25 Year Old Me Was And Idiot

Yeah, 25 year old me was an idiot, and I disagree with her on nearly everything that she used to believe. But, at the same time, I’m very sad for her. This morning I was thinking of that trek I used to have to walk to get from my grandmother’s apartment to work, and I kind of saw it again in my mind as clearly as if I was walking it myself. I walked that distance every single day, in the dark, in the cold, while raining, while flooding, and I never stopped. I only kept working harder. I always kept going. It made me feel very nostalgic and a bit sad.

So, I went back to read through my old tumblr which I had between, oh I don’t remember. Maybe 2011-2017? Somewhere around there. Wow, what a whiplash it was to read through all my personal entries. It was quite the road down memory lane. It felt like seeing a child playing, hahaha. I hate a bunch of stuff I used to like (crystals are bullshit, and spirits are 95% demons, past!me, and that’s that about that. Also, I should have been more of an asshole, because the things I felt like being an asshole about were actually good things that one should be assholeish about). But other things I kinda see the appeal. At least for me. Things that I expected to find cringe are actually not, they’re kinda cute. And that is saying something, since I rarely find things cute.

Like when I used to use a picture of aph spain as an emote on my personal entries and responses. I still think that’s pretty cute. I felt like aph spain was really a character that was very similar to my own personality and I still kinda think that. Oh, thinking back on it, didn’t I used to say that I was basically the lovechild of aph prussia and aph spain? Ah, that was very true I think. I’m very happy go lucky, but also obsessive about order and discipline in some things. Yeah, I wasn’t so off in that.

And also, the whole thing that attracted me to hetalia did have quite the appeal. The idea of countries being personified into a single character was very interesting, especially since it was done is such a silly, humorous way. I did try to incorporate the idea in some outline and scene drafts for Sadaehn, where it became a really angsty and edgy grimdark kinda thing, but I never quite got to work on it seriously.

I mean, I do also have 80% of an AU that I was planning to turn into an original novel (because if E.L. James could do it, then so can I) but I also never got to work on that other project. I think the outline just had too many structural flaws that I wasn’t mature enough to correct, and of course the lack of a good ending was a problem too. Also, the whole thing was shaping up to be somewhere around 130k, and I just wasn’t ready to go there when my biggest work was something like 40k. Maybe one day I’ll work on that. If I run out of ideas once I’m done with all the series that I’m working on right now.

Looking back on it, it was a nice, funny little cartoon that I don’t mind having been obsessed with for years, but as always, the issues with pedophilia and incest that are so present in anime were really bad things that always annoyed me.

And the fandom was…really not cool. This morning I looked through some of the old fic recs I had for it and I seriously cringed at so many stories. Like, seriously? So much awful stuff, so much just…awful things that ended up amounting to nothing, not even a good story.

I even reread a couple old doujinshi for which I still had the bookmarks and it suddenly hit me how right the japanese were when they called it yaoi. “No climax, no sense, no meaning”, why yes. That is the thing that hit me the most and I can’t believe that I didn’t see it years ago. The absolute lack of meaning and sense. These stories don’t mean anything. Terry Pratchett, for all that I don’t enjoy him nearly as much as I used to, has so much meaning in his stories. But there’s no sense in reading many of these. They don’t amount to anything, even the ones that I used to write. A couple of them were pretty fun when I wrote them in that they were pretty elaborate jokes, but aside from that…there wasn’t anything meaningful about them.

In fact, thinking about it now…I actually think that the lack of meaning was the one thing that really held me back whenever I tried to write an actual novel. The novel ideas that I had suffered from the same kind of lack of meaning that my fics had. Aside from Living With Myself, and Family Issues (which were very special on their own), none of my stories had any meaning. Hell, I suffered from that all the way until I finished the first version of SoulShattered 1 in a frenzy of like, a few weeks. Soulshattered was perhaps the coolest story I had written then, but it still had no inner meaning, which I only managed to fix once I wrote SoulShattered 0, about 6 original books later.

I think that is one of the reasons why I dislike fanfic so much now (as in, writing) and why now I see how bad it was for me to keep writing even when I could have reasonably started writing an actual original story. Not only did so much fanfic writing not make me a better writer. It actively made me a worse writer.

There’s nothing to be done now for all that wasted time and effort, but I still wish I had started working on my own stuff earlier, instead of playing around in something that was actively worsening me.

Ah, this is not what I wanted to talk about! But I guess since fanfic writing took so much of my 20s, it was inevitable. I’ll complain about my own past self some more in another entry. For now, there’s a lot of writing to be done.