#in fandoms ranging from as mainstream and huge as star wars

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

There's a phenomenon I've noticed in fandom that has been thrown into sharp relief by experiencing both the Critical Role and Dragon Age fandoms at this current moment but is by no means limited to just those two, where there will exist within the narrative a white guy (and it is always specifically a white guy) who is, demonstrably by his actions, a pretty shitty person. Hurt many many people. However, this character has also been granted some level of interiority by the narrative (the narrative's reasons for doing this are ultimately not relevant, what's important is that the audience does get a peak inside this terrible man's brain), and because he is funny, or sympathetic, or traumatized, or otherwise compelling, certain segments of the fandom will latch onto this character and focus pretty exclusively on how terrible it is FOR HIM that he is evil.

These fans will focus entirely on how sad it makes how he has to hurt people. How terrible it is that he is isolated from everyone. How awful it is that the protagonists don't take the time to understand him. Any pain and hurt he causes is only used as fuel to highlight how sad he is that he has to do these terrible things, with no empathy spared for the people this man has himself hurt. And barely any acknowledgement that he doesn't actually have to be doing these things; that he is terrible because he chooses to be and any personal suffering that he does experience as a result is ultimately his own doing.

I think in some ways this is the cousin to the well known White Guy Side Character phenomenon, in which fans will take a nothing, barely developed white male side character and assign him an importance and interiority in fandom that he does not have in canon while ignoring actual main characters who are not men and/or white. Except in this case instead of assigning undue interiority and complexity to a white male character to the exclusion of others it's assigning undue empathy to a white male character to the exclusion of others, even those who have been hurt by that character, and even when the narrative is pretty directly stating that he's the villain for doing what he did.

[duhragonball]

I’m posting this video as a reminder to myself to sit down and watch it when I’ve got an hour and forty-five minutes to spare.   My understanding is that it explains the “pro vs. anti” thing that I’ve seen people talk about, but never in enough detail that I could figure out what the thing was that people were supposed to be for or against.  

I’ve been a huge nerd for over thirty years now, and it always feels like I’m just close enough to some big argument that I hear about it, but I’m never close enough to actually know what the hell it’s about.  I will hear people say, “Oh, the fandom is so toxic”, and I have no idea what they’re talking about, because it’s usually a bunch of stuff that went down where I never would have been able to see it.    I don’t know if that makes me smart for staying out of these controversies, or clueless for being so unaware of them.  

This has always been my approach: if I like a thing enough, I might devote some of my internet presence to that thing.   I don’t really see myself as part of the “Dragon Ball fandom” any more than I’m a part of the “wrestling fandom” or the “chemistry fandom.”  If I ever started a Star Wars blog, that would only mean I was bored enough to do it.   It would not mean that I had entered the “Star Wars fandom,” something I presumably did in 1980.

The “wrestling fandom” has this shibboleth called “the IWC”.   I think it dates back to the 90s, when fans using the internet could talk about backstage politics and openly acknowledge that the matches were fake.  This led to terms like “internet wrestling community”, to distinguish these kinds of fans from the mainstream.   It’s 2021, and everyone and their mother is on the internet now, but for some reason people still talk about “the IWC”, and blaming “them” for everything that’s wrong and toxic in professional wrestling.   If only those keyboard warriors would go outside and touch some grass, and let the real wrestling fans enjoy the product.  

I think there’s a similar phenomenon in other "fandoms” , where the public perception of it is shaped by vocal minorities: the most toxic fans, the most well-known fans, or the most communal fans, the ones who make an active effort to band together under a common banner, for better or worse.   They just don’t have a name for their boogeyman, like “the IWC”, a name that falls apart under scrutiny.   If everyone’s using the internet, then it’s silly to blame an “internet community” for making things worse.  

So maybe the term “fandom” has reached a similar obsolescence.   In theory, it should only mean “people who like (x)”, but in practice it seems to mean “people who make it their business to be part of the fandom.”   But it seems like the only way to be that big a contributor is to be really popular, or tribalist, or toxic, or some combination of the three. 

I remember writing a thing about Dashcon after it happened, and I was mostly like “What the hell was that supposed to be?”  I don’t think I even knew about Dashcon until it happened, and I was like “Oh, I could have gone to this,” and then I realized I had no idea what it was trying to be.   I always thought of my online presence as a way to share hobbies, talk about favorite TV shows, that sort of thing.   The Dashcon crowd seemed to think they were making “Tumblr University” a real thing, like they were trying to start a cult and not enough people showed up.   Not everyone who watches Xena is qualified or inclined to organize XenaCon ‘97.  

