A fannish reset
Apr. 10th, 2020 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12It's time for Day Nine of the fandom meme, and this one's a bit contentious:
I: Has online caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?
I assume that this means 'have other fans on the internet caused you to stop liking any fandoms?' These days, the answer is an emphatic no, as I try to adopt a more live and let live attitude to fandom in general, a decision made easier by my choice to leave Tumblr over a year ago. I haven't missed it, and in particular I haven't missed its lack of boundaries, hostility, and assumption of bad faith on the part of strangers.
The three fandoms I remember losing interest in in response to behaviour of fellow fans online were Teen Wolf, Inception, and Sleepy Hollow (TV). It's likely that I would have wandered away from all of them even if my sole engagement had been watching them and not participating in fandom at all, and in general I was a lurker in all three fandoms anyway. So my repulsion was due more to observing fan behaviour from afar than actually being the recipient of fannish vitriol (with the exception of a single incident in Sleepy Hollow fandom).
In all three fandoms, it was an assumption that there was one sole way to be fannish, one particular preferred character or ship that 'everyone' liked, combined with a vitriolic policing to ensure that anyone who didn't care for the character/ship that 'everyone' liked felt as unwelcome as possible. My problem?
I had zero interest in Stiles or Derek (Season 1 Scott and Allison were my favourite characters). I had zero interest in Arthur/Eames (and in fact the pushiness of Arthur/Eames fans put me off not just Inception but also Tom Hardy for a while). And while I loved Abbie and Ichabod, I also loved Katrina (or at least the potential of what her character could have been) and resented the implication that if I loved the former I must hate the latter and wish for her to become evil and be killed off, or, preferably, both. I got increasingly frustrated because not only the Tumblr side of fandom but also the meta-aggregating LJ/Dreamwidth side of things kept pushing all the characters and ships I was bored with and insisting that 'nobody' in the fandoms was interested in anything else.
It was actually my experiences with these fandoms that caused me to develop a much healthier attitude to fandom, other people's preferences, and the fact that my own preferences were extremely unlikely to align with the party line in megafandoms, and that trying to participate in those megafandoms was a pointless exercise that would lead to me feeling increasingly bitter and besieged. It also made me much more alert to attempts to impose a party line in fannish spaces ('no woman would enjoy a story like that!' 'all POC hate this character!' 'no queer person would ever feel represented by a story like that!'), and the fact that those attempts almost always leave someone feeling like their experiences have been dismissed and they have been erased.
Above all, it made me stop taking other fans' preferences as a kind of personal affront. Fandom is big enough for us all to coexist, but I don't have to constantly throw myself into fannish spaces where I know I'll be unhappy. I've stopped trying to connect with people over shared fandoms (when I do, I see it as a kind of lucky bonus) and spent more of my energy seeking out and maintaining friendships with people whose outlook, approach, and attitude to fandom is similar to my own, even if they're fannish about completely different stuff that I'm never likely to read or watch. And I've been much happier as a result.
J: Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over the internet.
K: What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?
L: Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves.
M: Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.
N: Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).
O: Choose a song at random, what ship does it remind you of?
P: Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).
Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.
R: Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?
S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon.
T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?
U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.
V: Which character do you relate to most?
W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.
X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.
Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?
Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!
I: Has online caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?
I assume that this means 'have other fans on the internet caused you to stop liking any fandoms?' These days, the answer is an emphatic no, as I try to adopt a more live and let live attitude to fandom in general, a decision made easier by my choice to leave Tumblr over a year ago. I haven't missed it, and in particular I haven't missed its lack of boundaries, hostility, and assumption of bad faith on the part of strangers.
The three fandoms I remember losing interest in in response to behaviour of fellow fans online were Teen Wolf, Inception, and Sleepy Hollow (TV). It's likely that I would have wandered away from all of them even if my sole engagement had been watching them and not participating in fandom at all, and in general I was a lurker in all three fandoms anyway. So my repulsion was due more to observing fan behaviour from afar than actually being the recipient of fannish vitriol (with the exception of a single incident in Sleepy Hollow fandom).
In all three fandoms, it was an assumption that there was one sole way to be fannish, one particular preferred character or ship that 'everyone' liked, combined with a vitriolic policing to ensure that anyone who didn't care for the character/ship that 'everyone' liked felt as unwelcome as possible. My problem?
I had zero interest in Stiles or Derek (Season 1 Scott and Allison were my favourite characters). I had zero interest in Arthur/Eames (and in fact the pushiness of Arthur/Eames fans put me off not just Inception but also Tom Hardy for a while). And while I loved Abbie and Ichabod, I also loved Katrina (or at least the potential of what her character could have been) and resented the implication that if I loved the former I must hate the latter and wish for her to become evil and be killed off, or, preferably, both. I got increasingly frustrated because not only the Tumblr side of fandom but also the meta-aggregating LJ/Dreamwidth side of things kept pushing all the characters and ships I was bored with and insisting that 'nobody' in the fandoms was interested in anything else.
It was actually my experiences with these fandoms that caused me to develop a much healthier attitude to fandom, other people's preferences, and the fact that my own preferences were extremely unlikely to align with the party line in megafandoms, and that trying to participate in those megafandoms was a pointless exercise that would lead to me feeling increasingly bitter and besieged. It also made me much more alert to attempts to impose a party line in fannish spaces ('no woman would enjoy a story like that!' 'all POC hate this character!' 'no queer person would ever feel represented by a story like that!'), and the fact that those attempts almost always leave someone feeling like their experiences have been dismissed and they have been erased.
Above all, it made me stop taking other fans' preferences as a kind of personal affront. Fandom is big enough for us all to coexist, but I don't have to constantly throw myself into fannish spaces where I know I'll be unhappy. I've stopped trying to connect with people over shared fandoms (when I do, I see it as a kind of lucky bonus) and spent more of my energy seeking out and maintaining friendships with people whose outlook, approach, and attitude to fandom is similar to my own, even if they're fannish about completely different stuff that I'm never likely to read or watch. And I've been much happier as a result.
J: Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over the internet.
K: What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?
L: Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves.
M: Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.
N: Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).
O: Choose a song at random, what ship does it remind you of?
P: Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).
Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.
R: Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?
S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon.
T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?
U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.
V: Which character do you relate to most?
W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.
X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.
Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?
Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!
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Date: 2020-04-10 09:01 pm (UTC)♥
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Date: 2020-04-11 09:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-10 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-11 09:19 am (UTC)To make matters worse, I masochistically read all the meta that got aggregated on one of the big meta comms here on Dreamwidth at the time, but misinterpreted what was actually going on. There was one person whose weekly recaps always got included in the meta comm's roundup of 'good quality' posts, and this person hated Scott with a level of vitriol I'd never seen before. So every recap read like 'and Scott abusively did such and such a thing, in an abusive, bullying manner.' I thought the comm was deliberately and constantly pushing this person's recaps as some kind of definitive statement of what Teen Wolf fandom felt about each week's episode, when in fact what was probably happening was the mods of the comm posting a link to recaps written by someone in their circle. Almost all the Teen Wolf meta included in that comm (which was multifannish, not just for Teen Wolf) was written by people who actively hated Scott, but I now realise that it reflected the circles and tastes of the mods, rather than it being a deliberate attempt to shut out alternative viewpoints.
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Date: 2020-04-18 11:49 am (UTC)Ugh yeah, that surely sounds like enforced mod bias. They probably pitched each other up continuously too. I will never understand how hating on this is considered a fun free time activity by some people.
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Date: 2020-04-19 09:09 am (UTC)