fandom history + now; queer history + now @diskblorp - Tumblr Blog

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Poll about reasons why fandom is "quieter" these days: https://www.tumblr.com/memorizingthedigitsofpi/819055973575589888/there-are-lots-of-reasons-why-fandom-is-quieter

I'm amused that there's no option for "rose-tinted glasses" or even "other".

I feel like I'm forever posting about Baby's Second Fandom problems. Maybe it's my age or how long I've been in fandom, but it seems like I'm constantly tripping over toxic nostalgia, and this poll is yet one more example. The poll itself isn't toxic in the sense of being rude to other fans or anything like that, but it betrays a mindset that is generally not great for the people who hold it.

Fandom isn't quieter now.

LJ went the way of the dodo, and a cohort of "LJ was the golden age of fandom" people continue to cry about this. Since I'm the right age and was on LJ, I know tons of such people, and they show up on every single one of my "LJ was not the peak of fandom" posts to reminisce about how it was totally the peak of fandom and everyone agrees. Ah, LJ! Those were the days!

Tumblr is now where LJ was a decade or more ago, and I'm seeing more and more tumblr era fans choosing to be sad old fogeys prematurely.

It's certainly true that 2026 tumblr doesn't feel identical to 2012 tumblr even taking out the personal element, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how much tumblr has hung on post porn ban, even bouncing back a little as twitter shit the bed multiple times.

But I look at those poll options and just sigh. Discords are hard to know anything about from the outside, and there are negative aspects to that format, sure... But mailing lists were siloed. Invite-only LJ coms were siloed, and there were far more of these than people remember. Some of the old fic archives did not have open account creation.

It goes much deeper than places that one couldn't freely make an account on too. Even at the height of people thinking fandom=LJ or tumblr=fandom, it wasn't so. There are whole other parallel worlds that I never knew about at the time and only found out about a decade+ later when the quizilla tweens ended up on AO3 in college or whatever. Quizilla was huge. I could have been there. I just wasn't. I was on FFN at the beginning but left in the early 00s. Whole eras of FFN culture sprang up without me knowing about them. Even now, I see LJ slashers going "Wait? I thought everyone left FFN back in the day?" on a post that lays out just how much this isn't so.

Baby's Second Fandom problems can be a midlife crisis or they can be literally your second fandom.

Fandom wasn't that easy to find in the past. Even in an era where it's easier to hear of it, it's not always that easy to really get into it beyond reading a few fics on a site and doing zero interacting. People tend to enter fandom in meaningful way when they happen to like the hot flavor of the moment and when they're in a phase of life where they have the right mindset and level of free time for that.

It could be that they're in college and super excited about their favorite show. It could also be that they're terribly depressed, stuck in bed with a broken leg, and fic on the internet is the one bright point in their day. I'd say the positive version is more common overall because one needs energy, but the other one exists too.

I'm often into less popular things, but I found fandom properly by liking The X-Files just as it was majorly taking off. I learned to actually like and use tumblr in the thirty seconds during which I actually liked Sherlock. There simply wasn't anything here for me before that. Suddenly, everything was for me... even if Superwholock was extremely not.

One's first fandom or one's first fandom era or one's first platform teaches one how to be this type of fannish as a general response to media. I like canon in a particular way, so I want fic of it. I like canon like this, so I want meta of the fanworks fandom variety. etc.

Time passes.

One gets into some other media. Maybe it's also the flavor of the moment. Maybe one is lucky for a whole decade. But eventually, one falls in love with something else. This new Fandom (or ship or subset of a fandom) of One's Heart is not popular. There's next to no fic. Nobody writes analysis. Nobody cares. Or maybe it's just that nobody cares on this platform in the vocabulary and mode one expects.

The response is often that Fandom is Dying and/or that one's new fandom/ship/blorbo was robbed, robbed I say! But the reference point is a glowing memory of the peak of Sherlock fandom or one's experience shipping Harry/Draco. "Where are the ship-specific fic exchanges?" Except almost no ships ever get those, even fairly popular ships. "Where is the LJ com?" Except it's 2016 or 2026, and LJ coms aren't how we organize ourselves anymore.

Ye olde Media Fandom zine people did a round of this.

LJ fandom did a round of this.

Tumblr fandom is currently doing a round of this.

But just like with sharks, you have a choice: swim or die.

No one is denying that enshittification has hit many online hangouts, but there are always ways around that. Some of the AO3 forks have quite social and active communities—or so I've been told by the people making them the centerpiece of their current fannish activity. There are ways to find discords just like there were ways to find mailing lists back in the day. You can even start your own discord. You can't be excluded from the party if you're the one hosting it. One could start a curation tumblr that reblogs the important content from an active fandom even now in 2026. Sure, it would be a lot of work, but running a fandom newsletter was also a lot of work in 2006.

At the moment, I'm reading my way through a bunch of danmei webnovels plenty of other nerds read five or ten years ago. I'm still working my way through the sprawling tentacle monster that is DMBJ and its many adaptations. I'm finally getting around to the Thai BL dramas I didn't make time for until now.

