Prixmium Content

It's been a while since I regularly posted on here. I'm not sure that is likely to change, but recently I'd had some time when I had nothing else to do, so I clicked on the icon for this website the Firefox new tab page gives me. It insists tat BL is one of my top-websites, no matter how long I leave, presumably because of the sheer number of individual page views required to view a forum. It's weird.

Anyway, I've been thinking about Type Moon from an almost abstract point of view lately. I haven't actively engaged it as a fandom in a while when, for a couple of years there, it felt reflexive. When the initial passion for the content came over me, my searching online for more information and vocal fans of TM led me here. After lurking for not-long-enough, I decided to join, and the rest is personal history whether known to anyone who's still here or not.

The amount of content I produced for this fandom with the speed with which I produced it does prove one theory I had when joining which was that a forum might be a more productive environment than some of the other alternatives in fandom. First of all, there was the fact that it is so heavily slanted toward text transmission that it removes distractions I make for myself on other websites. Second, there was the fact that there's only so much time in a life, and the more I frequented this website, the more I went to others. I got a new phone in the summer of 2016, and one of the first things I did on the web browser was open a tab to BL. I only just closed it recently, because I am a tab monster.

Closing that tab wasn't some kind of emotional decision. It was a practical one. I was clearing away layers of tabs to make my work inbox easier to get to. It did remind me, however, of a time not so long ago when absolutely everything I did about Type Moon fandom and this forum was an emotional decision. My life has changed a lot in some aspects over the past two years, and I can say that I don't think the trajectory of that change would have been in basically any way the same had I not crossed paths with BL. Getting so deeply involved on this website happened for one obvious reason and some that might be less obvious.

Type Moon's mythology, and the Fate Servant Class System in particular, have made a mark in such a way that even unrelated interests eventually loop back around into an awareness of how it might relate to Type Moon even when I haven't had a thought about it in weeks. The other day, I was reading a Dear Author letter for a fic exchange and someone brought up a Fate Servant AU as something that they would like to see for nearly any set of characters, and while I don't really know how well it would work, I know that I've had similar thoughts. The fact that TM doesn't easily leave one's mind, particularly when one feels obligated to consume as much as possible of the material as quickly as possible as I once did, is both a kind of strange thing and a good thing. People whom I still talk to at least once a week are people that I met on and because of Beast's Lair. It's very strange to go from knowing people in your Fate-themed aspect of your life to just knowing people in the everyday goings-on of your life.

I have several still-work-in-progress fics here, and most of the time when I think of them I still want to work on them. It's good to see that there is a few batch of things people are writing about. When I came here, the fanfiction forum was so slow that my initial speed and eagerness were something of a novelty, I think. Now, I often cannot find threads that used to always be on top for at least a page or two.

With some time and distance, it seems so silly that I ever planned my day and my life around how things on a website. However, I still feel tugged back toward the stories sometimes and interacting with them. It's weird and difficult, though, because now that I'm on the opposite end of two years, I am aware of all of the baggage and history that come with it. Somehow, experiencing more and more of the life I've been making my way through for the past year makes it more and more laughable that a particularly political and high-stakes stance about the state of a forum is any kind of rational.

Something irrational and cool that is a byproduct of what ultimately feels like a very long exercise in silliness is that I actually become someone because of this website. I'm not talking about in the deepest of existential ways, but before BL I had never had a nickname before that stuck. Before I committed to my first username here, absolutely certain that people would understand the reference, I was a little afraid that if I ended up being called "Prix" that it would sound self-aggrandizing. However, I've found in the past two years that people I've befriended here simply call me that as if it were as natural as my given name, and I am very glad to have that name. It spread throughout my online life, when I had been trying to self-brand for years, and basically it's just weird that no matter how far or close I am to this fandom, it's always going to have this mark on me.

By the way, if you're hoping, sorry, this isn't a "goodbye, I'm leaving forever," message. It might be, but it's not my intention. It's more that there are certain things in my life I don't want to leave unaddressed. This post isn't with a goal except to remark that sometimes in your life, passing through phases of it, you brush past something that changes it, and like that katamari ball from a game I remember, you absorb it and hold onto it, whether you really understood it or not.