#thoughts on fandom

[trilliath]

We've seen lots of polls around authors saying it's not at all weird to get comments on old fic (it is in fact a delight!), but I'm curious about the other direction.

Life happens, writers can be shy or just get busy or simply not have the spoons to always reply right away even if they want to, and eventually it starts to feel like it might be weird to reply after a certain point. So:

[thatordinaryoddity]

hot take on 3x03 sweat tent scene

and since I know that most people here seem to feel differently about that scene than I do and actually love it (which I don’t), I’m putting my thoughts below the cut. You know, don’t like, don’t read, etc etc.

I’m finally gathering the courage to voice my thoughts on why this scene bothers me so much. Please keep in mind that this is my personal opinion, shared on my personal blog, based on my own impressions and experiences with this topic.

Call me prude, but for me, the entire scene felt uncomfortable and left a sour taste in my mouth for several reasons. I honestly can’t wrap my head around why so many people seem so unbothered by it or even love it that much.

First of all, even if we assume that Moiraine and Siuan are breaking up, I’m not on board with the whole “yas, go for it, girl” rebound narrative. They’ve been in a relationship/marriage for over 20 years. Unless the word breakup is used, I don’t think we can assume they’re officially done. Yes, Siuan betrayed Moiraine in 2x07 (though, to be fair, Moiraine wasn’t exactly a saint either so I don’t place all the blame on Siuan). But considering the depth of their relationship, I’d expect them to have a definitive conversation before ending things, especially given their shared responsibilities and history. No matter what Moiraine assumes about their status, I feel like there needs to be a clear, final acknowledgment of their separation before we treat them as truly over.

And honestly, they don’t seem over. Moiraine’s emotional support fishing net, her saving Siuan and her little eyebrow twitch, the kiss from the trailer - all suggest there’s still something between them (and we know there will be). Even if they are broken up at this point, it’s only been about a month. I get that people handle breakups differently, but I don’t see Moiraine as someone who immediately starts messing around the moment she’s out of a long-term relationship.

Now, setting aside the possible cheating aspect, there are other issues with this scene: Lan. Oh my god, brother? We see in 3x01 that Moiraine is still yearning for Siuan. She’s clearly not over her and isn’t emotionally in a good place. Lan basically even mentions indirectly how unhappy she seems. And yet, he suggests this as a solution? As if Moiraine is just going to forget 20+ years of Siuan because some random stranger flashes her tits? I’m so sick of the trope that sex is a magical fix for emotional distress after a breakup. And… Moiraine wasn’t even thinking in that direction until Lan put the idea in her head, which makes it feel even more forced and icky. His suggestion kinda boils down to “quit moping and get laid so we aren‘t that miserable anymore,” without any thought given to the emotional fallout.

Does he (or Moiraine) really think she’d truly feel better afterward? Has anyone who’s ever had rebound sex actually forgotten their ex because of it? Did it magically fix everything? Did it bring you lasting happiness? Or regret and even more pain? Anyway. His advice felt dismissive, and more broadly, the way the show treats cheating as something casual or insignificant is frustrating. (Honestly, this issue extends beyond Moiraine and Siuan. Rand/Egwene comes to mind, and Egwene deserved so much better as well).

And yes, maybe it was intended as a lighthearted, funny moment, just some banter between Lan and Moiraine. But for me, it’s an absolute flop and not cute at all. I hope we don’t actually see Moiraine cheating or anything like that, but even the implication alone already makes me mad and sad. If the show actually goes there, I don’t think if I can stand behind it.

And before anyone argues that maybe Moiraine and Siuan aren’t monogamous, or that Siuan wouldn’t care. Sure, we don’t know for certain. But based on what the show has told us about their relationship, all we’ve seen so far is a deep commitment, loyalty and resilience, at least up until 2x07. And if we’re going with the idea that wanderer!Moiraine can be off having casual sex with strangers while Siuan sits in the Tower, unable to do the same because of her position as the Amyrlin… well, that doesn’t sound like a very balanced dynamic to me.

Which brings me to another issue: Moiraine is off in the Waste, thinking about casually hooking up with some stranger, while Siuan is back at the Tower, dealing with absolute chaos? I saw other posts about how lonely Siuan seems, and I felt that. Imagine being in her position! I say it again; Imagine being in her position! She’s probably riddled with guilt and regret and hurting too (as we can see in her expressions in both 2x07 and 3x01, and in her conversation with the kiddos). But she’s got responsibilities, political turmoil and an entire broken Tower to manage. I’m pretty sure she’s not off checking out some other naked woman because, you know… she has business to handle and shit to deal with (as does Moiraine, actually). Idk, I just feel so sorry for Siuan. And again, if we assume they’re truly broken up and will try to reconcile later, Moiraine’s “one hour of happiness” would/could complicate things even more.

