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.

[isis]

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

Oh, how I wish!

[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.

[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.

[auroracloud]

Yes, yes and yes to all those fandom wishes!

[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.

[geckoholic]

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

[wheatear]

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