hi guys

i am typing this at 2:53am on wednesday march 17 2021 (st patrick's day uwu) with unfinished hw and a bunch of other unfinished stuff but i felt like i should type this anyway because i love procrastination.

long story short, aff is dead, i do not have energy to write at all, much less fanfiction, and there's not much left in kpop for me. let's address these issues one by one, shall we!

1. aff is dead

i think we've all been feeling it recently. since a few years ago, the number of people using aff regularly has sharply decreased and idk if it's because everyone just stopped writing fanfic, moved to ao3, or just grew out of the phase. regardless, i really don't talk to many ppl on here anymore (and the ppl i do talk to i haven't responded to in a long time gahaha i'm so sorry ;;;).

i find myself checking my profile every like two seconds because i just expect another notification to pop up even though it never will and i keep thinking about how long i've been on this site and it's actually... it's really sad i guess because a lot of the friends i made back then have left and i remember writing/discussing super junior/exo/infinite with them and now they're just not here anymore :(

and i guess it's sort of sad that i too will be gradually (or abruptly, idk) leaving like that but i think aff is mostly populated with the younger groups now anyway, nct and bts and blackpink and... yeah that's about it LOL. it's honestly so homogeneous nowadays and i'm not really interested in 90% of the fics here and literally no one reads what i write anyway LOL so what's the point?

on the other hand, even if i don't get a lot of views or whatever on ao3, it's still a lot more exciting than on here because at least i know ppl will appreciate what i write (idk how that works but the same fic will be ignored here but get moderate attention on ao3 soooo) and i in live off external validation soooo--

2. i do not have energy to write live

oops was that a little too blatant? you know i love writing and i have genuinely considered for real switching my major to creative writing but in the end i am a coward who is too scared of ing up a perfectly fine life so unless something drastic happens i'm going to stick it through with physics. and writing will just be my minor, something i do in my spare time, but it doesn't mean i don't love it but it does mean that i don't ing have the energy to sit through class and struggle with everything i should but do not know and still go write beautiful stuff.

school is literally killing me but it's not like anyone cares because i could just be exaggerating :eyes: because as you can plainly tell i am perfectly alive and fine. but i barely have the energy to do anything other than watch stuff on youtube and play genshin and drag myself through the work i absolutely have to do. i don't feel joy in anything anymore except genshin, really, and writing is just another responsiblity that i don't need right now.

i'll have to write at some point lol but that time is certainly not now. i overexerted myself writing a lore-heavy genshin oneshot a couple of weeks ago (though to be fair it paid off :smirk: ppl LOVED it heh and that external validation sure made the hatred worth it).

3. i don't like writing fanfic anymore

i was just gonna make the title 'i don't like fanfic anymore' but that's a lie and we all ing know it. i don't like writing fanfic anymore because it restricts me in a great many ways and i in hate it i want freedom if i can't have freedom in other parts of my life then i at least should have freedom here.

also because, okay so there's a show i watch called 'who's the murderer' with chinese celebrities and i was curious as to if it had fic and, of course it did, of course it did. 114 pages of it. and for the first time i understood why locals are always so weirded out by kpop fanfiction because holy seeing that kind of flash across my eyes made me so uncomfortable.

also because i have too many good ideas that i'm too selfish to share with the community in fears that someone ty will steal it >:) but that's a me problem (and a ty-person problem oh wait those overlap!) no but the point is that i want to expand and grow and if i stay in fanfiction i will never do that and it's time to move on.

4. kpop is dead dormant to me

i literally keep up with like two groups and they're old and both of them have had happen in the past few days. yunho (tvxq) was caught breaking quarantine rules and no idc if the restaurant let him stay, he should have known better himself in the first place (yes the restaurant had fault too but let's not fight with me over this) and dongwan/eric (shinhwa) had a ing instagram argument over internal issues. then i found out that sunggyu (infinite) left woollim and no he didn't leave infinite but good ing god.

ftisland is dead, exo is in the military, i am painfully conflicted about super junior, and even in nct i really only keep up with wayv. there's literally no more place for me in kpop. i'm someone who desperately wishes to hold onto the past and the good old times but time moves too ing quickly and rips the memories out of my hands. i can't keep up with the trends and i don't want to either, i just want a group i can stan for a long time, ppl who are good and nice and worthy of my time and energy.

and i find that more in chinese celebrities now. no, not all chinese singers, and especially not cpop groups (long story short cpop is not a big industry lol) but i found zhou shen, da zhang wei, bai jingting (actor), etc and then there are my bilibili websingers and i love all of them so much. i think the thing that strikes me about the entertainment industry is that a lot of these newer people coming in don't actually know what they're getting themselves into idk like i just feel like so many kids are caught up in the glamour that they're willing to give up everything for it and i just, idk how to feel about that.

meanwhile i could ofc just be assuming that everyone's dumb lol but you know, i think i relate a hell of a lot more to zhou shen who burnt himself out studying dentistry in ukraine before switching to a music major because 'idk what i would do but at least i would learn something and like it' and struggled for years and years before finally becoming comfortable with his own voice and finally becoming popular as he should. and i think i relate a lot more with da zhang wei who insists on being his own sarcastic self in an industry that by necessity is fairly deceptive and dare i say fake. and i think i relate a lot more with bai jingting who comes from the countryside and managed himself from the beginning and struggled with scandals from debut and is the nicest person to staff and ppl around him even if he seems cold on the outside.

this was just a very long rant about how i love zhou shen and da zhang wei and bai jingting but. 

5. conclusion

i logged out of aff for a couple of days and yeah sometimes my fingers itched and i typed that 'a' into the google search bar and watched that autofilled link pop up but i could always manage to delete it or close the tab before i loaded the site and i think that's a sign that i can leave this site now. i'll still be around ofc just not as much (not that it's any different from me ignoring my DMs for two weeks oops) but if you'd like to still talk outside of aff, i do in fact have social media that i use sometimes.

instagram: @hashtag.mags (message me that you're from aff otherwise i'm going to delete your request lol)

twitter: @_riseasgod (not reliable if you want to talk because i rarely check)

discord: ask lol i'm not putting that out here for everyone to see

anyway that's the tea beans and jam and i love you all thank you to everyone who has ever been with me on this almost-six-year journey and i will miss everyone's presence :( but this is not the end, it is simply the beginning (i say, ready to end it all over hw) and life branches here but may our roads and skies all be clear.

walk with the wind, and beat the out of those inner demons.