Hey everyone,
My last post on this blog was almost exactly two years ago and I doubt anyone cares much about this message but I thought I would give some final thoughts before bidding this blog adieu.
I started this blog in 2016 as a way to interact with other people in the OMGCP fandom and talk about a comic that meant a lot to me. In 2016 I was in ninth grade (freshman year of high school) and had extreme difficulty making friends at my new school. I was trying to balance high school, high level dance, and my struggles regarding my sexuality. I saw a lot of myself in Bitty and seeing representation in comics meant the world to me. Since I had no friends and was immersed in the toxic tumblr culture of the time, I thought that creating this blog would be a good idea.
I joined the OMGCP fandom near its peak. I had actually already started reading the comic in 2015 but I forgot about it pretty quickly, until I rejoined just a month or so before The Kiss™. After that, I fell hard into the community in one of the worst ways possible. I brought my fanatic SuperWhoLock mentality into a small community with all the confidence of a 14 year old girl who thinks that stan culture is healthy. Looking back on this blog I have a lot of regrets, but I was 14 and having this blog actually helped me a lot. I got to share my dumb headcanons and even managed to make friends through it (shout out to the Bittyholtz twitter group chat). I got to talk to like-minded people and have friendly debates with them. In 2017 I got to meet Ngozi at a comic festival. I probably made a fool out of myself, I can’t remember, but I got to meet an artist I admired and now I own an original Kent Parson pin so it can’t have been that bad.
By 2018 my interest in the fandom had plummeted and I stopped caring about the comic, the fandom, and this blog. This was in part due to the sporadic updates and lack of engaging fan content, but it was primarily due to the growing toxicity of the community and the way the updates felt...weird. All of year 3 was very touch and go for me. I would spend weeks elbow’s deep in the fandom and then a month doing the bare minimum to keep this blog alive. It felt as if the character development of Bitty and Jack up from the first two years had been scrapped, and in its place were caricatures and fluff. The rest of the cast had also lost their personalities. I still posted memes and joking headcanons, but I no longer felt connected with the characters or the story, with the exception of Kent Parson.
This community has always had an issue with Parse to the extent that people have received death threats for liking him. It was like that in 2016 and it’s like that now. I always liked Parse because he was flawed and relatable in a more realistic way than other characters in the comic. As I previously mentioned I found Bitty deeply relatable in 2016, but that changed when Year 3 came out. Year 1 & 2 Bitty was a flawed character with endearing traits, Year 3 Bitty was a selfish mother hen with an ego. He was no longer relatable, and the rest of the cast seemed to have been shoved to the side to focus more on Jack and Bitty’s relationship. The Tadpoles weren’t given enough attention when I was still reading the comic, with their personalities being dumbed down to “confused” and “stand-offish”. This left Kent Parson as one of the most dynamic characters in the series, despite his little screen time. Kent Parson was relatable too many people, myself included. He was Jacks foil and gave us a glimpse into Jacks life before Samwell and how that haunts him. The treatment of Parse during the LVA @ PVD updates was the tipping point in my abandonment of this blog.
I didn’t read Year 4 until Ngozi posted the final update schedule for Check Please on Instagram and I decided to catch up before reading the finale. I was reminded of why I fell in love with so many of these characters and this fandom. I started getting back into the fandom and re-reading old favourite fanfics. It made me realize that it was always the characters I loved, not the story. Seeing how people fill in plot holes or write redemption arcs for discarded characters is incredible. I especially love seeing peoples responses to the finale of the comic. Personally, I found the ending lacklustre, though I did get a little teary eyed over this comic ending after all my emotional investment in it. A lot of my critiques have already been said in the OMGCP Critical tag so I wont bore you with them.
Despite starting this post by saying I’ll be bidding Check Please “adieu”, I don’t think that’s true. I’ll continue reading fanfic from this fandom and I’ll likely browse some OMGCP tumblr tags on occasion, but it will likely not be reblogged to this account. I’m debating writing a Bittyparse fic that I’ve been thinking of, and if I write it I’ll post it here, but don’t get your hopes up. This fandom is bound to die in a couple years, some tags are already being abandoned and accounts are rebranding themselves away from OMGCP. The peak period of this blog was a time of growth for me and I thank everyone who read my silly headcanons and ridiculous AUs.
Anyways. Thanks for everything, Check Please fandom.
ttyl, Mel