I also know that Tumblr is obsessed with Moiraine/Lanfear, which is another idea I don’t love and haven’t been quiet about. But honestly? I’d rate the sweat tent scene as even worse because that is happening in real-time. Moiraine isn’t dreaming, isn’t having a vision, isn’t being threatened or forced. She isn‘t even gaining knowledge or power or whatever by (considering) sleeping with that woman.

Moreover, the sweat tent scene rubs me the wrong way because I cannot see Moiraine‘s character behaving like this. Yes, she’s human and has needs, blah, but I personally just don’t see her doing this. All of it feels like such a loser move. Why does there have to be so much toxicity and awful tropes all the fucking time? Can’t we just have that one pairing that is loyal and loves each other? I know this is my hopeless romantic side speaking, but I’m just disappointed in this scene and how the show suddenly portrays Moiraine and the fishwives.

That being said, I do love how diverse the show is in its portrayal of different relationships and I do think that‘s great and beautiful, and I do embrace it! But when it comes to the fishwives? I personally can’t mentally go there. Sorry.

If you made it through my TED Talk, my condolences.

[coye]

A lot of endgame shippers, and shippers in general, get their dopamine rush not from actually enjoying their ships, but from harassing people who don’t ship their preferences. All they do is leech off the hard work of artist and writers in their communities and don’t contribute nothing of value in return. They’re not creators, not thinkers, and certainly not builders of community. They are purely consumers, people who take and take without ever giving back, except in the form of unnecessary hostility.

Instead of worrying about the content that exists for their ship, they fixate on starting fights, harassing others, and attempting to control how other people express their love for their ships. They think their ship’s canonicity gives them a sense of superiority, but canon has never stopped fandom spaces from thriving with alternative ideas, and it never will. They’re nothing more than leeches, feeding off what others create while draining the joy, the freedom and the creativity from the spaces they invade.

They’re not the gatekeepers of fandom or creativity; they’re just loud, directionless, and entirely incapable of building anything of their own. The only thing they add to fandom culture is unnecessary toxicity, which everyone could do without.

[orym-blossoms]

It's so funny how tumblr works that like. Everyone has a distorted idea of what "everyone" says or what "general opinion" is. And it's just not a thing that's possible to measure here. Which is great! I disagree with the idea that we should all have to put things we dislike on our dashes for "content diversity" or w/e. But that does mean everyone has to remember that our little tumblr bubble is a tiny slice of the even tinier piece of all engagement with the thing we like across everything.

[yarns-and-d20s]

I'm a fandom old.

I just left this comment on a Reddit post. Thought I'd drop it here. Just to have extra access to it.

I've been around the block in fandom. There's always been holier-than-thou types, but they were... tamer.

I started on the peripheries of fandom in the late 90s, and then I was in a fandom that didn't have fanworks. I got involved, fully, properly, at 18 years old, in 2000, in the Due South fandom. I have the very distinct honour of being the reason a separate mailing list, "Due South After Dark", had to be created. I wrote a fic that involved either handcuffs or a blindfold. Some people were SO OFFENDED by this tiny bit of mild kink that it caused an uproar.

But it was kind of just pearl clutching. I wasn't called a monster or suicide baited or anything like that. In fact, a lot of the offended parties didn't even talk directly to me, just around me and about the fic itself.

And that's the flavour that sort of stuck with a lot of fandom drama for years. The shipping wars of the early 2000s were shockingly tame, and there was also a lot of--to use an antiquated term--wank about slash shippers; the first time I saw the "fetishisation" accusations dating back all the way to the early/mid 2000s.

I do remember that there was a small contingent of Harry/Hermione shippers who accused Hermione/Ron shippers of liking "abuse" because Hermione and Ron bickered (not unlike Han and Leia or Elizabeth and Darcy). One of the big things is that a lot of this was not actually targeted. It was people pontificating on their LiveJournals without calling out anyone by name. Not that there wasn't a lot of arguments In the Comments(tm) and whatnot.

The first time I ever saw the term "SJW" was actually in fandom, some years before I started seeing it in "mainstream" online discourse. It was in the late 2000s, and it was used by left-leaning fanpeople against other left-leaning fanpeople. Right or wrong, it was a term levied against a certain type of, and I'm not going to beat around the bush, middle-class white woman in her late 20s and older. To be clear: fandom, especially when involving middle-class white women, has long had problems with racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. But this specific type of fan, the "SJW" type, held to their convictions so hard they would drive people out of fandom. This is when things started to get targeted. When individual fans would get called out not for behaviour (eg, MsScribe, Victoria Bitter) but for what they made. For their fic. One young person who wrote a thoroughly misguided SPN AU (I don't remember if it was RPF or FPF--she wrote the characters as aid workers in maybe Haiti?) was driven out of fandom over that one fic; there was no atoning for it. There was no ability to learn why she shouldn't have written it. She was just a monster.

