On my "What the f***" fandom moment

Since I was a 12 year old obsessive fan of the boy band Dreamstreet (remember them?--Jesse McCartney's first gig), I've been an avid subscriber to fandom culture.  At that age fandom looked a bit more like recording the fandom stars' television appearances on VHS,  tracking down fanfiction on angelfire and  geocities, and finding friends in school who were equally obsessed with your fandom.  It looked less like tracking down YouTube videos, logging onto AO3, and finding people equally obsessed with your fandom on tumblr.  That means for thirteen years straight I have been a part of some fandom (usually a lurking part, but a part nonetheless).  I jumped from Dreamstreet, to Jesse McCartney, to Jonas Brothers, to Twilight (so ashamed), to Hunger Games, to some really obscure ones that didn't last too long because of their obscurity, to Glee, to Broadway, to Grey's Anatomy, and now to my most recent fandom, henceforth refer to as Fantasy for fear of implicating myself and others discussed in this entry.  Call me a bandwagon jumper-on-er because that's what I am.

Anyways, when I get into a new fandom, I really get into it.  I want to learn all about it.  All the ins-and-outs.  As I've gotten older my fandoms have switched into television and movies and away from celebrities themselves, so I have gotten invested in storylines and characters, and what the cast of a show or movie has to say about that storyline/character.  Sometimes, however, regardless of my disinterest in so-called celebrity gossip, the "news" pages for fandoms include information about the "stars" themselves.  So began my descent into "What the F***"-ery today.

I had just gotten home from a long and stressful day of work.  Of course, as any good fan does, I went right to my computer (tumblr to be exact) to do some surfing of the Fantasy tag.  I found a new blog that looked interesting and informative, so I clicked through it for a while.  After about 20 minutes (and a fall down the rabbit hole) the blog shocked me with the face of a high-school friend.

 "What the F***!," I screamed to no one but myself as I disgustedly scrambled away from my computer. You'd have thought spiders had just started crawling from the crevices of my keyboard.  "Ahhhh!" I stared at it from a distance.  The level of discomfort I felt at that moment is indescribable.  I mean, I knew that he had been working on the production end of Fantasy, so it wasn't completely out of the blue that his face showed up on a gossip page for the show, but still...it felt wrong.  I felt wrong.  Like I was seeing something I wasn't supposed to and getting caught doing it.  This was the guy who sat behind me in Biology lab, who performed scenes with me in our high school musicals, whose mother, and father, and sister, I know.  All of these people in the Fantasy fandom who visited the high-traffic blog saw that picture of my friend...and I was just one of them...sitting there, creepily idolizing him among the other production people in the picture simply because he is associated with a show that I really like.

YUCK! YUCK! YUCK!  I'm so creeped out.

In that moment I realized what fandom really is.  Fandom is devotion to story-lines, characters, and incidentally the people who portray those characters.  But the thing I knew in a cognitive way before, but felt in a visceral way today seeing that picture, is that those people are just that--people.  The have families, and friends, and class-clown high-school pasts.  And they have a job now.  A job that so happens to be the production of entertainment media.  But still, just a job like any other.  And it's a little creepy that I think of these people as something more magical and venerable than that.  That I put them up on a pedestal and consider their faces worthy of blog space for thousands to stare at.  I can tell you, my friend, he's pretty awesome. But nothing abnormally awesome.  Just awesome like anyone else. Just a former annoying high-school friend.

They're all just former annoying high-schoolers in the end.  Just like you and me.  Let's remember that.

Keep on thinking,
Josie