Oh the People, the Places Part 1

You know as I laugh and bullshit my way thru this casual narrative of my experiences w/ AFF, I am kinda struck by how much the simple act of using this site and writing this is forcing me to engage with the past. I forget a lot, and using this website is making me remember what happened back then and what kind of person I was. To an extent, it is drowning me in nostalgia. I remember how desperate and hungry I was back then, and I pity myself. I remember how desperate and hungry other people were, and I pity them. This is arguably worse because I do not know what happened to these people. And I worry.

So as I write this next story, I would just like to say that if this is you, I am sorry for what you went through. If this is you, I only want to give your story the dignity of being told, and I would like to share how you affected me.

I am now going to begin one of my most exciting stories about AFF. Tbh, I don't really think my personal experiences are that interesting. In the beginning, I wrote fanfic and thought I was above it all. Now, I mostly just write fanfic. But I have had the great privilege of being part of the loose AFF "community." I have also had the great privilege of experiencing the peak years of AFF use (the fuzzy time when EXO seemed to be literally everywhere, approximately after PSY's Gangnam Style), so for a while, AFF was actually a big deal to some people. And when teenage girls congregate on the Internet, shit will inevitably hit the fan. 

One of the great trends on AFF for a while was advice/review shops where authors could request an outside opinion on their story. Suddenly, everyone had become infected with the yearning to improve, and suddenly, everyone wanted to write like Dostoyevsky. Most shops, though, were run by people whose parents had raised them right and were generally very kind in their reviews. It was something else, then, to be mean, to really tear into a fic.

AFF was (and, arguably, still is) the land of the cliches. 9 out of 10 female protagonists were saccharine sweet, ever-suffering saints. A little overdone, a little empty. People were either unbelievably wealthy or unbelievably poor. Evil step-mother, bitter family rivalries, high school kangaroo court, it was all there. As a relatively well-read fic writer, I personally didn't care for these stories and was mostly indifferent, but as an elitist with perfectionist tendencies, I could not stand them!! I completely sympathized with the need to correct them and worshipped the few authors who I thought wrote well.

I circled one author in particular. Finally, I had found someone considerably more angsty than me. She sometimes wrote poetry, sometimes wrote stories. What was evident, though, was the excess of emotion she put in everything she wrote. I was fascinated by the pain she expressed. Depression is a little like falling into a pot of honey. It's really easy to get stuck, really easy to fall asleep, really easy to let things just happen. Her writing seemed to acknowledge that. There was a sort of deep, inextricable sadness to everything she put her hands on, and I loved it. She was conflicted about her sexuality. At turns completely sure of herself and then completely insecure, given to bullying, given to crowing. She said she didn't think she had ever loved before, and I loved it. The confusion, the ambivalence, the cavern of yawning, crystalline unease, I loved it all.

She wrote primarily about SNSD, and she seemed to favor taesica (if my memory serves me lol). I was still young and still vaguely homophobic. (Cosmopolitanism doesn't come easy folks!!) I was uncomfortable with 90% of what she wrote, but there was a secret quality to her writing that kept me reading. Now that I think back on it, I think it was empathy. She wrote, and I saw myself. I was torn up inside too, and I thought I had found a kindred spirit.