I can see these threads all converging and leading to, for instance, the Voltron: Legendary Defender shipping nonsense and the demonisation of one pairing over the other on moral grounds. I can see it coming from the Due South ladies who were offended by handcuffs and/or a blindfold, from the Harry/Hermione shippers saying that Hermione/Ron shippers were okay with abuse, from the specific callouts by white women towards people who wrote things unthinkingly and out of ignorance without having the opportunity to make amends for their grievous misdeeds in fic.

I can see how it leads to this thing, where we have people telling folks to kill themselves because they like a pairing with a 5-year age gap. Saying it's immoral to ship two characters because one of them is "autistic-coded" and therefore a child even though the character is in their 20s, it doesn't matter, that's pedophilia somehow (hey, Critical Role fans). Painting people as monsters because of a video game where the main characters commit murder and cannibalism and incest and it's not the first two things that are a problem.

The antis make everyone out to just be monsters, even the people who don't even like the taboo and dark fics, they just don't believe in censorship, harassment, suicide baiting, etc, over fucking fanfic. It's become "with us or against us". It's... terrifying. Especially because it's targeted against oftentimes vulnerable people who don't have, say, studios and publishers and tons of money to keep them safe. They go after, y'know, AstarionsGirl292 and not George R R fucking Martin. Well, I think they went after Tamsyn Muir? But she ain't GRRM, is she?

It's a helpless feeling, seeing fandom get to this point. But I can untangle it. And it sucks.

[armageddon-is-light-after-dark]

Remember and respect what came before and even as you advance it further

@breakfastteatime , @sauntering-down, @yubsie , @serena-darrin , @othernaut and @onwallsjcfwrites

I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.

[cafeyote]

me and gang at the haunted house

[linklethehistorian]

Source

Transcript:

“BREAKING: A constitutional amendment has been filed allowing President Trump to seek a 3rd term in office.

"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice."

It was filed by Congressman Andy Ogles (R-TN).

Don’t let this slip by unnoticed. This is not just “one extra term”, it’s a warning shot. It’s a red flag. It’s an omen.

They are slowly turning up the heat in the pan. Do not be the frog who sits denying it’s getting hotter.

One extra term will become two, two will become three, and three will eventually give way to lifelong reign of each president.

Fight. Fight for God’s sake.

Contact your local representative of congress. Convince them we do not want this.

We are going to end up in a dictatorship.

@ikiyou

Please help spread this. I don’t usually get political and I don’t usually ask for assistance but this is important and you have more reach.

[trilliath]

Friendly coworker: "So how was your weekend? Do anything fun?"

Me, quietly closing forty tabs on world records for plank position holds, scarce radioactive mining resources, contemporary usage of giant parabolic satellite dishes, which exotic birds might coexist domestically with peacocks, names of mountains in Colorado that nobody really cares about, Chilean port cities and environmental disasters, how long it would take to bleed out internally from a severed renal artery, what comes after tertiary quaternary etc, what is niobium used for, latest advances in liquid sutures, global patterns for ocean shipping, what color does methane burn, and (relatedly) 50k fresh words of fic for a truly decade-stale ship: "Oh, you know, the usual."

[crimsoncold]

Ah yes when authors or creators totally fudge the execution of their story and/or view their character in a way that is not actually supported by the very content they have created...

Complex and flawed characters are often more interesting than ones that are "perfect," whether or not they get the opportunity for growth or change in the story. Anti heroes can be refreshing and more compelling than traditional heroes. Villains themselves can be extremely entertaining, and occasionally are the best part of a piece of media...

But the author and narrative needs to have some coherency in their understanding, treatment, or presentation of their characters.

(When I say this I don't mean an author should be expected to explicitly condemn their character or their character's actions ....that is where one's basic reading comprehension comes in)

But rather I mean that when a creator doesn't understand or has an incredibly inaccurate view of their character or their character's actions- one that is totally unsupported by their actual body of work- it becomes incredibly frustrating as a reader or viewer.

I start to become irritated with the story, suspect the author is incompetent as a storyteller/incapable of engaging with media (even their own) in a thoughtful in depth manner, lose faith in their ability to make an engaging well thought out narrative, and often no longer feel its worth my time to continue to watch or read their story.

Truly I'm fine with a narrative or character that an author purposefully makes and understands is dark/disturbing/monstrous/satirical/misleading or unreliable

... but please, please just give me anything other than an author sincerely (i.e. delusionally) presenting or believing something or someone is virtuous and good when everything in their body of work indicates they are really just awful...

