#ly42

[imnotinclinedtomaturity]

LY 42 Debrief: On Fandom, Boundaries, and Frogs in Baths

I love writing fiction because I can so carefully craft a world or a scene or a plot point to perfectly execute the broader point that I’m trying to make. It’s satisfying to watch it all come together and do the thing I wanted it to do, my big idea tucked into a tidy little box. I loved writing 42 because I got to do exactly that. And then sometimes I write my tidy little box of a piece and still have more to say. Sometimes I’ll journal a little debrief, a way to work through all the thoughts I stirred up while writing. 

So now, lest you’d like to listen, I’d like to share that debrief and tell you about some of the choices I made while crafting that tidy little box and why I made them.

In TBV, Dan and Phil called this a new era, said the phandom is grown up and they’ve forgiven us. I’m very grateful that they have been able to forgive the phandom. They touched on some of the most egregious boundary crossings they experienced — the ones that easily come to everyone who was around’s mind without me having to list them out for you. But also, I think it’s important to acknowledge that those extremes didn’t spring up out of nowhere. There was an accepted level of boundary crossing that was normalized throughout the entire phandom, that created a permission structure for more and more boundary crossing. 

I appreciate their forgiveness, but since we’ve been given it, I’m not sure if there’s been enough self reflection on what it means that we needed forgiveness in the first place (or maybe people are doing this privately, or maybe it’s just not come across my dash). Part of being forgiven is reckoning with your own actions and making sure you won’t do them again. So, in some ways, ly42 and this debrief are my direct response to that.

***

I’ve been thinking about boundaries and fandom and the razor thin line between loving and creative support, and actions that can cause harm a lot lately. I don’t think that’s a particularly unique line of thinking in the phandom, or at least I hope it isn’t. 

But I’m also still reckoning with the question that — again, I hope — many of us are: what are boundaries that are reasonable and kind and fair to extend to people? To people who willingly put themselves in the public eye and professionally share their life with the world? To people who are constantly adjusting and learning for themselves where they want the boundaries to be?

To people? 

When writing this chapter, I kept circling back to the same thoughts. Where does my enjoyment come at the expense of someone else’s peace? And why, in the dark of the night, do I sometimes forget that that’s not an acceptable trade off? 

***

I organized this chapter the way I did for a reason.

Toxic things don’t tend to just appear. I like to believe that most people would walk away from toxic situations if they came out of the gate as recognizably toxic. The thing about toxicity is: it tends to creep up. It’s slow. Each step is normalized before the next step is added. We see this in so many arenas — in radicalization, in domestic violence, in toxic friendships, in cults, and a million other examples.

Fandom isn’t immune.

This chapter was, on purpose, meant to slowly escalate. To see how innocent posts can spark potentially harmful responses, how small curiosities can become boundary-crossing investigations. To start as tepid water and become a pleasantly warm bath, to becoming hot but maybe not glaringly so. To see how, when surrounded by equally passionate fans, how well-meaning, curious people can participate in the shifting of boundaries without noticing it. It was, very intentionally, a frog in a pot. 

So much of fandom is wonderful. It’s community and shared-love and a whole network of support and cheerleading that a lot of people don’t get to experience irl. Most of fandom lies in the happy, comfortable zone, and I purposefully wrote the most posts in what I dubbed the warm bath section to showcase that. To honor that. 

The too-hot and boiling sections were smaller because, in my experience, they’re smaller in real life, too. But they’re often the loudest, most memorable parts too. 

At least in my opinion, there isn’t only one problematic fan in ly42. If you walked out of the chapter thinking there was only one bad apple, I’d encourage you to read it again, thinking about each post from ly!dnp’s perspective — whose inner thoughts and emotions you are very familiar with — and see if anything else feels invasive. 