Every time I post about these things, their many fans leave positive comments. Maybe I'm not hitting them at the moment they were most excited about that thing, but lots of people enjoy revisiting via someone else's keysmash-y liveblog. They can come up with at least some comments and ways to interact.

For that matter, I got a reblog on that Bad Girls vid from someone who liked it back in the day.

Other people eventually got around to Beyond Evil. I get an occasional n00b to Miami Vice finding my ancient posts.

In some ways, the most fun is when you yourself feel young and positive and full of energy (regardless of actual age) and you're into the latest hot thing while all of your friends also are. I had a brief stint in BTS fandom like this where all of my offline friends were in the same fandom for once.

That's the outlier. Even if you just chase BNF authors from juggernaut ship to juggernaut ship, your other friends may not. Some friends will peel off as we change platforms. This is just how things work.

Fandom isn't quiet. My old friends from X time and place are.

Fic feedback isn't dead. You're just not in any hot fandoms right now.

It's the same song and dance any time a cohort ages out of the honeymoon phase with fandom or out of their initial juggernaut ship where they were well fed and into a more typical fandom experience where they have to go make new friends or hunt around to see what everyone else is watching or where fans are chatting these days.

The reason I'm forever rewriting my rants about this is that I think understanding the pattern makes it a lot easier to proactively look for fun or to choose to sit this round out or to decide to become that BNF who makes a small-but-live fandom happen.

Giving in to this It's Quiet Now mindset means being mired in toxic nostalgia, sounding like a grumpy and out-of-touch fogey even to other fans of your same era. They might tell you "Hey, the cool discord's over here!" if you sounded fun. You do not sound fun.

For what it's worth, looking at all AO3 works in English posted this year, here are some active fandoms. If a person feels like everything is too quiet, surely at least one of these has some actual community somewhere and not just fanworks (and is also not morally objectionable/the wrong genre/a canon format you hate):

Original Work (60161)

Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (42519)

Stranger Things (TV 2016) (33991)

Heated Rivalry (TV) (32720)

僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) (27328)

Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid (17166)

Batman - All Media Types (16941)

呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Anime & Manga) (16820)

The Pitt (TV) (16677)

原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game) (16114)

Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon) (14427)

Marvel Cinematic Universe (12253)

Stray Kids (Band) (10812)

Formula 1 RPF (9594)

Naruto (Anime & Manga) (9453)

One Piece (Anime & Manga) (9087)

Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse) (8819)

Star Wars - All Media Types (8543)

방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS (8475)

文豪ストレイドッグス | Bungou Stray Dogs (8431)

9-1-1 (TV) (8209)

The Amazing Digital Circus (Web Series) (7783)

Supernatural (TV 2005) (7317)

崩坏：星穹铁道 | Honkai: Star Rail (Video Game) (7196)

Project Hail Mary (2026) (6868)

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin (6803)

Cookie Run (Video Game) (6536)

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (TV) (6396)

Forsaken (Roblox) (6163)

Arcane: League of Legends (Cartoon 2021) (5771)

If you've never been into Asian media, maybe now's the time.

If you normally don't pay attention to RPF, maybe all of the many AUs in kpop fandom will appeal where more real life-ish RPF does not.

If you just fundamentally hate animation and can't go there, there are still plenty of live action canons getting fic.

Feeling exhausted and alone happens. It's just not a reflection of Fandom™ being quiet now or tumblr being dead or any of the things people normally blame.

It's some combination of one's personal circumstances that need to be addressed outside of fandom and one's unwillingness to check out wherever the action is instead of crying that it isn't delivered to us for the exact thing we already like in the exact format and location we already know.

We all have the power to fix this for ourselves. It just may require hosting the party or being willing to try new things.

blackheartbiohazards

➡️ Content warnings on fiction are a courtesy.

➡️ Not every medium of fiction and storytelling has or is expected to have content warnings or extensive tagging.

➡️ Print novels do not traditionally warn for content in any way.

➡️ Until AO3 came along, fanfiction did not traditionally warn for content in any significant way.

➡️ An author is only obligated to warn for content to the degree mandated by the format they publish their fiction on.

➡️ Content warnings beyond the minimum are a courtesy, not an obligation.

➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is a valid tag that authors are allowed to use on AO3. It means there could be anything in there and you have accepted the risk. 'May contain peanuts!'

➡️ Writers are allowed to use 'Creator chose not to warn' for any reason, including to maintain surprise and avoid spoilers.

➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is not the same thing as 'no archive warnings apply'.

➡️ It is your responsibility to protect yourself and close a book, or hit the back button if you find something in fiction that you're reading that upsets you.

➡️ You are responsible for protecting yourself from fiction that causes you discomfort.

traegorn

So there's a post going around complaining about American Imperialism and Pride, blaming queer Americans for other countries doing Pride stuff in June.

And I've chosen not to reblog it for a lot of reasons.

First off, it's blaming American Queer people for making Pride "international." This ignores the history of the movement. The whole reason it's called "Pride" comes from the people who were celebrating the anniversary of Stonewall. The reason this term (and the June date in some places) was adopted in other cities in the US, let alone countries, was as a show of solidarity as a movement. This was a choice made by marginalized people in those other places, and not an act of "imperialism." While this was starting, we were fighting to have any kind of "Pride" events in the US to begin with.

