Wishful thinking

[dolorosa_12]

I'm back at work, I feel like I've been run over by a bus, but the fandom meme continues. Day Fourteen is:

N: Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

I think I've established in the past thirteen entries here that I'm happy to kind of go my own way and tend my own fannish garden, cultivating the kinds of spaces and fannish behaviour/activity I want to see, even if it means sticking to fandoms-of-one and prioritising friendships with people whose attitudes and approach to fandom match mine (rather than the specific things they are fannish about).

If I could wave a magic wand and ask for three things in fandom as a whole, they would be these:

An abandonment of the idea of shipping as activism. In general what I'd like to see is an assumption of earnest good faith on the part of other fans. Being interested in different characters, ships, fandoms, tropes or fanworks to you should not be taken as a personal attack or a deliberate attempt to deprive you of the content you want to see. Likewise, if content is tagged appropriately, the responsibility to curate their own experience should be that of individual fans, not the creators of content that those fans would prefer not to see.

For fans to stop reaching out to actors, writers, showrunners etc to rope them into shipwars and other fannish arguments or make them aware of fanworks. If those people deliberately seek out fanworks and fan spaces, fine, but seeing fans tag actors into their shipping arguments on Twitter fills me with secondhand embarrassment.

A return to Dreamwidth and other asynchronous, text-based platforms as the primary fandom spaces.

None of these things are going to happen, because all of them go against the direction that fandom has been heading for the past ten or so years, but nothing in today's prompt said that my three wishes had to be realistic!


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!

Comments

[naye]

If I found a magic lamp with a WISHES FOR FANDOM sign on it I would hand it to you because you've got this.

Honestly, all those three sound wonderful. I am particularly wistful about the third - I'm currently in a fandom that is very active on Dreamwidth and it is so, so lovely (we've gotten people from Twitter to get on Dreamwidth, how amazing is that?), but I know it's a weird little fandom bubble and I miss when longform was the norm.

[dolorosa_12]

You got people on Twitter to move onto Dreamwidth? I salute you: that is astonishing.

I'm not saying that Dreamwidth (or spaces like it) were free of hostility and drama when they were the primary fannish spaces (*gestures at the entirety of Fandom Wank*). But I do think when things happen at a slower speed, it stops things blowing up into a complete frenzy immediately.

I'm of the opinion that if all three of my fannish wishes were implemented simultaneously it would do a lot to make fandom as a whole at lot calmer and more pleasant. It's the speed, immediacy (to actors/showrunners/writers, and to fans with opposing points of view) and sense of everyone being in a single space (whether that's Twitter or Tumblr) rather than off in our own little corners in comms, forums, or people's individual blogs that have combined to inflame things and create a more poisonous atmosphere.

(As an aside, can I also say how much I appreciate your comments on my posts for this meme. It's so nice to have someone engaging so thoughtfully with what I have to say!)

[naye]

You got people on Twitter to move onto Dreamwidth? I salute you: that is astonishing.
I mean it's not like they've given up on Twitter, but one person found the longform useful for the kind of stuff they wanted to share, and a few others just heard there was Guardian stuff happening here and so got accounts. :D

But I do think when things happen at a slower speed, it stops things blowing up into a complete frenzy immediately.
That and you can't quote-retweet with someone's out-of-context comment starting a dogpile of "look how wrong this person is let's cancel them". Which is a scenario that's very easy to imagine with Twitter. (In fact, I hear a fandom many of my friends are in is having one of those rounds of wank where people stop writing to avoid getting targeted...)

But yeah, it's not that this wouldn't be happening if not for Twitter, but that it's so much faster to drum up sides in a culture war and interact with people you don't know at all in a hostile way. Dreamwidth has such good measures to protect against that - on Twitter all you can do is go full lockdown, there's no inbetween like with the filters and circles and everything that we have here.

And I really enjoy your fandom meme posts! I'm of a mind to try it myself, but I'm so terribly scattered and unfocused just now that I'm not sure I could commit to a series of posts.

[kore]

Yeah, plus global tags on both Twitter and Tumblr make it very easy to swarm someone, or to hijack a fandom's tag. I first saw that happen with Elementary and it was just awful.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, I remember that situation with Elementary as well. I think any system which throws everyone's posts/content into a single stream and relies on individual people sifting through it to find what they want is doomed to failure. People are not capable of handling a space in which all their content is, in a sense, public and so easily shared with strangers. At least in spaces like LJ, Dreamwidth, and forums it required slightly more effort — you had to deliberately post a link, and if people wanted to engage with the original poster they would have to go back to that poster's space, rather than simply clicking 'reblog'.

[falena]

Where do I sign up to have your version of fandom become the norm? ;)

I especially would love for #3 to become real.

[dolorosa_12]

As I say, it's wishful thinking! I do my best to try to build and be part of that kind of community here, and I'm happy with my little corner here, but it would be nice if it were the norm, as you say.