Some boundaries I intentionally crossed while writing ly42, many of which had their roots in real life phandom experiences I’ve seen or had or been a part of:

There was a lot of speculation about ly!dnp’s sex life throughout the chapter — who tops/bottoms, is there any kind of dom/sub element, does Dan have a praise kink, etc? For new phans: back in the day, it was basically considered taboo to write top!Dan. Top!Dan fics or posts would get everything from less reads/kudos to active pushback. Even at the time, it felt invasive and like Too Much. Looking back, I wonder how it affected particularly Dan to see this (very loud) discourse in his fan base? How it felt, while struggling with so much internalized homophobia, to have people talk about your bedroom preferences with such charged emotions? How it felt for everyone to assume the wrong thing, to pretty viciously argue that no, he could never be the top? How much those assumptions probably chafed at the internalized homophobia? I know we all laugh about the “I’m a top” campaign Dan’s been on since the hard launch. It has always made me wonder, though, how much it stems from pain that we caused. I’m so happy that he has the freedom and comfort and confidence to scream that he’s a top now, but I wish we hadn’t spent so many years pushing this particular button. 

musicbidanhowell was a recurring character throughout the chapter. I wanted them to be a model of how good-hearted enthusiasm can blind someone to reasonable boundaries, can be so all-consuming that it’s easy to cross a line or two without noticing. This person’s curiosity is so understandable and relatable, and their findings are so interesting!! But… should they really have been scrutinizing every inch of Phil’s video backdrop? And, going a step further, should they have been scrutinizing every inch of Adaline’s selfie background — a person who surely did not consider that possibility when she posted a selfie to her personal instagram?

And related to that — how appropriate is it that there’s at least one account dedicated to Adaline? From what we’ve seen in the LY canon, Adaline seems to have no idea that she’s in the public eye. Does having your instagram unlocked and being related to someone famous mean that you consent to thousands of people following you? Is it appropriate for dh fans to be following Adaline at all, if their primary reason for doing so is her proximity and similarity to Dan?

And speaking of zooming in on every pixel of content… why was someone zooming in on Phil’s deliveroo account? What was the goal there? Was that really an appropriate thing to do in the first place? Are content creators responsible for making sure to omit every single little detail that they don’t want to share or could reveal too much? Personally, I think it’s reasonable that Dan didn’t think about the .2 seconds Phil’s deliveroo screen flashed to the camera and it’s out of bounds for someone to spend the time freezing the video on the right frame and zooming in until they can read the text that very easily could have contained his exact address.

Fans discover Dan’s private instagram and their first reaction is to try to find a way to access it. And from a fan perspective, god, I get the curiosity. What a violation, though, to intentionally try to gain access to privately posted content — especially with the goal of sharing that content with the wider fanbase. This was meant to be a parallel for all the archaeology that used to happen — the digging up and circulating of all the formspring and dailybooth and pre-hello internet tweets.. That still happens, I think, except I’ve blocked most of the people who do it from my dash now. I know Dan said archaeology was “okay” when asked, but it didn’t feel like permission freely given to me. If a friend borrows your sweater for ten years and you keep asking for it back and they continue keeping it, and then you, after ten years, finally say “okay it’s your sweater now” — was that really a gift? And if it was, was it a gift willingly given? Because I don’t think so. I refuse to engage with anything that touches the realm of archaeology because, to me, it feels like if DnP had real, honest control, they wouldn’t have shared that part of their life with us in the first place, and they wouldn’t have given us permission to keep having it. It feels like they “allowed” it because they’ve become desensitized to it. It no longer holds power because we’ve poked the bruise so many times it became a callous. I’m not interested in continuing to poke. 

I think it’s worth noting that many of these problematic posts were some of the most fun to write. Even the parts that I purposefully designed to be in boundary-crossing territory were interesting and compelling and sparked so many little mysteries that I could imagine creative conspiracies to solve and—

—And that’s what makes the slightly-too-hot bath dangerous. The water may feel a little hot, maybe more so to some than others, but it also might feel good. 

It feels good to revel in the romance of two people who you adore. The more of it you can consume, the more it almost feels like having it for yourself. And the more of the romance people want to consume, the more normalized it becomes for people to dig and dig and dig and share and share and share until, suddenly, nothing is scared anymore.

