The thing about fandom is, unless you leave it an angry, dramatic huff, you sort of just drift away. You never really get the chance to say goodbye. You'd think that by now, the point would be moot, that there'd be nobody I know left to say goodbye to, but even just a quick skim through the boards shows me at least a dozen names I still know very well. It's also pretty amusing to read those people talking about how FoLCdom was "back then" and to realize that if I'd stuck around, I would qualify as an old timer by now. Yep, I, ladies and gentlemen, am twenty-two, and I'll be happy to tell you about how things were back in my day. We had to walk to school in the snow! Uphill! Both ways! And our mailing list servers were housed in Turkey and destroyed by earthquakes!
I'm very sure that all of you made a bigger impression on me than I made on you, but I've been wanting to do this for years, so here I am. To the majority of you don't have a clue who I am, my name's Jessi, and FoLCdom was a big part of my life from 1998 or so to 2002. And to the few of you who already knew that, hi there. This is a thank you note.
I don't think I could have stumbled across FoLCdom at a better time. (You do still call yourselves FoLCs, right? I don't think I could handle the assault on my worldview if you didn't.
) I was just coming out of the supreme state of awkwardness that was junior high. I needed somewhere I could assert my individuality, to take risks and still feel safe. I realize most people turn to, I don't know, the drama club or something for that kind of thing, but I turned to Superman. My emotional and creative outlet in high school was an online community centered on a comic book hero. You know how, when people are posing for their senior pictures, they're supposed to bring some kind of prop from their high school extracurricular activities? I brought a Superman t-shirt, and maybe people thought it was some kind of fashion statement, but I knew better. Honestly, I couldn't have picked a better extracurricular activity if I'd tried.
FoLCdom, or at least the FoLCdom I knew, is amazing, unlike anything else on the internet. You are creative and eclectic and kind and funny and supportive and intelligent and organized and so amazingly rational. You are the only online community I've ever seen where your supposed flame wars consist of long, carefully worded posts about opinions and ideas rather than cheap, sarcastic shots. Maybe it's changed some since I was around, and maybe it was never really like that at all, but I don't think I can be entirely making this up. I remember there were sometimes these political and philosophical debates that sprang up on the off topic section of the boards, debates about touchy subjects that can bring people to blows even without the security of online anonymity, but these debates were always, always civil. It didn't matter if people had drastically different opinions, and they
did have drastically different opinions. Everyone just politely discussed those drastically different opinions. Now that I've been around the internet enough to compare and contrast, I can see the FoLCs I knew worked to create an honest to goodness
community, and they did that more effectively than any other online community I've ever seen. Heck, they did that a lot better than most real life communities I've seen.
Back then, I didn't compose nearly as many posts in real life as I composed in my head. I absorbed what everyone else was posting though. This means that I still have an inordinate amount of Superman knowledge rattling around in my brain (Fun trivia that I've still never had the opportunity to use: Jimmy Olsen's full name is James Bartholomew Olsen. Clark Kent's middle name is Jerome. Last I checked, we didn't know Lois's middle name, but a bunch of people thought it would be cool if it were something that started with O, so she could be LOL.) It also means that I picked quite a bit of knowledge from you about how to, well, how to be a person. I wasn't very old then. I'm still not, of course, but I was even younger then, and ridiculously impressionable. You were adults I respected, and, thankfully, if I was going to go around modeling my behavior after a bunch of adults, then I picked the right group. You taught to look at all the sides of an issue. You taught me to treat everyone, even really annoying fanboys who storm in from other fandoms, with the utmost respect. You taught me not to take myself too seriously. You taught me all kinds of positive, mature things about sex. (You might think I'm joking, but I'm not. My parents, like most parents I imagine, remained pretty mum on the whole sex thing, probably out of overwhelming awkwardness at discussing the intricacies of sex with their little girl. I could have picked up my attitudes about sex from my fellow teenagers, but instead I picked up my attitudes about sex from FoLCdom, and I think I got lucky there.) You taught me how to handle constructive criticism. You taught me to take risks, to try something creative, even when I'm a little afraid that what I'm trying is ridiculous. You (or specifically, Ann McBride, my ever-patient beta reader) taught me to when I need commas and when I don't, although I'll admit I still ignore that particular lesson every once in a while. Well, I least I can get it wrong on purpose now.
Obviously, I left FoLCdom anyway, although it's not like it was any kind of conscious decision. I just realized, reluctantly, that reading about Lois and Clark didn't do much for me anymore, and I moved on. It happened right at the end of my senior year, just as I was transitioning into college, so I guess you could say that I grew out of Lois and Clark. But I still never consider any part of FoLCdom immature. Oh, I think some of what
I did was immature. There are lines in my fics that make me uncomfortably aware of the fact that, yes, indeed, I was fifteen when I wrote those. But FoLCdom wasn't immature. My involvement in FoLCdom wasn't immature. It was what I needed then, and, honestly, my only regret is that it couldn't hold my interest longer, that I couldn't stay. I eventually moved on to other fandoms, and I learned that fandom, in the massive online-community-of-fans-of-media sense, can sometimes produce higher quality and more diverse work, just because it has a much, much larger pool to draw from, but it will
never produce anything like the civil, supportive community of FoLCdom. Honestly, you people are freaks, and I mean that in the very best way possible.
So I'm twenty-two now, and I'm in transition again. I finished my undergraduate degree in May, I'm working on my graduate degree in library science now, and I'm about seven months away from being married. It's hilarious now to think about all those romantic speeches I wrote for fic, because now that I've been the actual recipient of a genuine romantic speech, I can't remember what it was. Yep, my fiance proposed to me, and I don't remember what he said. In my defense, I'd just picked him up from the emergency room a few hours before, so I was already a little emotionally overwhelmed, and it turns out that when someone is actually making a grand declaration of his love to me, I'm too being thinking, "Oh my gosh, he's proposing, oh my gosh, he's proposing," to try to commit to memory what exactly he's saying. I think I'd probably write romance a bit differently if I were doing it now. Less grand declarations, more teasing. It turns out that real couples, or at least real couples of my experience, are more likely to argue about whether or not stegosauruses had two brains than they are to make eloquent pronouncements of their love. Which is good, because constant love pronouncement would get boring after awhile.
And I have thoroughly babbled away from my point, which is this: Hi. And thanks. I know it's just a superhero show, but all of you were real, and you helped shaped who I am today. Thanks for that.
Oh, you know what else? I've
still never read an nfic. All those years of whining, and I never even read one.