[isis]

A return to Dreamwidth and other asynchronous, text-based platforms as the primary fandom spaces

Oh, how I wish!

[dolorosa_12]

I think a lot of people here wish for that, judging by the response this post has received!

[kore]

A return to Dreamwidth and other asynchronous, text-based platforms as the primary fandom spaces.

YES, GOD, THIS.

I can never understand why most of text fandom went to Tumblr, and then it was even worse when text based fandom -- again! -- followed visual artists to Twitter. TWITTER. And both Tumblr and Twitter are horrible for visual artists anyway!

....AND THEN, somehow the Tumblr refugees who didn't like Twitter went to Discord. I just kinda gave up on trying to keep in step with fandom at that point. I'm a dinosaur, clearly.

[falena]

This so much. We can be dinosaurs together, clearly. :P

[dolorosa_12]

See, back when I was hanging out on fan forums rather than LJ, my main forum also had an IRC channel where the cluster of about thirty of us for whom the forum was our main social life hung out, so I do have some experience of fannish spaces being chatrooms. But I just don't have time for that now — the period in which that group of people most heavily used IRC was when most of us ranged in age from about 15 to our early 20s — i.e. we were in high school, university, or just starting out in our first jobs, and had a lot of time on our hands. This was also pre-smartphones, so to be in the IRC chatroom a person had to make an explicit, deliberate choice to be there, have switched on their computer, and have an internet connection. Whereas now a person could dip in and out of Discord, Tumblr, Twitter etc all day on their phone, with constant notifications. It would really stress me out!

I think the move to Tumblr was driven by a lot of things: the ease with which image hosting and uploading was possible (vs the clunky workarounds we had to make use of to post images to LJ or forums or whatever), the fact that it could be used as an app rather than solely as a web-based space, and, to be quite honest, the fact that a person could use it, gain a following and group of friends without having to post a single bit of original content of any kind — merely click the reblog button.

This last one is really crucial, and I think it's done a lot to ramp up the toxicity in fandom. Before, a person had to actually contribute something, expend some effort in putting some form of content in fannish spaces — even if that content was simply short comments on other people's fanworks/posts, aggregating links and posting roundups of other people's meta or fic or whatever. If a person lurked, it would be unlikely that they made friends or gained any recognition. Sure, there were notorious blowups and arguments, but they required participants to put text to screen to make them happen.

Whereas with the move to Tumblr, all that could be done with the click of a single button — no need to expend any more effort than that. And if a person had a large following, all they'd need to do is click reblog and encourage their followers to descend on whoever they took issue with.

Like you, I kind of gave up on those spaces. In my eight years on Tumblr I think I made two friends — everyone else I engaged with on that space was someone I knew already through forums, LJ/Dreamwidth, or real life. I'm happier just hanging out here in the kind of community that works for me, rather than trying to follow the fannish herd.

[monanotlisa]

Ah, preach it, sister:

"A return to Dreamwidth and other asynchronous, text-based platforms as the primary fandom spaces."

It's easier for those of us with depression and anxiety -- me! -- to manage microblogging, but for myriad reasons it's not the same, and this is my true home.

[dolorosa_12]

Whereas in my experience, Twitter and Tumblr massively exacerbated my anxiety, to the point that I left Tumblr entirely, and have gone through periods where I avoid Twitter, often for three or four months at a time.

To me they feel like everyone screaming at each other at the same time, in the same room, constantly.

I can see why all different kinds of online platforms exacerbate mental health problems, though, depending on people's personal situations.

[auroracloud]

Yes, yes and yes to all those fandom wishes!

[dolorosa_12]

They certainly seem to have resonated with a lot of my Dreamwidth friends here!

[thawrecka]

Shipping as activism has caused so many stupid problems in fandom that I often find it actively aggravating to think about. Oh, how I wish it would go away.

[dolorosa_12]

I mean, it's not like there weren't ridiculous shipwars back in the day where both sides used the silliest reasoning to justify why their ship was superior, but shipping as activism takes that to a whole other level.

If people were just more honest and prepared to state that they shipped something because they found it hot, narratively interesting, or fit their usual trope/characterisation preferences, or that they identified with one or both of the characters,we'd all be a lot happier. But because so many people feel that's not enough justification for their shipping preferences, we're in this mess.

[geckoholic]

Don't have much to say here, just that I agree SO HARD with all three points.

[dolorosa_12]

As you can see from all the other comments here, you are far from alone — among my Dreamwidth friends at least, these sentiments seem to be widely shared.

[wheatear]

Co-signed. All three of those sound great, especially fandom being on Dreamwidth. It's my favourite place to be.

[dolorosa_12]

It's just great, isn't it?

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that so many people on Dreamwidth really love Dreamwidth, but it has been cheering to see how much this post resonates with people.