***

I’m not immune to this. I’m not immune to engaging in activities that might cross real-life people’s — people who are famous, yes, but who, first and foremost, are people — boundaries. My single best creative work is rpf. I’ve written rpf for other fandoms, about characters whose real-life counterparts would probably be a lot less chill about smutty and romantic rpf of them existing than dnp are. I knew that when I wrote it. I still wrote it. 

I came into the phandom sometime in 2015 and the water temperature was already so hot. 

Everyone acted like the water wasn’t hot, though, and I hadn't ever been in a real person fandom before, and also there were level-headed friends I made that weren’t trying to add more boiling water to the bath and and and—

I’ve seen the Valentine’s Day video. 

Once. 

It was late at night and I didn’t really know the lore because the “drama” (in hindsight, it wasn’t “drama”, it was a tragedy) had gone down years before I was in the fandom. Someone told me about it and had a link. Everyone else has seen it, I remember thinking. The weight of what it might have been — what we now know it to be — didn’t register with me. 

It should have. 

I thought about it a lot, in the following years. Not the video. I honestly don't remember a single thing about the video except the disgust I felt with myself almost immediately. I’m surprised every time I learn that a piece of lore originated there. 

But I think about the fact that I watched it. That — regardless of if it was real or fake — I knew what it could be and I still clicked play of my own volition. I’ve, at least vaguely, referenced it in a fic with too little care (not ly, I think). I don’t have the excuse of being twelve years old at the time. I was in my twenties and still clicked play. 

***

I've always been an older phan. And maybe that’s why I always tended to shy far away from the more deeply analytical and invasive discourse. I’d see it come across my dash every now and again and I’d block whoever created it, or maybe whoever reblogged it. But I didn’t do anything. I never commented “hey, I think you’re digging a little too far into someone’s private life” or “eek just because something in is the government’s public record doesn’t mean we have a right to go searching for it”. Pre-hiatus phans, I think all of us know the feeling of seeing something come across our dash that pinged our yikes radar. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve usually swallowed that feeling of discomfort and moved on to the next post. Maybe sent it to a friend to bitch about. 

But I think maybe, this time around, it’s important that we’re more active about calling each other in. About saying “hey I get why this is a fun post, but it seems like it might be crossing a line”. Or, at the very least, that we’re more careful about what we like and share and create. 

Nowadays, I am quick to unfollow anyone that I feel like crosses a line because I very purposefully don't want my dash to increase in temperature. I like my memes and phanart and shitposting, and don’t want to slowly become normalized to too much and too much and too much again. Maintaining healthy, respectful  boundaries is active work. There are days it feels like a real bummer, honestly. Posts that I read and start getting excited about before I realize — fuck. This is voyeuristic. This is entitled. This may be fun, but it’s fun that is very likely at the expense of someone else’s privacy and peace. 

But it’s still work I am intent on doing — on encouraging others to do — because I love them so much and want them to continue feeling comfortable making content and, even more than that, want them to just be comfortable and happy. 

***

Post Hard Launch, I wonder if we’re thinking hard enough, as individuals and as a group, about the boundary lines of our behavior. And I think the group conversation part is important, because nothing else about fandom happens in a vacuum. We are a community, things are created and shared by us and for us and among us, and if we aren’t talking about this, then we can’t ethically do the rest, I think.

I wonder if we — fans who were around pre-hiatus — have reckoned enough with our role in the phandom the first time around. Because spectators can contribute to the rising temperature of the bathwater too. I think about how I never poured kerosene on a fire, but I also didn’t walk around with a fire extinguisher. My fire survival strategy was always, first and foremost, to avoid the fire as much as possible. And it worked pretty well — every now and then a rogue flame would escape and I’d hiss in sympathetic pain, but there was so much good, so many respectful people I could surround myself with, that I could, for the most part, pretend the fire wasn’t there. 

***

Sometimes I still see content on my dash that makes me uncomfortable. A re-shared compilation post from a decade ago, piecing together the queerest and most romantic formspring posts from the infancy of a relationship that isn’t ours. A slightly-too-serious commentary on bedroom positions. A post framed as knowledge and certainty about lives we can only ever have a curated window into. 

