#(that happened way more often in online fandom spaces)(but tbh my hang-ups in online fandom spaces)

[deathxproof]

hm, out of all of the things I was expecting when I slowly started putting myself back in fandom spaces, “unresolved trauma from being an autistic kid/teen who was always perceived as Too Much” wasn’t on the list, to be quite honest.

[chibiranmaruchan]

If I can add something 👋🏼 so I was in this zine, but dropped out early because life got too busy for me and tbh at the point the zine started out, I had already felt like an outsider to the sailor moon fandom for quite a while. All those people's experiences working on this zine are their own and I can't add much, as someone who didn't contribute in the end, only heard varying personal accounts of others who contributed. But I can talk about my experience in the online sailor moon fandom, why I don't contribute much anymore and solutions to the issues.

I know the fandom is old af, but it feels as a younger fan, that it's hard to break in with the older fans. I understand the fandom has been around since the 90's and naturally, you do form cliques with the people you talked to from sites from before tumblr, twitter, discord etc. But it honestly feels like younger fans, when they do attempt to positively interact with older fans, are seen as annoyances at best and a coup to take over the fandom at worst. There's also some fandom mom stuff going on, where young people, even if they're in their early 20's are infantalised with how they're spoken to, very much like a parent or teacher telling off a child, which is disrespectful to talk down to a grown adult that way. Naturally fandoms progress (especially when the target demographic doesn't change to age with the original fans) to allow new, younger fans in. Honestly, it can be a beautiful thing when people of different generations work together and bond over a common interest, instead of the hostility I am seeing.

Not only that, but as a black fan, I feel like it's very hard to fit in a lot of online sailor moon spaces, because there's a lack of prominent black voices. I feel like there's a lot of black fans who have been minimised, shut down and chased away, when they voice opinions or contribute fanfictions, fanart, cosplay photos, just because it doesn't fit the American-Eurocentric view of Sailor Moon that's taken root in the fandom. It's hard to want to contribute to the greater online fandom, when I don't feel listened to or wanted around, because people know I'm black. This further creates more issues, because there's not more people who look like me or understand me culturally around, to make me feel understood, more included or wanted around. Sometimes I'm the only or one of the few people in a sailor moon group who is black and it's very apparent, but not in a good way. I shouldn't feel like I'm overstepping in the status quo, because I happen to be a minority in this fandom, but I often do.

As an European fan, it feels like the fandom can be hard to navigate, because it's very American-centric and that leads people expecting everyone to care about the same topics, that in Europe, we simply don't care about. There's no accounting for cultural differences and that makes for some not so pleasant interactions. The world is a big place, so you're going to find variation in how people interpret the same topic or that some people are not as bothered by something that's a big deal in. I've talked to quite a few European sailor moon fans, who feel this way and it causes us to just hang in the background and be nervous to contribute, lest we're chastised.

Lastly, I feel like there's people who take pleasure in intentionally riling others up and take sailor moon way too damn seriously. Like to the point, I have to wonder if some people can separate fiction and reality. There's a lot of fandom etiquette thrown out in this fandom, with people being in spaces dedicated to particular ships, characters, verses of sailor moon etc and saying things that they know is upsetting a lot of people in those dedicated spaces. Ofc people are entitled to like and not like what they want and people can hang where they want. But if you're going to keep being negative about those things, why go into spaces where you know people like a particular thing to always be negative about that thing? There's plenty of spaces dedicated to not liking those things, where you're free to scream to the void to your heart's content.

Fandom shouldn't be negative and it's a dick move to do that to people who are just trying to enjoy it in their own way and quite frankly, if you do this, you're contributing to people feeling like they have to hide their fandom interests out of shame because it's not in the same way as others. There's a lot of people who already get made fun of irl for liking anime/manga, subgenres or anime/manga aimed at particular demographics, for writing fanfics or drawing fanart, for cosplaying etc and they come to those online spaces to feel like there's no judgement, just for people like this to tear it away. Whatever happened to the fandom golden rule of if you don't like something, don't seek it out? There's a lot of intentional seeking to get offended and then taking it out on others. Even sharing some fanart online for the first time got such a comment and made me not want to continue, because of that.

