Now with fewer commas

Below, the first batch of potentially more than one such batch of selected questions from that meme a few people have done. I’m going to leave out questions I don’t at least somewhat vibe with and alter wording as the mood takes me without commenting on it, as I think that’s more productive than highlighting the (no doubt very many) mismatches between the way the questions are phrased and my particular lived experience.

What’s changed about your fandom life in the last year? + Has social media caused you to stop liking any fandoms?

I’ve shifted the way I interact with people online towards posting on sites under my own domain first, and selectively using third-party websites to syndicate content/react to other people’s posts/dump large quantities of variable-quality game screenshots. This has allowed me to divorce fandom from the concept of social media (and, therefore, capitalism) as much as possible. Very much related to this: I’ve stopped trying to use fandom/generally being online as a way of making friends, because it rarely works for me. Some people appear to find making friends online much easier than making them irl … I just find it very hard in both settings tbh. There are some people I’ve met on the internet whom I would tentatively consider to be my friends, I guess, but now that I’m not deliberately setting out to befriend people I’m much more relaxed about being my ✨true self✨ and freely posting the various hot takes that would otherwise be chained up inside me, in the hope that people who don’t find their innermost thoughts reflected in my hastily composed output can be respectful enough not to cease all communication with me merely because we may have different opinions on one single thing. In terms of interacting with other people, I’m ignoring the complex social dance around (publicly) following and being followed and (my most hated word) Mutuals, and just commenting on things that I genuinely want to say something to, and saying the thing I genuinely want to say, subject to the Three Appropriate Checks For Basic Decency:

1. Could this response be construed as being in bad faith? (if so, consider a change of tone)
2. If I’m offering advice/factual information, is this something the OP seems to be looking for? (if not, consider a change of content)
3. Am I assuming that my interlocutor is a native speaker of English/familiar with my culture/able to interpret my naturally offbeat communication style with ease? Will there be a problem if they’re not? (if so, consider a change of tone and/or content)

Maybe commenting on others’ posts with abandon is what other people have done all along, idk, but not being beholden to “this person is in the Potential Online Friend category I need to interact with them in the following manner” means I can stop being neurotic about this particular imagined problem and redirect any neurosis towards other aspects of my life.

This time last year I was probably thinking about FF16 a lot … I probably would have gravitated away from it naturally anyway and returned to my true position of 100% Auron 100% Of The Time, but the comparatively little fandom drama that occurred nonetheless soured me on it immensely. I think I just have a low tolerance for apparently hivemindish fandom communities, perhaps because their nature flies in the face of everything I try to do to be a better person – for example, attempting to exercise some modicum of critical thought about the things I encounter in my life. This is why I don’t want any of my fandoms to be bigger, to be honest. I almost certainly wouldn’t be so attached to FFX if it wasn’t effectively discourse-free by virtue of all the discourse presumably having taken place on mailing lists 20 years ago and having blessedly failed to persist through to the present-day public internet.

What are the origins of your usernames?

I tend to use a different username on each platform because I enjoy obscurity, and many of them are actually, embarrassingly, the sort that would come close to deanoning me if I were to explain why I chose them, not that this is at all obvious from their external form. I have accordingly made a promise to myself not to overshare and must limit the list to the following:

• tobli (Dreamwidth): the name of a small humanoid creature from FFX-2 who likes to organise a lot of very ambitious and somewhat bizarre projects. I consider myself to be a small humanoid creature (I’m actually noticeably above average height for biologically female people in this part of the world, but I was very small as a child and that kind of thing never leaves you) and I like to organise a lot of very ambitious and somewhat bizarre projects.
• ovely (archiveofourown dot org): I created this account in 2015 to archive a kinkmeme fill, long since hidden away at a more enigmatic location, on which the prompter typoingly addressed me as “ovely a!anon”.
• spira.cedex (Discord): Spira is where FFX takes place and hence the location of my brain at most times. CEDEX is part of the French postcode system. This is probably my favourite username because it’s so stupidly obscure and combines two things that ought to have nothing to do with each other, a favourite activity of mine.
• fxrplane (Tumblr): I wanted to use some kind of FFX-related vocabulary for this, but because I was making the blog in 2024 and not 2008 every word I thought of was taken … then I remembered the cool and edgy trick of replacing some vowel with an x.
• fxrmain (Tumblr): this is my “main blog” in Tumblr account terms, I gave it this name because I am very funny and clever so I did.

I should probably go to bed and that means I should also probably post this now, otherwise it’ll never see the light of day. I may answer some more of these, or insidiously manipulate them to fit my own purposes, in a later post; then again, I may not. Who knows! I am actually just doing what I want, and I (somewhat presumptuously) think I’m even managing to do it without being an arsehole.