ren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
necessarian) wrote2019-07-06 08:26 pm
necessarian) wrote2019-07-06 08:26 pm
Entry tags:
fannish identity
this is a post for challenge 2 of ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sunshine_challenge; you can find part 1 here, my shiny new intro post!
so, what is my fannish identity? it's changed over the years. i won't tell you my first handful of usernames, only that i made my current ao3 account at the beginning of 2013 in anticipation of posting this grand longfic i'd planned... only to never write for that fandom again, and post a whole lot of fics i could never have expected. in 2013, i started becoming really comfortable with my writing; i abandoned a couple of of fics on ffnet because my writing style had changed so much that i couldn't go back and continue them. incidentally, i now feel precisely the same way about every single fic i wrote in 2013. i feel that way about most fics i've written, to be honest. i am constantly evolving!
my username, back in 2013, was memorde (me-MOR-de). i chose it because it means "bite me" in latin, and it was meant to be sort of cheeky. but what i found when i started vanity searching my username were a lot of spanish posts about vampires. go figure. my current username - renaissance - is much harder to vanity search, which is probably for the best. renaissance - meaning "rebirth" - was what i chose when i made a sockpuppet for posting yuri on ice fic in late 2016. the reason i made a sock account was because a lot of people were vocal in their hatred for yuri on ice at the time (idk man, 2016 was weird) and i felt kind of embarrassed, i didn't want to attract that ire to my main account. but, a bit over a year into the sock experience, i was getting stressed out by having two distinct fandom identities, using different names and blogs for each, having two sets of friends... a couple of my fics as renaissance had become pretty popular and i get a little obsessive about my kudos counts; i wanted to have everything in the one place. after all, what's an archive for? so i moved all the renaissance stuff over to memorde, deleted the sockpuppet renaissance, and changed my main username to renaissance. so renaissance does seem fitting; but apart from anything else, i just like it better.
(aside: necessarian, as you may have noticed, is an anagram of renaissance. that was ceu's idea, when i put aside money for a rename token for this journal but had no idea what to do with it because renaissance was taken.)
i think fannish identity is tied a lot to what sites you frequent. in that sense, i've been diminishing my fannish identity over the last few years. i got rid of my fic tumblr and twitter. the main reason behind this was that i'm starting to (try to) publish original fiction, and i don't want anyone to be able to connect the two identities - unless they go on some sort of epic scavenger hunt, which is possible, and if someone managed that i'd tip my hat to them. but anyway, it's easy to find people, especially on social media. my original twitter account had followers in common with my fandom one, and once or twice i saw one of my accounts suggested to the other. that makes them very easy to link. rather than telling people to unfollow me somewhere, i just got rid of my fandom twitter. to be honest, it feels great. one of the things with social media is that it makes it very easy for people to contact you. this is all fun and games when you're taking prompts, but sometimes it just felt like i was making myself too available to my readers. i don't mean this to boast, but i do have a lot of quite popular fics. (i also have some desperately unpopular ones, to balance it out.) and when you have so many people reading your work, following your social media closely, you get this dynamic where people act like you're all already friends even if that's not the case. i'm quite socially anxious and though i didn't realise it at the time, being available on social media made my anxiety worse.
that said, i do love having a distinctly fannish identity. it's separate to the identity i use to publish original fiction; it's separate again to my irl identity. (i did use my real name in fandom for a while, which i deeply regret doing.) some people don't have a problem with people knowing they write fanfic, and theoretically i don't either - it's just that i don't know who i can trust not to judge me for doing it. so, pretty much all my close irl friends know i write fic to some degree; some of them read it. (one of my friends, with whom i share zero fandoms, is subscribed to my ao3 just because i post fairly frequently and every time she gets an email that i've posted it inspires her to write.) but i don't want that information to be readily available to strangers. i think it's so easy to lose track of a sense of privacy on the internet these days, to spread yourself too thin. i want something left for myself at the end of the day, some secrets to hold close.
my fannish identity is still me. the only difference is my name, and that you don't really know what i do irl. but it's also a space to explore identity: i tried on they/them pronouns in fandom for a while, as well as using no pronouns. using they/them for a while in a generally progressive space where there'd be no probing questions about it allowed me to explore that aspect of my gender identity. even though i eventually decided to go back to she/her, i feel all the better for having had the opportunity to experiment. (i still prefer gender neutral epithets, and i like no pronouns conceptually, but it can be tricky practically.) this is all stuff i'd never really talk about irl. it's too personal - but also, weirdly, it's not too personal for fandom. this is a different kind of space. conversely, there are some things i'd freely tell strangers irl that i wouldn't dream of mentioning in fandom. different spaces facilitate different aspects of identity coming to the forefront. and fannish identity is different for everyone. i really, really love that.
