Tag: fandom wank

themardia:

One thing I’ve been seeing a lot on Tumblr from older fans is the notion that fandom is wankier/more toxic on Tumblr than it ever was during the supposed good old days on LJ/DW and man–that is just not true. The current wanks are different in that they’re co-opting social justice language and have a weird focus on “purity” or whatever, but ship wars have been happening since literally FOREVER (check the old school Harry Potter fandom, or the Ray Wars in Due South, or literally every major fandom that has ever existed).

People in fandom have always been insanely over the top about their ships. What’s happening now is that we’re not able to f-lock and stick to our own corners the way we did before. So, for example, if I’m a fan of Spock/Uhura in Star Trek AOS, if I go out on Tumblr and search by that pairing tag, I’m just as likely to see awful racist garbage as I am to see a nice piece of fanart to reblog. So yeah, that is a mess–but it’s a mess based in the structure of the platform we’re using, not because the good old fandom days were filled with people that were just INHERENTLY more tolerant and “nicer” than current fans are today.

I’m just really suspicious and wary of the nostalgia for the good old days of fandom, because I think that it’s not only inaccurate, it completely dismisses the progress that has been made in fandom since. You know what we didn’t have back then? A widely accepted content warnings system for triggering content. Open discussion of racism/sexism/homophobia in fandom and fic, and how we can and should be doing better. The good old days a) weren’t that good to begin with and b) you can’t try and bring back the stuff you liked without also acknowledging the parts of fandom that were awful.

I’m not one to usually comment on stuff like this. But I would like to offer a possible, reasonable reason as to why this nostalgia exists.

It’s deeper than secondhand embarrasment. It’s deeper than complaining. Adults in fandom are quite literally tired and scared. And for good reason.

Before I go into the TD;LR version of it all, I’d like to acknowledge that my opinion on big fandom events of old is not the same experience as someone say, 35, or even up to higher ages if we are talking groundbreading, decades old fandoms like Star Trek. The “old fandom days” that people usually feel nostalgia over are the 2000s. In the time I first joined online fandom in that era, I was only in my early teens. My experiences were not that of older fans who might have witnessed bigger battles than I did, though I have read about them in the past tense. (Parts of Potter fic stolen and published, the Anne Rice debacle, etc.) I do also know of the uncomfortable undertones of old taboo fandom, and how old “warnings” from back then were homophobic and much more.

(TD;LR) BUT, I stick to my take: it IS still worse now. It is absolutely still worse now, even taking into account the problems from before.

In fandom now?

People being bullied to suicide is commonplace.

Actors, writers, and producers getting death threats is commonplace.

Putting needles into cookies of a fanartist? Literal, honest to god, attempted murder??? is something that gets lost in the mix of “hot takes.”

Some artists fear posting their work now. Because it’s so easy for some rabid fan to get ahold of their personal info and try to get their life stolen away from them, fired from their job, or worse.

Loss of livelihood, expensive costumes ruined by rabid fans (P5 debacle), suicide baiting, gore spamming, literally getting young children on video saying that a ship is p*edophilla to make a point, and again, actual attempted murder… ARE more than objectively worse than a few websites getting shut down and a couple people getting sued.

And as an adult in fandom, I do miss the way it was when I was young. And I feel with the current climate, that shouldn’t be surprising at all.