I think about this when I feel joy at Dan and Phil dropping lore, particularly when they address lore that was at the center of conspiracies and fan favorite moments for a decade. Because it is thrilling and fun and a-little-feral-in-a-fun-way to learn a new tidbit of information about our collective hyperfixation/special interest. But also, many times, I’m left thinking about gifts, and how they aren’t really gifts if they aren’t freely given.

And I’m so happy — so, so happy — that Dan and Phil feel comfortable enough to talk about things that they couldn’t or didn’t want to before. There is absolutely joy in that, for both them and us. 

But two things can also be true. 

Confirming and addressing things that were at the center of scrutiny — I’m not sure that’s a gift. It feels, to me at least, like more of a reclamation. 

***

This chapter was intended to be equal parts celebration and caution, nostalgia and reminder. I hope you had fun reading it, and I hope it makes you think a little. The entire goal of the chapter was to question, “Where is the line?”

I don’t pretend to have any all-knowing answers to that question. I’m not Dan or Phil (surprise), and they’re the only two people on earth who can definitively answer that question. I can only think about where the line is for me (and, hopefully, encourage others to do the same). As much as I would love clear, detailed boundaries from Dan and Phil, as I was writing ly42, I really came to the conclusion that I don’t think it’s their responsibility to give them to us. Respect is something given, not demanded. 

And if they were to doll out detailed, specific boundaries, there would always be some stone unturned, some situation that they never imagined that comes to fruition and crosses a boundary while technically feeling “allowed” because, hey, it wasn’t on the naughty list. 

So yes, I think it’s our job as a fandom to self-modulate, to remember they’re humans and give them reasonable boundaries. It’s not their job to explain to us how to treat someone like a human. Of course, they absolutely have the right to draw boundaries and to tell us when we’re out of line, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that things are a “yes” unless they’ve explicitly said “no”. 

***

I love Dan and Phil with my whole heart and am so genuinely, deeply glad to be back in the phandom. LY is the most interesting thing I’ve ever created, and I’m so glad to be writing it again. These characters have come to feel like my own, a rough pencil sketch based on versions of two people that no longer exist. I’m very grateful to have readers who welcomed the self-reflective meta content of 42. Thank you in particular to @siriuscybernetics and @yairqq , whose tumblr asks provided an opportunity to think about this from new angles, and to all the ao3 comments that I haven’t responded to yet but were equally thoughtful and thought-provoking.

If, after reading this debrief, you have more thoughts to share, I’m always happy to hear them. The entire point of this chapter was to create discussion, so please know that even if I take a bit to give a thoughtful response, I’m very happy to hear your reflections. 

[siriuscybernetics]

so the fantastic @imnotinclinedtomaturity has released Love Yourself 42 so i can fiiiiiiiinally fully shout about what i've been working on

tl;dr the latest chapter of ly looks cool af if i do say so myself, i'm returning to my coding roots of making fandom things look pretty, i'm having a blast, thank you kit for letting me play in your sandbox

the original brief was "i want to format some tumblr posts in boxes" which veeeeery quickly ended up with the mission of "create as close to a tumblr dash as possible in a way which works for a fic which is predominantly long form prose". (read: i saw an opportunity to deal with all my stupid free time and ran with it). it's as accessible as i could make it (don't @ me at using tables for layout, i started doing this stuff before flexbox existed it's still in my dna somewhere, and they help with the other part of this), and looks good with and without creator styles. with the exception of the way ao3 handles pdf downloads eating read more content, it's also perfectly downloadable into whatever ebook format you like your fics in.

the tumblr posts spawned texts (which you've already seen if you're up to date on ly), tweets, and a couple of other bits, which will eventually be backfilled into previous chapters.

i'm a ui focussed software engineer professionally, although currently unemployed (#startup life lol). i learned my trade on myspace and neopets as a kid, making layouts for people back when i was deep in the fandom trenches of the neopets roleplay boards. this was such a fun project that felt like being back in that "mess around and see what works" mindset and i fucking loved it. not to mention being able to contribute to a fic which is currently one of my favourite pieces of fiction.