one of the options for the sunshine challenge is to post your entries for each prompt to a post on the community. but, in the vein of the rest of this post, i don't necessarily want to share this identity talk with strangers. i'll just leave it here, and let people stumble on it as they please :)
sunshine_challenge; you can find part 1 here, my shiny new intro post!so, what is my fannish identity? it's changed over the years. i won't tell you my first handful of usernames, only that i made my current ao3 account at the beginning of 2013 in anticipation of posting this grand longfic i'd planned... only to never write for that fandom again, and post a whole lot of fics i could never have expected. in 2013, i started becoming really comfortable with my writing; i abandoned a couple of of fics on ffnet because my writing style had changed so much that i couldn't go back and continue them. incidentally, i now feel precisely the same way about every single fic i wrote in 2013. i feel that way about most fics i've written, to be honest. i am constantly evolving!
my username, back in 2013, was memorde (me-MOR-de). i chose it because it means "bite me" in latin, and it was meant to be sort of cheeky. but what i found when i started vanity searching my username were a lot of spanish posts about vampires. go figure. my current username - renaissance - is much harder to vanity search, which is probably for the best. renaissance - meaning "rebirth" - was what i chose when i made a sockpuppet for posting yuri on ice fic in late 2016. the reason i made a sock account was because a lot of people were vocal in their hatred for yuri on ice at the time (idk man, 2016 was weird) and i felt kind of embarrassed, i didn't want to attract that ire to my main account. but, a bit over a year into the sock experience, i was getting stressed out by having two distinct fandom identities, using different names and blogs for each, having two sets of friends... a couple of my fics as renaissance had become pretty popular and i get a little obsessive about my kudos counts; i wanted to have everything in the one place. after all, what's an archive for? so i moved all the renaissance stuff over to memorde, deleted the sockpuppet renaissance, and changed my main username to renaissance. so renaissance does seem fitting; but apart from anything else, i just like it better.
(aside: necessarian, as you may have noticed, is an anagram of renaissance. that was ceu's idea, when i put aside money for a rename token for this journal but had no idea what to do with it because renaissance was taken.)
i think fannish identity is tied a lot to what sites you frequent. in that sense, i've been diminishing my fannish identity over the last few years. i got rid of my fic tumblr and twitter. the main reason behind this was that i'm starting to (try to) publish original fiction, and i don't want anyone to be able to connect the two identities - unless they go on some sort of epic scavenger hunt, which is possible, and if someone managed that i'd tip my hat to them. but anyway, it's easy to find people, especially on social media. my original twitter account had followers in common with my fandom one, and once or twice i saw one of my accounts suggested to the other. that makes them very easy to link. rather than telling people to unfollow me somewhere, i just got rid of my fandom twitter. to be honest, it feels great. one of the things with social media is that it makes it very easy for people to contact you. this is all fun and games when you're taking prompts, but sometimes it just felt like i was making myself too available to my readers. i don't mean this to boast, but i do have a lot of quite popular fics. (i also have some desperately unpopular ones, to balance it out.) and when you have so many people reading your work, following your social media closely, you get this dynamic where people act like you're all already friends even if that's not the case. i'm quite socially anxious and though i didn't realise it at the time, being available on social media made my anxiety worse.
that said, i do love having a distinctly fannish identity. it's separate to the identity i use to publish original fiction; it's separate again to my irl identity. (i did use my real name in fandom for a while, which i deeply regret doing.) some people don't have a problem with people knowing they write fanfic, and theoretically i don't either - it's just that i don't know who i can trust not to judge me for doing it. so, pretty much all my close irl friends know i write fic to some degree; some of them read it. (one of my friends, with whom i share zero fandoms, is subscribed to my ao3 just because i post fairly frequently and every time she gets an email that i've posted it inspires her to write.) but i don't want that information to be readily available to strangers. i think it's so easy to lose track of a sense of privacy on the internet these days, to spread yourself too thin. i want something left for myself at the end of the day, some secrets to hold close.
my fannish identity is still me. the only difference is my name, and that you don't really know what i do irl. but it's also a space to explore identity: i tried on they/them pronouns in fandom for a while, as well as using no pronouns. using they/them for a while in a generally progressive space where there'd be no probing questions about it allowed me to explore that aspect of my gender identity. even though i eventually decided to go back to she/her, i feel all the better for having had the opportunity to experiment. (i still prefer gender neutral epithets, and i like no pronouns conceptually, but it can be tricky practically.) this is all stuff i'd never really talk about irl. it's too personal - but also, weirdly, it's not too personal for fandom. this is a different kind of space. conversely, there are some things i'd freely tell strangers irl that i wouldn't dream of mentioning in fandom. different spaces facilitate different aspects of identity coming to the forefront. and fannish identity is different for everyone. i really, really love that.
one of the options for the sunshine challenge is to post your entries for each prompt to a post on the community. but, in the vein of the rest of this post, i don't necessarily want to share this identity talk with strangers. i'll just leave it here, and let people stumble on it as they please :)