The OP says that they're in aotearoa, and claims their pride should be in July, not June, because they earned their rights. They acknowledge that the official pride months in New Zealand (which differ by state) are in February and March -- but it misses the god damn point.

Pride isn't about having won anything. No one won any rights at Stonewall, nor was any historic legislation passed that day.

It was a god damned riot.

Pride is about the fight. It's about the day we decided to fight back.

Pride is about celebrating our ability to fight for our own existence.

If you don't want to celebrate it in June? Fine. I genuinely don't care when you choose to celebrate the fight -- I just care that you're fighting and I'm happy to stand alongside you. If you think people need to learn more about queer history in your country too? Awesome. I'd love to learn it. Share some resources or try teaching us.

But this weird attitude that it's somehow American Queer people's fault that your own community decided to adopt the anniversary of a riot in the US is just insane to me. They chose it to show solidarity, because when we fight for us, we're fighting for you too and vice versa. Especially in a year when American Queer people are fighting for their lives more than they've had to for a long time with the attacks on the Trans community, it feels pretty fucked up to equate those getting stepped on by the boot with the boot itself.

And maybe that poster is just young and hasn't thought about it. Maybe they're just frustrated that their nation's own queer history isn't more widely known. But this is also the exact kind of thing that gets fed into communities like this one in an attempt to divide it.

Don't fucking fall for it.

artemis-the-wolf-fiend

Also, Pride is a particular response to Western forms of queerphobia. It's incredibly important to recognize that other countries have their own queer histories but need Pride to challenge the US imperialism that shaped global queerphobia.

I often see people complaining about LGBTQIA+ discourse being adopted in other countries as well, and it's the same issue. That language is a particular response to Western oppressions that have been spread through imperialism. A non-US nation using those terms isn't US queer people imperializing them, it's them choosing to use specific language to challenge the impact of US imperialism.

(Also, the very idea of countries and nations is itself Western, so saying that a nation-state needs to exist entirely within its own historical context and not respond to imperialism is an oxymoronic erasure of that imperialism)

traegorn

So people have dug up the comment threads on that year old post I was referring to with this post, and they've decided to piss all over the poor in the new responses to my comments from a year ago.

So instead of engaging with people who can't be bothered to go through a whole thread and would rather write fanfic about what I wrote so they can argue against whatever strawman they've constructed.

The idea that a marginalized community having international solidarity at some point is "imperialism" is so ridiculous. Their own people adopted these things on their own. If you'd rather not... then don't? Stonewall UK named itself that because the British people who started it chose that name. No American asked them to.

That isn't imperialism. It's chosen community. But people with no understanding of queer history have decided to focus their own hatred of the American system against the people that system exploits too. It's like the so-called-leftists who think marginalized people in red states deserve what happens to them.

They started with the conclusion, and care more about who they hate than who they help. Nuance is fucking dead.

dykextraordinaire

everyone get more sex positive and resist the rise of conservatism and purity culture NOW!!!! i am so tired of seeing “queer” people shame others for expressing themselves sexually, for looking down on SWers, for insisting that sex is somehow devoid of meaning or emotionless, for implying that desiring sex is somehow dirty or abnormal. respectability politics is bullshit. you’re not morally superior and straight/cis people will not accept you no matter how badly you want them to. and guess what? the most vulnerable populations get hurt by this rhetoric. SWers, trans folks, queer black folks, queer indigenous folks, queer folks of color. please decolonize your mind. queer sexual freedom IS a form of resistance and a form of joy, and if you don’t understand that then you don’t understand your history.

biracy

Women jacking off to gay male porn became slightly mainstream knowledge for maybe a month and now it's all pushback. Now everyone's gotta come up with some reason it's actually unfeminist to jack off to gay porn (when described with distain the terms will always be "fujoing out" and "yaoi" which is probably fine). Acting like anyone needs to be told "actually it's fine to NOT think ur boyfriend doing faggot shit is hot" like literally anyone needs to be told that. Normalize monogamy. Let women be feminine. Et cetera

dovesndecay

Microaggressions against polyamory in interpersonal interactions are important and should be discussed, but I do wish more of the conversation focused on the ways that systemic amatonormativity impact things like family units, taxes, healthcare, inheritances, housing, childcare, etc.

I'm not dating or married or related to anyone I live with, and our household of four adults can't get any kind of financial or food or housing aid because we count as three separate households despite our semi-blended finances and living together for a decade. There are laws that have been proposed (at least, I don't know if any passed) that limit housing to nuclear families.

Amatonormativity and polyphobia are not just theoretical "people are kinda mean about this sometimes" -- they are real and materially impactful systemic issues, and they affect all of us.

makingqueerhistory

“The Surprise of a Knight,” the first known queer “stag film,” shows how gender, sexuality and desire have always been fluid

Waugh recalls, on his first watch, being “delighted by the unexpectedness of this glimpse into [the lead character’s] world,” and he’s drawn conclusions about this onscreen heroine after careful study. “She was a trans sex worker, obviously,” he says, “very beautiful and very much in possession of herself. The film is very frank about her fucking, as well as her costume performance and the revelation. I think there were a few rare glimpses of trans characters [in stag films], but this was unique.”

makingqueerhistory

The #Ownvoices discourse has done a lot of harm in the queer community. Queer authors have been pressured to come out before they are ready, and people who may never have the opportunity to publicly discuss their own identity are discouraged from exploring queerness in their art. As if exploring queerness through art isn't meaningful and important no matter the public identity of the artist.