this ended up way longer than i intended (what a surprise) so imma shut up but thank you again kit for your trust, and if you read phanfic and haven't read ly what are you even doing

[imnotinclinedtomaturity]

hiii! I wanted to ask you a not-necessarily-ly question, just because I'm curious (and keep in mind I was a very occasional casual fan of D&P pre-2019 and not autistically-invested pre Hard Launch so I'm uneducated of how obvious stuff was) What was your reaction as a phanfic writer as they started revealing stuff? Specifically: 1) "Trying to live my truth" being posted like around the same time you started posting... a fanfic about Dan living his truth (also ft: Dan "wanting to get stuff in and out of his mouth" and "oral fixation" which are real quotes from that vid). 2) the hiatus (*screams*) 3) Basically I'm gay (the stuff on sexuality+ a pretty good LY-like depiction of having all eyes on you in terms of being open about sexuality/ fan speculation) 4) The basically I'm gay stuff on gender + following dan-fucks-around-with-gender-norms era (I was thinking about it when you used all the nail-polish symbolism in LY given the early WAD-era posts with cross-dressing + Dan painting his nails fr) 5) The tit era soft-launches (ejem PLEASE watch this video compilation of kink/ general innuendos, those two are hornier and know more kink vocab than all the fanfic writers I follow combined: https://youtu.be/hYmOzuQ-J04?si=y_doub-DCNz9f_5Y )

6) The hard launch acknowledgement of the impact of phanfic (no shade because you were pretty vague about V-day Vid knowledge but for example, how do you feel in retrospective about adding cherry lube to your fic?) + #Iamnotabottom howell 7) The hard launch in general. Hope you are okay, no hurries on answering these or stuff from my yapping ass in general, I was just super curious as I read because you predicted so many things I thought were post-2019 (protective Dan, gender=formless-blob Dan, "i don't mind waiting" Phil, "wants to separate coming out from hard launch" decision, DAN LIKING FISHNETS... and so much more.)

i've been sitting on this ask for like 2 weeks or whatever, which hopefully now, it's obvious why.

i'll dig more into this in the debrief (coming soon), but i wrote 42 as a way to both process what being in the phandom during that time was sometimes like (both good and bad) and partially as a cautionary reminder of what we were and what we could become again if we aren't careful

i answered your questions to the best that my memory will allow because wow has my world changed a lot in 8 years or whatever and memory is a fickle bitch sometimes. i'm going out of order because the phanfic part is more important (to me) than the others:

6. since I started writing phanfic, it pretty much always felt "permitted" because I (i'm pretty sure) starting writing fic post tabinof. and like! they wrote their own phanfics to go in the book! look! they wouldn't do that if they weren't okay with us writing fic! we're not being creepy or breaking rules! (whether, at the time, it was permission freely or begrudgingly given is a topic for fair debate, and after TBV, i lean much more heavily toward begrudging than i did back then). phanfic had also been totally normalized in the phandom before i ever came into it. i've never been in a fandom with something as cool and comprehensive and organized and helpful as the phanfictioncatalogue. it was hard to challenge the thought of "is phanfic really okay" when it was so heavily the norm. nowadays, my thoughts are mixed (which I know is going to sound incredibly hypocritical as someone with a nearly 400k fanfic under my belt). i look back at the non-ly phanfic i wrote and feel a lot differently about it now than i did then. i think about writing about early 2010s dan being closeted and the 2012 drama, which was "old lore" by the time i joined the phandom, and don't necessarily feel comfortable with those works. writing phanfic is one thing, but those real life struggles weren't mine to write about. in 2026, i don't read a lot of phanfic, largely because writing phanfic takes up 99% of my available fanfic time and if i have to pick between reading and writing, i'm usually going to write. but when i do decide to read something, it's almost always au or, if it's "canon" -- never set pre-coming out, and rarely set pre-hard launch. i talk more about boundaries and how we all have to navigate them for ourselves (and also together) post TBV in the incoming ly42 debrief, but for me, not touching deep speculation on their irl closeted lives, especially their young baby relationship, is a hard line. you mentioned cherry lube specifically: i honestly don't know if cherry lube came from the bad video, and i wish that was a thing i Knew. i wish the contents of that video hadn't become so set in "canon" that it is impossible, in hindsight, for me to know which pieces of "lore" were lifted out of a stolen gift. that's part of why i'm not comfortable with pre-coming out "canon" phanfic. when i think about the content those kinds of fics, mine included, use to have, i get sick wondering which pieces of "lore" came from what kind of forbidden archaeology. which carelessly dropped trivia fact was actually a reference to a formspring answer that was never supposed to see the light of day. which family member's name was discovered through too-invasive internet searching. which cute date was based on something real, something ordinary people weren't supposed to know about. (i hope modern "canon writers have learned from our mistakes) re: #iamnotabottom howell: all i can think about is how vigorously angry a loud subset of people would get at any implication that dan topped. writing top!dan was legitimately kind of taboo. got way less hits and kudos. absolutely no one should have had such viscerally strong feelings about their bedroom positions that they got into legitimate spats with strangers on the internet over suggesting they might be something different. there's a reason this theme showed up over and over in 42.

