Ever since I started this blog, I’ve been more comfortable covering other people’s fandoms. From gothic lolitas to Homestucks, the fact that these other communities dovetailed with my own interests simply made it easier for me to write about them from an informative point of view.

So until now, I’ve been hesitant to share my obsessive descent into Yowamushi Pedal fandom.

I’ve liked shows before, sometimes a lot. I was crazy about Natsume’s Book of Friends last year. But it’s always been a passive, individual, and fleeting thing. This is the first time I’ve felt compelled to join a community and create things because of how much I loved a show.

I mentioned earlier that I started writing a fanfic. I finished it, and then I wrote two more. My fics are actually very popular, which isn’t too surprising since I write all the time and I do it for a living. I worry about giving away my livelihood like this, but let me tell you, it will be a cold day in hell before somebody writes on my professional work: “I read your story three times in a row and it got better each time!” Or even more touching: “You made me feel like I was falling in love.”

I have made friends purely because of the fandom. One is a girl whose writing I have admired for years, who I never had the guts to reach out to until I saw we shared this fannish interest. Another draws fan art of my fanfics and sends me gifts in the mail. It feels very special and rare to be in such a predominantly female space online, too—most of my aniblogger friends, for whatever reason, are male.

Until now, I never realized that reporting and blogging on fandom have helped me to keep a degree of distance from it. It’s been since middle school since I felt this heart-pounding, wobbly bundle of emotions about characters. That’s what makes it really embarrassing—none of this is real. I have no right to have so many feelings about something pretend.

So I hide it. I have been deleting my tweets more often. I started a new anonymous Tumblr to keep my fandom from spilling into the rest of my life. I have a weird lifestyle/career in which my blog, Twitter, and even Tumblr support a semi-professional representation of the public image I feel comfortable projecting to everyone—my family, my colleagues, total strangers. My new hobby authoring romantic fanfiction does not mesh with it in the slightest.

I love to write about fandom. But now that it has happened to me—and it really does feel like something that happened, like falling in a hole I can’t get out of—it feels trivial. It’s like some wonderful, horrible dream I should conceal until the inevitable day when the show is over and the spell is broken and I awake, my reason restored, and say “Wow, I sure had a lot of emotions about that show. Thank goodness I didn’t make a mockery of myself by sharing them on the Internet.”

But you know, I have never been drawn to other people’s fandoms in order to poke fun at them. I think it’s incredible when people are more invested in their fandom than anything else, to the point that it drives them to create their own works. To not give myself the same understanding and esteem would be hypocritical.

So this is the giant mass of guilt and embarrassment and deep, obsessive love that has been going through my head the past few weeks. Have you ever fallen too hard for a fandom?

Actual photo of me and my friends via Yowapeda episode 29