"You wanna talk roots? Let's talk about how most of 2012-2015's fan culture is not just extinct, but erased from existence."
I'm actually curious about that, I've never been in any fandom long term. What was 2012-2015 Tumblr up to, and why was it erased?
Porn, queer theory, sex positivity, and beginners’ attempts at racial justice.
Most of it either disappeared, deleted, or died after the 2018 porn ban and the subsequent antisexual crush of SESTA/FOSTA.
Followed in rapid succession by all the US fascism.
There’s this notion that fandom is separate from the greater culture but it’s really, really not.
The same political forces that led a bunch of basically normal but newly impoverished people to join Qanon and become screeching bigots also led fandoms to rephrase ‘I don’t like this ship’ as ‘this is pedophilia.’
Nothing new, to be clear. People have been doing that for centuries.
The difference is a matter of centralization and scale. Tumblr WAS fandom, it was where fandom occurred, for about 6 years. Multifandom and crossover content in particular is just GONE. There weren’t places for that to move to as everyone dissipated into separate, semipublic, and even MORE ephemeral spaces like discord.
It’s hard for me to describe, especially unmedicated, but the elimination of huge swathes of fandom in late 2018 just.
Fandom used to be on the absolute bleeding edge of sexual politics, and now it’s this regressive, sanitized, commodified space where people think history began in 2016.
