Vesania

Her/She Sy/rup, brown & trilingual, ParadoxInsanity on ao3 Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyways

[iamnotawomanimagod]

everyone hates Taylor Swift. everyone loves Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is the death of feminism. Taylor Swift is a businesswoman at the top of her game. Taylor Swift's father bought her career. Taylor Swift has been creating, writing, and shopping around her music since she was 13. Taylor Swift is a child star. Taylor Swift doesn't deserve sympathy for being a child star because her family is wealthy. the best thing that's ever happened to Taylor Swift is getting her masters back. just kidding, it's actually getting engaged to a football man. pointing out this discrepancy makes you a fake fan who can't just let her be happy. "I'm so tired of hearing about Taylor Swift, everything I've ever learned has been against my will." "Omg 13 people texted me to tell me Tayvis got engaged!!" Taylor Swift is a hack and her music is mediocre. Taylor Swift is the greatest songwriter to ever exist. "Taylor Swift fans should be shot." "Three teen girls have been shot to death at a Taylor Swift themed dance class." Taylor Swift's engagement ring is ugly and gaudy. Taylor Swift's engagement story is a perfect fairytale. Taylor Swift can't possibly be queer now that she's Engaged to a Man. Taylor Swift probably isn't queer, but reading into her lyricism and symbolism is very affirming for a lot of her queer fans. Taylor Swift is the straightest person to ever exist. Taylor Swift fans who think she's queer are delusional. Taylor Swift should stop the genocides. Taylor Swift doesn't speak up enough about serious political issues, which is disappointing, because she has previously claimed she wants to. "Terrorist attack at Taylor Swift concert thwarted, but we're mad the concert was cancelled without immediate explanation." Taylor Swift ran the most financially successful tour of all-time which was viewed by hundreds of hundreds of millions of people in-person and online. A mismanaged Taylor Swift concert leads to the death of a fan. Taylor Swift sings a song about a life cut off too short too soon at the next show and almost cries onstage. Taylor Swift is vapid and fake and preys on her fans' vulnerability. Taylor Swift speaks specifically and directly to Me about my feelings and experiences. Taylor Swift is too wealthy, famous, privileged, and sheltered to have any idea what it's like to be a normal person. Taylor Swift has not lived a normal person's life since she was a young teenager. Taylor Swift isn't a serious enough literary figure to make a joke about being an English teacher. Taylor Swift writes some of the most clever, poetic, and evocative lyrics in mainstream pop. It's empowering that Taylor Swift can stay home and bake bread and cry into Travis's arms when she's overwhelmed with happiness. It's sad that Taylor is settling down for such a basic man. If you haven't heard Taylor Swift's early discography you can only call yourself a fan, not a Swiftie. Taylor Swift sets off a friendship bracelet trading fad among several music fandoms. "Isn't it cute that's how Taylor and Travis got together?" "God it's SO cringe that's how they got together." I love Taylor Swift. I hate Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is fine, but I'm just tired of hearing about her. She's ruining football. She's made football watchable. She has a new album coming out, yes!!!! Why won't she stop making music, hasn't she made enough money and gotten enough attention yet???? Anyone who likes Taylor Swift is vapid and shallow and has bad taste in music. Anyone who doesn't like Taylor Swift is misogynistic and unwilling to engage with her music on a deeper level. Taylor Swift Taylor Swift Taylor Swift Taylor Swift Taylor Swift -

[goth-queen]

[gatesofminrathous]

there will never be anything as funny as the mutual disbelief between long form and short form fic writers about each other's style.

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

meanwhile long form writers look at people writing 1000 word one shots like god I would cut off my left nipple to be able to say anything concisely. i would love to play with multiple ideas. free me from the shackles of this child I have birthed. i love them but I now must take them to t-ball and doctor's appointments and they're going to destroy everything I own.

[fn300v2]

Miss them again😋💖

[classicmeevs]

dash is dead im teleporting to the past

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard?max_post_id=606474489540042752

[classicmeevs]

2016 dash here

[cleonibbles]

2014 dash

2012 dash

2010 dash

[neververy4]

BEFORE YOU CLICK A LINK!

Reblog this post :) Especially if you’re on mobile, you’ll lose the post if you click the link without thinking. Take a note from your elders before you

[porcupine-girl]

Interesting note: It definitely uses whoever you're following now, not at that date. Even the 2020 one includes a lot of people I was absolutely not following yet in Feb 2020, which is actually kind of cool, I can see what they were reblogging from this fandom before I got into it.

