Fandom Veteran Gothic
One of your favorite old fics has been taken down. You can find it on Wayback Machine, but it’s only the original Geocities site. The font is Comic Sans and there’s a tiled repeating background of stars obscuring the cyan text.
You read a fic at some point in a fandom you no longer participate in. You want to re-read the fic, but the title and pen name of the author keep escaping you. You don’t even know where it was posted. You can find dozens of other fics with a similar concept but not that one.
An author you used to follow moved their work from their personal website to their friends-locked blog. You sent them a request three months ago. It is still marked “pending.” You wonder if you will ever get to read their work again.
You get a follower out of nowhere. Their screen name is familiar. It’s the person you RPed explicit chat logs with when you were sixteen. You’ve changed screen names four times since then and don’t know how they found you.
You forgot the password to your old FanFiction.net account. There are terrible relics of your past as a writer archived there. They must be destroyed. You can’t recover the password because the email account no longer exists, and the site isn’t answering your emails.
You were in this fandom when it was small and just getting started. Now there’s a whole expanded universe of new material, and you just want to read fics in your original fandom. Only the new characters are popular.
Three fandoms later, you run into someone you had fandom drama with five years ago. You wonder if they ever forgave you for your part in what happened. You’re too shy to ask. Interactions are tense and you go your separate ways. You travel the same fandom circles for a while, but never speak.
You have WIPs on your hard drive from years and fandoms ago. You want to finish them, but the fandoms are no longer active. You wonder if anyone would read them if they were done. You sometimes open them and wistfully read their partially-finished stories.
