How to Deal With an Account Made by a You Who Hasn't Existed for Seven Years

Today is my seven year anniversary of joining this site. While I haven't posted on here in a while and am conspicuously not looking at any specific story I keep telling myself I'll get back to one day, I have still been somewhat active in reading on this site. The more time that's gone on, though, the stranger it is to look at the stories I have here, and not just because one of those stories is incredibly close to 1k likes, what the fuck.

At this point, those stories were basically written by a different person. I do recognize this is how time tends to work, but that doesn't make it any less striking. I'm not even the same gender as the idiot who wrote most of what's on this account, to be only a bit needlessly harsh to my old self. On top of that, how I view fanfiction and fandom in general has changed dramatically. When I was writing and participating most actively in this site, I was swept up in the crowd coming from groups like Plan 9 for Equestria and Rage Reviews, and I had a very specific idea of what fanfiction writing and engagement was supposed to be like. Stories, and the authors behind them, could be effectively categorized into "greater" or "lesser" based on such things as perceived effort, airtight resistance to grammar and spelling mistakes, willingness to be perfectly okay with about twenty people aggressively shitting on your work, and how you kowtowed to the statements of said people. "Greater" authors got left alone, mostly. "Lesser" authors got shamed into usually deleting their work, or having to deal with the tide coming back on whatever they posted, leaving packs of downvotes and a graveyard of a comment section. I was fourteen and pretty sure this was okay. After all, it helped the quality of the site, right? Having less "bad" authors cluttering the pages is a good thing, yeah?

It took a long time for me to gain a healthier view of how to interact with fanworks and with other fans. It took a long time for me to redefine the "bad" users from people just having fun writing to the people like me who sought them out to be hurtful. It took a long time for me to step off that high horse and realize that this isn't some enlightened museum for only the highest quality, very few people here are professionals, and this whole site has very low has stakes unless you want it to. Fanfiction isn't something that you should have to be treating like a job, or a competition, or as something you have to be constantly striving for growth and acclaim in. This is a medium anybody with internet access can pick up for themselves, and that's pretty amazing. The bar for entry is just knowing English to some degree and very basic grammar, and that's the bar for continuing well past entry as well. And that's fine. Honestly, it's more than fine. Something this accessible is pretty special, I now think. Fanfiction is a place where you can read a work written by somebody in their upper thirties who is elsewhere published and has a patreon and on the next page find a story written by a thirteen-year-old who has nothing going but grand dreams and the kind of frantic energy being in middle school gives. It's a place where you can find people who have written only one highly scrubbed story and people who have written three hundred pieces that barely passed moderation in the same amount of time. It's an absolute mess of experiences and levels of experience, of people here for fun and for a chance at horsefame, people who think they have the next hit idea and people who just want to express how much they like something.

Honestly, I regret that when I was most active here, I saw that as "cringy" instead of fantastic. I look at the frankly depressing amount of old half-finished ideas in my drafts on this site and wonder if I hadn't had a stick so far up my ass, if maybe those could've seen the light of day. I wonder if, had I found more grace for others and appreciation for how they chose to enjoy their hobby here, I could've had more grace for myself and the things I wanted, "cringy" or not. Or maybe that's just me being older and more depressed and casting a weird importance on things that wouldn't have changed much.

It's odd to come back here with that very different view, though. I look at and remember things I said on this site that I don't agree with even slightly anymore, but they're still out there, linked to who I am now because they're from the same account. I don't really know what to do about what's already there. I don't even know if the vast majority of the people I knew then are even around anymore to read this. Some probably are though, I mean, it's current year, what else are we going to be doing.

I guess there's not really a huge, coherent point to this blog. It's mostly just the slightly collected feelings of nostalgia and annoyance with my past self that I feel whenever I log on here anymore. I think, in the end, the answer to this blog's title is this blog itself. I'm dealing with what I believed and did in the past by recognizing how differently I think now. It won't undo anything, but I think it's better to start somewhere than never start at all. The start I'm having here is definitely apologizing to anybody I treated poorly, if they're reading this for some weird reason. Considering that's really not likely at all, another start here is by taking this all far, far less seriously.

After all, this is a niche writing site for a now-past show that I'm on in my free time. I'm going to treat it like that. I might even have fun doing so.