Dammit, just discovered a friend here's been dead for two years... · 6:31pm Oct 24th, 2023
Today I learned that Jordan died in April 2021, and I had no idea. I was re-reading some of my older fanfics, saw his comments, thought, "Huh, I wonder how Jordan's doing", and the answer is, he's not. Dammit.
He and I didn't agree on much of anything regarding real world politics, but were surprisingly well aligned on MLP politics and characterizations. He enjoyed and commented frequently on my work, and I enjoyed his. I very much regret that he'll never get to finish his multi-chapter works and that he'll never get to read mine when I finally finish them.
This isn't the first time -- I've had fannish friends die before. An entire fandom community died with Kielle in 2004; she was the lynchpin of online comics fandom at the time. Fellow Q fans from Star Trek Jeanita Danzik and Atara Stein died in 2005 and 2008. It never stops being a painful thing.
For some reason I find it so very hard to believe that writers die. How can all the worlds in someone's head just cease to exist like that? But they do. We are as breakable as every other human.
I've seen other people on Fimfiction die, but no one I knew. Life is more fragile than it looks.
I am also just hearing about this now.
WAIT WHAT
I knew for a while now, yes. I still lament his passing. Incredible mind and passion for world building.
Fucking hell, I had no idea. I did wonder why I stopped seeing him around the site but assumed he had left the fandom. Oh that's so heartbreaking. Thank you for spreading the word.
At least they are in a better place. And their stories, their worlds continue to love on in the thoughts and memories of his friends and readers.
Oh wow. I never talked to Jordan, but I always saw them in comment sections. It's tragic that they never got to finish the project they were passionate about
I hadn't read anything by him, but I suppose I can change that now :/ sorry for your loss
Yeah. I learned about it like six months after the fact. It always struck me as... wrong in some undefinable way, how quiet his passing was. I mean, I never really knew the guy, and I can't say I ever read any of his stuff, but he was a prolific commenter in this part of the site. I expected the news to get around naturally to those who did know him a lot quicker, like it did with MythrilMoth back when he passed, but... well, I'm sorry you had to find out so late. I guess on some level, I just assumed that you already knew, but were dealing with it in private, or were too busy with life stuff to comment on it publically at the time. Now I wish I'd contacted you myself and said something. I'm sorry I didn't.
5752051
I have my regrets on not letting Alex Warlorn know about this exact thing years ago, because I stupidly wasn't 100% sure if he knew or not when I saw (now deleted) comments from him on Jordan's userpage.
And then I saw that he didn't know. I could've potentially said something earlier, but I didn't...
And yeah, it really does feel wrong in how it felt like it just happened in a whisper, the word spreading.
I never talked to nor read any works of his but I recognise his profile from seeing previous comments of his. It’s so interesting how in person, human life can sometimes seem so fragile but online it’s as if people are invincible— also it can be so much harder to realise that someone online has passed, you either have to be very perceptive or have real-life connections. He sounds like he was a great person and I’m glad that this has been brought to attention again.
5752105
I guess the lesson to take from it is that we shouldn't just assume that others will do the things we leave undone. I assumed that Jordan was well known enough that others who knew him better than I did would pass the word on to others who cared about him, so I didn't have to myself. Classic bystander effect. I should've known better when people like Alara (who I knew spoke to him) didn't make any public acknowledgement of it. 5752010 also didn't know until I told him myself. I should've asked more people about it, done my part at the time. Maybe the only reason it was so oddly quiet is that people like us didn't think we needed to speak up.
I hope it's a mistake I don't make again.
5752115
Fandom is a weird liminal social space. In real life, you expect the real life friends or family of the deceased to contact you, because you know them. But fandom makes it possible to know a person's whole life story, personality, preferences, everything that makes them them, without knowing a single person in their real life, or even their real name.
I intend to make a will with access to all my social media accounts and passwords so that my husband or my children can notify people in the event of my death. Other friends of mine who died, I was fortunate enough that there were other fans in our community who were their RL spouses, or that I knew their real name, or both. But now that my oldest child has aged up and left MLP fandom behind, I have no RL people who are part of Fimfiction.
It's sad, but when you're an older fan this is definitely a thing you need to think about.
5752148
Yeah. I've taken similar measures myself. Not that I expect to die anytime soon, but I do have a friend with a FimFic account whose job it will be to get the word out if the worst should happen.
Though, what I really want to set up is a shareable Google Drive folder he can link with the incomplete drafts and outlines of all my unfinished projects; if I die suddenly, I want to at least provide my readers closure for all the stories that I won't be able to finish.
5752157
I did something like that the last time I had surgery. I'm deathly afraid of anesthesia; something about the idea of going to sleep and never waking up horrifies me. So I created an account with access to my personal Office 365 tenant (we're Microsoft consultants here), and queued a post on Tumblr with the login and password, for a week from the day of surgery. If I lived, I figured, I'd be able to stop it from posting.
Well, I lived and it didn't post. :-) But yeah, having someone who I'd trust with the login who could post it if I died would be helpful.
5752213
Well, glad we didn't see it, but good to hear that you've got that queued up just in case. Hopefully it's not needed again for a while.