[asongoftearsandfandoms]

Amazing how few of you there were in 2010 and 2012

[jjjjjjjjoey]

When ur mutuals w/ some cool ass people rb if u agree

[my-dailydreams]

[s0rinarl]

Im not even gonna try to make that last hand make sense, I think I've drawn enough hands for tonight 🙃

[490hertz]

i identify so much with this

[paradox-insanity]

Tagged by @spiritofcamelot my love

Last book: The Martian - Andy Weird

Last Song: Runway - Lady Gaga & Doechiiiiii

Last Movie: Just got home from Devil Wears Prada 2

Sweet or Salty: Tragically i am always susceptible to a sweet treat

Coffee or tea: tea but like iced only

Working on: avoiding everyone i know

tagging: @bestiesinthebus @iamaweirdviper @fleabagsversion

[writingdose]

as a writer, it’s very important that you know this: whenever you tell yourself “this will only be one-chapter-long” that is a lie. your brain is lying to you. it won’t, in fact, be just a short one-shot

[my-dailydreams]

[thegentlemanstar]

this site gets accused of being way too usamerican a lot but i wonder what the actual proportion is

are you usamerican

yes

no

some other nuanced answer (pls elaborate in the tags i’m nosy)

Voting ended onJun 5

[stealingpotatoes]

@crossover15 kofi requested the twins meeting Padmé's handmaidens!! (sequel to this)

(kofi requests are open!)

[stealingpotatoes]

Anakin looking up at future Ahsoka: Ah, okay no I get it now. I see what you were talking about Obi-Wan: So you'll be sorry for rubbing it in my face that you're taller than me? Anakin, with a wide grin: What? No! Now there are TWO of us taller than you! Obi-Wan: I should have joined Dooku when he asked

YOU'RE RIGHT screw the time travel au tho, this can happen in every fix-it au ever as well

[stealingpotatoes]

oh my gods... aunt soka with baby tiny skywalker twins..................

(links // tip jar!)

[ao3commentoftheday]

I don't know if it's just me being in small fandoms, but fandom as a whole feels...really lonely as of late. People have split themselves up so much that they don't discuss things the way they did before, they just kind of post their stuff and leave and half their audience "consumes" it like "content". There's no comments, barely kudos, the only places fans talk with each other anymore are on private discord servers that no one ever finds out about...I don't know, I'm a bit of an old and I feel like I'm screaming out into the void for no reason at this point. Sure, "somebody" will like my stuff, but will I ever get to know about it?

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

Even if nothing happens as a result, you tried. And maybe you just made someone's day. 💗

[curator-on-ao3]

Demographically, I have a fair amount in common with @ao3commentoftheday with the exception that I am a parent.

And my oldest child has entered online fandom.

Thankfully, my child and I don’t share fandoms (we both prefer it that way), but we did sit down to discuss how to maintain privacy and safety while also being friendly in online interactions. I taught my child about fandom red flags and green flags, from my experiences, and my child has since asked for my advice in terms of my child’s own fandom experiences and how to handle issues and concerns.

All that being said, I was surprised and confused when my child informed me that my child had not been leaving kudos or comments on AO3. Keep in mind, this child would read longfics for days, tell me how great the author’s writing captured the characters, etc.

“Why didn’t you kudos or comment if the fic was so good?” I asked.

While my child explained lack of ability to comment due to fic restrictions (my child has expressed not yet feeling ready to have an AO3 account even though my child is old enough and my husband and I would be fine with it), my child said kudos didn’t matter: “Who cares about one kudos?”

“The author cares. And, if the author for some reason doesn’t care, I know you care about doing the right thing. I think expressing appreciation for other people’s fanwork is the right thing to do. What do you think?”

My child went back and kudosed all stories read to that point.

But I’m just one parent. And it’s absolutely not the job of fandom to parent children. There’s an idea that the way we behave in real life is divorced from the way we behave online. There’s some merit to that in the form of maintaining privacy and boundaries online that might be different in person. When we’re talking about basic manners, though? Golden rule stuff? That’s what’s become lacking, and I hope it improves.

