I've been considered a tragedy since birth. My family didn't see me as one, of course, but society at large did, because I was born autistic. I wasn't diagnosed until 2009, the year I turned 20, but I was never not autistic, and that was an incredibly isolating experience to grow up with. I knew I was different but didn't know how, and I knew I didn't fit in with my peers - and my peers made it devastatingly clear that I wasn't one of them. In middle school, in the early 2000s, there was a period in which I really had no real-life friends. I was going home and going on the internet and exploring the things I liked that way, because nobody wanted to be around me outside of my family. Of course, being the little video game nerd that I was, I swiftly discovered fanfiction, and fandom became my escape from the real world. I made online friends - some of whom I still have today - and I thrived. I was happy. I was talking to other people who liked the same things as me, many of whom also shared my struggles. I'd found a community.
Back then, I had a Livejournal, a Fanfiction.net account, and a deviantART. Social media wasn't a thing yet, but there were forums we used to talk, and of course we'd instant message with our online friends. Fandom spaces were run by the fans for the fans - adults with the money to buy and maintain web spaces would build websites, and those websites would form fan rings by linking to one another. The sense of community was immense, and it was wonderful. I'd found a place I was safe to be myself. It was arguably the only place I could be myself. I was an awkward teenager, of course, but I was able to make friends. The adults in fandom were so cool, still doing what they loved even though they had jobs and often families. Seeing them made me realize I didn't have to give up what I loved as I grew up.
Social media arrived in its modern recognizable form when I was a senior in high school, when I noticed people using Facebook in one of my classes. Before that, we had MySpace, which was still closer to Livejournal and Xanga than modern social media. I'd never had a MySpace, just an LJ. I didn't want a Facebook. I didn't even make one until the summer after my freshman year of undergrad just so I could keep in touch with a few people I'd met at college. But my college years were still spent in fandom spaces - I got a Tumblr and a Twitter in 2009, and Tumblr ended up quickly becoming a locus for fandom because of its robust tagging system and ability to share content easily by reblogging it. It was still okay back then. It was still free back then. It was still the fandom I knew, with communication and sharing made easier. It was a bit more centralized now, but it was easier to maintain friends even when they changed usernames, because you were still following each other. It was fine.
I'm not entirely sure when the shift began, but current-day fandom is stressful. It's not fun. It's often a hostile space, especially if you're not white or disabled. I miss reading people's deep analysis posts about characters and themes and interpretations. I miss how people would stay around for years and years. Star Trek fandom is a great example - they've been here since the 1960s and aren't going anywhere. So many fandoms just disappear the second the series they revolve around is over, and it's sad. The passion is so fleeting. It just doesn't feel the way it did back then. Just like social media and memes, fandom is moving too fast for my liking.
Fandom used to be where I went to be myself. Now I'm actively shying away from it.
I wasn't really active in fandom spaces once I entered the workforce after grad school, but it was less about being busy and more that I'd noticed a change. More people than ever had internet access, and fandom spaces, once considered niche communities, were overflowing with people. This was overwhelming, but not necessarily bad, because it meant more people were creating fics and art and making gifsets and generally being passionate. But social media had changed people's behavior on the internet - now everyone was trying to put their best face forward instead of being themselves. It was becoming more and more about image and less about being yourself in a safe community where you could explore who you were. I went from being actively engaged in my younger years to merely lurking, watching the spaces where I'd been able to learn about myself in my youth become taken over by purity culture and posturing whilst at the same time becoming more homogeneous and reflecting society's biases at large. They weren't counterculture anymore. They were just culture.
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| L-R: Emmet, the younger twin, and Ingo, the older twin. |
That was snatched from me cruelly in early 2022. A Pokemon game called Pokemon Legends: Arceus came out, and for whatever reason, despite it being set in the past, the developers made the decision to throw Ingo into the game with massive memory loss, separating him from his brother. What was worse was that the game was rushed and didn't get to properly resolve, so although the player (also thrown into the past with memory loss) is able to somewhat assist him, neither the player nor Ingo goes home on-screen, and it's all left in the air. I was devastated, because once again, someone like me wasn't allowed to have a happy life - we're so often tragedies in the media, and this was a reminder to me that happy stories for people like me are so rare and fleeting. I also knew what was coming the second I found out he was in the game, because I'd been aware of fandom trends, and my heart sank like a stone.