Maybe I should have just started watching Sarah Z’s video in the time it’s taken me to write this, but I’m kind of in the groove so I’m going to keep going.   I want to follow this line of thought.   “Popular, toxic, and tribalist” seems to work well as three categories of fandom problems, as I’ve seen them.

1) A “big name fan” goes too far, or gets too big for their britches, and people turn on them en masse.   Think Logan Paul filming a dead body in Japan.  There’s smaller versions of that all the time.  

2) Entitled assholes harass someone over one thing or another. Twitter has really opened my eyes regarding the sheer gall of some people when it comes to art theft, reposting without credit, etc.   They will not only double down on their perceived right to screw over content creators, but they will then turn on the same creators for daring to stand up for themselves.  This also extends to professionals as well, like when Vic Mignogna’s fanbase decided to turn into his personal army against Funimation and the voice actors listed in his ill-advised defamation lawsuit.  

3) Us versus them mentality.  I think “pro vs. anti” has something to do with shipping characters below a certain age range.   I got that impression once, but something tells me it’s kind of an amorphous argument, and I’ve seen people expand “age of consent” into all sorts of things.   Is it okay to “age up” a character?  What about two adults with a big age-gap?   What if a character just “looks” younger than they are?   What if some people?   Write creepy shit?   To cope?  I’m pretty sure a lot of this is just trying to find a hill to die on, a hill popular enough and noble enough to make it worth their while.  

Loyalty has been on my mind for a while.    This idea that if you support someone hard enough, long enough, they will reciprocate that support when you need it.   But it doesn’t always work that way.   You can put all this time and energy into a relationship and then it turns out the other person was taking you for granted the whole time.  For you, it might be a big deal, but they can take it or leave it.   It’s an imbalance, and it’s not a healthy one.

And all three of the above are examples of that imbalance.  These toxic movements always seem to center around some cult-of-personality, like an artist or a voice actor.   They might be a good person, and a group of people try to take them down out of spite, or for sport.   Or they might be a jerk, and they throw their weight around and people will defend them out of social inertia, or a misplaced sense of loyalty.   Or there might not be a BNF involved at all, and it’s just groups of people rallying around whatever flags they’ve made up for themselves.   They each try to demonize the other side to make themselves feel noble, a mutual admiration society.   But I think it always comes down to loyalty, this idea that if I just stick with this person or cause long enough, it’ll pay off later.   That’s why so many of those Capitol rioters thought Trump would pardon them, even though he didn’t even know their names.

That’s not a “fandom” issue.  That’s a human issue, and I’m not sure there’s a fix for that.  I’ll see people lament how terrible a particular fandom is, and I always think “I never hear about the good ones.”  I think that’s because there are no good or bad fandoms, only good or bad experiences.

In any event, I think I’ve reached the conclusion that loyalty isn’t something to be given lightly, since it isn’t always returned.   The hill you’re dying on can’t love you back, and sometimes the people dying on it with you aren’t that into you either.   

[silveny-dreams]

The KOTLC Squad As Social Media Celebrities

All of them have different specialties and they all meet at some sort of convention

Sophie Foster runs a wildly popular fandom blog, where she talks theory and plot points and character development for her favorite tv shows/movies/book series/etc.

Her favorites are what I’m dubbing “mainstream nerdy” series such as the Marvel movies, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Harry Potter

She has plenty of legitimate theories, but she also loves to post and expand upon some super crackpot theories she comes up with, and they become Inside Jokes that her fan following continues to use

Her fan following varies from Other Highly Dedicated Fans to people who really love her exciteable and sarcastic personality

Keefe Sencen is who everyone considers to be the Father of Vine

He creates a variety of Vine content, ranging from absurd humor that makes no sense, lighthearted pranks, to well-thought-out mini-skits (and some are released in series)

All his content is clean, and he’s one of the only white boys on Vine who doesn’t turn out to be a piece of garbage in real life (which is TOTALLY NOT A REFERENCE TO IRL VINERS HAHAAAAAAA)

One of the only brodudes who can wear a baseball cap backwards and that fashion coding doesn’t automatically mean “I’m a sexist jerk” on him

Linh Song accidentally became an insanely popular Instagram model

Tam started taking pictures of her while messing around with cool lens extensions for his smart phone and it turned out she was Flawlessly Aesthetic in every single one of them

Tam decides to post a couple on his photography Insta and everyone loves Linh so much that they make a separate account just for pictures he takes of her

Tam runs the account and Linh’s aesthetic fashion sense turns her into an Accidental Fashion Icon

