aidennestorm:

This is for you, my fellow darkfic fans– who, like me, enjoy wading (or sometimes outright swimming) in the tragic, the terrible, the twisted side of the fandom pool. This is for anyone who has ever felt targeted or been directly targeted simply for the fictional tropes you prefer. I’m not trying to provide advice, or invite discourse (hopefully not); this is just a personal message, from me to you.

And the message is this– you should never, ever feel like you need to break yourself into pieces to be accepted, liked, loved. You are a whole person, and you deserve to exist as a whole person. You have the right to exist as a whole person. You have the right to have people in your life that adore you for who you are, including your interests.

Of course, there’s always compartmentalization to a degree; I do it myself. Very few people in my offline life know what I do in fandom, or even know that I’m in fandom in the first place. I have very dear friends, also in fandom, who are squicked by tropes I love, and we’ve agreed that those won’t arise in conversation. That’s not what I mean, here.

What I mean is: the people who tell you that you’re bad, or immoral, or “insert any disparaging/hurtful/cruel epithet here”– they’re wrong. You know that fantasy is different than reality. You know that our fictional preferences don’t define our real life choices. You know, just like Lin-Manuel Miranda does, that “your art is a place to work stuff out”. 

We know who we are. No matter what they tell us.