Sure enough, everything was angst and tragedy now. Everything had to be sad and rip people's hearts out. There was no more happiness, no more slice of life depictions of autistic people just existing as themselves. It was all about the separation and the sorrow, and I couldn't even look at it. It hurt too much to know I wasn't allowed to be happy again, that people like me didn't get to have our happy endings in life.
And then the angst gave way to the inevitable ableism, which I'd known was coming from a mile away, and I lost all the progress I'd made towards self-acceptance.
As I mentioned above, as fandom has become less of a countercultural thing and more of a mainstream thing, it's become more of a reflection of society at large. The ableism inherent in society is such a strain on my real life that I spent most of it hiding in fiction to cope, because it was often the only safe place where I didn't have to think about what other people thought of me. The shift in fandom to a mainstream cultural institution brought with it the mainstream societal ideas I was trying to escape from, however, and more and more I noticed fandom spaces at large becoming ableist, especially when it came to mental illness and neurodivergency. (Don't get me wrong, there's so much ableism directed at physical disabilities, too, and I can't stand that either.) Characters who were autistic-coded or actually canonically autistic were treated as perpetual children, stone-cold robots, or scary and potentially unhinged under the surface. I knew they would come for Ingo and Emmet again, the way some people had in 2010. I knew what was coming for me in turn.
And the ableists came. They treated Emmet, the younger, perpetually smiling one, as a child, or they decided that said perpetual smile was a slasher smile and he was unhinged and scary and violent. They created ableist ships with a character Emmet had never met in canon that fetishized mental health issues and abuse in ways that were deeply uncomfortable. They weren't exploring an unhealthy dynamic to explore it and make a point, they were doing it to fetishize it. And they were looking at characters just like me and treating them the exact way my peers treated me when I was younger - deciding something was "wrong" with them (especially Emmet), and acting like they were scary and messed up for being the way they were instead of just autistic.
I disengaged for my mental health the moment Ingo was announced as being in PLA. I knew I wouldn't be able to interact with the fandom because I knew what was coming for me. But I did take the time to write a primer on the two characters I loved more than any others, because they were so important to me and my own well-being. At the end of the primer, I mentioned that they were autistic-coded and for people to do their best to not be ableist. So few of them seemed to pay attention to that part. For months after the primer was published on Tumblr, people came to me with questions about the two of them and about trains, assuming I was a big-name fan of some sort. I dutifully answered as many as I could and pointed out ableism as much as possible, but so many of them seemed to think I actually worked on a railroad instead of being an archivist, as I mentioned so many times, and I wondered if they were even reading anything I wrote.
The misconception likely came from the fact that I did know my shit about railroads and finally fulfilled a childhood dream and drove a steam locomotive for the first time in March 2022, but it was a sign that people weren't going to take my words to heart.
I found some like-minded people. To this day, we have a Discord server where we discuss ableism in media and in fandom spaces, and we can talk about Ingo and Emmet in ways that respect that. That server is the only little safe space I have now regarding the subject, because the fandom at large became so alienating to me so quickly. I recall often now how my best fandom experiences have always been in smaller fandoms, with fewer people, and in friend groups. No one there had to perform or posture. Everyone was just having fun. It was ultimately more supportive and collaborative and kinder than the megalithic hivemind that fandom has become now. But the fallout after PLA was the nail in the coffin for me directly interacting with fandom spaces. The place that had once been my refuge from a real world that hated me became a reflection of that world I was trying to escape from, the world where library patrons call me "weird" because I'm too enthusiastic or say I act like "a schoolgirl" for the same reason, the world where I was emotionally abused by a friend for not being good enough or enough like her mother, the world where I was bullied for my entire school career by my male peers for not being like the other girls around me and performing femininity correctly.
It all hurts so much, and I know bringing it up in the fandom itself would be ignored at best and bring more bullying upon myself at worst. Instead it stays inside of me, eating me away from within, dissolving what remains of my self-acceptance, because every ableist post is a reminder that the world will never accept me as I am.
I came so close this time, too.