(She’s in talks with up-and-coming designers about collaborating on her own fashion line)

Sometimes she manages to get a somewhat blurry picture of Tam (since he avoids pictures of himself like the plague) and everyone always loses their minds when she posts them to her account

Biana Vacker is a popular youtuber

Her channel is always, first and foremost, a makeup/skincare tutorial channel

But she’s branched out to include weekly pet videos, non-intrusive life updates (she doesn’t chronicle every aspect of her life), doing lighthearted silly challenges, that sort of thing

Every now and then she features Fitz in a video and everyone freaks out

Speaking of Fitz! He runs a wildly popular twitter account that’s just him making jokes and embracing his Dorkiness to its full potential

His profile picture isn’t of him, so for the longest time no one knew what he looked like, but then Biana featured him in one of her videos and everyone went “OH CRAP HES HOT” and his following (which was already huge) skyrocketed again

He meets Keefe at an earlier convention and then whenever they meet up (they live on other sides of the country) Keefe features him in a vine

All the vines and videos featuring Fitz include him solely for the purpose of poking lighthearted fun at him for having such an awkward and sometimes “old-person-y” sense of humor (he says things like “what the kids are saying these days” unironically...basically think of in real canon how he has like twenty pairs of the same pajamas and make that into self-deprecating, fully-embraced humor)

Dex Dizznee, like Biana, is also a youtuber, but a completely different kind

Dex makes videos about how to fix your own technology without having to take it in to the store and pay loads of money to get it fixed, using sassy and sarcastic humor about sticking it to big companies

He does unboxing videos for new technology, talks about pros and cons of different brands and stuff (but in a “will you have an easier time of it” kinda way), and partners with places like RadioShack to give discounts for people looking for the pieces and parts to do their own tech repairs

Occasionally, he does a video where he destroys old tech (like throwing bubble TVs out of high windows or setting ancient laptops on fire or seeing how an old phone stands up to an industrial drill) which features his best friend, Marella, who is basically a junior Mythbuster, doing all the dangerous stuff

Marella also runs a podcast that is pretty much a “fight the power” activist sort of podcast--it exposes revisionist history, educates people on race/LGBT/sexist issues, promotes environmentally friendly ways to fight the power, all that jazz

Usually podcasts covering such hot-button issues don’t usually have big followings, but Marella is super personable and respectful in a feisty sort of way and it draws a huge following

They all meet at a convention, although some of them already know one another (Biana and Fitz are siblings, Fitz knows Keefe already, Dex and Marella are friends IRL) and it turns out they’re all really big fans of each other’s work

Fitz unapologetically geeks out when he meets Sophie because he LOVES “mainstream nerdy” stuff

Keefe casually follows Sophie too and Sophie geeks out when she meets HIM because she loves his vines and finds loads of ways to use them as references or inside jokes on her blog

Biana is THRILLED to meet Linh and Linh has always wanted pointers/tips from Biana on makeup and skincare

Tam LOVES Dex’s YouTube channel (”I’ve kept my cameras and equipment ten times longer than my other friends who do photography because of your channel, you’re doing the Lord’s work”)

Dex thinks Fitz is HILARIOUS and admits to Fitz when he meets him that he’s daydreamed about how they’d be best friends if they knew each other IRL

Sophie, Linh, and Biana in particular love Marella’s podcast, although all the boys come in close second

They all go out for pizza together one night during the con and each post about it in their own social media accounts and all their fans LOSE THEIR MINDS because of all their niche interests crossing over

They make plans to all meet up at least once a month, and some of them make separate plans to collab for their mediums

Linh’s Insta account starts occasionally featuring both Linh and Biana, who both learn from each other and step up their fashion and makeup game to a whole other level

Marella and Sophie feature each other on their podcast and blog, respectively, talking about social justice issues in fandom and pop culture

Fitz tweets regularly about his and Dex’s text conversations, which are Straight Up Comedy because they have somewhat similar senses of humor

Marella helps Biana with a few videos where they set Biana’s old makeup on fire or use it to make fandom art for Sophie

Dex starts up an inside joke about tech fixes “so easy even Grandpa Fitz can do them”

Monthly they meet up and do things like laser tag or bowling or go to the zoo or aquarium

Tam and Linh find ways to set up aesthetic pics during each of these get-togethers; Biana and Keefe film bits and pieces of it; Fitz takes pics and tweets them, as well as any humorous dialogue that happens; Sophie blogs about all her new friends’ secretly geeky interests

Basically they break the internet on a fairly frequent basis

[fabmerce]

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