thorduna:
ohfreckle:
So what, are you planning on becoming a boring old fart with no hobbies or interests? Without us “old people” you wouldn’t even know what fanfiction is.
hoooooly balls
no offence to young talents (and i use this word for a reason - young writers might surely have talent, but not experience) but i’d like to see anon enjoy a fandom where all the fic was produced strictly by 15 yr olds
and the irony of this being a reaction to a post/piece of history that clearly shows who are the people that kickstarted fandom as we know it today.. wow
Okay wow.
I think a lot of younger fans have no idea what fandom was like before the internet. Sure, you probably hear stories, and not to make “I walked fifteen miles both ways uphill to read my fanfic and I LIKED IT” sort of statements, but y’all realize that if it weren’t for the people who had come before, fandom wouldn’t be here, not in the incarnation it is now, not something that belongs to and is created by fans who exercise a fair amount of freedom to remix and re-imagine and rebuild the worlds we love, right?
When you talk to older fans, you’re most often talking to women who might have been the only woman in the fan spaces they had access to, who traveled to conventions or found ways to exchange letters in the regular mail with other fans. You’re talking to people who had to bring their fic to the copy shop and print it out and mail it, who risked printers refusing to print it, who risked things getting damaged or destroyed.
You’re talking about people who fought to get their slashfic printed. Actually fought, had shouting matches, received threats, had manuscripts destroyed in malice, because it wasn’t acceptable then, in so many ways.
You’re talking to people who, when the internet was still in its primordial state, risked C&D letters from companies and creators who tried to protect their copyrights with the most iron of fists, who saw every fan creation as an assault.
Again, you’re talking to people who fought, who moved from web host to web host as the people hosting their servers were threatened with lawsuits.
These are things that happened, and, what, you’re saying the people who lived and fought to make fandom what it is today, to make it a space where people can talk about and write and draw more or less anything they want and find other people who want it to didn’t live their lives valuably?
They gave you this. They fought sexism and homophobia and draconian ideas about rights. They traveled miles and spent their own money for this.
I’m not yet an Old Fan, but I’m not a Young Fan either, and I’m so fucking grateful to every fan who came before me for creating the place where I can do the things I love and be myself and where my experiences in fandom are respected by my colleagues and the people I care about.
These are the people you should be asking to tell you all about their lives, to share their experiences; these are the people you should be learning from and absorbing as much as you can from if they’re generous enough to share. These are the people who can give us hope that even though we’re still fighting a lot of things, like companies who’ve now realized our value trying to capitalize unfairly on the work of fan artists, like continued sexist and anti-queer attitudes prevail and how they reflect on people’s attitudes toward fanwork and its value.
If you’re telling someone to get a life, if you don’t think a life in and of fandom is valuable, you’ve fallen for those lies; you’re discounting not only their value, but your own value as a fan.
Don’t let them do that.
AS OLD AS DIRT AND PROUD OF IT.
