All this to say, goddamn but is fandom a nice place to be sometimes. There's a certain baseline amount of feminism/anti-racism/acceptance of LGBT+ people/etc that is really really awesome and I miss it when it's gone.

Yep, that's precisely why I'm in fandom, more than an attachment to any one storyline. Your group experience sounds like a particularly mainstream cross-section of the population, and I don't say that kindly.

I am a little confused by the description... is the group you're currently working with in French, or there are two fiction groups operating here? I fixated on French + pronouns and now am wondering if there are French speakers writing about Philadelphia and racist elves and etc. The idea of that is wild. I live in the US and still would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about Philadelphia without doing some basic research (except yeah, it's an urban area, therefore a diverse population).

I also confess I'd had you gendered as female (because I'm female, and tend to assume that all fandom authors are female until I ask otherwise). I'll get better about a gender-neutral conception of you. What pronouns do you like, in English?