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.