20181127.0430

In conversations with my wife over the long weekend just past, I had occasion to remark about my involvement with various intellectual properties. In my younger years, I spent quite a bit of time, money, and energy consuming such narrative milieus as the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, of Middle-earth, of Asimov's sprawling future history that now looks so quaint even though the clarity of writing remains in force, of Donaldson's chronicles of unbelief and their turgid prose (and I am sure that one shows in what I write more than I might want it to--for several reasons), of Hobb's Elderlings corpus that led to my master's thesis, of Legend of the Five Rings and of roleplaying games more generally. And I am aware that most or all of them have surpassed my ability to access them fully; they are surrounded by critical and fandom apparatuses that exceed me (in most cases; fandom is largely beyond me, though I have a handle on criticism of one of the properties I've listed, at least).
I am not sure how I feel about the matter. I've noted in other places that I'm glad to be free of the dick-wagging that accompanies so much community engagement with the intellectual properties I've engaged with and those similar to them. I've also noted that I miss being able to devote myself to them as I once did--even though I know that engagement is far harder now than when I was young, given the proliferation of nostalgia and the products that cater to it, as well as increased access through various media technologies. There are not enough hours in the day to attend to them all even if that is all that gets attention, and I am not in a position to be able to give myself fully over as I used to be able to do. I cannot afford to be so selfish.
I am also not sure anymore that I want to be. Aside from the simple matter--but important to the kind of little shit that I was and that many people still very much are--of a sex life (which I do not discount), family life is fulfilling in ways that fandom never was for me. To be fair, I've been lucky in my direct experience of fandom; the communities in which I participated were relatively supportive, but part of that support came only because I had a place enforced upon me, and my challenges to it were in the forms accepted by those communities. Those in which I am still engaged are far more casual and more broadly supportive--but, again, I know I am lucky in finding them. Each of us within them has horror stories of others that were...not, and they do not except the "official" fandoms, those associated most closely with or outright endorsed by the owners of the intellectual properties involved.*
My family, though, my wife and daughter, particularly, are far better for me to have than a place among the various fandoms. I am an expatriate of those fandoms no less than of academe, and I return to them as I may, but I do not think I will seek to emigrate from that smaller, greater nation in which I now dwell.

*I am aware, at least peripherally, of the challenges of fan-work and, indeed, of fandom itself, to ownership of intellectual properties in a moral and ethical sense, though not so much in a legal one. The latter seems to be the common understanding, though, and given the general audience I presume to address in this webspace, it is the one with which I am working in this piece.