singedsun

This post is a Big Mood.

I posted in a friending meme and a friending comm last month, and now I can't even remember half the things I listed as my favourites, and what I do remember I really haven't written about except in passing... I feel like I should have put up banners saying "Beware! False advertisement! Please add me so I can read YOUR thoughts on these things though /o\" And even with things that take up a lot of space in my obsessive fannish brain, like your Brendon Urie example, I just have nothing to put down in writing... Like I listen to a podcast that I probably spend half of my waking life thinking about, but I don't know what I'd say about it on DW.

I thought about this a little, and I suppose it helps to think of the favourites/interests list not as a list of current active fandom where you are creating visible content, but as a sort of glimpse into your fandom history and fannish background. (If you wanna be wanky, you could say it's an example of Barthes' conception of the self-construction of your public identity. I've always liked his list! "...slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock...")

So, generalising here, people whose faves include HP and LotR have probably had a different fannish path than someone with a Western anime fandom background or someone who would list MCU as their first fannish interest. Even if you don't share current fandoms, you can sort of of guess whether you have some familiar fandom baseline you can fall back on. For example, for some people asking "Which Hogwarts house are you in" is an obvious icebreaker and the answer works as shorthand (sort of like the Myers-Brigg type); for others, even if they are casual Potter readers, it's just a boring question. -- I obviously don't advocate for gravitating only towards people with a similar fannish background, but I think there's value in these lists, even if they feel haphazard and even false to us once we've finished writing them. Just the fact that we thought of the items on the list tells something about us.