Y’all, I got a confession to make. I’ve been logging onto Facebook. I never deleted it. I stayed off of it mostly since I dramatically published my “ Why am I leaving Facebook and Instagram? ” post almost two and a half years ago. I didn’t delete my account because I had pictures on there and some old friends whose contact info I never got, and it was on my to do list to get those handled and delete the account since February of 2021. And it was nice that I didn’t since that still allowed me to occasionally dip onto the site if I wanted to look at a business’s Facebook page (yo, some places don’t bother doing websites anymore, just socials). But lately, I’ve been doing more than reluctantly logging on when FB tries to block my ability to view a restaurant’s updated hours. I’ve been scrolling. Just a bit. The top three or four posts and then that’s it. I might even click on the “Show All Comments” section. I haven’t commented or liked any posts myself because that would give away that
There's a question that I've been pondering lately: Why do people like seeing their favorite characters suffer? As many of you know, I love Final Fantasy VII. In particular, I love Cloud Strife, the moody sad boy protagonist of the game. Because of my great affection for this fictional man, I seek out (and write) fanfiction where Cloud faces a variety of hardships from childhood trauma to harrowing battle injuries to horrific laboratory experimentation to plain just being lonely. But why? Why do I like reading about a character that means a lot to me, who reminds me a lot of myself in some ways and has helped me understand myself better, suffering? Why do I seek out stories where he is in pain? And why am I not alone? There is an entire genre of fanfiction called “whump” where the writer’s favorite character is subjected to whatever sadistic imaginings the author can dream up. And people can dream up a lot of pain for Cloud Strife, largely because that’s sort of his deal in th