Toxo, when your Spy says things like “When you could not have the whole thing, you found what pieces you could†and “He fucks just like his motherâ€, I start wondering… Do you have more mindfuckery in store for us? Please, yesss… >>124 And this is why I love your thread so much—I learn something new every time you post. I’ll have to go look up Henry Jenkins now. Also, I’m interested in knowing more about the paper you’re working on yourself, if you won’t mind sharing. What is the focus? It sounds interesting! I’m also curious about what you yourself do for a living; a paper speaks of academic credentials to me—did your studies kindle the love of beautiful prose and fan the flames of inspiration? Maybe I chose the wrong profession, then—I’d love to be able to do what you do here. I also have a confession to make: I’m one of the non-player fans. I’ve played TF2 a few times, years back, but my current computer can’t run the game without lagging and I don’t have the time or money to visit an internet café frequently enough to establish a decent level of proficiency; I’d be the eternal nØØb. I also tend to think that gaming isn’t as rewarding as writing, drawing, blogging or otherwise communicating on the internet; these pastimes result in a tangible product (fics, drawings, new friendships), whereas time spent gaming, especially if there isn’t a specific goal to reach, like completing a level, which will result in a reward, feels ‘wasted’ to me without anything to show for it (okay, maybe hats, I suppose…). To me, the gaming part of the fandom isn’t really all that important anyway; most fics seem to be centred on the resolution of interpersonal conflicts between characters off the battlefield, not on anything that happens in the game; the teams fighting each other is a plot-device in fanfiction if mentioned at all. So the actual game isn’t really relevant to the parts of the fandom I participate in. Why do I then like Team Fortress 2 in particular, when I don’t play the game? I think the limited canon is part of it; there’s so much uncharted space on the map I can colour in to my liking without worrying that I’ll accidentally overlook some obscure but crucial detail. Likewise, the characters are fun to play around with; they’re very three-dimensional for being little more than cartoon characters, with small canon glimpses into their backgrounds that make them fascinating to poke at and puzzle out, and knowing so little about them fuels the imagination to fill in the blanks. But I think it’s how the game setup itself ties into the fluff that makes TF2 uniquely appealing to me: in most video-game fandoms, in-game tools like the Medigun and Respawn are deliberately ignored for the sake of realism, but the TF2 fandom embraces them. This permits me to enjoy a lot of things I’d otherwise steer clear of—I (usually) don’t like character death or permanent injuries in my fanfiction/fanart, but TF2 creates a safe, guilt-free place for me to explore all kinds of otherwise dangerous/lethal situations without disrupting the status quo. I can kill off a character in a fic or read about him dying, and it’s okay because I know he’ll just respawn later. This is particularly important to me here on /afanfic/, because it lessens the cognitive dissonance I experience from enjoying guro, medical and torture kinks as a healthcare professional trained to a Pavlovian ethical response when confronted with the deliberate, sadistic infliction of pain. The fandom does generate a lot of that stuff, maybe for the same reason—this thread alone reveals that I’m not the only person here internally conflicted about liking these things, even if I might be the only one actually doing some of this out of a sexual context, but in TF2 nobody really gets hurt and that makes it okay to like it. Ah well, I'm getting tl;dr. I hope this verbose ramble makes sense and that my foreigner’s grasp of your beautiful language hasn’t muddled my meaning. I’ve become somewhat self-conscious about replying to your thread; the last batch of commenters praise your writing much more eloquently than I. I think I’m starting to suffer from a bit of Freudian vocabulary-envy…