I see a lot of young-ish fans on Tumblr being uncomfortable with the idea of “old people” still being in fandom. Even episode 17 of One True Podcast, “Stomping On Each Other’s Lawns - Generational Divides in Fandom”, which was trying to have people from both sides of “the generation gap” actually had fans in their early 20s and late 20s and referred to the fact that there were even some people in their 40s and 50s kicking around tumblr–acknowledging older fans while implicitly claiming they’re much rarer than in reality.
There are plenty of very young people on tumblr. There are plenty of not-so-young people on tumblr. It’s quite a spread.
AO3 was proposed in 2007, almost a decade ago. The people who jumped on board to help build it initially were not primarily students. We were mostly adults with careers already; that’s what gave us the skills to take on a major project like that. A decade later, I am in my mid-30′s. Some are younger; many are much older.
There was that silly wank a while back about the X-Files supposedly being for teens the same way Buffy was marketed for younger people… only The X-Files was blatantly marketed for an adult demographic back in 1993 when it premiered. Twenty-something plus twenty-three years equals a fanbase in its late 40s. The venerable X-Files archive, Gossamer, was started by people who are now officially Old. Same with Fanfiction.net, MediaMiner, and all of the other great fandom infrastructure we’ve known and loved.
I hate that “The kids these days” shit. Young people are just as welcome in fandom as anyone else.
But I wish you guys wouldn’t sell yourselves short by thinking that you have to be ready to build AO3 when you’re a teenager and that you’re passé and must abandon all of your hobbies by 30.
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
Bolding for emphasis:
Mainstream media is already going to tell you that adult women are required to take care of other people’s children instead of taking care of ourselves. Culture is already going to tell you that old women can’t have fun or seek pleasure, that women in general are suspect and can’t be trusted to read “problematic” books without being brainwashed.
Fandom is here to tell you that other people’s kids can be your friends if you both choose it, but you’re nobody’s free therapist, nanny, or censorship board. Fandom is here to tell you that you can backbutton when you want, but you can also read what you want, even if it’s “bad”. Fandom is here to tell you that you can enjoy your hobbies for the next however many decades until they carry you out feet-first.
Deleting Your Livejournal: You Don't Have To Set Yourself On Fire On Your Way Out Of The Building
I’ve seen people reblogging a post that states
(1) LJ servers are now being housed in Russia and
(2) that “the Russian government now has access to private information on private citizens across the country, their interests, their views, their families” and
(3) and recommending that fans delete their LJ blogs and communities.
If you do reblog/post about deleting Livejournal accounts, please let people know they don’t have to delete wholesale - they can import their blogs and communities to Dreamwidth. I’ve seen too many people anguishing over the loss of their creations, the wonderful comments and feedback they’ve received, and their fandom history because they do not know they have choices.
So if you’re going to pass along a message of “FIRE!!!” , please point them towards the exits safely.
Fandom on tumblr is progressively making me feel older and older. Am I ridiculous for still thinking in "The Old Ways" of fandom as opposed to this huge, policing force that seems to be "Neo-Tumblr Fandom"???
Nah. One thing that speaking out against The Discourse has shown me is that there are many, many young people on tumblr who just want to ship what they ship and not be yelled at for stupid reasons. Some of them feel guilty about this and are relieved when a wizened crone like myself (over 30 and nearly dead) validates those feelings. Some of them already know those feelings are valid.
There are also many people on tumblr who used to be on LJ and who aren’t all that young. Some of them visibly think in The Old Ways. Some of them fully embrace the worst of the discourse because it’s an excuse to look righteous while fighting the same old ship wars as a decade or two ago.
Genuine interest in social justice has always been a thing in fandom. Douchey excuses for why my ship is great and yours is problematic have also always been a thing in fandom. The generation gap is smaller than it appears.
Is the current wave of anti discourse a significant shift in fandom culture?
“…
I don’t think it’s a significant shift in fandom culture…exactly. I think it’s mostly a thin veneer of SJ-washing on old fandom strife. I love my OTP and hate your OTP, so your OTP is problematic garbage while my ship is the only moral choice. I hate the female character that gets in the way of my OTP, but I can’t call her a bitchy cuntface because it’s 2016, so I’ll say she’s the white fave and something something abuse, or declare her a lesbian/asexual and come with pitchforks after anyone who ships her with a man, which is usually how she gets in the way of my (m/m or f/m) OTP. I hate fanfiction that doesn’t cater to my preferences, but I sound like an entitled asshole when I say it like that, so people who write fics I don’t like are problematic.
