On fandom over time
Dec. 9th, 2018 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
22degreehaloSo, here I am, on Dreamwidth again. This is my second account, but I've honestly barely touched my first account in years, and both I and fandom have changed a lot since then, so it felt appropriate to remake. And given everything going on with tumblr, I figured I'd have a crack at opening up DW again.
It's an odd feeling. It makes me feel very nostalgic, but not necessarily in a way that makes me happy. And that's kind of the purpose behind this post. Because even if people are wondering which site to turn to after tumblr and DW has come up a lot, I haven't been able to work out what I should actually post here yet. I write fic, but that goes to AO3, and honestly back when I had a DW almost nobody ever read my fic there instead of at AO3. And I'm kind of in an in-between fandoms situation right now.
But then, as happens something like once a week, I came across a post on tumblr that made me feel really awful. And it was like a lightbulb went off - oh yeah, I kind of hate the community on this site, now. Maybe DW will be different.
Which was my instinctive reaction: fandom has changed, and not for the better. Back when I used DW and LJ? Fandom was so good and accepting and kind! Not like these days!
But... is that feeling justified? Or am I just looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses?
As backstory: I'm 26. My first fandom was Harry Potter, and I started on Mugglenet, reading through the forums (though not contributing much) and reading fanfic. I quickly moved on to fanfiction.net, where I got into Avatar: The Last Airbender, and then anime through Tokyo Mew Mew, sending me to Fruits Basket, and also to Final Fantasy X and X-2. I came onto LJ at some point as a teenager, right before the Strikethrough (so I didn't really appreciate the enormity of it), and ended up joining tumblr in 2010. I stayed on LJ and DW for several years after that, joining AO3 as well at some point, until they just kind of faded away under tumblr's centrality. (I've also been following some fandom subreddits over the last few years but they tend to be pretty small.) I've been in all kinds of fandoms, from film to anime to webcomic to historical RPF.
To start off with the obvious, and the feelings that instigated this post: fandom of the last few years has been far, far more emotionally damaging to me now than it ever was before. I've always had parts of fandom that made me angry or irritated, but never has fandom made me actually feel like a worthless, terrible person who deserves to be harrassed. It'd be easy to underestimate this, so I really want to make it clear: I have had really serious anxiety spirals and attacks of depression due to things done within or in the name of fandom.
The biggest and most hurtful of these has been ace discourse. I always used to identify as just bi, and while biphobia was a thing, it would only typically crop up occasionally and by minor groups of people, and when it happened, the main thing it made me feel was righteous indignation rather than shame or fear. Fandom always kind of, at heart, felt like it was by and for bisexuals. But in around 2015, I came to realise that I was probably asexual, and might be aromantic, too. And that's where ''ace discourse'' started - the death threats sent to a-specs in LGBT+ spaces, the ''jokey'' posts about how a-specs deserved to be oppressed (or that OP actually WANTED them to be so), the posts about how a-specs all need to get fixed by a doctor or are abusive to their partners or are all just sick and broken and unnatural. And most of all, the idea that any a-spec who needed anything from the LGBT+ community, whether it was kind words or a suicide helpline, was 'stealing resources' from REAL oppressed people. So that justified mocking and humiliating a-specs at every turn, harrassing them and sending death threats, and all around trying to make a-specs feel as awful as possible so they'd leave.
This already came at a time in my life where I was feeling really shitty, having graduated from uni and now in a very long dry streak of unemployment which made me feel like a worthless burden on society. But seeing the LGBT+ community - the one place I had ever felt safe and welcome - turn on me and act like my very existence was disgusting to them, at the one time I actually needed some support, really kind of broke me, honestly. I was convinced I'd be alone forever, unable to support even myself let alone the child I always wanted, and only ever made the world a worse place for people. I still find it so hard to feel pride in myself or my identity, and I'm terrified of letting people know what I am for fear they'll harrass me. When I see happy queer couples now, it doesn't give me the 'phew, this is a nice and supportive place!' feeling anymore - if anything, it makes me feel so shitty and bitter and jealous to be reminded of how much I've lost and how little this really makes me happy anymore, because I know full well the people making this content could still hate me.
And while ace discourse was (is? at least, I see it crop up less often now - not sure if it's over, I'm better at avoiding it, a-spec people have just given up and re-closeted, or all three) theoretically a LGBT+ community thing, it was always impossible to separate it from fandom. The first thing that really shook me was the reaction people had to Yuuri Katsuki from Yuri on Ice! Now, Yuuri was honestly more relatable to me than almost any fictional character I've ever come across. The depiction of his anxiety and how it manifests, his low self confidence but desperation to be good at something, hit a really strong nerve for me, and the fact that he was really super ace-coded made it feel like a dream come true. But any time someone tried to make a post about how Yuuri was ace, they would end up harrassed because 'he's gay.' (I lost one mutual participating on a dogpile like this of someone who had literally done nothing more than suggested he could be ace.) Despite the fact that he could be easily read as bi, too. Honestly, the bad experience, and my fear of inserting myself in a place I wasn't wanted, permanently killed the fandom and even the character for me. I still like Yuuri in theory, but I just can't let myself feel strongly about him or I feel awful and guilty and upset.