trying to live my truth (specifically the oral fixation) line rocked our fucking words. like, there was this understanding amongst the phandom that *yeah probably*. i remember the wave of other youtubers (tyler oakley, connor franta, ingrid nilsen, hannah hart...) coming out and dnp not saying anything and coming to terms with okay *if we're right* then this is just how it's going to be. like a funhouse mirror that distorts, but doesn't truly hide, part of reality. and then dan made the queerest coded video and made a very obvious reference to sucking cock and everything shifted. i'm pretty sure i cried the first time i watched that video (i am not a big crier, for context). i felt like that was probably all we were ever going to get, but it felt like so much, was such an honest video, that it never felt lacking

hiatus sucked (for me). it mapped really well onto when i was going through my own Dropout Crisis and pandemic and i drifted away from the phandom for a long time (there was also the ly of it all -- enjoying their content was hard when i was reminded of this big unfinished project that i didn't actually want to leave unfinished). i remember being (in hindsight) unfairly frustrated with them, esp dan, for scaling back on content so much after ii. (this is my perception) there was a lot of resentment in the phandom around that time. people had spent a lot of time and money and effort going to ii and supporting them in general and then dan starting quietly ghosting and people felt like they were owed more, owed an explanation, owed something. and i'm not going to lie to you and tell you i was any different. that i was magically unproblematic when my dash was filled with post after post ranting about the same things. the attitude around the beginning of the hiatus is part of what drove me away. it's extra terrible because we, in hindsight, know more about what was going on with dan in that time and i am so mad that we weren't more forgiving. that we, at least initially, probably contributed to burnout through our demanding and whiny little posts that, yes, came from a place of love, but also weren't appropriate. i spent october - jan catching up on hiatus content though, and there was so much great content there. i'm sad i didn't engage with it in real time.

i remember where i was when basically i'm gay dropped (i was vacation at the beach, literally on the beach) and remember again crying because it felt so important. i remember trying to explain to the people i was with how important this person coming out was, how hard it must have been for him and how amazing it was that he did it anyway. i remember a few weeks later when phil came out, it didn't have the same emotional impact (don't think it was intended to), but it was just as important and revolutionary.

in hindsight, i'm pretty sure the first time i saw dan in nail polish, my world was shifted way more than a cis girl watching her favorite youtuber play with "gendered" fashion should have been, but i wasn't ready for that conversation. LOTS of people lost their shit (/positive) right along with me, so it was easy to overlook how it made me, personally, feel (also, given how much "dan changed my gender" has become a meme, in hindsight, at least some of that shit-losing around me was other people having their own trans experience with it). i do not remember if irl dan wearing nail polish preceded ly!dan wearing polish and some women's clothes, but they were definitely an ouroboros in my mind and baby trans thoughts

i wasn't around for tit era in real time :( can't wait to watch that video later though

at the top

thank you hard launch. i'm not sure if we deserved you, but i am so so so grateful for you.

