When I wrote about obsessive porn devotees who actively review porn scenes, I mentioned that I never wanted to become one of them. That’s not because I never want to become obsessed with porn, but rather because I don’t want to become obsessed.

See, I like fandoms, in theory. I’ve always been a huge proponent of having something in your life that interests you – Lord knows I’ve seen enough people retire and then have no clue what to do with their lives when they’re being told what to do. Fans have something that gets them out of bed in the morning, whether that’s their dedication to the lost art of calliope music or just an adoration of all things Willem Dafoe.

Life’s tough. Anything that makes it easier is a Good Thing, in my book. But there is this fine line in fandom where people stop treating it as a hobby and start treating it as a mandate from God, completely forgetting that other people exist.

The funny thing is that those who aren’t fans blame it on the flavor of fandom – “Oh my God, it’s Harry Potter that turned her nuts!” or “Judas Priest made them crazy!” or “Porn made him into a basement recluse!” But the essential truth of fandom is that all crazy fans are basically alike. If you put an anime-crazed teen into the same room as a fifty-something nutso trainspotter, they’d both have absolutely nothing of interest to say to each other, or anyone else outside their fandom…

…but what they’d both have in common is that they’re using their fandom as a way to block out the outside world.

Everything in this universe becomes filtered through the lens of their devotion, no matter what that devotion is; they believe that everyone genuinely wants to hear about the fine details of their love, no matter what the outside evidence is that statistically speaking, nobody cares. They crawl inside their particular fandom and try their best to pull the covers over their heads.

The Internet encourages this. Three decades ago, if you were a crazy Star Trek fan, you had to work to find other fans, going out of your way to conventions and subscribing to badly-typed newsletters. The rest of the time, you had to deal with non-fans on a regular basis, and probably had to reluctantly count a couple of non-Trekkies among your physical friends. But now, at the click of a button, you can immerse yourself in a sea of people who all think as you do, which helps sustain the illusion and boils the sanity away from the truly looney even faster.

They don’t have to live in the real world. They have the net. And more importantly, they don’t want to see anything but their fandom, reducing all the other joys of existence to an irritation at best.

And because that bubble-world of fandom is all they have, they get furious whenever it’s threatened. If someone has a dissenting opinion on whether VINCENT WOULD MOW THE LAWN, they’ll treat it as though it were an attack from the Gestapo. It gets to the point where people get furious at the author of a book series because she departed from “their” canon, forgetting that whoah, you’re playing in her sandbox, not the other way ‘round.

And while I think it’s nice that social misfits can find friends – remember, I was one for a very long time – I also think that “learning to deal with people who don’t share all of your values and beliefs” is perhaps one of the greatest skills one can master. Restricting yourself solely to a small enclave of like-minded people hardly ever seems like a good idea to me…

…especially since they tend to get insular and nasty, becoming spiteful towards the outside world and the heretical sub-branches of their fandom. The strange thing is that the deep and devoted fandoms often get the same reactions from nerds that people have to babies; people think they’re somehow innocent and sweet, but really they’re only cute when they’re getting everything they want at that exact moment. The rest of the time they scream a lot.

Now, keep in mind that I’m not talking about fandom in general. Lord knows my deep love of D&D and comics got me some great friends who disagree with me about many other topics, and my obsession with blogging is, well, why you’re reading me right now. I will repeat: Hobbies are good. Fandom itself isn’t bad. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are fans who go off the rails and start treating everyone else in the world like an avenue to further explore their zeal for Their Fandom, and that is troublesome.

The interesting thing is what creates that syndrome. Maybe the non-fans are right, and it is some . Maybe everyone has some secret trigger, a hidden Manchurian Candidate-style psychological issue that, when encountered, will inevitably pull them into the obsessions of whatever their deepest lust is. It could be that all that separates me from Crazy Cat Lady is that I haven’t stumbled upon whatever fandom that would trigger me.

Or maybe it’s a psychological profile, and there’s just a certain kind of person who succumbs to it. Maybe the guy who can’t leave his X-Files DVDs alone is like a baby bird; he would have imprinted onto whatever half-decent show he saw first, and it just happened to be X-Files. Could have been Beastmaster. Who knew?

But I know that I don’t want to become one. Being an obsessive pornhound leads one to think of women as objects, certainly. But being an obsessive fan also leads one to think of people as objects as well, and I’m against that as a whole.

Sadly, this also applies to obsessions with politics and religion. And it gets worse there, because the debates that occur in those areas actually matter. But that’s a topic for another day.

(Tell me I'm full of it)