And this, naturally, is part of a broader attempt to cut off any fandom interpretations other than the 'correct' one. TBH I've never been a type to like enemies to lovers fic or belligerent sexual tension, and I can't stand love interests in otome games who berate the protagonist or try to control her like an object. I've always been critical of those things when portrayed as normal in fanfiction. But I DO like complicated relationships, which sometimes means unhealthy ones. I've written about very bad relationships I would not want anyone to be in IRL. I've written weird, tabboo smut. I've written incest. And that's partly about psychology, finding it interesting to delve into other people's minds, and partly about emotional catharsis, and partly because I've always been drawn towards weirdos who feel shame about who they are as a weirdo who has a lifetime of experience feeling shame about who I am. (Plus, most likely, reasons I'm not even aware of.) But now, it's become normal for anyone who has an interest in these kinds of relationships to be accused of romanticising and glorifying it. I can't count the number of times I've felt awful just because I wrote some edgy incest fic when I was a teenager.
Because harrassment has become acceptable. Bullying is moral, against the right people. And that's not an exaggeration - there are people unironically posting that teenagers should be bullied or they might end up into BDSM. It's literally conservative style 'bullying builds character' but like, woke, I guess?? And just like anyone who opposed torture was defending terrorists, questioning these tactics brands you as someone who thinks we're being too hard on racists. (What they mean by racists - whether actual nazis or just naive white teenagers who are horrified to learn they've said something wrong - is left deliberately vague.) It's purity culture to an extreme, where one misstep leaves someone cancelled forever, even if they have legitimately achieved really great things by working really hard. (See: the amount of people complaining that Steven Universe is homophobic. Steven Universe, literally the first kids' cartoon to include openly queer main characters, including non-binary characters and butch nb women.)
Maybe I'm oversimplifying it to try to bring it down to a single ethos, but I can't help but feel especially hurt by a change in attitude around fandom. It used to be that weird was good, weird was special, weird was wayyy more fun and interesting and authentic and whole than 'normal'. And sure, sometimes that just meant random humour and cringe-inducing t-shirts, but it was legitimately a haven for people like me who never felt like I fit in IRL at all. (I now understand I probably have ADHD and have more than a few autistic traits, so it's also clear that such philosophies are really important to neurodivergent people, too.) But now, it's all changed. People unironically call each other freaks over their ships. They harrass people writing incest because 'normal people know that's nasty.' 'Weird' has become synonymous with 'bad'. I can't help but wonder if this is all because fandom itself is viewed differently. In the 2000s, fandom was very much seen as niche and geeky and strange, and as it was filled with queer people, was very much looked down on. All of us knew going in that we were looked down on by creators and other people on the internet alike, and our obsessions and ships were not something we'd typically tell uninitiated people about. So we created a place that was, well, safe - where people could make weird porn and write crackfic and just be unashamedly strange and overenthusiastic and silly, because we'd had enough shame in our day-to-day lives. Now, people go into fandom expecting to be treated as equals - why shouldn't slash shippers be treated just the same as any other kind of watchers? Why shouldn't LGBT+ people be seen as normal? And I'm honestly so, so happy that these changes have happened and that we've come so far against homophobia! But I feel like it means people these days have so much less empathy for people who are viewed as weird, because they never thought of themselves that way. Fandom never used to have a respectable image - now, the people writing BDSM cast a negative light on the good, pure Klance shippers.
(I am not into Voltron, by the way, and you could not pay me to do so.)
But, am I just out of touch now, then? I remember a post about how as people grow up they become less tolerant of young people and more conservative, and that this tends to happen at around 30. Is that what's going on? But my issue isn't that young people are becoming too progressive or left-wing. Exactly the opposite - I feel like conservative ideas and values are overtaking LGBT+ spaces as LGBT+ people become more mainstream. Take the whole idea of 'mogai' identities: while there are certainly a lot more unusual ones than when I was a teenager, and I can't see myself ever taking on one now, I really love that there are so many people working hard to define their own existences and come up with identities that are meaningful to them! If an identity exists, it's because it's worth something to someone, and I'm really happy they have that tool avilable to them! My issue is with the other young people (predominantly, anyway) who go out of their way to mock and bully anyone using anything they deem 'mogai'. Hell, the very idea is literally just 'ummm I identify as a demi-pan fox otherkin half microwave lolz' 4chan bullshit humour masked as gay-positive. And maybe they are right - maybe writing abusing relationships and unusual kinks IS harmful. I don't usually believe that, but... it's possible.
