Is the current wave of anti discourse a significant shift in fandom culture?
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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 …..”