[imnotinclinedtomaturity]

okay i'm back with a re: ly42 part two, because there was a part of your reply to yairqq that really jumped out at me.

i didn't originally comment on the meta of ly42 because i was exposed to the frog boiling intentions of the chapter in advance, but you talking about phanfic being so normalised in the phandom that you didn't / couldn't question it really points to the frog boiling nature of fandom as a whole. like you get exposed to more and more in our little echo chamber that it's really difficult to spot when things start getting weird and invasive.

and that's not even to get into the weirdness with dnp specifically because in the early days the concept of a separate "fandom" outside of them and their own internet community didn't exist, and they could never have dreamed that the silly things they were sharing online (thinking about tweets and formspring qs etc) would end up seen by so many people. which is an interesting contrast to ly!dnp because them meeting later in their respective careers and already having a following means they're *aware* of the eyes on their "public" communication, but there's still a level of archaeology happening in the deeper fandom spaces which is 😬😬 but like... the doxxer mentioning living with their mum implies that they're probably a teenager and haven't thought through the implications of what they're doing and that's such a good parallel to the phandom of the 2010s.

(like, i was on tumblr back in the day and casually watched dnp on youtube but the phandom *scared me* in 2012 and i didn't want to be a part of it. and then i was busy having my own crises and trying to be an adult, so i only got into it post hard launch and i'm carefully curating my experience because i do keep seeing some weirdly entitled stuff that makes me super uncomfortable)

hi again alfie :)

i think any situation can be a frog boiling situation — no matter how good and pure it starts out. and fandom — for all of its wonderfulness and joy — absolutely can be one too! i didn’t really enter the fandom until… idk 2015? i think? (not before that, because i distinctly remember watching my first dan video shortly after college graduation). in hindsight, the water was already HOT. but everyone acted like the water wasn’t hot, and i hadn’t ever been in an rpf fandom before, and also there were level-headed friends i made that weren’t trying to add more boiling water to the bath and and and—

and there’s a lot of excuses, but it boils down to fandom is fun — sometimes, even, the invasive parts. that fun can make it a little too easy to lose sight of the implications of actions, i think.

back in the day, there were things that came across my dash that made me uncomfortable, major blogs i had blocked because every time they came across my dash i was horrified at the way they would talk about dnp or the levels of investigation they would do into archaeology or their modern day private lives. it’s still happens, to some extent, i think. i still see formspring posts float across my dash every now and then and cant help but think about how… wrong that feels. i am quick to unfollow anyone i feel like crosses a line because i very purposefully dont *want* my dash to increase in temperature. i like my memes and phanart and shitposting, and don’t want to slowly become normalized to too much and too much and too much again. it’s active work.

my entry to youtube fandom was vlogbrothers, which always had a very strong community around it. but i think back to the community i knew there, how inclusive it was with hank and john, and thinking about how that probably is how dnp’s early early community felt too... it makes it even more clear how shocking it must have been for their audience to shift from a community talking *with* them to a community talking *about* them. i hadn’t fully considered that shift before, so thanks for making me think

(that weirdly entitled stuff you see sometimes on your dash is probably the same stuff that compelled me to feel like i needed to write this chapter and make this point and start this conversation, even though i think, to some extent, i’m probably talking to an echo chamber here. i suspect the overlap betweenmy blog and my fic and the people making invasive posts is slim to none, but i still think broader conversation and awareness is a thing worth having)

[imnotinclinedtomaturity]

do you have any estimate of when ly42 will be ready? no rush of course, take as much time as you need, i’m just super excited!

hello hello!! I’ve been deeply offline for two weeks because my cat from the states arrived and my dad’s been in town BUT I also knew that would been the case and had like 90% of the chapter banked before 41 even went up lol, so we’re still on track for the ~two weeks vague timeframe we’ve mostly been on during ly2: electric boogaloo

all that to say, I’m hoping end of day tomorrow (tuesday)! depends on 1) how the last two bits I need to write go and 2) if formatting (and ao3 bc I know girl was struggling yesterday) behaves

I’m hopeful tho because the bits I need to write are short and I’ve done about ⅓ of the formatting so far and haven’t run into any major issues!

