The Sentimentalist
Let me just say, before I start, that I loved the opening. Lovely woman, great set, very welcoming, told you all about the drivers and the passengers. She was far too polite, of course — but we'll come to that, because I'm not her, and I'm not here to hold your hand.
The people who read fanfiction are, in my considered opinion, the laziest emotionally invested human beings ever to walk this earth. And I don't mean that as a criticism of the effort — I mean it as the highest compliment I know how to give, because it takes a truly impressive level of commitment to be that invested in something while contributing literally nothing to it.
Think about it. These people have read more words over their lives than some people will ever see. Millions of words. More than the collected works of every novelist you've ever heard of, and they've done it about other people's characters. Not their characters. Not people they created. Not even people who are real. They have read the equivalent of an entire library about two characters they did not invent, in a world they did not imagine, and at the end of it they will tell you, with complete sincerity, that they are the ones who understand those characters best.
They are the person at the football match who has never once played football, screaming at the professional that he should have passed it. They are the person who has watched ten thousand hours of cooking shows and never once turned on an oven, telling Gordon Ramsay where he went wrong. A spectator who has convinced themselves, through sheer volume of consumption, that they are the real expert.
And here's the part that gets me. They do not just read. They curate. They sit there with their little list of requirements, like a woman ordering at a restaurant where she's not paying, and they demand their journey be exactly to their taste. They want the two who hate each other to fall in love, but slowly, but it must hurt a little, but there must be a happy ending, but there must be no surprises, and if the writer does not deliver exactly this, they complain. They leave a review. They take their custom — which is to say, their attention, which costs them nothing — and they go elsewhere.
They are the only people in the world who can be this demanding about a free product they did not ask for.
And the writers — God love them — are the saddest, most brilliant, most emotionally extravagant people on the planet. They sit in their own little rooms pouring their hearts onto the page, and every time a reader says "I liked that bit," they glow for a week. A single comment from a stranger and they feel seen. And the readers know this. And the readers exploit it. The readers have become the emotional equivalent of a man who knows a woman will do anything for a compliment, and who has learned exactly which ones to give.
It's a beautiful, terrible, perfect symbiosis. The writers need love and will do anything for it. The readers need a journey and will pay for it in nothing but words. And who do you think comes out of it feeling like the winner? The readers. Always. Because they got a whole emotional journey, crafted by a lonely genius, and they gave nothing but a few words and a little of their attention.
They are the smugglers of the emotional world. They have figured out how to have all the feeling of a love story — the longing, the ache, the payoff — without any of the risk of actually being in one. They get to feel everything. They get to choose exactly how it feels. And they never, ever have to risk their own heart, because the heart doing the risking belongs to the person who wrote it.
Ask one of them if they're emotionally invested in characters they didn't create and they'll say no, no, I just like the stories. Then watch them, at two in the morning, cry over two of those characters finally holding hands in a scene the writer called "fluff."
They are, all of them, people who have found a way to be in love without ever once risking a single second of it. The most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And also the most ridiculous. Which is my entire job.