For the lack of better words, I've always been a bit of a nerd growing up. At the risk of sounding like a stereotype, I didn't have many friends, I wasn't the center of attention, and liked to read and draw, both quiet hobbies. Naturally, that lent itself to a quieter personality and exposure to more media.

My first real foray into fandom culture was with Harry Potter, around ~2013, when I finished Deathly Hallows for the first time. By that time, the last movie was released about 2 years ago, which would make sense that the fandom space was still fairly active. While I didn't communicate much with anyone, since I was still very young, I was able to peruse fanart on the internet, or tumblr posts discussing the series. Through that, I learned about the existence of subculs centering around media consumption, and how I interacted with the things that I experience.

(There's the ethics concerning J.K. Rowling, separating the art from its creator, and the right to nostalgia, but this is out of the scope of my experience as I was no longer invested in the series when allegations began to surface, and is therefore not relevant to the article.)

One thing led to another, and at around 2014, I found myself being convinced by my friends to download Instagram. For a good 1 or 2 years, around 2017, I was a semi well-known figure in the more artsy, girlish side of MLP Instagram, making a name for myself as a photo collage editor. I made a couple of other friends of a similar age through this circle.

Soon, this specific flavor of the fandom died, and my friends also outgrew My Little Pony. One of the girls introduced the rest of us to the Love Live SIF mobile game, and that was my first proper introduction to the animanga scene. (We even made our little idol group.)

I don't actually remember what was popular, at the time, and I can't clearly list out specific orders of animanga fandoms that I was in, but there are a couple that I distinctively remember. The MLP friends that I met earlier became huge fans of Takaya Kagami's Seraph of the End, especially the Mikaela X Yuu pairing, so I played along and eventually found myself interested in it. I also posted about Sui Ishida's Tokyo Ghoul for a while, despite having only watched 1.5 seasons of the anime. All the meanwhile, I was diving into the world of anime and watched many mainstream titles at the time, including Fullmetal Alchemist, Fairy Tail (at behest of a friend, which I ended up disliking), Black Butler, Madoka Magica, etc. I was exploring a whole other world of foreign media that I never knew existed beforehand.

However, distinctly aligning myself with certain fandom spaces, as well as the animanga umbrella in general, came with repercussions, both online and in real life. One of my distinct memories of this is being bullied on my Instagram page, calling me “immature” and “childish” for enjoying My Little Pony. I would doodle in my notebooks, and the girl sitting across from me would ask "ew, isn’t that the thing that kids watch?" These experiences all built shame, whether I realized at that time or not. Eventually, I couldn't stand it, and essentially "quit" participating in online fandom spaces completely. I made a whole Instagram post about it and everything; I still stand by that decision as one of the best things I’ve ever done.

Just because I quit the online space did not mean I stopped engaging in fandom culture completely. Whenever I “got into” something new, I'd spend time searching up good art on Pinterest, or watch analyses about the thing.

However, the grasp of these TV shows and video games were now different. Slowly, I spent a shorter time invested in each “fandom,” each period lasting about several months at maximum. OMORI, Twisted Wonderland, Persona 5, to name a few. The grasp of this sort of enjoyment was much more fleeting.

Eventually, life got a lot busier. What was several months of fixation became a temporary high after each show, each book, and each video game, and I realized I no longer connected to fandom culture in the same way. At first, I wondered if the doomscrolling bug was finally getting to me: that perhaps I now had the attention of a goldfish due to the corporate overlords incorporating short-form content everywhere, and my ability to deeply resonate with stories was effectively gone. However, I could intensely enjoy something and still speak of it in fond terms years later; I simply was not consumed in the same way.

Much of my energy is spent creating over consuming now; I cannot confidently align myself as a participant in any fandom anymore. Perhaps it’s a byproduct of age, or the circumstances of lower engagement with the digital space that caused so. The specific feeling of joy that I used to get from witnessing pieces of media that resonates with me a lot simply no longer exists. It could also be the type of media that I now tend to consume more often: many of them do not lend well to fandom culture, in my opinion. To name a few examples — standalone books, indie music, art films, documentaries, etc.

Of course, that is not to say I don’t engage with media that have strong fandoms at all. Somewhat recently, I’ve watched Amazon Prime’s Hazbin Hotel, which has an extremely robust fan base. Did I enjoy it? Sure. Would I call myself an active member of the fandom? Probably not. I’ve grown now to enjoy things that I seek to enjoy, without every positive piece of media turning into an all-consuming experience. This is not to shame people who continue to participate in fandom culture beyond their adolescence, of course; I applaud people who do so, and it is these people who keep these communities vibrant and running. I am simply saying that it is no longer the way I engage with this world.

Why include such extensive discussion on fandom culture, then, on a personal site primarily of created characters? Because fandom culture still contributed immensely to how I pursue my art today. I’ve caught myself accidentally reinventing storylines or parts of characters from media I used to love. They’ve provided me both visual and characterization inspiration that I otherwise wouldn’t know about. I wouldn’t have known the things that I like and the things that I don’t, both in prose and aesthetics. My style would not have been established without going through my “anime phase”. Without fandom culture, the identity I have as an artist would not exist today, and for that, I’ve learned to be grateful.