The Patron

Thank you, my friend. Appreciate that. Solid set. You told them about the smugglers of emotion, about the spectators who think they're the experts. Very clever. You made them laugh.

I'm not going to make you laugh. I'm going to make them feel it.

You see, my predecessor there told you all about what the fans do — how they read, how they curate, how they demand a free journey and feel like they've won. All on the surface. He was still being a gentleman about it, still talked about them with a little affection, like they were clever foxes. I'm going to tell you what they actually are, and I'm going to do it without the affection, because I've been one of them, and I know exactly what's going on in there.

The fanfiction reader is not a spectator. That's too flattering. The fanfiction reader is a parasite — and I mean that in the loving, biological sense, not the insulting sense. A parasite doesn't hate its host. A parasite is completely dependent on its host. A parasite couldn't survive without it. And that is the truth of the fanfiction reader. They could not survive without the writer. And they will never, ever admit it.

They have convinced themselves that they are the connoisseurs, the ones with the taste, the ones who understand the characters best, who could, if they ever bothered, write something better themselves.

But they don't. They never do. And that's not just that they don't write. It's that they have spent their entire fanfiction-reading careers telling themselves that they could, and choosing not to, and using that as a way to feel superior to the people who actually do the work. They are the person at the party who has never once written a single thing, never risked a single word of their own, and who still manages to tell you, in detail, everything that's wrong with the person who has written three hundred thousand.

Because writing is scary. Writing means you might be bad. Writing means you have to sit with your own thoughts and your own talent — or your own lack of it — and risk being seen. And the fanfiction reader has found a way to have all the pleasure of a story without any of the risk of making one.

I've been on both sides. When you're a reader, you feel powerful. You feel like you have all the choice. You feel like you're the one with the taste. When you're a writer, you feel nothing but terror and hope and love. You feel like you've handed your heart to a stranger and you're just waiting to see if they'll take care of it.

And the fans get to feel the power, the choice, the connoisseurship. And they never have to feel the terror. They never have to hand their heart to a stranger. They never have to sit alone in a room and wonder if anyone's going to come.

They are, and I say this with complete love and complete contempt, the only people in the world who have figured out how to be emotionally intimate with somebody without ever once being emotionally vulnerable. They get to feel everything, and risk nothing.

They are, in the end, not parasites. They are patrons. They are the people who sit at the table and eat the meal and tell the chef what they'd have done differently, and leave a tip in the form of a comment, and feel like they've paid for the whole thing.

They have not. They've paid with a few words. The chef has paid with their whole heart, every single night, for years.

And they will never, ever understand that. That's the joke. And I think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen.