#FreakyCommunity

[athenanfaymont]

🧦📚🖖✨ Happy 25th of May — Geek Pride Day, Towel Day, and a Celebration of Imagination!

Today we celebrate a little bit of everything. Star Wars, Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Geek Pride Day, Reader Pride Day… and what’s beautiful is that they don’t clash. They don’t compete. They accumulate.

Because that’s what happens when you create imaginary worlds: you end up building real communities.

📖 When we first fall in love with a story, when a character makes us feel more seen than any real person ever has, it usually happens in solitude. In a quiet room, in soft lighting, on a rainy afternoon or under an endless summer sky — that first connection is intimate. Private. Almost secret.

And then… you go looking for others. And you find them.

🎮👾 Over time, the worlds that once felt like personal sanctuaries become shared gathering spaces. It doesn’t matter if you started with Harry Potter, Marvel, One Piece, Star Trek, Terry Pratchett, Final Fantasy, Doctor Who or Dragon Age. What matters is that each one opened a portal. And on the other side, there weren’t just dragons or starships: there were people like you.

And that, for me, changed everything.

Because I wasn’t quite “weird enough” for any urban tribe, nor “normal enough” to blend in. My teenage years felt dull on the outside, eccentric on the inside. I never really fit in at school. But books, games, forums, fanfics, and films offered me an alternative home. An imaginary one. An immense one.

🌍✨ I imagined my place in the world — and in doing so, I found it.

And I’ve never really stopped. I keep writing, rereading, sharing, gaming, theorising, falling in love with impossible characters and recognising myself in real people. People who were also saved by a world that doesn’t exist. People who turn imagination into something shared.

💫 Today, I celebrate that. I celebrate the kind of community that forms when someone says: “You like this too?”

Because in that moment, it’s no longer just yours — it becomes ours.

[His imagination was filled with everything he read in books… by Salvador Tusell to illustrate Don Quixote.]