Ok, I was going to do this last week, but then the Arisia business happened, and I wanted to talk about that.

I think I’ve probably mentioned that I spent a lot of time escaping from reality in books as a child and adolescent.  Because of that, I have a tendency to get really wrapped up in certain characters, which makes their deaths super tragic for me, or really anything bad that happens.

Book three of the Malazan series wrecked me.  I finished it lying on my living room floor sobbing uncontrollably.  I have cried, usually on the bus during my commute, during every single October Daye book of Seanan McGuire’s.

Ditto for the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant.

The end of Captain America: The First Avenger makes me sob every time I see it.

(This is why not crying at the end of Infinity War* is part of what made me realize how very not good it was. Seriously, I should have been sobbing like a baby.  Not a single tear did fall.)

Part of this is, as I have mentioned before, that I spent a fair amount of my adolescence bullied, and even before then found a lot of solace in books.  So, yes, I develop some serious attachments to characters, particularly recurring characters in a series.

Also, my tendency to isolate myself when things get overwhelming kind of lends itself to this.

This carries over into webcomics.  During Questionable Content’s arc where Faye and Sven were hooking up, I was really angry at Sven for ostensibly cheating on Faye, and annoyed with Faye for not stating her boundaries more emphatically, but mostly at Sven who knew.

I follow Check, Please religiously.  I’ve backed two of the three kickstarters.  Between seasons two and three Ngozi hinted/joked that she might need to break up the two main characters, who had JUST gotten together.

I actually yelled, “NO!” at my laptop.

I may have developed an unreasonable crush on the character of Alexei “Tater” Mashkov, in that comic.

He is a delicate cinnamon roll and I will hear nothing against him.

Which is why I love the fanfic community, so.  Even the stuff I’m not into, I get why people write it. From fluff to the obviously working through their shit fics, it’s all written by people like me, who feel strongly about these fictional characters we identify with for whatever reason.  And regardless of what else we disagree on, at the end of the day we’re all there for roughly the same reason.