I Thought I Was Pretty Solid On That Whole "Difference Between Reality and Fantasy" Thing, But Part of Me Is Almost Starting to Believe That Buffy Characters Really Are Posting on the Internet.

OK, first somebody starting keeping a LiveJournal in-character as the First Evil, and that was amusing. Then somebody else(?) started one up for Willow, and that was even cooler, because the voice was very Willow, and it did a nice, imaginative job of filling in the gaps of what happened between episodes. Now it seems Oz has a Journal. (As you can imagine, it's pretty... terse.) And at some point, as I was reading along in these things, something really strange happened. It suddenly ceased to feel quite so much like reading a clever and innovative bit of fan fiction and much more like eavesdropping on the lives of actual, real people. I think it was the comments that did it. I mean, Oz creates a journal and posts one two-line entry ("Everyone's got journals. Sunnydale got weird.") and suddenly there's 50 comments from various denizens of Sunnydale, mostly saying things like, "Oz! How are you doing? How's Tibet? Gee, never figured you for the LiveJournal type! Keep in touch, man! How come you never write?" It's all so bizarrely real and normal that it's actually kind of jarring to remind myself that these people don't exist.

If I were feeling up to serious deep thought today, I might go off into a discussion of how the internet is changing the nature of fiction, perhaps even blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, and speculate a bit on what that might mean in the grand scheme of things. But I don't particularly feel up to that, so instead I think I'll just sit here and quietly worry about my sanity...