Also it is absolutely ridiculous to think that we can deem a work from a country where queerness is illegal less legitimate because the author has not chosen to publicly disclosed their identity. Authors who were forced to hide their names because of government crack downs on queer art have been questioned for not being openly #Ownvoices.

I'm passionate because I have experience with this issue. I was questioned as to whether I could write about trans people, while I had been out as genderfluid in my personal relationships for years. I just didn't think it was a strangers business. If not for pressure from outsiders, I may have had a better experience coming out on my own terms, but some of y'all ruined that for me.

#Ownvoices is useful as a marketing term for the people who want to use it, but it is not the barrier art must cross to be deemed "queer enough".

bk-poetry

Announcing Fanfiction.lol !

hey all! i've built a new ao3 fork called fanfiction.lol 🤙🏽 key differences:

🚫 no invite queue: sign up and start posting immediately. no waiting, no velvet rope.

🏳️‍🌈 expanded content warnings: added ableism, homophobia/transphobia, racism, rpf and more. plus relationship tags for aro/ace spectrum, qpr, non-binary/genderqueer focus, poly/ensemble, and more.

🏷️ all tags are canonical: everything you tag goes into the searchable record. no volunteer wrangling bottleneck.

💜 fandom-agnostic moderation: i care about the writing, not fandom politics or discourse. write whatever you want, tag it honestly.

it's a small personal project but fan communities deserve independent infrastructure.

if you enjoy fandom, i'd love for you to sign up and poke around. tell me what breaks. the source code is at source.tube/brennan/fanfiction.lol.

find me at brennan.day/accounts or email [email protected].

write whatever the hell you want! 💜

bk-poetry

More Information

Hi, I wanted to add some more info about fanfic.lol based on some replies. I was trying to keep the original post short and have done write-ups elsewhere but I'll reiterate here.

The admin/webmaster: I'm Brennan! I'm a Queer Red River Métis writer and webdev and huge advocate for the IndieWeb. You can get to know to me on my site, brennan.day

I made this for fun, and it's running using a homelab server in my basement. I don't make money or anything else. I'm just doing it for the love of ball.

fanfic.lol is meant to be a small, independent alternative for fanfic and fandom that prioritizes joy and fun. No aims at trying to replace AO3!

I am anti-genAI and so is the site. You can read more about my stance on AI here.

Archive warnings, like everything else, are under construction! I do have to adhere to the laws of my country (Canada). Please be patient.

I am pushing straight to production, which is to say the entire site could explode at anytime, so please do not use it as the only place you put things! :)

I forsee only a handful of people using this site, it def isn't for everyone. If you don't like it that's okay! Whether you want to give me input or just ignore it entirely.

I did a longer write-up here. Thank you everyone for the kind, warm reception of my silly little project. <3

olderthannetfic

I love the longer write-up. It gives me a much better sense of where you're coming from and why people should trust you—or which users would be a good fit.

I was there for the start of AO3, and we really did think we were going to usher in the next age of archives a la eFiction. It took too long for AO3's code to be in that kind of shape and the internet changed radically around us. We did not mean to create a behemoth. We just wanted venture capital bros to stop disrespecting us.

As a side note, all the comments you're getting like "There already is a fanfiction website. Wtf" are exactly what people said about AO3/OTW in 2007. There was a ton of bitching about us stealing FFN's idea. (Never mind that there were older archives.) There were frequent complaints about how there was already "an archive" and we didn't need another. Most of that discussion got deleted when FFN decided to nuke all of its inactive social spaces one Thanksgiving weekend while nobody was around to object or save their data. But I was there and I remember it and it sounded exactly like these comments now.

The oldschool core of AO3 was into the age of archives. We liked there being lots of different little spaces run by different fans. It's nice to see that energy floating around in 2026. Go indieweb!

I wish you a hundred invested users who want to form a community and nobody else.

snakussy

havent checked it out personally yet but just a super important note that since op says hes obeying canadian laws:

canadian laws are very different then most countries, ergo, if you want to post underage/gruesome stuff, it would be safer for op if you posted on that on ao3 instead. obscenity laws do in fact exist here and op get in legal trouble depending on what you post. so you know, be nice to op.

someone already asked op "is dead dove and proship content allowed here" and he said "yes if its legal" but didn't clarify what that meant, but basically in canada its

"if it can be interpreted as obscene, you can get in trouble"

so while you can get away with sfw content of lets say an adult/minor, it can bring things into outright illegal territories if you make it nsfw. but its not JUST that. our obscenity laws ALSO apply to violent sexual horror. so if your kink is lets say, woundfucking, a person can get op in legal trouble for hosting it, even if everything is all consensual.

people don't often get in trouble for obscenity laws because its So Much Effort, but from a hosting perspective thats different. a user posting content on ao3 isn't really gonna get tracked down, but a canadian hosting a website could be.

in conclusion: make sure to check out your kinks on canadian law sites before you do anything here. genuinely a nice project, just be careful for ops sake

olderthannetfic

Yup. Good point. That's something to look out for in most archives, whether from owner preference or local laws. I'd say the US is more of an outlier than Canada; we just exert an undue influence on internet culture.

