i was a fanpol for all of the six years i’ve been involved in fandom. here’s a thread of small realizations about my own behavior as a fanpol that eventually led me to the pro-shipping community.

i hope this thread will reach current fanpols who have noticed the same behaviors from themselves, and allow them opportunity for some self-reflection.

1) i was really scared of not just posting my original content, but creating as a whole. i never knew when i would be misstepping. eventually, i hit the biggest creative slump of my life.

2) i looked back at all of the essays i’ve written about fandom and realized that a lot of them were me just needlessly criticizing people that were harming no one (even just liking the wrong sort of au), and were the same sort of judgements that made me afraid to create.

3) i got very confused that shows like sex education were allowed to depict underage characters having sex when i had been told that that was illegal. (turns out that was just a crappy interpretation of some very questionable laws.)

4) when i saw the specific phrase “literal cp” being used to describe fictional depictions of minors in sexual situations, it really hit me hard. to me, “literal cp” is the pictures of my body floating around on the internet, not fucking art and writing of fictional kids.

5) i saw an increasing trend of even the most fanpol-friendly ships being deemed problematic for small reasons. i‘d be in one fanpol circle that liked a ship, and another that wrote it off as problematic, and i realized that the latter just wanted to justify disliking the ship.

6) i never gave fics kudos, knowing that anyone could see it and i couldn’t take it back. i bookmarked many fics, but the vast majority were private. i was scared about sharing screenshots of the fics i was reading because i was afraid people would figure out what i was reading.

7) i had a lot of “guilty pleasures” that i would never share. sfw omegaverse fic, aus where a protagonist was a villain, and other “not deplorable but questionable” content. things that i knew would be frowned upon by my fanpol friends.

8) even worse than that, i reached a level of cognitive dissonance where i had been reading “problematic” nsfw fic for years on a near daily basis, but it was only in the past war that i consciously registered that i was doing the very thing i decried.

START TW: ATTEMPTED SUICIDE!

9) i tried killing myself when i was about to turn 18, because i was scared that my tastes in fiction meant i would eventually hurt real children.

END TW: ATTEMPTED SUICIDE!

10) i felt like 50% of the discussion i saw in fanpol circles was about casting judgement on others, rather than enjoying the content that one liked.

11) i realized that it gave me an adrenaline high to find the next problematic thing or the next hot take. every little thing that could be criticized would be criticized, and i found genuine entertainment from it.

12) i questioned a lot of related ideologies that were very common amongst the fanpols i knew. these beliefs were all that i knew since i was a 12-year-old lgbt+ kid interacting with online spaces for the first time. when i questioned some of it, i started questioning all of it.

13) there was a constant wariness in fanpol circles. you were either on the chopping block, or the one looking for others to chop. people got cast out of friend circles for small mistakes that could have been resolved with proper communication.

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i can think of at least 3 different fanpol circles where this was a pattern. after 3 years of this, it really fucked up the way i view social relationships. it’s only recently, with therapy, that i’ve allowed myself to get close to others.

14) fandom just...stopped being fun for me. i dropped fandoms very suddenly on multiple incidents either because of the constant atmosphere of judgement within the fandom, or the sudden judgement of the fandom i was currently in.

15) i would never bring up my doubts (or even just need for explanation) of certain fanpol tendencies for fear of crossing some sort of unspoken line.

16) even if someone never made a mistake big enough to get cast out for it, people would gleefully mock them behind their back in dms and private friend communities for the slightest transgressions. writing an ooc rp application, supporting a specific au, so on and so forth.

17) i started finding the idea of being too old for fandom really bizarre. i can’t imagine myself ever losing my passion towards my interests. maybe that’s just my young neurodivergent self speaking, but...idk man, i have been this enamored with media since my memory begins.

18) fans of my first longtime fandom started being put on dnfis a lot more in 2018. i felt the need to tack on a disclaimer about how i’m critical of it every time i mentioned it even briefly. i’m now realizing i never stopped liking that interest, just started liking it quietly.

19) my consumption of media started becoming about seeming progressive instead of actually seeking out content i liked. people who liked this character were racist, but people who liked this ship had taste, and so on. every fan of anything was assigned moral value.

20) adherence to canon became a weapon. you could attack things for improper characterization, for events being unlikely to happen in canon, and more. it was the exact opposite of the intentional deviance from canon that was core to fandom.