This was originally a reblog, but my internet connection dipped out as this amazing website was processing my post, so it never posted, and now I’m just making my own post.
This is my thoughts about the kids in fandom Discourse.
I really wonder how much of this “fandom should be by/for and prioritize kids” mode of thought is a product of the growing accessibility of the internet.
Like lots of kids throughout the ages, I was a preteen when I first found That show that pulled me towards wanting to make fanfiction and fanart. If it had been 2017, I likely would have started lurking on tumblr. However, it was 2003, and so the only internet community that I had the skills to access and participate in was a single forum on the official Nickelodeon website. A space designed to be exclusively for children.
A year later, I had discovered anime, and that meant no more safe, easily-accessed official forums. It meant leaving a neatly-manicured Kid Zone and venturing out into the Wild West of the wider early 2000’s internet. It meant Geocities sites connected by webrings, like stops on an ancient and haphazardly-mainted trade network. To run a website back then, you needed to know how to code at least somewhat, and you needed to know how to deal with web hosting services and build networks with other fansites. The people who knew how to do all of that were, by and large, adults in their mid-20’s and up.
Some of the people with the networking skills needed to maintain fansites had developed those skills writing and mailing zines, back in the dark days before public internet access. These people were even older.
Everyone knew that kids were getting into online fandom, too, of course. On websites, people used standardized citrus-themed content warnings for adult themes in their fanwork, and segregated more mature art and writing to separate pages from their all-ages-appropriate stuff. Even as a kid who quickly worked up the chutzpah to click through on a few of those spicy sour links, I appreciated the effort to help kids comfortably navigate fandom spaces primarily built by and for adults.
I really think that the number of younger people in online fandom increased as the skill levels needed to participate in it decreased. I remember discovering LiveJournal in high school, and feeling like I’d entered a bustling city after years of wandering desert paths from one village to another. There was so much of everything, all in one place. Now tumblr is filling that niche, serving as a hub for fandoms of all kinds, for better or worse.
It’s no surprise at all that kids are becoming more and more active in fandom communities: fandom is just one click away, on an internet that they’ve grown up with as a fact of life. But honestly, the age composition of fandom at large is probably the same as it’s been forever: adults in their 20’s and up. Adults still maintain the scaffolding of fandom communities: they’re the ones who organize and staff cons, produce zines, maintain large official fansites, and more. It’s even becoming more and more common for the adults who write, act in, and work on shows (and films, comics, etc) to also become active participants in fandom themselves. There are people working on shows right now as storyboard artists and writers who got picked up by studios because of their fanworks.
Fandom can contain designated kid-safe spaces, but fandom at large is far from a kids-only space, and demanding that it should be is short-sighted and unrealistic. And regardless of age, it’s up to everyone to guide their own consumption of content, and avoid stuff that they think is inappropriate or don’t want to see. We’re all in this together. Content creators put up warnings, and people heed those warnings, or don’t, at their own discretion. That’s my Hot Take.