“It’s Not A Phase, Mom!”: The Discomfort of “Fandom Ownership”

Ever had someone speak for you— while you were standing right there? Maybe it’s someone who’s known you for a long time: your mother, say, or a pal from back in grade school. Maybe you’re having a conversation about politics and this person, eager to get your assumed support on their side, interrupts you with “Oh, Y would NEVER agree with so-and-so!” 

Or maybe it’s something much simpler: a mutual friend invites you to dinner, and they proclaim “Y doesn’t like (insert food here)!” when the subject has just never come up.

And maybe they’re someone you’d always trust to have your back in a pinch, but it doesn’t matter this time... because this time, they’re patently, unbelievably wrong. So you stand there kind of helplessly, not knowing how to respond to this: this assumption of your character.

As you can probably imagine, this happens a lot to people who fall under the “fictionkin” label. 

Particularly with the popularity of fandom social media circles, in which you can find a hundred posts on any given day declaring a full and complete understanding of Person B’s motivations, what makes them tick, and how they’re pretty much guaranteed to react if (certain situation) were to come up.

There’s only one problem with this.

None of them have a true complete picture.

Let’s go back to that happy hypothetical Story of You biopic that I tend to use as an illustrative device a lot. Imagine that the creative re-telling of your personal struggles proved so popular that they made a whole Netflix series based on your life: ten episodes, first run. And almost immediately, people who’ve never met you decide that they are 100% positive that they know everything that makes you who you are. 

They start sending you care packages... full of food you’re allergic to, because that was never a part of the story the franchise chose to tell. They make entire playlists that they claim would be your Favorite Thing Ever™️... of which at least half the songs are unbearable to you, because they have associations with incredibly unpleasant events in your life. They even write entire treatises on your sexual habits... which are literally untrue just by virtue of the limits of your experience. These examples all pretty much suck, but do you see what I’m getting at, here?

And what you end up doing is watching this idolization of an archetype, an amalgamation — a character, yes, see how that works? — of your own living, breathing, feeling life... while being unable to express your actual thoughts on any of it. Because the same people that spend most of their waking hours fantasizing about your reality would immediately and categorically deny it if you even hinted at the truth of your existence. 

Anyway. This can get uncomfortable, occasionally, to say the least. And as I’ve said before, it’s also incredibly isolating.

(This is exactly 50% of what bugs me so badly about the idea of “AU” fan fictions; if you can heartily invest in the fantasy that XYZ gunslinger is a Mysterious Schoolteacher™️ in some alternate reality, and STILL see them as XYZ without any cognitive dissonance, how is entertaining the truth of the phenomenon we live with much harder? But that’s another story, to be told another time.)

And in a way, that sort of... fandom ownership is the thing that creates the most friction between fans and writers, directors, actors— anyone involved in the creative process of any of the “fictional” universes our lives intersect with or originate from. It stems from that same belief; the idea that because you spent two hours of your life watching someone’s antics on the big screen — or, say six hours over ten years, or even four hundred hours over forty years(but, in the end, it’s still the ‘same’ two hours) — that you somehow understand them better than anyone else, that you have a personal claim to them. 

And thus, anything that they may say or do that does not fit with your pre-existing idea, the shape you made in your mind to fit what you imagine them to be, is somehow a blight, a blemish, or, more dramatically, a “character assassination”. It never occurs to these people what they see is only a smaller part of a larger whole. 

The “characters” with which they identify are drawn that way within what is presented as a fictional universe expressly because these narratives are designed to hit those emotional beats, as I’ve said before: the grand drama that you can project yourself inside. Every person can imagine themselves a hero: a space pilot, a zombie killer, a grand medieval knight, a superhero, a Jedi. It’s the parts between the ground-shaking events, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, that are harder to understand. 

And this is where one of the hardest parts of being “fictionkin” emerges again: the fact that in the absence of their original timelines, what’s left is the work. The emotional work, the reason – after almost thirty years of dealing with this phenomenon – that I’ve really come to believe people cross over: resolution. Healing. Closure. Or maybe there’s just something unfinished, and until science fully explains the nature of quantum mechanics, we’ll never really know why. 

