How do you think fandom community has changed in recent years? Do you think it's changed for the better or worse? Is there something you think we should bring back?
How do you think fandom community has changed in recent years? Do you think it's changed for the better or worse? Is there something you think we should bring back?
The thing is… I’m not sure the fandom community has changed all that much.
We complain about lurkers. There have always been lurkers.
We complain about spam likers. There have always been spam likers.
We complain about lack of comments. There have always been a lack of comments.
We complain that no one reblogs anymore. There have always been people who don’t reblog or share or rec or do whatever else is current to promote someone else’s fic.
There have always been groups of friends creating intimate little clubs that turn cliquey and secretive, who refuse to let in new people, who contribute to fandom with events and awards and bolster each other’s confidence and support each other when it seems no one else does, and who are the target of someone else’s vitriol and jealousy.
There have always been groups who decry one trope or another, claiming immorality and impurity and “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children.”
There has always been censorship—whether it’s imposed by the platform or the author themselves.
Everything old is new again. And everyone’s child is always writing a book.
Now, I’ve been in fandom spaces since 2002, or thereabouts. I suppose that makes me quite a bit older than some, and maybe I can’t claim to have been there Gandalf, when The Premise was alive and well, but I’ve definitely seen my share of the rise and fall of various fandoms and spaces in my time.
I think, in many ways fandom now is better than fandom then. For one thing, we aren’t relying on mimeographed copies that have to be mailed out in brown covers. But we also can’t expect the stars to show up to our living room meetings to discuss how their characters might feel about other characters.
(Please, please do not invite actors to your living room meetings. Please.)
We can connect with each other so much faster and easier, and in so many more ways. We don’t need to find each other through expensive conventions or cryptic messages in official magazines. We have millions of fanfics at our fingertips, on multiple platforms that focus on so many different things. We are spoiled for choice, both in terms of what we consume and how we can contribute, and where we hang our fandom hats.
But that means it’s harder to find each other, too. Your best fandom friend might not have followed you from your previous fandom, or they’re posting on a site you’ve never heard of yet, or they’re behind the locked doors of a chat group where you aren’t allowed to go.
In some ways, we’re just as desperate for connection as those 1960s housewives, licking a stamp and hoping for a reply.
You ask what we should bring back. I don’t know. But that’s mostly because—I’m not sure there’s anything we’ve lost, not really. What we have now was built on what came before: the Yahoo groups and the listservs and the mimeographed zines and the black mourning bands and all the other things that people made for each other because they loved something the same. Even if we don’t remember it, what we create remembers it.
If that makes sense, anyway.
(There have always been fans, looking for connection. There will always be, long after we’re gone. I can’t wait to see what they build with what we’ve left behind.)
