasn't okay, and it wasn't some random anonymous person. It was me.

I should have remembered that no matter how much I later regret my actions and hope no one else remembers them, the internet does not forget. And to be honest, I don't forget.

I can say with confidence that this post is going to generate serious amounts of rancor on both the meme and bandflesh. It's going to hurt my anonymous experience and I will, from time to time, regret making it. But at this point, I've done so much to harm my lj fannish experience, and the community that has given so much to me - that changed my life, that shaped who I am - that I could not continue to dodge it. I owe everyone on my friendslist an apology. I was wrong, and I'm so, so sorry.

I will not be leaving bandflesh, and I won't be leaving meme, and I won't be deleting my LJ. Each of the three is so important to me that it would be like losing part of my heart. But I completely understand anyone who no longer wants to interact with me because of the way I've mishandled the relationship between the three.

I also won't be answering comments on this post for a bit, because now that I've made it I'm going to, uh, go hyperventilate in a dark room for a while. Okay.