A return to an Age of Archives means reading the rules of each more carefully. There used to be a lot more variability, not just because of laws but also in terms of focus.

In general, if you post a lot of underage, violent kink or noncon, AO3 is probably going to remain the right choice for hosting. A number of countries, not just Canada, go after a lot of things in text that the US does not.

I want to emphasize that this isn't a stance on OP's part any more than AO3 having to comply with US trade embargoes represents AO3 staff's personal opinions on Cubans. This is just the reality of running a site.

cheaphalloweencostume

“be gay do crime! but sex is yucky and crime is wrong!” ass website

rebellum

Kinda wild how the concept of emotional labour changed from

"people have to hide their emotions to perform specific types of labour where their apparent emotions influence another person's. Eg. Flight attendants have to be cheerful all the time, so that passengers feel welcome and safe. This suppression and masking of emotion can cause a sense of disconnect within the individual where they dont know what their true feelings are. This is part of the Marxist idea of alienation from labour and from the self."

"If you ask me to care about you or listen to your problems, youre being toxic."

queeranarchism

It's worth taking a look at how we got here.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term in 1983, specifically describing it as emotional performance required by a worker for a job. This alienates the worker from their own feelings. The expected emotion can be care, joy, etc. but it can also be harshness or simply the expectation to not show your real emotions in the workplace.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild also coined the term 'the second shift' in 1989. describing how in families where a man and a woman both have a job, the woman is often still expected to do all the child raising and house cleaning, meaning she is carrying a double workload.

Already in 1983 (before coining the term 'second shift' but already developing the concept), Hochschild herself connected the two ideas, writing: "In a typical nuclear family unit, it is thought that women become responsible for much of the emotional labor by default, meaning they are responsible for shaping and managing the family’s feelings." So we have the person who coined the term, immediately after coining the term, also using emotional labor to describe unpaid household work! This is part of the term since its inception!

Around 2015 the term gained a lot of popularity and began to be more broadly applied. Some things that are, according to Hochschild, NOT emotional labor include:

Doing physical chores around the house

Doing mental chores like remembering birthdays

Hochschild: "if we talk about all the unpaid labor women do in the home as “emotional labor,” we’re insinuating that any kind of labor that falls most often to a woman is “emotional.” Like chores are just labor. Writing Christmas cards is just labor."

Also not emotional labour:

Expressing genuine emotions that you feel

Doing things that make other people feel better

Hochschild emphasizes that doing things to positively impact other people's emotions isn't 'emotional labor'. Managing and suppressing your own emotions is. That's where the alienation that is central to emotional labor comes in: it's alienation from your own feelings.

It's also essential that there must be an expectation on the person to do this. Hiding your real feelings by choice isn't emotional labor. As with emotional labor in the workplace, non-caring emotions and suppression of emotions typically expected of men are included. So when a wife expects her husband to suppress his pain and not cry in front of the children, that is an example of emotional labor. So to summarize, emotional labor according to Hochschild doesn't have to always be paid labor, but it does always involve:

The management of your own emotions

Alienation from your real emotions, as a result of being forced to perform other emotions.

Pressure/expectation, there are negative consequences if you don't do the performance.

There is a system, (the workplace, genderroles, etc) shaping these expectations, putting specific expectations on categories of people.

Finally, Hochschild never said that emotional labor shouldn't exist or that it doesn't have a function. In the workplace and out of it, emotional labor can achieve important things. The nurse that uplifts the patient and the parent that comfort their child might both be hiding their real feelings and that itself is not bad. The problem is the pressure to do this labor when you dont want to, the lack of acknowledgement of this labour and óf its potential for alienation, and the division of this labour according to gendered expectations.

animentality

postilionstruckbylightning

People really need to take a wider view of this paranoia about age gaps and realise this is how we lose the ability to build communities. You need to be able to realise that people can have things in common with you even if they grew up in a different time/place/culture. You also need to realise you can build communities with people who don’t have obvious things in common with you, that people can have the same goals and needs as you even if in most ways they’re very unlike you. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to work together to have any chance to stand ip against the few who have so, so much more power, money and influence than any of us do individually. We need to form communities that reach across age (and class and race and sexuality and so on…).

firawren

This is one of those topics I feel very strongly about and agree completely with the points in this post.

I struggle to make fandom friends on Tumblr, and sometimes I worry that it is because people in their 20s think they can't be friends with someone in their 40s. That I'm uncool, weird, cringe, intimidating, or just too different from them.

But things don't change as much with age as most think. Older people still are silly, awkward, overwhelmed, enthusiastic, confused, playful, irresponsible, obsessive, dumb, cool, horny, and all these other things young people think we stop feeling or being as we get older. We're just humans. I am really great friends with someone on here more than 20 years younger than me because we have so much in common! You can't tell that we're different ages when we chat.