Sailor Moon is cool and all, but it's not worth me getting my knickers in a twist over and happy to die over something that doesn't even matter outside of a fandom context. It's a comic and cartoon at the end of the day, it's not worth me getting upset that I'm going to upset people online who impact zero shit in my irl. Nor should it with anyone else. No one's entitled to anything from me, not my time, energy, a response, nothing.

But as someone who has made the graduation process of being chronically online to actually touching grass by going to irl anime meets, I can say things are so different for me. I don't know if it's a UK thing or irl thing, but I find none of the fandom discourses or cliques that are heavy in the online sailor moon fandom, are a thing irl. No one cares what we ship, which characters we like, if we prefer 90's anime or crystal, manga or musicals etc. The irl anime fandom has its own issues ofc, but not these issues. Especially because I hang in places designed for poc, especially black, to be able to enjoy being blerds. The most we do is dance and pose to the DiC theme, it's like reliving our childhood's all over again. Especially in 2023, with how mainstream anime has got, more groups like this are cropping up. Honestly, I highly recommend them to there's more than the online discourse as your only avenue when it comes to enjoying sailor moon.

the drops of moonlight zine nightmare

hello all, long time no post! you may remember (probably vaguely at this point) that i was participating in a Sailor Moon zine called Drops of Moonlight. you may also be aware that this zine has still not been released.

unfortunately at this point, i feel compelled to share that in addition to the long wait and lack of communication, the zine's organizers have repeatedly insulted and belittled their contributors. i've put together the following Google Doc with information detailing the general poor conduct of the organizers of this zine.

if i could go back and not touch this zine with a 40 foot pole, i sure would! thanks for reading!

[dreaming-of-assclass]

Happy New Years!! 🎉🎉

This year has been such a rollercoaster for everyone, I’m sure. A lot of things happened, but I’d say my experience with AssClass and the fandom has been one of my favorite parts of 2020! I’m so glad I joined the BigBang and met lots of new creators, eventually gaining the courage to make my own blog. And now here we are! I love this blog and interacting with all of you so much ❤️

I’ve been a bit messy lately lol...a lot actually omg. This month was packed with a lot of family and school stuff. My biggest New Years resolution is to improve my organization for sure. The next month, I want to empty out my inbox. And I’ll get to posting all the now-late Christmas fics hahaha.

And now to celebrate, here are some headcanons of what the AssClass characters’ resolutions are!

Karma: He tells everyone that he’ll try to be less prideful or whatever. But in actuality, he plans to get more creative with pranks and specifically make Terasaka’s life hell.

Nagisa: Wants to get out of the house and hang with his friends more, get space from his mom. Also wants to improve his sociability and speak up more for himself.

Kayano: Get revenge on that stupid girl who stole her role in- well, that’s a minor one hehe. Her biggest resolution is to honor Aguri and Koro’s legacies, and move on after everything, get her life back in order.

Okuda: Speak up more and get out of her comfort zone! Also take Karma’s advice and get a little wilder with her experiments. After all, science is all about possibility. Go big or go home~

Kanzaki: Beat up some punks with video games, as usual. Rebel against her family, fuck shit up. Basically, to embrace her inner badass all the way. Also start her own little flower garden.

Sugino: Practice his pitching! Also get his grades up because according to Shindou, “Jesus, Sugino, even my 97-year old grandpa could write this essay better than you.” Yeah...the boy needs to improve his academics if he wants to succeed jdhdjej

Gakushuu: Conquer his father of course! Be the best in his school. One-up Class E, although we know that’ll be impossible. Also he WILL adopt that Pomeranian he saw the other day.

Terasaka: He really needs to actually figure out what the politics are like in Japan lmao. He knows nothing, he just said it in the moment to screw with Koro and Karma. But yeah...the boy realizes now what he actually said lol.

Muramatsu: He’s gonna fix the ramen recipe. Damn his dad and whatever tradition they have, it’s so bad, he needs to. Also he’s gonna practice learning more fish recipes since he wants to do fishing more often.

Hazama: Try and stay away from her mom. Get that really nice witch book she saw in the store. Fuck it, she’s gonna go all out with the goth aesthetic and change up her wardrobe.