You can pretty much see the shift slowly taking over comms like FFR and F_W in the mid-00s. People still wanted to complain about the same things (your OTP is not my OTP, your favorite character is not my favorite character, your top/bottom preferences are not my top/bottom preferences, your characterization is not my characterization, your headcanon is not my headcanon, your genre preferences are not my genre preferences–fluff vs. angst, AU vs. canon, porn vs no porn, your fanwork quality is just kind of bad) but had too shift the language they used to air those grievances. You couldn’t just be bratty about fandom not doing the thing you wanted, the other side had to be bad people. Plus fandom tends to quickly self-segregate into cliques of people who like this vs. people who like that, and then you gain social points for being the brave person who stuck it to THE MAN who ships the other thing. It was a gradual thing.
What I think has changed is that fandom has become a more public activity, and a more mainstream activity. Instead of a few dozen people in mostly-friendslocked posts on LJ, who have Don’t Talk About Fandom as the first rule of fandom, you have several thousand people on tumblr, a public site with no privacy settings, as well as the creative team behind the canon. TPTB interacting with fans, retweeting/reblogging/liking fanworks, and even admitting they read fanfic is becoming more of a thing …..”
A sentiment I’ve seen going around a lot lately is that fanfic is predominantly slash. You see it in every “Why so much m/m?” rant and in most meta about AO3. I’ve heard versions of it on Fansplaining and much more blatantly and egregiously on One True Podcast.
But if you bother to look at FFN where shipping statistics are harder to generate, you see that het still outnumbers slash in most fandoms, and even the big slash fandoms often have more het than they do on AO3. If you look at Wattpad, Mary Sue/1D guys vastly outnumbers 1D slash. Twilight is a het juggernaut fandom, and it’s far from alone. It’s just AO3 where slash is king. That’s because AO3 was founded as a reaction to slash being less welcome elsewhere. AO3′s ship-centric structure that makes it so easy to get statistics you guys use to shit on slash was created because it was hard to search for slash on previous websites. Those sites were run by people who didn’t think it was important because they assumed most stories were the default, “normal” type: het. (Or, in many cases, “gen” with canon-ish plots with canon-level het content.) Complaining about AO3 being slash-heavy is tantamount to saying that people with similar tastes aren’t allowed to group themselves by those tastes. It’s saying that it’s not okay for there to be even one place where slash outnumbers other things.
It makes me angry that many of the big purveyors of meta in this day and age are so ignorant of recent fandom history that their arguments start from the blatant falsehood that most fic is slash. If most fic around you is slash, it’s because you’ve chosen to surround yourself with like-minded fans. Love AO3. Hate AO3. It’s up to you whether you use it at all. But don’t use it as a weapon just because you’re insecure about your own tastes or angry that nobody is spoon-feeding you longfic of your favorite ship.
This thought brought to you by marathoning a lot of old One True Podcast episodes while driving home for the holidays. (Seriously, guys, way to disrespect other fans.)
Next time you see someone’s meta starting from this assumption, call them on it.
Come you knights and come you pilots With your ships and sabers shining Come and stop your children’s crying Come and join the rebel queen
“Come Ye Knights,” by Sheila Willis, performed by Technical Difficulties
@sci-fantasy saw my plight and sent me a better-quality recording of this song, and I’m very grateful. Anyway, I’ve posted three version of this song now. It’s a good song, and it’s topically relevant.
Hello! How does Livejournal work? I don't quite understand it. Do you have individual profiles where you post your work and people go read it or...how do fandoms work on LJ? Thanks.
Each LJ account is a journal, just like each Tumblr account is a page of all of the stuff you’ve reblogged or posted. You could “friend” people, which made them show up in your “friends list”, which is like a Tumblr Dashboard.
Each account also automatically has a “profile” or “info” page. This is like the terribly underused profile pages on AO3 or like a Tumblr “about me” page or sidebar. The difference is that, on LJ, the page is always there whether you choose to do anything with it or not. In addition to whatever text the person has added about themselves, there’s also an “interests” section where you add site-wide tags. When somebody clicks on the tag for ‘slash’ or ‘meta’ or ‘vidding’ or whatever, they see a list of all of the accounts that have put that tag on their profile page.
Some people posted a lot of fic to their journals. I didn’t, and most of my f’list didn’t. More often, our posts were journal posts (how my day went, info about my new cat), meta about fandom, descriptions of whatever con or event we’d just been to, and that kind of thing. People also posted news: I found out about Yuletide that first year it ran from my whole f’list promoting it.
The big difference is that LJ posts cannot be reblogged. People respond in threaded comments discussions on the original post, which stays where it was originally posted, on that person’s LJ. Another difference is that tags on a specific post can only lead you to other posts on that same journal: If I’ve tagged my posts ‘meta’, and you’ve tagged posts in your own journal ‘meta’ also, there is no way to get a feed of both of those together. So, unlike Tumblr, if I want to tag all of my Poe stuff with ‘TFA’, those posts won’t get mixed in with The First Avenger or whatever else might use the abbreviation ‘TFA’.