And also—you can be friends with people who you do NOT have much in common with! Because fundamentally, you always have humanity in common.

Years ago, there was this lady in my community who was maybe 30 years older than me and who I knew was far more conservative than me. I dismissed her as someone I didn't want to spend any time with because she was obviously too different than me. But, I was forced to spend some time with her (long story), and guess what? I became really good friends with her! Because I found out I was wrong about all those things that made her different than me? NO! I was right about that—she was just as annoyingly conservative as I had suspected. BUT that wasn't the whole of her person. She was so much richer than that. There were lots of things I didn't know about her. A few of those things were commonalities, but overall, we still didn't have much in common—but that didn't matter. We could still be kind to each other, help each other, respect each other, even enjoy each other's company if we stuck to topics where we didn't clash too badly. I feel really bad for judging her, and I'm so glad I gave her a chance.

So yes, please make friends with people who are not your same age. You probably have more in common than you think, and even if you don't, that doesn't matter. We're all humans and we need each other. Our communities need us to get along.

delphinidin4

I'm 40. My bestie is in her early 60s. We met in 2014 on tumblr thru fandom. make inter-generational friends!!! <3

naamahdarling

The constant framing of an older person interacting with a younger person as something with clearly predatory intent is a huge part of the problem. Learn to spot actual grooming behavior and patterns, don't substitute a difference in age for your actual judgment. This pedojacketing shit has to stop. We were not meant to stick to only socializing with people within two years of our own age. That is not how you have a functioning society.

Also, we built these sites and all the source material for your fandoms. Stop acting like it's weird for us to be in our own damn houses. Learn to talk to people older than you. Go learn to quilt.

kitsnicket

I don’t like this actually

kitsnicket

This is depressing does anyone else find this depressing

olderthannetfic

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/817668699351924736/it-makes-me-sad-but-sometimes-i-feel-like-fic

regarding your reply, was there ever a time when people appreciated fanwriters more than fanartists? i've been in fandom for over a decade now and i feel like there's always been more interest, appreciation and praise for illustrative works vs written ones

*cackling*

Yes, fucking all of Livejournal fandom and mailing list fandom and Usenet fandom before that.

There were routine complaints about how much art got treated as fic illustration or a reward to The Real Backbone of Fandom (i.e. BNF writers) at best.

There also was and is a whole tier of discussion around how the most technically proficient fan art might get more praise than the best novel-length fic, but Baby's First Fic gets encouragement, while technically wonky art gets derisive "My eyes!" "Uncanny valley!" responses, leading to writers feeling able to practice and improve within the social space while artists are expected to spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus or not be seen at all.

Whether this is true everywhere is beside the point: the discussion has been constant for at least forty years and probably many more.

The technological capabilities and emphasis of a platform does a lot to promote one sort of content over another. Even just looking at the written word, snappy one-liners do well on tumblr but they do really well in microblogging spaces that don't allow long content. Conventional wisdom is that tumblr doesn't like long-ass text posts... I invite anyone who actually thinks that to look at how many notes I get. How a site is designed matters.

OTW used to get a lot of complaints about how it was 99% fic-centric and maybe 1% vid-centric while not giving a fuck about drawing and painting type fan art, which is reflective of who built it (BNF authors who are also vidders).

You might be thinking "Um, but it's a fic archive...", but it was never envisioned as fic-exclusive any more than the other archives of the day were completely fic-exclusive. That was the effect of the difficulty of getting a project off the ground and of the unconscious priorities of the people at the helm. In that culture, "fandom" = fic+. The plus also mattered, but it was something on the side. Fandom=fic. Period. That's the definition of fandom. Maybe people wouldn't have stated it that baldly, but that was the assumption underlying a lot of their discussions of fandom itself.

Even anglophone anime fandom back in ye olde days produced a lot of fic and was less intensely art-focused than I feel like it got later. And that's with the weeb desire to copy doujinshi culture from Japan... the parts that were the easiest to look at if you didn't speak Japanese anyway. I remember I met a Japanese fan on Mixi years ago who'd written an entire doujinshi novel of The Professionals. She and her one friend were like the entire fandom in Japanese, poor thing. But doujinshi novels are relatively inaccessible if you aren't fluent in Japanese. They remained largely invisible to outsiders.

I know plenty of fans who are here for text, text, and more text to the point that they find any endless scroll and heavily visual website unusable. You aren't going to see them because they're barely present on Tumblr, never mind tiktok, instagram, etc. They're probably still posting on Dreamwidth if they're using social media at all, but they may well still be writing tons of fic or supporting cons or whatever else.

It's all about the platform and culture. Look at how art vs. fic are treated on AO3. People do like art and highly-skilled art of something popular will get plenty of kudos, but AO3 is not built for easy thumbnails or browsing that is image-oriented. Art can also be harder to respond to verbally. It's fic that gets the meaty comments that build fandom friendships the majority of the time.