Nakamura: Thinking of dying her hair a cherry pink. Also will make it her goal to annoy Karma and Asano as much as she can. Tells everyone she’ll try to focus less on gossip and blackmail, but it’ll quickly be a broken promise lmfao.

Fuwa: Get her hands on an actual sword. Buy some more video game and manga merch, like keychains and such. Might tell herself to be more grounded but she knows it’s like impossible.

Kataoka: Improve her backstroke just a bit more, it’s been a little sloppy lately. Work on her self-control...specifically try to calm down the urge to deck Okajima whenever he’s being himself.

Hayami: Adopt a cat. Volunteer at a cat shelter. Pet more cats. Adopt another cat...Maybe try a new hairstyle. A deeper resolution would be to speak up more and make her opinions known. Also to relax a bit more.

Maehara: Maintain a steady relationship for once in his life. When that inevitably fails, his next goal would probably be to give more focus to grades and soccer. Wants to concentrate more on his future tbh

Okano: Working on her temper and insecurities. Will try and be more patient with others...mainly just the boys lmao. Gonna try to remember and stretch more often before she jumps into gymnastics stuff.

Korosensei: Be. Less. Of. A. Perv. This is what everyone assumes is at the top of his list. But no...his number one resolution is to honor Aguri and keep improving as a teacher and person, for the sake of 3-E. He truly wants to better himself for them, and do something meaningful for what little time he has left.

Irina: Do more online shopping. It’s way less work and she can just sit in bed, browsing through lingerie while eating ice cream and crying over Karasuma. Wait. That’s another resolution. Improve her love life. Also...be nicer to the students...I GUESS she yells loudly to nobody.

Karasuma: Eat less junk food, try to cook healthy actual food. That’s gonna fail though. Connect more with 3-E and make sure he’s doing the best he possibly can for them. Save the world. You know, the usual stuff.

This is all I can think of for now lol...hope you enjoyed. I mainly just did my faves jrhrhdjeke.

[antthonystark]

With the drama happening in the fandom today (some malec fans saying they will boycott the next episode because there's only 2.5 mins of malec but several other individual Alec and Magnus scenes, a hashtag on twitter saying they want the parabatai bond broken so there's no more Alec + Jace scenes) I feel really bad for Matt, Harry, and the others. Like all the hard work they do just gets shit on by their "fans" if it doesn't fulfill something very specific. It must be really disheartening :(

wow i think it’s a testament to my ability to finally be able to filter out shadowhunters fandom’s puerile bullshit from my life that none of this even put a blip on my radar, so it’s nice that i’ve managed that lol (so i don’t genuinely know if any of this is true so i’m really taking you at your word here, apologies if i’ve misunderstood something as i’m really not in the mood to go try and seek this out)

and honestly, don’t be upset about these fandom temper tantrums, it’s just much more fun what you laugh at everyone instead. like, for one, it makes me laugh that people think that matt daddario is the “captain of their ship” or “one of them” or whatever it is these days (and harry too, but matt seems to get the most attention because he’s often the one doing the damage control and desperately trying to placate the fandom, and they mistakenly believe that his attempts to smooth their tantrums over are him being “one of them”). so honestly i’m sure they’re used to it by now lol, like i’m sure it’s much more annoying for them than it is disheartening, but i totally get where you’re coming from. 

actually more to the point, malec shippers’ massive, palpable, throbbing insecurity over the alec/jace relationship will never fail to make me laugh though tbh. i mean it’s always guised in some kind of quasi-genuine (but utterly misapprehended) critique of the relationship not “making sense” to them, or some extremely biased “”analysis”” of jace’s character -- where they haven’t forgiven him for being shitty to alec in a few episodes almost two seasons ago (despite allowing maryse the full benefit of the doubt when she was objectively much worse to him and for much longer) and are upset because jace’s top priority in life isn’t inquiring after alec’s relationship status and that his relationship with alec does not revolve around malec -- in an attempt to discredit their bond and their friendship and their genuine love and care for one another. like, alec being soul-bonded to jace is such a source of consternation for  so many malec shippers that so desperately want everything about alec’s life to revolve around his relationship with magnus (to the point where they can’t even conceive of alec having any difficulty or concerns or even minor hang-ups about doing something as massive as giving up his mortality but whew i digress) that it’s genuinely funny (and also, if i wasn’t clear, really fucking dumb lol).