I’m very excited (and also lowkey nervous) for 42! it’s different and cool and has been a really interesting chapter to put together

[siriuscybernetics]

hi alfie! Just here to say you are an absolute king (queen? monarch?) for doing so much for a (presumably unpaid) project like LY42 and it looked super cool!! Thank you for all the hours it must have taken you, because it 100% added to the "oh shit this *is* what fandoms are really like oh god" feeling. Like, fans like me are absolutely blessed that people like you and @imnotinclinedtomaturity give us such fun and creative stuff for free. I love the internet because it reveals passion like yours and I hope you feel my admiration when I say you two are really embodying creative pioneer AP (think interactive christmas adventure) with your dedication. Have a good life! <3

oh my god????? it's 2am and i was about to go to bed when this hit inbox and now i might cry?

i'm so glad ly42 is getting such a good reception and that my work is contributing to that! i feel like... my role has been to give kit's words a stage to really sing on, because i mostly drew some boxes around them on your screen ;) but i also don't want to go full self deprecation, because the layout selling the immersion makes the words hit different.

and you're so right the internet is fucking magical, and i love that even in the age of algorithms and apps and brands dominating everything, there are spaces where actual people can come together from thousands of miles apart to *play* and *make shit* and let other people enjoy it. if i can be even a fraction of a percentage as creative as phil i'll feel like i'm winning at life, but i do try to take his approach of "okay this is what i have to play with, platform wise, what if i poked in the corners to push what we're doing with that".

thank you so much and you have a good life too <3

[imnotinclinedtomaturity]

I wanted to thank you for your writing as of late. Especially the last chapter of LY and your recent posts about fandom and RPF. I've never been in a fandom ever before the hard launch and it's been a bit of a journey to go through an extreme hyper-fixation where I wasn't sure exactly where the line was (except for the glaringly obvious ones that were discussed in the hard launch video). I never even read fanfic before so diving head first into the phandom and RPF is a bit of a massive jump for me. As I've come out of the rabid obsession a bit (whoops) these pieces examining the phandom are invaluable and so interesting. I do find my position on RPF shift slightly as well, leaning more towards AUs myself. As I was reading more and more I did begin to wonder why certain themes kept popping up as if they were canon when the details seemed so invasive. So, all that to say, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and your writing with us!

(catching up on asks i let fall through the cracks, sorry for being slow)

oooof the extreme hyperfixation is so real, and i swear it hits different with rpf/fandoms around real people. because they're real people, not just characters in a book or a tv show, i think it can feel like there's limitless content, like the canon is so big and expansive that you'll never hit the end of that, and that is a really intoxicating feeling. but the point i set out to address in ly42/the debrief was that there's inherent danger in thinking about real people as "content" and "canon" because they are just humans with lives -- lives that they happen to share with the world. i think it can be easy to lose sight of that, especially in the throes of hyperfixation and/or when surrounded by other equally-zealous fans

(also, yes, it can be horrifying to notice the invasive themes/small details that pop up in rpf as if they are canon. i can't pretend i'm immune from consuming it and contributing to it in the past, but i hope to do better post hard launch)

thanks for reading, thinking about it, and sharing your thoughts <3

[imnotinclinedtomaturity]

Hi hi, Kit! Me again! I just wanted to let you know that LY!42 was just..so heartbreakingly good. Like, so good. And it had me in tears. I felt the fear, the heartbreak and ALL of the emotions.

I feel like more people need to read your debrief too, because it was amazingly well written and thought provoking. I have my own thoughts of things, and I'll keep those to myself. But thank you so much for both of these insightful pieces, and I eagerly await it.

Chee.

(apparently i failed to answer some asks from a bit ago, sorry! the last few weeks have been emotionally volatile)

thank you for the kind words! i'm glad it hit, i hope as the arc unfolds, it continues to hit. it certainly consumed my line of thinking for several weeks, so it was great to see it spark thinking and conversation in readers too

to people not reading my fic: fwiw, i think the debrief stands alone as a f/phandom think piece & i hope is worth a read? i had a lot to say and a lot of things i hoped to inspire other people to think about too

(ly42; debrief)