#my accidental rant treatise on the beauty of fandom

[curiousoh-randomfandoms]

I hate to dogpile but yeah. The point of fandom isn't to create product, you can potentially go to work for that. (And thus capitalism has no place in fandom except in the way that it effects the community members IRL that makes it difficult to fandom how they want to. Because real life interferes unfortunately with creating art despite how necessary it is to live.)

And I say this as someone who's had a 4 year period where I literally was too physically disabled to create art the way that I had.

I found another way because I had to. To freaking survive this hellscape. Making stuff was literally the only way that I held on.

And same deal when I was freaking out of my house trying to hustle and be able to afford the basics around 16-20 hours a day, more than 5 days a week. I was engaging (obviously not as much) because it was necessary to my survival at the time. I needed art and community and just a break from trying to get by.

It's about the art. Sharing the work is about community building. There literally wouldn't be any reason to share the work, in fandom without the community. You would just keep it to yourself. You can't make bank on other's IPs and because of that True Fandom isn't and can't be commercialized.

It is 100% that beautiful horrible desire for connection and understanding and community that drives you to share the work. I was writing stories by myself for around 5 years before I had anyone who actually was willing to read it. That didn't mean I wasn't trying. I was in fandom before internet, before finding that connection was easy. I was in a fandom of like 3 people pre-internet. Because that's how many people I knew were into the thing. Obv. in internet times that number got a lot bigger.

But yeah it's about sharing your weird little brain worms and infecting others and being like, isn't this insane and wonderful and horrible.

Genuinely A.I. has no place in fandom. You might consider that ableist as hell. But I am a working artist who's had chronic pain of around 30 years so I don't give a fuck about that. It is ableist. A.I. generation is literally ableist. It's built on the labor of disabled folks.

The majority of working artists I happen to know (And I know I lot because I travel for work and engage in that community building. There are people who I met the first time I was attempting to sell my art who wanted to sell art who I have now met at events trying their dreams.) are disabled in some way. Literally like 90% of them.

I have friends who have M.S., POTS, arthritis bad enough they have those poor hands that are just stuck, ND, mental health problems, vision issues and wheelchairs etc. And the main victims of the A.I. crap, the work that they stole without compensation are those artists.

Trying to monetize art is an act of desperation. Yeah it can certainly be about ego but the majority of artists are not financially comfortable with family trusts to fall back on. The majority of artists I know and have met, started trying to make money with the crap they made in their spare time because they literally couldn't afford to live. And other avenues make them potentially too rich that they don't qualify for the medical help required to allow them to keep living in the level of health most possible, yet that richness cannot afford the maintenance to keep them alive with their conditions.

I am so sick of this A.I. Tech Bro argument that it's somehow ableist to expect art made by humans. To want human expression to be the primary art in the world.

And yeah I had friends who had been living a financially free life where they could afford to maintain their conditions and were actually doing insane things like beginning to have savings, that literally could no longer in a Post A.I. generation mainstreaming world.

I don't fault folks for using A.I. as assistive tools for things like grammar, or potentially translation although both of those have been such a wonderful community building cornerstone of fandom... and we really should not be seeking perfection in our art that's just for us, that's made out of love, out of need to express ourselves etc. Because I get that it is hella hard to find wonderful folks that want to translate out of love or beta because they see the potential in your work and just want to make it sing. And as is often the case, even more in this terminally online world. The act of creation is solitary at first. It takes a while to build some community.

But man, I absolute hate to see the individuality scraped out of stuff. To see people stagnate because their work isn't changing with them because they are no longer the primary architects of that work. We are ever changing and it is beautiful. It is amazing the way that my work changed when I was physically unable to work the way I could. It literally made my work so much better, I explored stuff that I wouldn't have otherwise. And it will continue to enrich my work for the rest of my life.

And A.I. just middle of the roads you. It doesn't keep your little idiosynchronisies and lexicon that's a beautiful microcosm of all of the beautiful people who you've loved and left the mark on. It doesn't understand the iconography of the media you've consumed that it then colored by your experience, color sense and cultural background. By the time period you happened to have lived. It just removes you.

And fandom, as all the best community building is... it's about who you are, what you do and who you love.... who you hate even. How you move or cannot move in this world. It's about yearning even maybe and the passion to do a thing even though it does not benefit you outside of this weird little community. And the benefits are simply being known. Sharing a little piece of yourself while you consume and love and encourage others who are sharing a little bit of themselves too.

My point is that it is about love. And as of yet, there isn't a computer that can do that right, yet.

just saw a fanfic on ao3 have a dedication for chatgpt... that section is meant for your horny perverted mutual who proofread your work, you violated sacred law and you will be torn apart and laid bare btw