regardless, malec shippers also seem to think that they make up a much bigger share of the total viewership of the show than they do - such that their boycott should have some massive impact on the show - but that’s been true for a long time, since they do arguably represent a strong majority and have a great deal of influence online and in most core fandom spaces. but the overall ratings don’t really represent this (in some ways they do, like 2x06, malec date, was one of the more-watched episodes of 2a, to be fair, but it’s generally all over the place with no clear trend). and it is with utmost pleasure that i report that “parabatai lost” is the most-watched episode of all season 2 after the premiere. and the most-watched episode of 2b after the midseason premiere was 2x14 “the fair folk” (the most clace-centric episode of season 2 by a mile). so, uh, boycott away, lol. 

[shinelikethunder]

disconnected thoughts on fandom and the indieweb

Recently I discovered the IndieWeb project, and I... think I am a lot more intrigued by it than by other Better Social Media Platform pipe dreams and decentralization projects I’ve seen? Because it’s not a monolithic platform that has to be all things to all people, or even one that has to gain a critical mass of userbase before it’s useful for anything. It’s just a bunch of people, making sites that work for them, and banging out protocols so their sites can talk to each other and hook up to the social-media hangouts du jour.

The basic idea:

- Have a personal website, preferably a personal domain name, that is the hub for your online identity and stuff. Posts, tweets, pictures, links, reading list, events, whatever you’d normally be posting to social media. You host it, you control it, you own it. You tweak it to fit your needs, no Xkit required.

- Once the original archival copy is up on your personal site, cross-post it to whatever social media sites it belongs on. You don’t have to quit your Tumblr habit, or convince your friends to quit theirs, or give up the audience you can reach on a large site.

- Use a pingbacks-on-steroids tool to collect all the responses (likes, reblogs, comments, etc) from the various sites you’ve cross-posted to. Ideally, display them at the bottom of the post back on your website.

As an idea, I like it a lot. In practice, a lot depends on what tools are already available, how useable they are, how capable you are of coding/templating/configuring to fill in the gaps, and how difficult large sites make it to push/pull from them automatically. That’s pretty much what I’m interested in exploring in the near future, for my own use if nothing else. I already have most of my Tumblr content backed up to a Wordpress install on my own shared hosting account, so I’m kinda curious see how much IndieWeb compatibility I can manage using plugins and template tweaks.

Indieweb and fandom:

As a potential tool for fandom to wean ourselves off the various hellsites we’ve inhabited over the years... okay, it’s an interesting thought. One with lots of unanswered questions, but interesting.

Lots of unanswered questions, so the rest of this is going under a cut.

- Upside: I know a lot of older fans are still nostalgic about the early blogosphere and even--heaven forfend--the Geocities days. Many things about them were shit, but the archipelago of personal fan shrines, indie blogs, having a personal site with a personal archive of your work, etc. was awesome. And the “own your own creations” ethos fits in nicely with AO3′s “we have to own the servers” philosophy.

- Enabling factor: Fandom builds and customizes stuff like crazy. Yes, including the younger generations who weren’t around for the “build it yourself” days and seem to think AO3 burst fully formed out of the forehead of a long-lost deity. What, you haven’t noticed that even on a hobbled hellsite like Tumblr, teenagers are using the relative freedom of the theme system to spontaneously rediscover all the sins of Geocities web design? (I rib with affection, as someone who definitely had a page with flaming torch gifs and a sparklecursor back in 2001.) Full, out-of-the-box, point-and-click setup is necessary to get fandom to adopt something in any decent numbers. But once we’re there, a disproportionate number of us start tinkering with anything that’s customizable, and when someone with actual coding skills comes out with a useful tool to supplement missing capabilities, it spreads like wildfire.

- Gaps and directions to expand: Indieweb principles include “scratch your own itches,” so here are my itches, which I’m going to shamelessly project onto fandom at large.

Import--needs rock solid LiveJournal-clone and Tumblr support if your site is to serve as an archive. I don’t know if there even is a working Wordpress plugin to import from LJ or Dreamwidth. The best-supported Tumblr->Wordpress importer is actually better than most standalone Tumblr backup tools, but it still mangles video posts/embeds. It’d also be cool to have import tools for AO3, Deviantart, and other major fanwork repositories.

