Fake It Until You Make It

Chapter 17: That time she almost said she loved me*

*which I didn't find out until at least two weeks after that, but first things first:

My first time at Comic Con had been when I was fresh into High School, as a fan, dressed up as Wonder Woman with Irene – tradition we repeated every year up until our final edition before we left the West Coast for college. After that, of course, I was on The Mediator so the Comic Con experience took a new turn. I started attending every year to be on our panel, I gave about ten interviews per day, did signings and attended parties and basically sleep walked my way back to the hotel every year and every year it was just as magical as that first one.

Comic Con was home to me, from the early hotel breakfast to running into other actors you don't usually get to see, up until taking in forty minutes of enthusiastic questions and love declarations from the people that had been waiting in line the entire previous night to see us – people, kids whose lives we had touched without even realizing it. Teenagers in black skirts and flats, outfit my character Suze wore to school, or black leggings and boots with a tool belt, outfit she wore to break into houses to save the day from the new psychopathic ghost in town. And that was just my character's cosplays. Add to that all the white outfits and black eyeliner that Hanbin's character, Jesse, wore, or the ultra-blonde wigs representing Suze's best friend who was albino, or all the priest costumes (they went to a catholic school and the dean who was a priest was also a Mediator, very close friends with Suze). It was my own version of a crazy adorable family and each edition was sweeter than the last one.

This year it was both different and nerve-wracking. The show had already ended, our series finale had aired the previous month, so this was our last panel as The Mediator cast and I was scared out of my mind the fandom would be mad and demanding answers about the whole Jenbin (Jennie+Hanbin) affair. Truth is Hanbin was the one who should be worried since it appeared they were blaming him for the end of the show (which was indeed a fair assumption if we're being honest). There were a number of people who thought, of course, I was the slut who ruined the show after sleeping with her love interest, just like I did in Broadway with Insung, but at least from my point of view it seemed they weren't the majority.

I knew this, of course, because with my secret tumblr account I could both keep an eye on the royal world I was undeniably a part of, and in my own fandom (insert here the fear I felt when my phone was stolen that people would find out about my tumblr and think I was some sort of royal stalker).

And talking about the royal world, that was another side of the coin that made me even more afraid of Comic Con this year: Lisa. I was afraid someone would talk about her or ask about her and in every single panel I attended (three for Comic Con, plus one more for Nerd HQ for charity) every time they opened for questions I held my breath expecting them to bring up Lisa until someone ended up asked something nice like 'how do you feel about portraying one of the most real and strong female leads on television right now?'. Turns out I had no reason to fear because, apparently, my fans are awesome.

On the first panel (for Game of Thrones, the first and last panel I would do with them since my character only lasted one season), I got a couple of questions about the British accent and my favorite part of shooting in Britain ('the place is just really beautiful, it didn't even felt like working, you know?'), and on the Marvel panel I just got to talk a little bit about how my character had grown to be more than she had been imagined for (and also got teased when someone in the audience brought up the picture of me as a 14 year-old dressed as Wonder Woman, character from the DC Comics, not Marvel. 'Traitor!', branded jokingly Robert Downey Jr).

On the Mediator panel, it was emotions, emotions, emotions from the very first second. We got there early, we did one last photoshoot as a cast, I found out Claire and Jacob, two of our castmates, were dating, walked on stage to the incessant screaming of our fandom and finally, as usual, sat beside Hanbin on the panel table to answer some fan questions and talk about our series finale. This one girl who was dressed as my character waited in line just to tell us she hoped we were feeling okay and that she was sorry in the name of the fandom for how terrible the previous week had been for us – me and Hanbin – and that she hoped we knew we were loved and supported whatever we decided to do next in our careers. As if my emotions at this point weren't bad enough. Obviously, I cried. We talked about the finale, answered questions, joked around, and, at the end, screened two videos. An up-beat one to Pink's Good Old Days, of our funniest behind-the-scenes moments since season one and one about our last day of shooting. Shortly after wrapping up our very last scene, it had taken me about ten minutes to get up from lying on the floor where I had been shooting the scene – it was my death scene - because I was crying so much I couldn't move.