Friday open thread: ask me anything

[dolorosa_12]

Hello, and welcome to the end of another working week! I hope the first week of February has been kind to you.

This week's Friday open thread is inspired by the snowflake_challenge friending meme: given I've subscribed to a bunch of new people, and a bunch of new people have subscribed to me, I felt it would be nice, rather than doing a new introduction post, to instead offer a space for more general questions. With that in mind, the topic of this week's Friday open thread is: ask me anything! Is there something you'd like to know, or something you'd like me to talk more about?

As a starting point if you have no idea what to ask, my intro post is up-to-date in terms of who I am, my fannish interests, and general approach to Dreamwidth and internet community. My fic is on AO3: Dolorosa. 'the via dolorosa' is the tag I use in posts talking about my day-to-day life, if you want an overview of things that have been happening to me recently (although there are hundreds of these posts, so be warned).

If you don't want to ask me anything, please do feel free to use the comments to tell me something if you feel you'd like me to know about it.

Comments

[dolorosa_12]

I think it's a bit of a mix of both, to be honest. Once I'm fannish about something, those feelings tend to remain forever, even if I'm not actively thinking about the canon or producing fanworks/meta etc about it — it's more as if my feelings are a like a tap that can be turned on or off at any moment. As I was an intensely bookish child, the first things I felt fannish about were books, and a lot of those early books/series are things that I'm still fannish about, more than twenty years later, and any new books/series that sparked those feelings simply got added to the fannish list.

However, in terms of fandom as a group activity, I think I was scared off megafandoms (or even just medium popular fandoms) by negative experiences in the brief period I tried to do fandom on Tumblr. There were moments when I briefly dipped my toes into things like MCU, Star Wars sequel trilogy, and Teen Wolf fandoms (as well as stuff like Sleepy Hollow, which was briefly very popular, but not on the same level as the others), found them to just be full of wank, drama and thin-skinned people who would fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, and backed away slowly. (I found the dying days of Livejournal-based megafandoms such as Inception to be similarly offputting — I was initially interested, then realised that I didn't ship the juggernaut and would be constantly surrounded by this assumption that everyone was in the fandom due to shipping the juggernaut pairing, and decided I wanted no part of that.)

In contrast, my experience being in small book fandoms, whether on message boards/forums, Livejournal, Tumblr, or here on Dreamwidth, has always been consistently wonderful. People tend to be calmer, more accepting of people being into different pairings/characters, and because there are so few of us, and every fanwork is greeted happily (rather than people ignoring/being annoyed by fic focusing on characters they don't like or pairings they don't ship). And although fanworks by their nature are going to get less engagement than something in a megafandom (for example my most highly kudosed work only has 144 kudos, and some of my other fic only has 2 or 3 kudos — but it's also only been read 10 times or so), it's also not at any risk of being drowned out by a deluge of other fic in that fandom/for that pairing or whatever: anyone who wants to read that fic is going to see it, even if that's just ten people.

So since I realised that (for all the above reasons) I find small book fandoms much more fun, I've consciously chosen them, and deliberately avoided participating in bigger fandoms.

[charlottenewtons]

That's interesting, thank you for such an in depth answer! I definitely share your aversion to megafandoms, they do tend to be wanky and overwhelming in terms of fanworks to sort through.