That isn't to say that the culture of AO3 matters more than the culture of where you actually hang out, like Discord. It's just an illustration of how much platform infrastructure matters.

makingqueerhistory

#Ownvoices is useful as a marketing term for the people who want to use it, but it is not the barrier art must cross to be deemed "queer enough".

coraniaid

I know that twenty-five years ago is a long time in the past and I know that Season 4 of Buffy aired in a cultural context very different from today, but I am once again begging you to understand that -- even though neither Willow nor Tara will describe themselves as lesbians anywhere the audience can hear until halfway through the next season, and even though they won't so much as kiss on screen until several episodes after that -- we are definitely meant to understand that Willow and Tara are sleeping together for a large part of Season 4.

They are not friends for a long time first before starting a physical relationship, as I've seen some people claim (largely to compare Kennedy unfavorably with Tara). Tara's decision to describe herself as "yours" to Willow in Who Are You? doesn't come out of the blue at all. Oz smelling Willow "all over" Tara when he comes back to Sunnydale in Bad Moon Rising isn't a strange misunderstanding or leap of logic. Willow and Tara have been "doing spells together" from the very first episode they meet, and it is not even slightly subtle what "doing spells together" is intended to be a metaphor for. Subtle enough to fool a TV network censor, maybe, but the intended audience are not meant to be under any illusions about what's happening.

By A New Man -- Tara's second episode! -- Tara and Willow are meeting in Tara's bedroom late at night to "get together" and Willow is promising Tara they'll "start out slow". Tara even lampshades this by asking "start out slow doing what?" What could it mean? Furthermore, this scene is explicitly juxtaposed with a scene in which Ethan and Giles -- who Jane Espenson, the writer of the episode, is on the record as writing as if they had a shared sexual history -- meet up at a bar to get drunk and discuss their past, with Giles indignant that somebody has recently questioned his masculinity and Ethan ruefully describing the two of them as "a pair of old ... sorcerers", musing that "the night is still our time" and (though it's played for laughs as a misdirection) seemingly telling Giles that he's "really very attractive". We know, too, from something Buffy says later, that Willow didn't go back to her room at all that night after casting a spell with Tara. Where did she sleep? Why is she embarrassed about it enough to lie when Buffy asks her where she was? For that matter, back in Hush, Tara's first ever episode, Willow and Tara do a spell together too. That episode ends with three parallel scenes: Buffy having a conversation with her future boyfriend Riley, Giles having a conversation with his soon to be ex-girlfriend Olivia, and Willow having a conversation with [... well, come on, what do you think this relationship is being framed as?] Tara.

By The I In Team -- only Tara's third episode! -- Tara is very explicitly being written as though she's a girl Willow is regularly hooking up with in secret but isn't ready to introduce to her friends yet. She's trying to gift Willow emotionally significant old family heirlooms and looking hurt when Willow doesn't want to accept them. She's saying suggestive things like "maybe tonight, if you're not doing anything, you could come over and we could ... do something" and getting (justifiably) upset when Willow tells her she's already made plans "with people" whom she's clearly not ready to introduce Tara to ("it's kind of a specific crowd ... you might feel out of place"). And Willow does end up going to see Tara that night, when Buffy in turn brushes her off to go and hang out with her boyfriend (and the rest of the Initiative). What do you think is happening when Willow knocks on Tara's door late that night and asks if she "still want[s] to do something?" and the door closes behind them? Were they staying up late to read a book or play checkers, do we think?

This is the wider context in which we're meant to understand the conversation Willow and Tara have in Goodbye Iowa. Willow wistfully says that she "had so much fun the other night, those spells...". before rushing to reassure Tara that "I hope you don't think that I just come over for the spells and everything. I mean ,I really like just talking and hanging out with you and stuff." Or Tara saying in response she's okay if that's the only thing Willow wants to do tonight and shyly admitting that she's "been thinking about that last spell we did all day." They are emphatically not friends who later fall in love and start a physical relationship. That's exactly backwards. They start off fooling around "doing spells" together, then they quickly develop deeper emotional feelings for each other. The magic -- and everything that represents -- explicitly comes first.

Yes, it won't be until New Moon Rising that Willow tells any of her friends about Tara as a possible rival or replacement for Oz. It won't be until the end of that episode that Willow will tell Tara she loves her (indirectly, at that), and it won't be until the following episode The Yoko Factor that Willow will describe Tara as "my girlfriend". And, as I said above, we won't see them so much as kiss on screen until well over halfway through Season 5. It was the early 2000s -- it was, in fact, literally early in the year 2000 -- and there were very clear limits to what the writers could actually get away with showing on network television. Not only was this fifteen years before gay marriage would become legal across the country, it was three years before Lawrence v Texas. Multiple states still had laws prohibiting same sex relationships. To modern eyes it's all a bit tame and understated, sure, but the writers were trying to be as clear as they thought they could be!

