(//_-) ← emo bang

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

There's too many photos I wanted to share, so I made the quickest collages in the west using CollaGen, Background Tiles (first thing my browser gave me when I typed in "tile background"), and a dream.

Content warning for animal/pet death

This is my dog, Dogie. Pronounced DOUGH-gee. My family could never agree on how to spell his name, and no conceivable spelling is perfect in my opinion, but I settled on Dogie.

Dougie is a dance move. Stop spelling his name as Dougie. He is not Dug-ee. @/my sister



No clue what breed he is. Someone came to our door asking if we wanted a dog, and we did want a dog, so we gave the guy (he looked ~17) money and he gave us a dog and we never met again.

Had Dogie for almost 9 years, the longest I've ever had a pet, before he died 2.5 years ago in circumstances I still haven't explained online yet. (That's for another post.) He lowkey had no redeeming qualities besides "would sit in your lap as soon as it forms" and "didn't attack toddlers on sight," but I wuv him anyways! And he's still my dog. When I'm asked if I have pets I include him. Yes, I have a dog 🙄 Yes, he is bones 🙄 God forbid a dog be dead!! Actual menace; pour one out for him tonight.

Kimmy, short for Chimera, was never actually "my" pet. She was my roommate's pet, and she let me watch her when she didn't feel like it -- which was basically all the time. Functionally my pet. Kimmy's not even her "real" name, I think my roommate called her Leo, but I didn't really care 😭

She was so cute!! I took no less than 20 pictures of her a day, I'm sure. She loved to sleep on/near me and knead my tummy, which was awesome, but she also loved to jump on my desk and knock the fandom keychains off my corkboard, which wasn't so awesome. But it's okay, she's cute so we forgive her even if she never asked for forgiveness and definitely feels no remorse.

Long story short, my roommate dumped my clean laundry on the porch and I left that apartment, so no more Kimmy. I hope she kept her, but I have little faith in that woman. So Kimmy kind of isn't currently my pet and shouldn't be included in this post. But I like her. More people should know about her. Look at her.

As for an actual living creature that lives with me as we speak--


This is Luna (despite clearly looking more like a Sol). This is who kept my mom company before I moved in with her. She's a funny-looking Cocker Spaniel, but the sweetest thing around. I've been feeling like a liar for never writing about walking her, like "how will future beings know about the daily life of some random person they found on a hard drive somewhere if I don't include the dog-walking??" so here's me finally saying this -- I walk her every afternoon/evening, unless it's below freezing or I'm sick.

She's not allowed in the bedrooms, so right now as I type this she's laying at the entrance to my room staring at me. Do you think she knows I'm talking about her?

Yesterday's challenge was to write about your fandom origin story! I'm a day late, and I sincerely promise that I will be late again ^_^

When I was 9, the Mario video game franchise gave me that spark, and I drew the characters on everything. The Mario wiki is something created by the fandom, right? And I would read that thing every day like it was a book. (I had what was previously the family computer in my room, with only computer-changing downloads needing to go through my mom first. I was set up to be an internet addict, as you can see.) I also scrolled through Google Images like it was an image board. So, in a voyeuristic way, I was "participating" in fandom... maybe???? Also when I was 9, Kidzworld was all the rage in my grade. I made my profile Luigi/Daisy themed, but I didn't really make friends through it nor was I majorly active. How could I be, when there was a Mario wiki I could be reading instead?

But the next year I met a girl who is still my best friend. One day, she wrote something on a paper of mine in class and told me to look it up when I get home. So I did exactly that. And that's how I got into Hetalia. Actual life-changing event, because that's how I got into anime in general, and thus pretty much everything I'm into now.

After watching all of Hetalia I was hooked. I would trace screenshots to learn how to draw anime style. I independently invented text roleplays by writing on paper during a class movie and passing it to my friend. They were formatted like scripts for plays, and I was very surprised to learn that usually people write actual paragraphs when they roleplay, with quotation marks and everything. I did closet cosplays for dress-down days. I begged for my first sketchbook so I could draw my awesome Hetalia Mario AU comic (which you don't get to see unless you come to my house in real life, sorry). I made my Kidzworld profile entirely Hetalia themed. And I liked Hetalia so much I finally bothered to use the KW forums to talk to others about it.

Me and ..... 4? other kids talked about it in General all the time. People told us to make our own forum since we were clogging up General, so we did, and then the Recent Forum Posts would constantly be filled with us ~5 chatting it up about Hetalia almost every damn day. See, on Kidzworld there was a section on the side of the site for recent forum updates, and there were no group chats, so.... everyone saw what was functionally our Hetalia group chat, and sometimes people did post in our forum to say "can you guys shut up" 😭 But other Hetalia fans came in and out too! Of course we all would share good AMVs and whatever you'd call those slideshows with music on profiles' video share thing, fanart we liked as well as our own art in our galleries, etc. The whole nine yards.

I feel like that was my first and only time being "active" with other members of a fandom; time passed and we all stopped using KW, and in future fandoms I would mostly enjoy fan art and comics from the sidelines silently. I can name the amount of times I've had strangers talk with me (not just compliment but really Talk) about anything I've drawn or written on half a hand. I'm kind of questioning what the word "fandom" means now, because in the past when people would say "I don't want to associate with fandom anymore but I like X media" I'd be like "aren't you automatically in the fandom by being a fan?" but now I'm thinking it might. might mean actively creating things based off a property and discussing the property/fan creations with other fans, which means I haven't been in a fandom since I abandoned Hetalia when I was ~14. I just talk with my 1-2 friends about stuff. Might post fanart or headcanons online but the internet is so fragmented and centered around likes that not many people talk with me about the things I've shown them. Especially on Tumblr, which with it's (near?)unlimited character limit you'd think would have been the second coming of LiveJournal, but instead was more of a place to put things you like, possibly with a semi-cohesive aesthetic. I'm sure the vast majority of Tumblr users just like and reblog things and only make an original post once every blue moon... it's not very encouraging of nonaesthetic or unfunny things (unless they can be used to make you look like a good person). Well, part of why I'm cutting my time on big socials is to experience an environment different from that.