Once your Tumblr posts are in, there's no way to automate the very first thing I’d want to do upon liberating my data from the vise-like jaws of What Tumblr Wants You To Do With Its Site: separate out posts I created, posts I added comments to, and posts I just shared via reblog. A nice addition would be the ability to copy Tumblr tags to a metadata field that’s separate from Wordpress tags--WP tags tend to be organizational, whereas on Tumblr, tags are often a sidechannel for comments that don’t propagate on reblog, thus filled with all sorts of crap.

On that note, Itch #3 is mass-organization tools. Select all posts that fit certain criteria and do a mass edit on their tags, categories, post types, or other taxonomy data. Lots of fandom folks have years or decades worth of content from various sites, making organizational tasks highly impractical to do manually. I’ve dicked around with a few Wordpress mass-edit plugins, but none of them seemed to work that well.

Not sure how well the existing backfeed tools support Tumblr notes, but for fandom to bite, the Tumblr support oughta be pretty damn slick. And the cross-posting should ideally support all the features of a native Tumblr post, because by god, we will use them, and we will notice if an expected one is missing. I can spot IFTTT cross-posts from AO3 without even reading text, and tbh my eyes usually skip right over them, unfair as that may be.

If this project extends to feed readers/aggregators, the embrace of multi-site cross-posting implies a need for deduplication. Preferably getting rid of Tumblr’s charming “barf the full post back out onto your dashboard every time someone you’re following shares/responds to it” behavior in the process. For fandom use, it’ll need a blacklist feature. And I’d love some more heavy-duty filtering, selective subscriptions (like to just one tag of a blog), creating multiple feeds based on topic or on how much firehose you want...

This may be a personal itch, but at least for personal archiving needs, I’m sick, sick, sick of the recency bias that’s eaten the internet since the first stirrings of Web 2.0. Wikis are practically the only sites that have escaped chronological organization. It would be cool to have easily-manipulated collections with non-kludgey support for series ordering, order-by-popularity, order-by-popularity with a manual bump for posts you want to highlight, hell even alphabetical ordering. None of these things are remotely unsolved problems, but they’re poorly supported on the social-media silos most people’s content lives on these days. Fandom’s suffered from this since at least the days of LiveJournal, which had the ominous beginnings of what’s since become the Tumblr Memory Hole. Relentless chronological ordering + the signal-to-noise ratio of any space with regular social interaction = greatest hits falling down the memory hole unless a community practices extensive manual cataloguing. Hell, LJ fandom did practice extensive manual cataloguing, but even within that silo, there was so much decentralization that content discovery was shit if you didn’t know the right accounts to search through. Like, fuck, at least forums bump threads to the top if they’re still active--LJ and blogs have the same "best conversation evar falls inexorably off the map as new posts are added, no matter how active it is” problem that InsideTheWeb forums did in 1999. (Anyone else remember InsideTheWeb? AKA 13-year-old me’s first experience with platform shutdown, frantic archiving attempts, and massive data loss. Fun times.) Tumblr and Twitter, meanwhile, spam you with duplicates of the original post every time someone you’re following replies to/shares it, a key component of the endless firehose of noise drowning out any attempt to hang on to the signal.

All those itches are things I could probably code myself if I got a stubborn enough bee in my bonnet, which might well happen. On the other hand, I have some deeper doubts, ones that aren’t going to get addressed by Wordpress plugins or shiny backfeed support:

The whole concept of IndieWeb fails to address (and might even worsen) what I suspect is the core dysfunction of social media. Which is the degradation of community spaces, and their replacement with a hopeless snarl where all content lives in individual accounts. There are a lot of weird effects that arise when the “social” sphere is built entirely upon the one-on-one connections created when someone subscribes to another account or gives someone else permission to view their restricted posts. Echo chambers, shame mobs, out-of-context remarks going viral, popular accounts setting off harassment storms whenever they disagree with someone, the difficulty of debunking hoaxes once they’re out in the wild... all of those are either created or made much, much worse by the lack of any reasonable, stable, shared expectation of who a post’s audience is.

