jimmyhkim21 | fandom and the fourth wall

By now most or all of you have seen the horrific situation that had transpired this morning regarding a member of SPN. For those of you who are unaware, this is basically what happened: fan X was outed to her friends, family members (including underage people) by fan Y. We don't know who Y is but it's only a matter of time.

In order for Y to do this, Y tracked X not only through LJ, making friends with X, but also through other social networking sites until Y had enough intel to do the maximum damage. And Y succeeded. Unfortunately for the entire SPN fandom, and I mean the entire SPN fandom.

People use LJ for many reasons - some for creative purposes, some as a diary of sorts. But we all use it as an outlet, and through this endeavor, we meet complete strangers and hand over our trust to them even though we may have different opinions on many subjects. Why? Because they can appreciate whatever is being offered and we become richer because of this connection.

In spite of this, there is the fourth wall that separates our fandom pursuits from our real lives. We do this for various personal reasons and all of them are legitimate. And that fourth wall allows certain amount of freedom: to allow us to express unpopular opinions or maybe even consider something that we wouldn't under real life circumstances. This is why SPN is particularly blessed with talented writers. But, as of today, all this has ended through the selfish, self-centered, destructive act of Y.

Y deliberately friended X with malice aforethought. Then continued the charade in order to find X's personal pages in other social networking websites. Then trolled through X's various friend lists, garnished e-mails of the people Y went looking for, before pulling this heinous act. Y not only harmed X, but by doing this, has terrorized X's entire family. I had posted earlier that Y must be emotionally damaged or mentally unstable. Maybe this is still true, or Y is just that selfish and destructive. Either way, SPN fandom has suffered an ugly blow.

This was a plan born out of hatred, executed with vindictive purpose, and with deliberate fuck-you to the entire SPN fandom. In the last few hours I'm seeing various journal lock-downs and defriending. I don't know if I'll be cut or not, but I do know I'll be poorer for it. Just for this alone I want to see Y publicly stoned.

I don't know X personally but several people on my f-list are close with her and their reactions are breaking my heart. There isn't much I can do for X but what I can do is: the moment Y is revealed I'm going to collect all my markers in every single fandom I was/am member of. I will personally see to it that Y's identity is outed and I will most certainly make sure Y will never be welcomed in those fandoms. Y destroyed that fourth wall, not only for X but for all of us. That kind of behavior is inexcusable and must be noted by all fans in all fandoms.