The three stages of fandom involvement, as expressed through Freud’s tripartite model of the psyche

16ruedelaverrerie:

ID: The fandom is new, you are new, everything is shiny and the whole goddamn world is down to bone. There is a kinkmeme, possibly. You are sure that you will be content just to eternally write one PWP fic after another where one half of your pairing is a unicorn and the other half is a vampire.

EGO: You give a shit about things like plot and character development. Author’s notes no longer solely consist of the single word “lol”. Fics start to edge over 5k words and special spaces have to be created for you to do the things you used to do during the ID stage, which seems like it was an eternity ago but actually was probably like last week in real-world time.

SUPEREGO: You read Edward Said’s On Late Style and start to cry because he really gets your relationship with this fandom. Nothing means anything except for 50k+ epics that you are too afraid to finish because you feel, in your bones, that it will be your last. All sex scenes are written entirely in abstract metaphors with “cock” thrown somewhere in there out of a sense of duty. You write a fic that appears to be a space opera. It is actually a meditation on death and genre. Nobody understands you (except for Edward Said).