Re: ‘lol what the fuck are the right reasons?’
I can’t reblog halfhardtorock’s earlier post about ancient 25-year-old fandom baddies, so here we go.
There’s five or six items on this list that are conflating ‘fandom elder’ with ‘any trend OP dislikes,'like the idea that they’re responsible for perpetuating racism/sexism/fetishism/etc. For instance, as an older Star Wars fan, people treat Padme a lot better now than they did in 2005.
I obviously don’t speak for everyone, say, 25 and older in fandom, as we’re not a monolith, but a lot of the other things listed here boil down to things OP thinks are icky to some degree, and is thus incredulous that people would bother to defend them so hard. The original post also balks at the idea that old people in fandom have anything valuable to say, and/or that they’re too high faluting for the newest generation to listen to or take seriously, to the degree that I think some people hear 'fandom history’ and immediately decides to tune out because it’s akin to 'fake news.’ Still, this is a large part of why elders are so seemingly hellbent on protecting ~problematic content. We set up careful boundaries, like the tagging system on AO3 or in kink memes, precisely so it’s more difficult for some wayward youth to accidentally happen upon anything they aren’t ready/willing/legally supposed to see.
Fandom elders are quick to “well, actually” blanket posts on Tumblr about how gross they are for shipping what often gets incorrectly termed incest or pedophilia, for whatever reason (wanting to explore a personal kink from a safe/fictional distance, as a coping mechanism, as a writing exercise). This is because they remember incidences like predecessors to AO3 being shut down randomly, often for vague, unsubstantiated reasons - LiveJournal communities, Geocities websites dedicated to 'slash.’ Again, most of the claims of pedophiliac/incestual content in fandom aren’t adhering to a legal definition of these words at all, but they make people take notice, which makes it easier for them to be shamed/silenced. A lot of written content, even involving actual underage fictional characters, is protected by free speech laws besides, at least in the U.S.
Fandom veterans also work to shut down wank about these things quickly because, in a lot of cases, we’ve done this song-and-dance before. It’s an old meme. We can often sense when an argument is going to devolve into or even started as morality bashing than a substantial, logical point being made, or when someone is there to argue purely for the sake of arguing and has no actual end-game or plan to concede or compromise. Words like SJW and dogpiling and shaming cater to keeping this from happening. It sounds very dramatic, to be sure, but after all, it’s not the 30-year-old Voltron fans on Tumblr going out of their way to harass people.
Again, I am only one person, but my experiences and observations of fandom trends makes me fairly confident that people writing naughty fanfiction on the Internet aren’t going out of their way to groom minors for, um, I’m not even sure? Writing their own erotic fanfiction (which a LOT of us did, probably before having actual intercourse, in many cases, because we felt safe)? A lot of modern morality policing in fandom implies that a 17-year-old finding a kinky slash fanfic and reading it needs to be infantilized and protected. And they are, somewhat, by tagging systems and specifically marked archives that largely exist because when fandom elders were teenagers themselves, they thought it was important to create things like these for both organization and safety purposes, because we wanted a place to explore things of a sexual/erotic nature without being preyed upon or having our intentions demonized, and I would argue that we at least nominally succeeded. It’s surreal to see all that effort now being used as a jumping off point for trying to eliminate that same content, forcing it 'underground’ once more, until the cycle begins anew.
My phone ate the first couple paragraphs of my initial reply, and I feel like it sounded better there. Oh well.