LJ also has “friends lock”, so you can show different posts to different sets of people.
LJ communities are a different type of account: people with personal livejournals can post to a com, and it will show up in that com’s page but attributed to the original poster. Many fandom coms were mostly fic posts. Others might discuss canon or serve as newsletters linking to posts related to that fandom on other journals.
LJ’s features evolved over time. It eventually became easier to search for other fans and communities by interests and to search for posts by text they contained. The search got worse again in recent years after some Russian drama. But, overall, LJ was never very easy to search, and I never thought it was a good place to post fic. During the LJ years, I did a lot of my fic reading on archives: Fanfiction.net, Mediaminer.org, the old Yuletide archive (before it was imported to AO3), FictionAlley, Slash Cotillion, etc.
LJ did feature a lot of embedded art, but its native image hosting capabilities were a late addition. LJ fandom is much more about text than art/visuals. Some people are very happy about the move to Tumblr because their favorite thing is fan art, and that’s king on Tumblr. Other people miss the threaded discussions of LJ and don’t like how meta has all but disappeared on Tumblr.
Dreamwidth (DW) is similar to LJ. There have been other LJ clones that were important to fandom, like Insanejournal and Journalfen. Both LJ and DW are still somewhat active, though nothing like LJ was at its prime.
If you’re asking how fans found each other, most of my LJ friends are people who made interesting comments on the posts of other people I already knew. Some are people I found through communities for our shared fandoms. Some I found by looking at my friends info pages–which show who else you have friended–and checking out all of the journals listed. A lot were also people I knew prior to LJ from mailing lists and archives, and some were people I met in person at conventions or at school.
LJ was THE place to post fic for slash fandoms between its popularization and the release of the AO3. Single-fandom and single-topic archives existed, but weren’t always easy to use and usually had a bar to entry (you have to submit your fic to a human being before it would be posted). Fanfiction.net went through several purges of adult content. So if you were writing stuff that was “edgy” or even sexually explicit, LJ was the place to be. Fandom- and pairing-specific fic communities had elaborate tagging systems to find stories within the comm; if you wanted to get into a fandom, you’d search the interests for the active communities. LJ was also where most fanwork events like exchanges and big bangs were hosted.
Because there’s no reblog feature on LJ, people would often post links to other posts they found interesting. There was a whole ecosystem of newsletter-type blogs that would aggregate links to all the meta and fics posted in a fandom on a regular basis. And no global tag search meant that a lot of different sub-fandoms could thrive in their own networks without seeing each others’ posts. If no one had friended you, no one would find your posts or care if they existed, so some of the shit-stirring would go down in anonymous comments to posts that people were actually reading.
Watching that Leonard Nimoy documentary on Netflix and they actually mention slash fic and art but not in a like ew gross way. They let George Takei explain why it’s important to the lgbtq+ community, and Nimoy’s son even calls the fan vid he saw compelling.
I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with
my friend Britta, who was working at the time as community manager for
Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the
bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate
tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output
along a bewildering number of dimensions. If you wanted to read a
3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it
seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but
not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate
combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably
write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about
folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative
editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of
friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.
There is no God, life has no meaning, it’s all over when you can’t search on the slash character.
Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written
requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only
goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I
could not believe what I was seeing.
The transcription of his talk is amazing, everyone who has an interest in fandom and platforms and the way we interact with the sites we use should read it.
(As someone who ran a fandom newsletter at the time of the Great Delicious Disaster, this guy saved my fucking life - so much of that process was automated in Greasemonkey and independent user scripts, and after Delicious shit the pot we were able to move it over to Pinboard with relatively little issue. And then newsletters and LJ fandom in general went away relatively quickly, but that’s a different story. The point is, this dude was amazing when fandom needed someone to be amazing for us.)
But man, I feel like his talk should be required reading for anyone who runs an online platform that attracts fandom, or wants to attract fandom, or really just wants to foster community.
In my foolishness I asked, “Could you make me a list of those features? I’ll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement.”
Now that’s old fandom resource right there. I found it when I was about 13 and just getting into slashfic. I must have read that site so many times.
I’m glad it’s been preserved. It’s so hard to keep things on the internet once the creators aren’t maintaining them any more. A physical object persists until it’s destroyed but data can just… vanish. Abruptly and without warning.
look, fandom as a whole certainly has its own built-in biases and problems that need to be addressed
but like
every so often i think about all of the deep, nurturing lifelong friendships that only ever happened because one day two internet strangers were like ‘oh hey, we agree on which fictional characters should kiss!’
people who are right now helping each other survive via connections they initially forged by liking the same sailor moon girl or something
the internet is a goddamn garbage pit but it is also a goddamn miracle