However, I can't sit here and act like things have only become worse, either. I brought up people being too willing to point the finger earlier, but that could only happen because of how much more aware fandom has become. As a teenager in the 00s, I fought homophobia and was angry at bi-erasure, but I didn't consider myself a feminist. I was into Kirk/Spock for months after the '09 movie before I saw someone suggest that a person could oppose Spock/Uhura for racist reasons, and it was really startling to me. Racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, and more was unambiguously more common back then than it is now. As a white, cis person who didn't consider myself neurodivergent back then, it was easy for me to not notice it. So there's a very real chance fandom back then WAS a very hurtful place, just not to me.
And to an extent there was bad stuff that I just couldn't name - the way Spock was treated in fanfic, and the way Vulcans were treated in general post-TOS, always really upset me, but it felt so stupid to feel bad over a fictional race being mistreated. Only later did I come to understand it - the Vulcans are essentially autistic people, and in them being villified in a way they never were in TOS (where, ironically, they both stood for and championed diversity; only later did the writers decide that they didn't actually want diverse cultures which were still positive, and derailed the Vulcans into being intolerant) made me feel bad about those autistic traits in myself.
And that brings up something else that's easy for me to forget: hostile, bullying behaviour isn't exactly new in fandom. When I was thirteen - and I vividly remember that I was exactly thirteen - I discovered pottersues and the HMS STFU and fandom wank and sporking and all of a sudden I was SO determined to prove myself the Smartest and Most Mature thirteen-year-old by gleefully watching as badfic authors were mocked and viciously insulted. Flaming was a thing. Character bashing was prevalent - it was normal to see a fic that was totally normal except one character was written as an evil unlikeable asshole just because the author didn't really like them, or even see them constantly subjected to abuse and humiliation by the other characters for that same reason. And a lot of that was tied up in misogyny.
So maybe that's it - fandom stayed just as hostile, except the insults changed from 'you're a dumbass' to 'you're a freak'. And I was always able to situate myself as a Good fic writer, who also never posted any fic until I was an adult so I never had to face being flamed. In terms of the acceptable target becoming bigots, that's genuinely a positive, especially given that in earlier fandom, mocking cringy teenagers and kids was incredibly common, and in retrospect really shitty. But somehow, I feel like the venom behind attacks has gotten substantially stronger. Before, there was a lot more 'haha, this guy's just an idiot.' Now, it's 'fuck you, you deserve to die you piece of shit. Oh wait are you a rape victim? Are you writing this to cope? Tell me so I know whether you need to die.'
Maybe I was just more out of the loop back then. I never heard about Winterfox until recently, though admittedly I was never really into fantasy as a teenager. I came after Ms Scribe. I was never invested in the Harry Potter shipping wars, and didn't get into Supernatural until long after its peak. Maybe I would have felt just as hurt and alone if I joined 00s fandom the age I am now.
And there's always the mistake of seeing more people speaking out about an issue and assuming that means things are worse. I was never part of the ace or aro communities until the last couple of years, even if I supported them from the outside. I've learned so, so much more about racism and ableism and transphobia in the last five to eight years. And that's not just about groups popping up in fandom - the world has changed. I'll admit that while I was in uni, it was easy for me to believe that things were just getting better. Same-sex marriage was achievable, and women were being listened to, and sometimes a show would even include - gasp! - a bisexual character! (Never a cartoon, though. The idea of LGBT+ people in kids' shows still seemed futuristic.) I became interested in feminism, and started to identify as that, but there was no real sense of urgency. Conservatives sucked, but we were winning. And then Gamergate happened out of freaking nowhere, and it was like the top was taken off of a canister of densely concentrated white male anger. Suddenly, more and more young people were espousing these conservative ideas - ideas that in the late 00s/early '10s I saw everybody my age laugh off as ridiculously old-fashioned and stupid. And then everyone couldn't stop talking about how awful immigrants were, and Trump was actually getting supporters, and Brexit happened, and Trump was elected...
...and I understand that. I understand the fear and the desire to destroy ANYBODY who might be even SLIGHTLY hurtful to you, because that's the only way you can feel safe. (For a-specs, that means not being safe anywhere, now, though.) I understand feeling so powerless and hurt and wanting something you can control, some understandable target you can vent your frustrations towards. I understand wanting to be able to escape all of that awfulness, and feeling so angry at people who come into this space trying to discuss and disect it and cope with it in a totally contradictory way. And society really is divided. It's not that everyone is equally more conservative - the progressives have in many ways gotten more progressive as all of this has happened. (Apart from the ones complaining about mogais and kink, anyway.)
