Been thinking about my relationship to fanfic ever since I realized I'm going to run out of Dorohedoro fic soon enough. Thought about those posts from Tumblr circa 2012-2013 where one of the running jokes was that reading fanfic was people's entire personality. (And I think there are still people like that, but those #relatable posts aren't as widespread since the rise of cringe culture.) You know, the kind of posts where people talked about reading fanfiction every night before bed. Smut being their bedtime story, even.
I remember wondering how people managed to find that much fic to read, and then I realized recently that these people also just so happened to be a part of the internet's most popular fandoms, their tastes aren't as niche as mine, and I think it's safe to say that I've always had higher standards for fic than the average person since middle school, based on what my childhood friend has told me lmao.
But I am grateful for the Dorohedoro fic I've managed to find. It's been nice to go through the archive and find a lot of fics I'm interested in reading. I've only had to exit out of a handful of them, and that's mostly because of the author saying something alienating rather than the fic being too amateurish for my tastes. I kind of wish the fandom was a little bigger just for the potential of seeing people explore certain concepts and characters that haven't been explored yet, but at the same time that's just asking for trouble lmao.