Misc +++

+ Feeling exhausted for reasons I'd rather not get into at the moment. Man, am I ever beat. Think I'm going to go to bed early tonight.

+ Bought some pants today. They fit well and were on sale. Pretty pleased.

+ Was able to open my windows for the first time in ages. No smoke this afternoon. Felt so, so good to get some fresh air in here.

+ The book I'm reading is really good. (Purge by Sofi Oksanen.) Harrowing, but very absorbing. I kind of went to the library and checked out every book they had that was related to Estonia. ...There weren't very many. But this novel was one of them. Anyway, I haven't been able to put it down. Might check out this author's other works later.

+ Tumblr user Roran01's latest Hetalia RoHun fanart is great. (Their blog displays as dash-only, here's my reblog if the other one doesn't display properly). ...Anyway, it's just, whew. NICE. Their description says "AU" but I prefer to imagine nationverse with sexy roleplay because... well, it's hotter to me that way ahahaha.

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People saying that Hetalia is a small fandom make me feel absolutely insane. Tell me you’ve never been in an actually small fandom without telling me. Something with over 100 Ao3 uploads in the past week and tons of new fanart on tumblr every single day is by no means small.

Thing is, it’s decently-sized, but it’s heavily fragmented. A lot of people silo off into circles related to characters/pairings that they like, and sometimes there’s not much interaction with people who like completely different character groups - and this can make it all feel a lot smaller than it actually is. You get into a less-common character, you pal around with the people who like that one, and it starts to feel kind of claustrophobic and slow. You encounter a lot of the same people whether you like it or not, and the only fanwork about such-and-such secondary/tertiary character that you see is the stuff you and the people you know make. But there's stuff going on that you'll never know about.

Do I have any idea what the FRUK and AmeCan fans are up to? No! Do I care? Also no!

As a point of comparison, some small fandoms I’ve been in: English side of Nirvana in Fire fandom, 1900 Ao3 works. SSSS, 2100 Ao3 works. Vatican Miracle Examiner, 153 works. aRTD, 141 on Ao3 and I’ve written 25% of them. Etc. Hetalia, at over 50k Ao3 uploads and (as I mentioned) over 100 in the past week, is downright chonky in comparison.

Sure, it's not like the glory days of the LJ, when I had to take the comm off my flist because I couldn't keep up, not to mention the huge amount of activity on the kink meme (and the anon meme...), but... damn, dude. No, this fandom is not small.