I (In the heart of a fandom There is always a duel or several)
What is all this really about? fandom? A few weeks ago I read an article that shook me. It was written by Lilly Dancyger, the author of First love: essays on friendship (2024), and appeared in the digital edition of HER. The thesis of We Need To Talk About Our Ex-Best Friends lies in the idea of mourning for a friendship. For the author, the lack of ritual in the face of the pain of that is not comparable to any contemporary scenario. Not even that modern society to which one belongs and which one presumes to belong? Invests a second in that feeling. In that suffering. So much so, that the person experiences a fierce isolation. In addition, it is a partial loss. That human being is not going anywhere! In most cases, he does not die, just continues without taking into account your interlocution. People talk about ‘breaking up’ after mourning and only now do I understand that the word itself symbolises the creaking of something that when put back together will not crack in the same way.
Belong to a fandom It feels a bit like that. In my heart, we all suffer, are suffering, or have suffered a loss (or several). And we have found in Dreams of freedom something, I don’t know, that we were missing to start thinking about whether to continue forward or not. The feeling of fandom It alleviates the trail of cadaverous friendships that we carry behind us, the families that have not known how to support non-normative sexualities and other great losses: all of love, of incomprehension.
Some days, it all comes down to getting up in the morning, posting a message on some social network about the novel and not feeling that tremendous loneliness that no one can live with when you miss someone and you can’t or, rather, you shouldn’t tell them. They tend to be messages without express mentions, there is no @ or hashtag. It is just a phrase thrown into the air, very elaborate, whose glove someone might pick up with humor and closeness.
During the journey through the desert that any duel entails, you lose the right to reply. Your body is submerged in a state of paralysis that only allows you to connect to the network and look for other souls at four in the morning, commenting on how beautiful Marta de la Reina is, and how much she resembles Carol Aird, or how brave Fina Valero is, the whole world loves you, and the number of tattoos the #Mafin are getting with her face, which we should not forget is that of the actress Alba Brunet.
II (I sneaked into your dissociation)
A recent friend – we have formalized our friendship in writing, we are not from this century – tells me that some Taylor Swift fans talked about the effect blackout. This phenomenon occurs in the fan experience: a kind of blackout? that prevents you from remembering what you were doing during the moments before coming into contact with that which you are following without pause. There was a high point in all this when there were even people who sent me ALL the information about what was happening in the community: an ice cream dedicated to #Mafin, some imitation Cánovas scarves (a very expensive and French-like invented store that appears in the series) that came from somewhere in Eurasia, tattoos (there are authentic Sistine Chapels of lesbianism), songs made with AI… I prefer Camela, the one from I love her more, I’m sure Fina would sing it to Marta de la Reina. A song of millions. Anyway, I’m a bit of a historian of all this, I always wanted to be the librarian of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. And that’s in the fandom There is a level of creation and intellect only comparable to the rise of the three cultures in Toledo in the Middle Ages.
These days, with the theatre going on, many fans are wondering how to act when they leave the play, what to do when Marta Belmonte is present, in person. For many #Mafin, the pilgrimage to the Abbey is our climb to Mount Carmel. When our body is subjected to such stress, the ways it finds to find a little peace are a mystery. The closest thing I find to this is when I constantly go to the website of Tiny Cottons and I ask my girlfriend what I do. She recently told me that those stylist appointments are like playing pelota: I throw the ball (me) and it bounces back (against me). In my case, when I leave the theater I won’t wait for Label Monte, I’ll walk home. When I get there, I’ll have milk and cereal and play Zelda (for a little while). I don’t appear on the diagram they’ve made of the stalls that indicates where who sits. This exists, for the record. And organized by day, believe it or not.
The fan experience is a degree, and a pleasure, and a form of modern dissociation, a current and functional hysteria, the product of an unparalleled socio-affective tension. We are authentic junkies of the lives that are shown to us in audiovisual fictions and that feed us, in this case, with dopamine, lesbianism, vampirism and homoeroticism through memes, gifs and catchy songs.
III (Mentally dating Marta de la Reina)
I get startled every time I post a message on social media and someone who has a photo of another member of the cast as their user image interacts with me. My blushing makes me feel so bad, it’s horrible: I feel like someone is watching me with love. fandom of #Mafin is the fruit of an accumulation of imaginings and triumphs of the LGTBIQ+ collective. Its hit It is the embrace from the past to the present and its Achilles heel is the emotional precariousness that we carry within.
All these girls make me feel good with what they read, what they listen to, what they love. Above all, I feel good about the group we have with Carlota, Judith and Laura. The other day, while we were having a drink, we exchanged sapphic gossip and sighed waiting for Marta de la Reina to look out of the window that was near us in the bar.
I finally bought a ticket to go to the Abbey on September 22nd. I’ll go alone. On a Sunday. It’s a date not much sought after by other fans (the other fans of Marta de la Reina, I mean). It was the day when there were still seats with some visibility. Going to the theatre to see nothing, no, going to the cinema to see a horror film and have a bad time, neither. I told an old friend that it was the transition from the night of the 22nd to the 23rd, a night of San Juan (ha, ha) in September. She told me: “you play with San Juan according to your interests.” “That’s what the soap opera, magic, and horoscopes are for,” I think. To play.
What will remain of the fandom in the end in me…? I notice a certain groove, pronounced, in the prefrontal cortex. There is a before and after living a daily collective enthusiasm. Perhaps relationships should aspire to buy a new mirror in which to look at ourselves, instead of the deforming and benzodiazepine violence that a duel entails. But perhaps it is only a dream or, rather, my dream of freedom: knowing that we are not crazy, that everything is fine (or will be), and assuming —whether we like it or not— that we are the Queen Jesus of someone’s life. The bad ones, the very bad ones.
Grief is a devastating and traumatic experience in which we are subjected to unprecedented sadness and we can do nothing but wait for time to pass or decide to explore a new way of connecting with that person we miss without guilt or pain. From longing. Should I be getting over it already? These last few days I notice that I am less interested, that I am less attentive. Does this worry me? I am getting my face back.
