#thoughts on fandom

[0junemeatcleaver0]

with everything going on with doja cat, i'm now finally starting to see people discuss the parasocial relationships that fans have with celebrities in a slightly more holistic way. which is great!

and we've started to see regular people becoming more and more disillusioned with influencer culture, which is also great!

but i think maybe it's time to bridge the gap between the two topics and finally start talking about the weird parasocial relationships some fans have with other fan creators.

large fandom blogs are run by normal people. people who are allowed to have their own opinions and block people they find annoying and being just normal people with regular lives, they don't always have time to speak to every single person who interacts with their blog.

it's cool to be inspired by other people's fic and meta, but to rewrite someone fanfic because it's not to your taste or to lift every non-canonical idea from someone's meta post and use it as an outline for your fic is just...entitlement, frankly.

like, it is so fucking weird to me to view fan creators (whether they're bnfs or not) as just vending machines for attention or ideas. get a grip.

[trilliath]

i'm old enough to know better than to care about ship wars but it honestly is kindof hilarious to be back in a fandom where there's a full war going to the point that people are writing full violence fics against each other's ships and hacking actors socials to put words in their mouths. like it's so genuinely stupid but like. still funny.

[hellcheer-heaven]

Hello, sorry that this is going to sound so preachy and stupid, but I just want to send out a message. Also nothing happened to me, I just want to state something.

I know this blog focuses on all things Hellcheer and so far it’s been a good experience here on tumblr amongst friends and fellow peers. While I do very much love Chrissy x Eddie, I just want to say that even if you don’t ship them, that’s okay. If you want Eddie to be with someone else, that’s okay. If you want Chrissy to be with someone else, that’s okay. If you would rather have them as friends only, that’s okay. If you rather have Chrissy x reader or Eddie x reader, that’s okay. If neither of them are supposed to be together, that’s okay.

It’s a beautiful thing that so many fans can express themselves and their love for their favorite characters and/or ships in this fandom. Regardless of the manner and medium, I truly do find the creativity absolutely fantastic. The love is there and you all do a marvelous job of showing it, however you chose to.

Disagreements will come up, I can’t and won’t pretend that they don’t exist. Just know that I’m happy to see your work and listen to your ideas.

I just wish we could all be a little nicer to each other and to ourselves. Nothing good comes from spreading rumors, fighting (amongst others and within our own groups), or harboring animosity.

Regardless if you’ve been in the fandom since the very beginning, a couple seasons later, or even in the past few months/days, please know that you are welcomed here.

It’s okay if you disagree with some or everything that I’ve written here. I don’t know what anyone else has gone through and I won’t pretend to know. If I could hug you through the screen, I would.

I know it’s easier said than done, but I really do think that we are all capable of growth.

[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.

[applecidersstuff]

Percy Jackson is against bullying.

He is however very sad that neither Annabeth, Clarrise or Drew had met Octavian in camp Jupiter, because as much as he frowns on it he would pay any kind of money to see those three tear him a new one for acting like a little bitch he is.

[frownyalfred]

I’m using ao3 the way god intended: via 36 open semi-abandoned tabs on my phone at 2 AM the night before work

[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

[mroddmod]

they are like puppies. 2 me

[dianartemiss]

IDK have some clearer thoughts on tagging since i've bitched about it a lot lately.

I think it's a good thing that ao3 and tumblr have made tagging commonplace and mainstream and an accepted part of the community.

Not to be old, but I was reading on FFN when you could 'tag' two characters only and with no indication of whether they were a ship or not. You could only put your fic into one fandom. Every option was preset and summaries were very limited in length.

I was also reading on personal sites, fandom/ship specific sites, livejournal, yahoo groups, media miner (which was another ffn-esque hosting site), adultfanfiction.net, and kind of anywhere else there was fic. It was basically the wild west and everyone did things different and you just kind of had to do a lot of guess work and hope that people would include relevant things in the summaries and that you correctly understood which ship or whatever else they were meaning.

In a lot of ways if was good for building up a robust tolerance for weird shit. People have literally always written weird af stuff and it's never going to stop. I have run head first into fics that included but were not limited to: beastiality, watersports, cannibalism, pedophilia (literally not like what antis scream about now), necrophilia, rape, and one memorable instance of sex with a tree (lube not included) with no warnings whatsoever.

And my main thought is "Some of y'all want to go back to that? Why?". It was so hard to find anything. I know it sounds like I only appreciate tagging for exclusionary reasons but no. I do not miss looking for crossovers and having to run the search so many times for each iteration of how anyone could have possibly made an acronym. Or searching for individual character names or other hopeful keywords or anything else. It was like looking for a blade of grass in a haystack.

As a reader, yeah it is my own responsibility to look out for my own triggers and manage my expectations. I had to chill out and learn some new fandom cultural norms. If an author is wanting to avoid spoilers, I get it, do your thing and I will be cautious accordingly.

But if that's not the case. If I'm doing my part to use the filters and avoid things and not be a dick, it would be nice if authors would tag their work and do so in such a way that they're actually useful and part of the system. It's a kindness to readers and more pragmatically, it helps get the work in front of the people who want to read it.

[trilliath]

you know what’s so much fun? getting comments on something you wrote like 10 years ago and the commenter is like “oooh this chapter - the mysterious missing books, the thing X character said, gosh I wonder what’s coming next!” and you’re like... fuck dude me too? I have genuinely no idea what happens next in that story, I don’t remember it anymore.

[a-taupe-fox]

I've complained about this before but SERIOUSLY.

What is the fucking OBSESSION with ANY even a TEENY bit older character chiding younger characters for swearing?

and it's ALWAYS the same it's just "Language!"

And it NEVER makes ANY fucking sense!!!! In canon, the older character

A.) DOES NOT CARE.

B.) ALSO FUCKING CURSES.

WHY DOES THIS FANDOM OBSESSION EXIST AND WHY IS IT FUCKING EVERYWHERE.

Like. If your teenage character has had to help stop an apocalypse or super-powered serial killer or something, like.

I think there are way more important things to care about than if they use the fuck word or not.

(And having older characters care is usually hypocritical, not supported by canon, distracting from the actual point of the scene, and also not funny, if it's somehow meant to be a joke.)

[booksandpaperss]

sometimes u just gotta write the most cliche self indulgent fanfic u can think of. for your health

[red-room-studi0]

HOLY FUCK I JUST NOTICED THIS-

This was probably REALLY obvious but like- I had not seen anyone point this out yet. This is such a cool detail that I never noticed till now.

[incandescent-mushroom]

House has definitely sent Wilson a dick pic or several but he sends them by email because they are both old men and the titles are things like ‘URGENT: please identify if lung cancer’ or ‘patient biopsy results - respond ASAP’ so that Wilson’s guilt complex makes him feel obligated to open each one just in case someone’s life is actually on the line