so the thing is, the thing is, you’re just bopping along listening to some well-produced musical numbers and watching some soap opera-esque nonsense you’re not supposed to take all that seriously. and the jokes are offensive in that irritating wink-nudge way but now and then there is something that is seriously, legitimately hilarious and look, okay, guilty pleasure, you’re having fun.
and then one of the characters on your screen says something, there’s something that happens to them, and it just feels real. it’s hyper-reality, it’s disney theme park reality, but suddenly you’ve been that person, or you know someone who’s been that person. or you’ve wished you could be that person. you know what they’re saying and it feels like a real true thing and slowly there’s all these layers you see, you peel that character back and you get it. and they’re no longer their label, and they’re no longer the shallow subversion of their label, either, suddenly there are two dozen ideas in your head and their history and their future and where you want to see them go is laid out for you like a map.
it’s maybe one or two of them, at first, but it’s like a magic eye picture. suddenly you unfocus and refocus and look sideways, and you’re seeing down into the surreal plots and the one-liners and all these people feel real to you. the ones you hate you start to really hate, and the ones you love are as real as if you know them personally, because we do know them personally, because we’ve all been them, or wanted to be them. some button has been pushed. and we’re breaking things down line by line, slowing down every little look, crafting an inner world that we crave for these people we love, hoping we’re not inventing it. we argue over whose map of the future is correct. we analyze subtext down to the nanosecond. none of us ever disbelieve that our perceptions are real.
but we don’t get that inner world. things swerve suddenly to the left, things said last week get forgotten the next, the hyper-reality is still there in all its oppressiveness and overlays that deeper truth like a messy, sometimes-ugly filter. and strangely enough, we rebel. we are so sure, we are so deeply sure of what we saw, those flashes of reality, and we say: ‘they’ve been ruined. they’re the victims of shoddy work. this isn’t what they really are. these strangers who write their stories are telling them wrong.’ and there’s the futile hope that we’ll get those glimpses of truth again, no matter how rarely they come. that fictional creations that can be whatever their authors want them to be will be allowed to shine as those people again.
and when months have come and gone and those characters we first fell in love with are neglected or reinvented at their ugliest, when our perceptions are neither proven or disproven but left shapeless, sitting in a sort of limbo - long past when we should have left, we’re still here. we’re talking about how we would have told it. we’re on tenterhooks, waiting for word of their futures. our maps are in front of us, with some lines erased but stubbornly redrawn to the same basic endpoint.
the thing is, leaving would feel like abandoning our friends.
#This is as close as I’ve ever come to the exact reason for why I’m still here. #Well that and all my fandom friends.
(via aubreyli)
