Individualism in Fandoms
It’s been a deeply personal and joyful experience, but also an exceedingly emotionally taxing decade for me, trying to put my head out for a community that I want to make a home for myself. But as much as I would see common ground, it’s been tough for me to find a way for myself to break into the community when personal life intrudes on you to no end – even when you do as much as you can trying to acquire distance from heteronormative parents when you want to express yourself as queer to a community.
As much as being part of a community has its benefits, when socializing is rarely your strong suit and your energy for yourself dwindles, it’s hard to make it feel like a relief when trying to put yourself out there feels like a chore for yourself. And to me, it never felt right to see that what is supposed to be a mental support circle could equally be a source of heartache whenever things even slightly go awry.
And it’s that moment where I realize that as much as being in a community makes me feel a part of something, it’s important for myself to focus on personal priorities and needs in life – and it’s that hard disconnect that makes it a big personal barrier to partaking in a community.
Despite all that, when everything does go in order, being part of the community and having your individuality leave a mark, at the very least on someone, there is a worthwhile takeaway in the end of it all. I hope when things do sort out for myself, and I rediscover my passion in life, maybe I could be ready to return to those communities and be able to give back to the community that, for better or worse, had defined me.
Something I realize writing down is that despite that the focus of the Midway Menagerie is about the furry community, the experience I want to write about is more about trying to be in any community. Anything that I can explain for the furry fandom can reasonably translate to other communities like anime, coding or kink. It does seem random, but those are fandom -- or community.
Journey to Fandom
Growing up within a spectrum and having to be in special education has already had me ostracized within my school. And whenever I’ve been told to undertake it again when I return to school for a new year, it always involves me having to protest myself not to be under it and be with the rest of the students in school, no matter how “special” it would be – heck, even being in the actual special AP courses doesn’t convince them.
During those times outside of spending time at home playing on my PS3 or playing MMOs on the house computer, I got myself into the Poke-fur community on Tumblr. This led me to my first personal drama with people I was trying to make an impression on. However, it then led me to a tight-knit circle that was my first form of a friendship circle that I was a part of – even if most already had history together, at the very least, I was part of it.
Then one incident led to another, and another circle had me trying to re-invent myself. From there, it’s been a cycle of trying to make an impression on people, drama stirs indirectly or directly, and having to be back in my corner for my own mental safety.
When I first finally started attending cons outside of Massachusetts with Chicago’s Midwest Fur Fest in 2023, it definitely felt like I was jumping off a cliff in terms of attendance count and getting easily lost. It doesn’t help that the couple of people I actually do want to meet who were friends in my old circle get so dragged around that my insecurity reared its ugly head. And from that, I incidentally cause people to push me away from them, making me force myself to re-invent myself again after a mentally apocalyptic first con experience. I don’t know what happened to the one person from the United Kingdom since then. The other person, on the other hand, had actually come back around to me during Anthrocon 2025, and although I rarely talked to them since, it’s clear that they held no hard feelings against me when they explained that they had their own personal shit to sift through. Keep that latter part in mind (especially for myself).
Since then, after moving out without my parent’s aware back at August 2024 to live with other queer furs, learning how to co-op with others and learning to live without my parents had also has its shares of heartache with trying to learn on the spot what make others tick and learning boundaries before realizing a year-and-a-half in that it won’t work out since then, I have been trying to find a new place if I don’t want to return to my parents.
Between all those, outside of the furry community, I have been trying to get myself with latex, kink and the greater general trans and queer community, but when the circle nearby are rather closed off and big and the actual friends you want to be around are all unreachable because they’re oceans away, it’s been tough to find myself to show me the ropes – in more ways than one.
Now my current regular circle that I spent a year-and-a-half bunkering down has been through the gacha gaming circle after dipping my toes with Zenless Zone Zero, and now I’ve been playing and talking about Blue Archive (and Umamusume) in a circle who are passionate about it that it became my personal comfort game with stories and histories that has me caring about it despite being laid under the predatory nature of gacha.
A fact that at the time of writing had recently became a grim reminder with a system-wide change to the gacha mechanic that has established fans of the 5.5-years of service for the game coming in arms with arguments that has armchair data analyst with AI-generated text on change of luck of pulls and the erosion of trust to the developers between a valid poor communication to wild speculative conspiracy about the changes with people being divided on opinions, but to put that part out of the way as it’s ultimately not the focus:
Water is wet, gacha is still gacha, and gacha is and has always been predatory by its nature of probability, and probability, regardless, is always a source of human biases regardless of data (and I’m speaking as someone who flunked Probability and Statistics in college and barely survived the retake).
