I need to share this heartbreaking, wonderful and insightful post about friendship and fandom at Firefox News:
This is fandom. Aside from the squeeing, aside from the flamewars, 'shipwars, and FK wars (don't ask), it's about forming a community. It's about making friends with people you'd otherwise never even meet, and becoming as close to them as your family. Closer, in some cases.
[...]
Being fannish is one thing. We're good at that. We've been obsessing about our shows and movies and books for years, most of us long before we ever met a kindred soul who said those magic words, "OMG, you like that too?" But it's that second moment which lasts. It's the relationships we build from the most tenuous stuff, and how we keep building them, and shore up the old ones with jokes and stories and shared experiences and comfort even from far away. These are the things that matter, whether they're held in common with your best friend from high school, or with this wonderful fan who lives two thousand miles away but shares in every way your deep and abiding belief that Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher should be shagging like weasels. (Please choose your own favorite couple to be shagging like weasels.)
[...]
Fandom's about not being alone anymore. Maybe you started as a fan-inna-box, two hundred miles from the nearest con and farther still to the nearest fan, but you came here to find friends, and to share your squee, and to create things together, and to say, "I was here, and I loved this thing, and these are the people who will remember me." Maybe they'll remember you for that fanfic where you had all the characters doing a kickline, and maybe they'll remember that filk you did to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," and maybe they'll recall with a smile the weird in-depth meta you did on the time-travel episode, and maybe they'll remember the vid you did of the dancing penguins, but mostly, the good friends will remember the other things you did and talked about, your pets and your family and that trip you dreamed of and that crazy prank you pulled on your boss and that time you dyed your hair blue. Even if you never met in the real world, the way the mundanes would say you define a friend, they'll remember.
This dovetails with some of the reasons I love conventions:
Those of us who will cram thirteen of our friends into a hotel room for a weekend to geek out together have a place to go where not only will we not be laughed at for dressing up but encouraged to do it (except the furries; those weirdos are on their own.) We can invade a hotel for a weekend, pretend it's like the cereal convention in Sandman, and recover enough hit points to survive our real lives until the next one.
I've already got a couple of cons on the schedule for 2009: Phoenix Comicon and Penguicon. I'm sure more will be added, and even though I don't know what they are, I can tell you with complete honesty that I'm already looking forward to them all.