(Being you know a typical reasonable person I posess the ability to analyze and separate the content/actions/words of fictional characters from the opinions and values of the author... and I can appreciate dark stories or character without feeling like it says something bad about my own morals and without requiring the author to justify their choices by either incorporating some sort of moral lesson or explicitly condemning/critiquing something within their work itself... e.g. I am still unapologetically a huge fan of hannibal (series) and hannigram- awesome dark show/dark pairing...)

or on the other end of this same scale (and another pet peeve of mine) when it's not the author or story with a disconnect but rather fans who are interpreting a character in a manner distinctly unlike how the story actually presents them.

Being totally in denial about the flaws/mistakes/darker aspects of a character, badly misinterpreting the author's story, rejecting or outright ignoring all the obvious canon evidence that their favorite character made a mistake/was in the wrong/or is much darker than they are willing to admit, or harassing fans whose interpretation/opinion does not match their own heavily biased one...

(Guys just accept/embrace a character's flaws or even their villainous aspects and enjoy whatever story or character you want to...you can like a fictional character without having to deliberately/inaccurately interpret them as always in the right or perfectly virtuous... you don't have to have/fabricate moral justifications to support you liking a character ... they are fictional characters ... you are free to like/appreciate/critique/dislike/or otherwise engage with characters... but they don't exist and their actions aren't real ...you don't need to purposefully bury your head in the sand or go to other extremes to defend someone/something that doesn't exist)

Here's the thing I keep trying to articulate and possibly failing: I don't actually mind characters who are terrible people. I have enjoyed many. What I mind is characters who are terrible people while the narrative keeps trying to say that they are wonderful, often contradicting what the narrative shows us, with no self awareness

[allisondraste]

Acknowledging that “critical thinking” means “thinking about things in a thorough way from different perspectives” and not “finding every flaw in a thing and fixating on it until all the joy is gone” is so liberating.

It’s supposed to be about intellectual curiosity, not about finding ways to devalue things that aren’t perfect or that we personally dislike.

[rovermcfly]

I think a lot of people are forgetting that on tumblr fandom used to be practiced very differently. now everyone fucks off to their discords or tumblr groups to discuss everything with a select few, making tags be nearly only used for posting some finished fanworks or not at all

a decade ago people didn't have tumblr groups. people didn't even have dms. if you wanted to talk to anyone about anything you had to make a post, or send an ask (which more often than not would get published and thereby become a post in the end too)

so next time you think "I have a fandom thought but I have to find a small group of hyperspecifically like-minded people to share it with in private" remember all the freaks you could be missing out on meeting by keeping the tags dead. use tags, make friends. fuck discord.

[witless-winion1]

Telemachus, crying that he finally gets to meet his dad: “For twenty years, I never could outgrow you”

Odysseus, the short king, also crying: son, you are several inches taller then I am

[orym-blossoms]

You know I truly miss the days before social media and ubiquitous convention panels when a story would end and everyone knew they were free to interpret it as it spoke to them and imagine what came next for themselves. Even if a creator agrees with me, I never actually need an answer to the questions media brings up.

Would be cool if maybe creators got to talk about process and fun behind-the-scenes anecdotes instead of having to fill in every question fans have. Fun fact: despite what school may have trained you to believe, not every question has a right answer. There is no prize for "being right".

[caitsgaptooth]

No, because what do you mean Arcane has completely rewritten the rulebook on queer representation in media, and it did it so effortlessly that it puts so many other shows to shame. Like, how are you going to tell me this animated series—ostensibly a spin-off of a video game—has given us some of the most nuanced, unapologetically powerful sapphic characters ever without reducing them to stereotypes, side plots, or, worse, trauma porn?

Vi and Caitlyn? Their dynamic is ELECTRIC. You’ve got Vi, the rough-edged, fiercely loyal, scrappy brawler with a tender side that could wreck anyone emotionally, and Caitlyn, the sharp, principled, deeply empathetic enforcer with a heart of gold. The way their relationship is built on mutual respect and trust while navigating all the insane, tragic chaos around them? Literal chef's kiss. And not once do we get the tired, lazy "coming out" narrative or the "but what about the gays?" rhetoric. Their queerness isn’t the story—it’s just a beautifully natural part of who they are. And THAT is revolutionary.

And let’s not even stop there. This show handles gender like it’s been waiting for everyone else to catch up. Characters like Sevika, who could give you chills with her sheer badassery and gender-nonconforming energy, exist unapologetically without the narrative ever feeling the need to spoon-feed us explanations. It’s just there, woven seamlessly into the fabric of the world.

So many shows claim to want to "normalize" queer relationships or push the envelope, but Arcane has quietly dominated the space by just writing characters who feel authentic. Their struggles are about class, power, loyalty, trauma, not token representation or forced diversity. This show said, “We’re just going to make some of the most layered, compelling characters you’ve ever seen—and oh yeah, some of them are gay. Keep up.”

Like, the bar wasn’t just raised—it was launched into the stratosphere. What do you mean this level of representation isn’t the norm yet? Arcane said, “We’re not asking for permission to exist. We’re just existing.” And that? That is art.