Who the hell are you, and what do you think you're doing?

Hi! I'm ShearBolt!

You might know me as a Boruto fan from some platforms such as the place formerly known as Twitter or BlueSky. Or, if you're a real one, you know me from Ao3. You might call me Shear or Rebecca or Aunt. You might have been in my DMs. You might have slept in my chicken coop.

But in case you don't know me at all, let me give you the fandom version of a college entrance essay.

The summer before my sophomore year of high school, the boy I was dating took me to a small art theater in a college town on the other side of our rural county to see X– no, not X as we know it now. The anime film X. I could look up a summary of the movie and tell you what it was about, but all I remember is swords with a side of psychological trauma. As in all movies I saw that summer, other... uh... things were occupying my attention in dark theaters.

I knew of DBZ, played the Ranma 1/2 fighting game on SNES, and caught some early Pokémon episodes that never finished before my morning school bus arrived, but that was my first real introduction to anime, but I didn't fall hard for the medium until I saw Cowboy Bebop on the same boyfriend's couch a year or two later. (My folks didn't have cable.)

Throughout high school, I borrowed a few series on (gasp) VHS from friends--Tenchi Muyo! and Utena--but it wasn't until I got to college and had access to Toonami and a high-speed internet connection that I got deep into anime. I finished Cowboy Bebop, watched Trigun, Hellsing, Serial Experiments Lain. I caught the weekend Toonami lineup while my roommate disappeared to frat parties: Yu Yu Hakusho, Inuyasha, Outlaw Star, whatever Gundam was airing at that time...

(By this point, you've probably realized that I'm old).

The year my boyfriend (yeah, that guy I made out with in movie theaters in 1999 who is now my husband) and I moved into our first apartment when I was starting my graduate work in American Studies is the same year Naruto began to air in the United States.

I followed Naruto over the years, dipping between the anime and the manga, going long periods without reading a chapter, than binging for hours at a time. When I first started watching it, I was studying American literature and geek studies. By the time the last chapter was released, I was an artisan cheesemaker.

Life is weird that way.

I never really engaged in fandoms (beyond a Star Trek Voyager chat on mIRC circa 1997). Media interests were something shared with friends rather than strangers. And throughout my 20s and early 30s, I spend too much time working to pursue my interests beyond keeping up with the Naruto manga occasionally.

Fast-forward to 2021. I'm doing contract work and have a three-year-old son. Unbeknownst to me, my husband had downloaded CrunchyRoll to watch anime episodes on his lunch break. This is how, when he started watching and dropped Boruto before episode 50, all of our shared devices started spamming Boruto content at me, trying to drag him back in.

It hooked me instead.

I told myself that I didn't have time to get obsessed with an anime series. I'd just watch a few short clips on YouTube. Nothing major. Just to get a sense of what was going on. Then, I saw parts of the Time Slip arc and KNEW I needed to see it as a whole. Like a bouncy ball thrown into a neat line of dominos, I crashed through the first 200 episodes of the series in six weeks, haphazardly and out of order. I finally caught up during the SECOND chunin arc.

That led me to fanfic, first reading, then writing. And to making a Twitter alt with the hopes of lurking in the background of the fandom. I... guess I'm not good at lurking, though.

I love Boruto, both the character and the series, and I thought the best way to share that love with the world was to talk about how good the series was, engaging with it on a deeper level, pointing out the craft in the writing, the shape of the plot, the intricacies of the characters.

I am grateful the time I spent on Twitter, the friends that I met, the experience of being in an active fandom. Of course, there was bullshit. Lots of bullshit. More bullshit than I'd experienced in ten years that I'd had my main account. I learned a lot about fandoms--both good and bad.

And when Twitter changed hands and owners, and the platform's new ownership started weakening the protections that existed to keep out the bad (both from the fandom and from society), I decided to make my exit and move to BlueSky.

That's the Who-The-Hell-Are-You part.

Now, for the What-Do-You-Think-You're-Doing.

I've watched the internet go from a series of connected databases used to research journal article abstracts to Geocities to the golden age of blogs to social media to the corporate consolidation we're going through today. I feel as though the internet is getting smaller, not bigger, the information super highway rerouted to a series of toll roads, taking us all to the same locations.

Our activity became content, content to feed corporations, letting them amass wealth on our productivity and train AI LLMs on our words and art with no consent or compensation. Social media should be our gateway to one another, not a locked door to keep us inside a content factory where they decide what we see and how we see it.

There's a lot of things we can't change in this world, but our use of the internet isn't one of them.

And that's why I'm starting this blog, a home that I own for my thoughts and work, a platform that I can share with others. It's not going to replace what I'm doing on social media, but provide me--and hopefully some of you!--with a place to post writing, critiques, and maybe even art.

This is all very aspirational and probably comes off as a little self-important (at least it does so to me). But we need aspirations now. And we need to acknowledge that we're important as individuals rather than users.

Again, if you've stumbled your way here, thank you for visiting and welcome! I look forward to finding out what we can create together.