But every now and then I read posts that seem to just ... ignore all of that subtext entirely. That seem to proceed on the basis that Willow and Tara were just good friends who, sure, secretly got together at night and did spells together, but seem entirely unaware of the mere idea that this could be read a metaphor for anything. That assume because they aren't officially a couple until the end of Season 4, they can't possibly have been doing anything physical before that (as if this season isn't full of examples of the rest of the core four Scooby Gang members having casual sexual relationships with people they've yet to formally label as their boyfriend or girlfriend). Posts where people complain that Kennedy and Willow got together too quickly, in contrast to Willow and Tara who -- they seem to think -- had a much longer period of getting to know each other as friends first (when? I always want to ask, when do you think this happened?). Posts where people think Tara's just being weirdly intense when she tells Willow "I am, you know. Yours" in Who Are You?, as if the two of them hadn't been symbolically (and presumably literally) sleeping together for weeks by this point. People for whom the central metaphor of Willow and Tara's relationship -- something the show itself introduces and repeatedly calls attention to throughout Season 4 -- just doesn't exist. People who assume Willow is just randomly awkward about introducing her new platonic friend to Buffy or Xander, in a way she's never been about any other friend she's had (witch or otherwise) and that there's no deeper meaning to it than that.

And, well.

On the one hand: so what, right? People have lots of odd takes on this show. This isn't even the most egregious popular reading of Buffy I can think of. But I guess this bothers me more than some other readings I dislike because it doesn't seem like a deliberate attempt to ignore canon, the way some takes that rub me the wrong way do. People aren't reading the show this way because they want to downplay Willow and Tara's relationship: on the contrary, the people who post this way are fans of that relationship. And yet, to me, it just makes the whole thing feel ... I don't know, kind of chaste and bloodless. I mean, in this reading, Giles and his "orgasm friend" Olivia are having sex throughout the first half of the season and Buffy and Riley are having sex throughout the second half of the season (especially so in one particular episode) and Anya and Xander are having sex pretty much all season and meanwhile Willow and Tara are ... what, holding hands and looking at roses and thinking pure, innocent thoughts? I just find that kind of grating.

Yes, if the show was airing for the very first time now, in 2025, then Willow and Tara could -- and I believe would -- have been a lot more explicit about their mutual physical attraction, right from the start. But the fact that the norms and prejudices of the time meant the writers couldn't show us that explicitly doesn't mean they didn't try to make it obvious. It doesn't mean that they didn't succeed in making it obvious, for the people watching along as the show first aired who understood the metaphor. And I just think it's something of a shame that this point seems to be lost on some modern audiences.

drst

Ok. So. Having lived through this in real time, the OP is right.

When S4 was on the air, one of the big megachurches told the congregation to leave messages on The Bronze, which was the online posting board for Buffy fans, condemning the show for promoting homosexuality. This started well before the "I'm yours" moment so it went on for months. We'd be having a normal day chatting about whatever and them some random post often spewing the most vile shit would show up.

This was before social media as you know it existed. You couldn't just find a public page on the internet to leave a nasty message for a public figure. But it was known that the cast and crew including Joss Whedon not only read the board but would post there. (During breaks in filming Joss would sometimes randomly show up and do the equivalent of an AMA.) So in addition to thousands of letters that were sent to the studio objecting to "glorifying lesbianism," the online community also got bombarded with shit.

For months. Long before Willow and Tara would kiss on screen for the first time. Everyone understood what was happening, including the people who were furious. NOBODY THOUGHT THEY WERE JUST FRIENDS. This relationship was historic for US television. Xena and Gabrielle weren't on a network in the US, but Buffy was. There were multiple firsts for Willow/Tara. There were essays written about the use of magic as a metaphor for discovering that you're queer. This was a landmark moment and a lot of people were very angry about it.

We had a troll come to the Bronze one day, much more erudite than the drive by bigots we were getting. His name was Morgan. He seemed reasonable at first, but he was saying the same thing as the others, just in prettier words. We argued with him for hours to no avail. Someone who ended up becoming a friend of mine delurked for the first time that day and just ripped Morgan to pieces. It was a spectacular piece of writing that I wish I had saved.

Amber Benson (the actress who played Tara) showed up and argued with this guy too. The cast and crew knew about the posts just like they knew they were getting hate mail.

Morgan wasn't deterred though. He kept coming back. No matter how thoroughly he got proven wrong, he wouldn't stop. So finally another friend of mine, who I knew offline, pulled a Spartacus and said, "Well Morgan, I'm gay and I disagree with you." She wasn't, AFAIK, but that wasn't the point. So I posted it too. Then someone else, and more and more people. That wall of solidarity finally drive the asshole away. "Gay for a Day" went down in the history of the Bronze. It wasn't the end of the shit but it was a message to the queer members of our community that we were on their side.

When the "I'm yours" moment happened and the relationship went from being alluded to as subtext to just the text, some of us from the Bronze went a little crazy. We bought Joss Whedon a toaster. (Yes, I know what you're thinking, but we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes back then.) The episode of "Ellen" where she comes out involved a joke about getting a toaster for "converting" enough women into bring lesbians. That episode aired in 1997, the year BtVS premiered. That was another big first for network tv and the Ellen show was cancelled after the following season partly due to the backlash. We had raised enough money that we also got the toaster engraved with the dialogue and the date the episode aired.

After we sent the toaster, Joss posted on the Bronze that his Emmy nomination paled in comparison to the toaster. He showed it to the cast and crew. Another message in the barrage of hate that we all understood what was happened we supported it.

Y'all don't understand how different things are in your media just 20 years later.

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