Authors may never know just how much their works affect us and there’s something tragic about that. Thank you to all the writers, please keep your work up, it means more to people than you know.
I get so incredibly emotional about fanfiction. many a time have I wept about the passage of time—dear 2018 fic that had the authors note etchings that you were in grad school: I hope writing this made midterms more bearable, or at least that one night. thank you for writing my favorite character or ship, it’s comforting to know that I have a friend across time that had the same rot, the same afflictions, the same ideas when experiencing this media.
dear fanfiction from my adolescence, that made me realize I still had worth outside of conventional creative writing classes. that I was still a writer, even in the dark, even alone. thank you for influencing me in so many ways unbeknownst to you.
I get emotional about the “missing” parts in an unfinished series—what was in your head, ao3 user? your dreams and hopes and ideas? Or, what about chapter ten, which has triple the amount of comments due to your plot twist. what was that like in the timeline of your life? or, what was it like when you happened to only get one comment on chapter 1?
the rarepair authors that I’ll never connect with because they moved on: thank you for still leaving it up.
it’s just. cosmic to me to open these fics from 2,5,10 years ago and see where the author was at, to see where fandom was at, to see anything at all so human!!
I can comment, I can kudos and bookmark, but there’s no obligation for them to write back. I’m just thinking about the passage of time and the idea that we can connect in so many ways!