Disclaimer: I hold no claim on anything other than cool images I make.

Ah, yes. The lovely Fan community. Gotta love them. They are passionate, they care so much about the thing they are a fan of that sometimes, they take matters to their own hands. This has led us to a lot of Fan Made Content, like stories (fanfiction) and games (fangames). Another name for it is User Generated Content (UGC) but that naming feels too corporate, too rigid. I think you’re not an “User” of a game or a story, but that you’re a “Fan” of it.

I like many games, I’ve played several. But my approach with dealing with fanbases is quite simple: Do not engage fully. It’s not because I hate the fans or anything like that, but that I dislike how it all turns into a blob of ideas that can ruin the perception of a franchise for you.

I could give you tons of examples, like literal children playing GTA5, making it appeal to that demographic, and also explaining things like FiveM being handled by literal man-children that didn’t like the original developer, only their money (more on that link). Or how several fans go from ‘I love this game, it’s the best’ to ‘I hate this game because this character sucks’ in less than a few years, yet they stick around for some reason (which makes me go ????).

And of course, you have the people that like to confront you, over everything. I simply hate no time to deal with that, so if you wanna do that (or call me names), you’ll get the block button (even if it doesn’t work properly [I’m looking at you Discord]).

When I say do not engage fully, I think it’s better to think that you shouldn’t be constantlytry to make conversation about it with others. Especially when you get into a franchise where the main game hasn’t happened over 5 years, so, like, GTA, Half-Life, NFS (I kid [or do I???]), Danganronpa, Neptunia, Left 4 Dead, and several more. It causes the so called ‘brainrot’, and it leaves a mark on you. You’re allowed to be a fan of more than one thing, and you can enjoy them from what they are.

What I don’t like is when liking something somehow turns into your identity and it causes a massive regression on how one treats things inside of a fanbase. Ideas are thrown around, fan content is created, people get mad at the company, things get blown out of proportion, fan brainrot kicks in and it starts hurting newcomers to the franchise. It’s usually bad.

I enjoy the things I play, as much as I can, and I honestly like to branch out because it doesn’t really matter how it looks like, as long it plays well/has a good story. Nier: Automata, Stellar Blade, Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, Baldur’s Gate, these are games that I would not enjoy a decade ago, and yet, today I like them all in different ways, being very different between each other.

I played Persona 4 in 2010, after playing Mass Effect 1 in 2008 and Dragon Age: Origins in 2009, and I was immediately hooked. I finished the game and started over immediately, cleaning up mistakes. In 2012, I bought a PS Vita just to play Persona 4 Golden and it was great. Yet, you won’t see me posting in Persona related forums, or Discord servers (which is what people use nowadays). Because my ‘do not engage fully’ rule has been in full effect.

However I do engage in some cases, where I feel that things can be under control. There are many ‘safe’ spaces out there, that people will use, and I tend to go those, to engage with some members and have a sense of what the community is aiming. That way, I get no brainrot and can enjoy more than one thing, which is the whole point.

Me as a Fan of Something, Making Something

I got a friend to send me an AI summary of myself, and it was mostly correct, except I don’t use Twitter anymore, instead I moved to Bluesky and that I still am planning to do stuff with Skyrim and Fallout 4, it’s just a matter of time allocation.

Speaking of these, the Old Extra Activity website is still up, as an archive of what it used to be. I made pretty followers for Skyrim and Ellen, The Cartographer for Fallout 4.

Nowadays I do stuff using Koikatsu, but I’m making a racing game using Unity, more on it later, but I try to do other stuff in the meantime.

One of them is a fan story called “Almost Second Nature”, Neptunia related. It’s under works right now, and I’m gonna work on it and maybe post in Archive of Our Own once it’s done. It’s been a while since I played it, and people told me ‘it’s good’ so far. That makes me happy and excited to continue. At some point, I’d love to see it turn into a comic, but that implies drawing and those will take time and money. Maybe at some point…

I have many ideas, and I’d like to do some of them, either stories or games. I’m simply a fan, but I’d like to go ‘official’, making things that others would enjoy as well, because that is what everything is about. Money is nice but secondary, enjoyment comes first always.