[queenofattolia]

i do think that a lot of this is just the result of a lack of lurk moar attitude in fandom/the internet in general.

when i was a tween who first found fandom in the late 90s/early 2000s, people didn't explicitly teach me how to interact with fandom. i lurked for a solid year before i signed up for my own account on the forum i'd found. (i can still remember how the adrenaline coursed through me as i signed up for my own account--i felt tingy and more than a little ill!)

by that time, i had a very good sense of social norms there. i still made a few mistakes, and the more established members smacked me down in a matter-of-fact but not unkind way. but i'd learned by watching. hell, by the time i started actively participating, i knew all the inside jokes!

as op mentioned, i don't think that people lurk anymore, and my theory is that the rise of social media/web 2.0 created a different approach to web communities.

today, every site is presumed to be for every person. the entire point of the really big social media sites is that everyone is on them. (this is one of the things i hate about them btw because it results in context collapse. i do not want to talk to my third-grade teacher, my favorite cousin, complete strangers, and my fandom friends in the same voice, but that's another issue).

whereas in web 1.0, the internet was riddled with niche sites/communities. you had to go out and find your place (and sometimes it took a while!). once you found it, you were invested in becoming a part of that specific community, so you did the research (lurking) to find out how people interacted, what all the unspoken norms were. by the time you picked your handle and made your account, you just knew stuff.

i'm sure this was not true of everyone, but it was true of far more people at the time. people looked before they leapt.

there are many, many reasons that i think that fandom has suffered from the web 2.0 environment. the fact that creators/writers/actors and fans are all on the same sites using the same tags for general publicity and for fannish nonsense is a huge problem. the way that sites are so big that people feel that their contributions (as with kudos above) don't matter is a direct result of the way social media undermines community and makes everything a performance of whatever your late-capitalist brand is. the fast pace of those sites makes people think that interacting with older posts is a bad idea. the lack of filters of the kind that we had on livejournal where you could determine who saw what or even just the way that forums often made you join before you could see content created walls within which communities could grow (think frost and walls making good neighbors).

i know we can't go back to the assumptions that operated before social media. we have to explore other options. i love when people make psas here telling people about fandom norms and history! i think it's the best thing! and maybe at this point that is the only way to handle it.

tumblr and ao3 are very weird sites in that they straddle the web 1.0 and web 2.0 kinds of internet.

from web 1.0 they get the lack of algorithms, the way you have to make choices about what you see, chronological arrangements, and (on ao3) lack of ads, etc. tumblr has a slightly slower pace than most social media; ao3 has a much slower one.

from web 2.0, though, you get scale, centralization (which is both ao3's greatest strength and greatest weakness), and the fact that it takes little effort to locate these sites--anyone, no matter their level of investment in fandom, can just stumble on them.

so you end up having a lot of people who are not actually fannishly inclined (aren't invested in a gift economy, don't really understand that fandom is supposed to be fun, don't really get the creative urge etc.) interacting with people who are fannishly inclined, and it causes some really problems. especially with younger people whose experience of the internet is as a venue to signify and perform certain kinds of morality/coolness/trendiness that are at odds with what fandom has always been about. basically: you have a bunch of normies clashing with a bunch of nerds. (obviously the normie/nerd divide is a spectrum and not a binary, so i'm overstating, but still.)

when you have people who are coming to fandom from different angles--some people who are coming to it as a provider of content just like all other media in their lives, especially elsewhere online; some people who are coming to it as a participatory hobby wherein we build community around shared affection for [thing]--there's going to be lots of clashes and weirdness.

i kind of think that fans need to go back to create set-apart spaces for fandom to happen. note that i am NOT talking about gatekeeping. everyone who treats others with respect would be welcome. but just having fenced-off areas that are explicitly for certain kinds of fandom interactions. where we can basically have our party away from the normies, but other nerds who are younger or just getting in touch with their nerdiness can find us.

i'm not sure how we'd go about doing it. but i think smaller, more intimate internet spaces are really necessary for fandom to be enjoyable. for fandom to be fandom tbh.

[alessariel]

I think this is why we see a rise of discord servers in fandom spaces, because that is exactly what discord is: a way to create a smaller community that can be found and accessed if you go looking but that isn’t as open as a tumblr or twitter or AO3 account. They’re also fundamentally more about interacting than posting content. Many discords I know have become communities with their own rules and lingo, just like forums or livejournal communities were in the early 2000s.