Longtime fanperson, (hopefully) future Episcopal priest, forever Trekker. This is a personal tumblr that does not represent anyone's views, not even really my own. They/them.
when someone is a christian they are not constantly asked their position on the holocaust the transatlantic slave trade the extermination of native americans or any of the thousands of atrocities committed by christians so why do muslims get asked about terrorism and jewish people about israel and are grouped in with specific bad people while christians are not required to explain themselves??
Episode 172, âSafe Spaces,â is split into two parts: first, Flourish and Elizabeth read and respond to a series of listener letters about their recent âFandom-Tinted Glassesâ conversation; then, they discuss another listener letter on younger fansâ struggles to avoid or escape âantiâ or âpurity cultureâ dynamics. In increasingly fracturedâand increasingly hostileâdigital spaces, is it possible to create fandom environments that allow us to truly protect ourselves?
Click through to our site to listen or read a full transcript!
How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?
Iâve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and Iâm not sure I have a really good answer, but Iâm going to try.
Iâve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authorsâ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines werenât where I was doing most of my reading.
I think in terms of generally âwhat it was like to be in fandom,â the big-picture stuff hasnât changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, yâknow, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If youâve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like âproviding warnings might be niceâ (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure wonât say weâre perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.
There are some fights we actually donât have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like itâs been years since Iâve seen the âreal person fiction is wrongâ battle, but also I donât hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so itâs possible thatâs still going and I just donât see it.
There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasnât a question because there werenât canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder âdoes slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?â Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but thatâs because what appears to have happened is that the term âshipâ (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, âoh, I ship that.â For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.
Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much donât exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we donât write a lot of now. Like, I havenât seen smarm in years! I also havenât seen Weâre Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where youâd basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. Youâd have to motivate this decision. Youâd have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasnât straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think heâs not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, âOkay, Captain America is bisexual, letâs go!â Itâs... different.
Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I donât know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think theyâre too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didnât have your own email address, so you couldnât sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didnât exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, youâre probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people donât have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they wonât get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how youâre doing that? Youâre going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but itâs going to take people hours to download them!
(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and Iâd have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)
And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?
There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that donât seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, yâknow, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and Iâm sad theyâre pretty much gone now.
I also donât think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.
Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldnât you be able to?
This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. Iâm currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didnât, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely werenât readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still havenât! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.
Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then youâd better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you werenât watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadnât seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So youâd get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic theyâd read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someoneâs fic once. Like âJim and Blairâs apartment has a small water heaterâ (not actually canonical) or âBlair is a vegetarianâ (thereâs an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).
Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadnât seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. Iâd seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didnât get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!
I think also one of the things about fandom thatâs not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if youâve been in fandom a while, youâve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if youâve been in a lot of fandoms, if youâve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. Youâll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.
But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you donât know when the site itâs on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. Itâs a site where you can put your fic up and you donât have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they donât allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesnât like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.
So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but itâs a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldnât have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think thatâs great.
This is SO accurate to me. We had different experiences in Ye Olde Fandom, obviously, and I haven't been in it quite as long, but in essence it is extremely correct.
Bones getting frustrated about the paucity of Vulcan medical information being made available to him and assuming itâs because Vulcans are super insular and secretive about their medical information, when it turns out that your average Vulcan just has no idea how many body parts they even have
Does anybody else h/c that this isnât necessarily a Vulcan thing but a Sarek thing? Like poor child Spock got the absolute minimum info from his dad about how his Vulcan anatomy works and just kinda had to read about it in textbooks and smutty Vulcan dime store novels?
I think Voyager more or less confirms this in that Vorik is 110% better-adjusted about pon farr than Spock is. Also, Sarek is canonically Mr. Bad at Being a Dad, so h/c accepted
HELLO here is the Tumblr article Iâve been talking about for the past month! Itâs done itâs here and itâs FOR YOU, yes YOU still hanging out on this beautiful terrible horrible wonderful website!Â
Featuring quotes from  @tragedycamp and @benepla, anecdotal data from the informal polls I conducted on here a while back, and lots of speculating on Why Is This Site Different Than All Other Sites?Â
More than anything else, Tumblr in 2020 is a self-sustaining ecosystem. Itâs a semi-sealed and increasingly fertile terrarium, a nigh-impossible perpetual-motion machine of a platform going productively psychotic in its isolation.
seconded (although by âsecondedâ I mean âhereâs to maybe coming back to tumblr, which I never loved as much as elizabeth, but hey, I keep remembering the good parts of it latelyâ)
[this space intentionally left blank] @flourish - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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