But all that aside, what anyone who gets to know us quickly realizes is that these are not only real people; they’re whole people. This is an important distinction. 

This, to me, is also a good way of distinguishing people who sincerely experience this phenomenon from people who play it as a lark, or use it to mock people like us: we’re not cardboard cutouts. Far from it. And like any other person who’s ever existed ever, our lives are made up of much more than just the big dramatic moments. This is important. 

Because the things you don’t see on the screen, or read about in the books, or get from any other pop-culture reference, are the parts of actually being a person that make up a life. And they aren’t extrapolated from wish-fulfillment or “creative license” based on whatever; they are built the same way your life is: from our memories. Whether you believe the phenomenon is legitimate or not, there is one thing scientists agree on: memory is entirely valid to the person experiencing it. Just like you, we remember the smaller details: and our personalities are made up of a sum of our experiences — like anyone else’s.

Maybe Person Z is a bad-ass space zombie killer(I’m just making stuff up for this example, bear with me). Maybe there have been six movies about Z kicking ass and taking names, with just enough “character development“ thrown in to make you feel like you really understand him. He lost his family in the space zombie apocalypse, and you’ve seen dramatizations of a lot of situations he’s been in; so you think you know him pretty well. Right?

Except... well... there are always, always other things. Things that seem insignificant, perhaps, but aren’t.  Maybe when he was ten, he was bitten by a neighborhood dog. And regardless of his terror, the owners kept insisting it was entirely his fault, so as a result he’s never fully trusted dog owners. (Again, lousy example, but the first one to come to mind.) 

Maybe this will eventually pop up in his “media” — in a comic, or a flashback buried in a two-hour film(This happens sometimes, when ongoing media portray a memory or event that had previously only been part of our personal recollections. It happens more often, statistically, than it would were we just “guessing” or “making it up”, and is a surreal and disturbing experience: often terrifying and validating, by turns) — or maybe not. 

But regardless, perhaps down the road he meets another space zombie apocalypse survivor that, by all understood definitions of his “character”, he should immediately trust and take under his wing. Only he doesn’t... and he won’t. Because of that one event, and its echoes through his life, that no one was there to see. 

Maybe it’s something smaller: maybe X, who’s a brooding liquid shadow in the book you’ve read, has a soft spot for a certain piece of music, because it reminds him of his mother. He’d never admit it, but it’s there. Maybe your kickass warrior woman likes to be held in the ditch of the night by a man she could bench-press at any point. Screaming fanits would rant about how that “robbed her of agency” or “made her a victim” because to them, she is an archetype: not a person. (And — this is important — I don’t blame them for that. I’ve said this in prior posts, so I won’t reiterate. Just be aware.)

Childhood, trauma, insignificant interactions... these things shape people in ways you can’t fully understand without sharing them exactly. Which means that just like I might intermittently talk to some people, I’ll never really know them without making a real effort to be an ongoing part of their lives. And even then, I might know someone twenty years and be surprised that they sleep with a stuffed pig... because it never came up. Little things. Little things that make a life.

And people might use that against people like us, when we dare give voice to our memories, to invalidate or discredit us: despite the fact that we remember these things, the things you don’t see, and like everyone else, these things have shaped who we’ve become — in ways that don’t always fit with what you think you understand. 

(To be honest, this also sums up the rage of angry fanboys of all franchises; people who feel entitled to send actual death threats to people involved with their fandom of choice when what they have planned out in their minds, the journey they have chosen for X person, is not the direction the media has chosen. Because they think they know X, and thus almost own them, they see any deviation from their imagined outcome as a betrayal. 

Which is egoism at its finest when it’s about someone else’s creative franchise; imagine, then, what it feels like to live these lives, to wake at night wracked with guilt over something you cannot info or even really make right, to weep copiously while shouting... to experience it from the inside while a legion of people lay claim to your experiences. 

It’s a bit overwhelming, to say the least. And gets a bit into projection... which will be the subject of another post.)

Maybe this is why the drive to write this blog; to be heard, to be understood. Because just like the subject of that biopic, we’d rather three people care about the truth behind the drama than three million care that we exist.

I’m here.