Basically, if “own your content and host it on your site” also applies to your comments, interactions, etc, it starts running counter to one of the strengths of the Old Web. Which was community contexts where you explicitly weren’t posting to your own space or addressing everyone who might be looking at the main clearinghouse of all your different stuff. You were posting to the commons shared by a particular group with a particular culture and interests, not all of whom were people you’d necessarily want to follow outside that limited context, some of whom you might disagree with or dislike, but in any case you knew what audience you were broadcasting to. You knew what the conversation was, how similar conversations had gone in the past, and the reputations of all the main participants--not just the ones you yourself would subscribe to and the ones attention-grabbing enough to get shared by the people on your subscription list. And you weren’t spamming all your other acquaintances with chatter on a topic they weren’t interested in.

Shared spaces can also establish whatever social norms they need and moderate accordingly. (Plus, plurality of spaces = plurality of norms for different needs, which would solve a LOT of what’s currently ailing fandom.) Peaceable enforcement of a code of conduct, beyond the “minimum viable standard” sitewide abuse policy, is fundamentally impossible on social media, where individual muting is the closest thing you can get to moderation. That + unstable audience = any social norms that exist are so unenforceable it turns people into frothing shame-mob zealots, ratcheting up the coercive pressure on everyone the more it fails to work on the handful of unrepentant assholes who would’ve been permabanned from any self-respecting forum within a week. Moving onto personal sites with beefed up syndication/backfeed capabilities ain’t gonna fix that. Meanwhile the truly heinous dickweeds who’d ordinarily run afoul of the sitewide abuse policy will have the same capabilities, minus any risk of getting banned.

If there haven’t already been epic drama meltdowns caused by the “reply in your own space by making your own post, which includes a copy of the original post for context” model... it’s only a matter of time. You don’t even need malicious actors, just a human conflict where one party has overprotective subscribers. Or information turns out to be faulty and in need of correction. Or an argumentative type stumbles on the permalink of an acrimonious reply post that was actually resolved amicably several replies downthread. Or someone edits an apology into their controversial post and someone who’s been attacking it refuses to update their copy because tilting at strawmen is more fun. Or someone tries to make an embarrassing post go away by deletion and their co-conversationists don’t cooperate. Tumblr’s “reply by reposting in your own space and adding commentary” system already spawns endless floods of drama and misunderstanding, and that’s a system with some limits on the participants’ control, and relatively disposable accounts/identities if the shit hits the fan.

Basically, I’m all for personal websites as archives of your creations, but seriously dubious of them as archives of your interactions. Especially if the interactions aren’t well-segregated from the regular content feed that goes out to everyone who follows you. Yes, abuses of moderator power when interaction is all taking place on a site the mod controls are a thing. But if those sites are an archipelago of indie spaces rather than a monolithic platform, shitty mods don’t thwart the development of a healthy social ecosystem, they just drive everyone away to a competing space whose mod sucks less.

(Private/access-restricted archives of your interactions might be a compromise? You still have your stuff in case the other site goes down, but it’s not out there replicating the ill effects of the Tumblr reblog-to-respond model.)

Leaving aside all that, the IndieAuth component--using personal sites as stable identities you can log in with--is just as workable for community platforms as it is for cross-blog commenting. Proliferation of unlinkable accounts was one of the downfalls of forums, after all. That said, one potential point of friction is that fandom is far more pseudonym-centric than the devs and tech hobbyists who’ve coalesced around IndieWeb so far. But stable pseuds with years of reputation behind them have social effects that resemble real names more than anything else, so as potential culture clashes go, I’d hope that’s fairly surmountable.

As noted in the musings on LiveJournal archiving above: CONTENT DISCOVERY IS A BITCH IN DECENTRALIZED COMMUNITIES and that’s a major stumbling block for fandom. OTOH, platform-agnostic protocols with customization potential = room for experimentation with independently-run discovery/search/tagging layers. (Life goals: stay uncool enough that my “Like Uber, but for ___” elevator pitch ends up being “It’s like Technorati, but for fanfiction of Kirk drilling Spock.”)

Okay, that’s it, jesus christ it’s time for me to go to bed.