With that tangent out of the way…
A Drop of Water in Crashing Waves
A common through-line through these snippets of my life is that all my moments in the community – while all have their moment to shine as wonderful memories – always have their thorns when an unspoken rule has been broken. And it’s those kinds of gate-keeping that, no matter what circle, fandom, or community it is, always become a sensitive sore spot for people that makes it hard to identify. The reason why it has been so hard – anecdotally speaking – is that it’s hard for anyone (especially with someone like me who can’t identify social cues) to recognize those without those boundaries to establish for both ends of the exchange. And even when those mitigation and safety measures are there, it can still quickly break when there is something that nobody can anticipate. In my own admission, I still struggle to know what boundaries to set whenever I talk to someone that I have some genuine interest in for fear of accidentally making a bad impression that stains a potential relationship.
And while I do want to get myself involved, it became quickly apparent that no matter how much I tried to partake, it always take a lot out of me and ultimately felt like you didn’t do anything despite doing as much as you possibly can given your own circumstance given the hundreds or thousands of people within a community with all their own circles and cliques that those people find their own security under. Trying to get yourself a blip in the community might often feel futile when there’s nobody there to recognize you, much less finding anyone who is looking around like you.
And with the barrel of issues between sleep, food, and mental motivation to do… well, anything without either getting easily distracted with ADHD or getting so hyper-focused that I stay up, it’s never been a healthy approach to life. And that is not to mention still having to contend with overprotective and heteronormative Southeast Asian parents of a first-generation kid growing up in the first U.S. state that legalized same sex marriage and a premier sanctuary for queer folx like me when life has already proven to be too much for me to deal with.
And that part of the backpack of personal baggage has slowly but surely made me realize that it’s hard to be part of the community when your personal life keeps getting in your way. And ultimately, it kept me away from the existential matters that I want to fight for. Unfortunately, I don’t have the mental capacity to partake in it because I know it will take a lot out of me physically and mentally to put my belief and my existence on the line when I still need to protect my existence from the immediate personal issues like rent, family, and community. Basically, It’s hard for me to take care of others when I should take care of myself first.
A Rock on the Shore
Here is my message especially for myself for this – what is ultimately a personal rant – to share for the inaugural blogging carnival:
Don’t forget to remind yourself why you are in the community you are in to begin with, and don’t forget who you are and ultimately have a clear idea of who you want to be, both yourself and the people you want to be around.
It’s way too easy to try to make an impression by conforming to what the people around you do and wanting to try so hard only to learn in hindsight that it might not be your thing.
But it’s also very easy to convince yourself that it is your thing, or ultimately you know that it is a thing you want to be a part of because it intrinsically interests you but never find the people to partake in it, discouraging you from participating at all, which is particularly demoralizing. And for that, it’s important to be resilient and be willing to try again when you can.
Outside of the community, the past few weeks with a project on my job have me starting to rediscover my passion for coding and have gotten me learning to architect complex software applications for myself and my job long after I got the coding basics down but never understood the development community of the language. But while re-learning the Python development environment is one thing, it’s learning to be able to trust your own ability and do what you know is right for yourself and the project by just writing a testable unit function before figuring out how functions connect.
It’s a tangent that for me speaks to why I am still passionate about coding even in the age of AI “vibe coding,” when rational developers use AI at a limited capacity as just another tool while those same developers still manually review their code in a human capacity with critical thinking in those aspects being well… critical. And I hope that perspective could allow me to share with the community even a bit of knowledge for others.
Waiting for the Tides to Go Out to Return
This moment for me to try to rediscover myself is a way for me to bring motivation to eventually find myself again and identify what I truly want in life before being willing to be able to finally give back to the community that had pretty much defined my life in many ways.
Writing down this blog entry, while it had me go through a few weeks to figure out a topic, days to get myself motivated, and hours to outline and write, also had me remind myself why I am interested in community in its purest form, and that is to share, learn, and enjoy the things we like together. The thing, however, is not to take those opportunities for granted, and it pays to find ways to give back or express yourself.