So... in the end, I don't know. Maybe fandom really is more toxic these days, because of changing expectations around fandom and really shitty real-world happenings. Maybe fandom people are just as angry, but the targets have changed. Maybe fandom is less bad overall, and I'm just more aware now of what's going on. Certainly, all three feel real to an extent - there are fandoms where I will not check a random tumblr unless I've seen them discard exclusionism and antis, but others which feel more healthy and reasonable and accepting than the ones I knew as a kid. And maybe that's it - maybe I've just grown up and changed. I always tried to be accepting, but I'm so SO much more aware now of what groups I ought to be accepting of than I was back then, or how to actually do that. Which is tough in itself. I want so badly not to hurt anybody, to create things that will make people happy, but the more awful things I'm aware of the more scared and ashamed and guilty and worried I feel, until the negative feelings are overwhelming.
I don't know if fandom on LJ and DW was ever better. But I think, at least for now, it will be better here, if only because the typical age range is a bit higher, not to mention the ability to lock posts or the greater ability to write long posts and explain yourself in the comments.
And if being on DW doesn't make me kind of feel like I don't deserve to be alive just because of who I am, well, that's a pretty good reason to try spending some more time here.
It's an odd feeling. It makes me feel very nostalgic, but not necessarily in a way that makes me happy. And that's kind of the purpose behind this post. Because even if people are wondering which site to turn to after tumblr and DW has come up a lot, I haven't been able to work out what I should actually post here yet. I write fic, but that goes to AO3, and honestly back when I had a DW almost nobody ever read my fic there instead of at AO3. And I'm kind of in an in-between fandoms situation right now.
But then, as happens something like once a week, I came across a post on tumblr that made me feel really awful. And it was like a lightbulb went off - oh yeah, I kind of hate the community on this site, now. Maybe DW will be different.
Which was my instinctive reaction: fandom has changed, and not for the better. Back when I used DW and LJ? Fandom was so good and accepting and kind! Not like these days!
But... is that feeling justified? Or am I just looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses?
As backstory: I'm 26. My first fandom was Harry Potter, and I started on Mugglenet, reading through the forums (though not contributing much) and reading fanfic. I quickly moved on to fanfiction.net, where I got into Avatar: The Last Airbender, and then anime through Tokyo Mew Mew, sending me to Fruits Basket, and also to Final Fantasy X and X-2. I came onto LJ at some point as a teenager, right before the Strikethrough (so I didn't really appreciate the enormity of it), and ended up joining tumblr in 2010. I stayed on LJ and DW for several years after that, joining AO3 as well at some point, until they just kind of faded away under tumblr's centrality. (I've also been following some fandom subreddits over the last few years but they tend to be pretty small.) I've been in all kinds of fandoms, from film to anime to webcomic to historical RPF.
To start off with the obvious, and the feelings that instigated this post: fandom of the last few years has been far, far more emotionally damaging to me now than it ever was before. I've always had parts of fandom that made me angry or irritated, but never has fandom made me actually feel like a worthless, terrible person who deserves to be harrassed. It'd be easy to underestimate this, so I really want to make it clear: I have had really serious anxiety spirals and attacks of depression due to things done within or in the name of fandom.
The biggest and most hurtful of these has been ace discourse. I always used to identify as just bi, and while biphobia was a thing, it would only typically crop up occasionally and by minor groups of people, and when it happened, the main thing it made me feel was righteous indignation rather than shame or fear. Fandom always kind of, at heart, felt like it was by and for bisexuals. But in around 2015, I came to realise that I was probably asexual, and might be aromantic, too. And that's where ''ace discourse'' started - the death threats sent to a-specs in LGBT+ spaces, the ''jokey'' posts about how a-specs deserved to be oppressed (or that OP actually WANTED them to be so), the posts about how a-specs all need to get fixed by a doctor or are abusive to their partners or are all just sick and broken and unnatural. And most of all, the idea that any a-spec who needed anything from the LGBT+ community, whether it was kind words or a suicide helpline, was 'stealing resources' from REAL oppressed people. So that justified mocking and humiliating a-specs at every turn, harrassing them and sending death threats, and all around trying to make a-specs feel as awful as possible so they'd leave.
This already came at a time in my life where I was feeling really shitty, having graduated from uni and now in a very long dry streak of unemployment which made me feel like a worthless burden on society. But seeing the LGBT+ community - the one place I had ever felt safe and welcome - turn on me and act like my very existence was disgusting to them, at the one time I actually needed some support, really kind of broke me, honestly. I was convinced I'd be alone forever, unable to support even myself let alone the child I always wanted, and only ever made the world a worse place for people. I still find it so hard to feel pride in myself or my identity, and I'm terrified of letting people know what I am for fear they'll harrass me. When I see happy queer couples now, it doesn't give me the 'phew, this is a nice and supportive place!' feeling anymore - if anything, it makes me feel so shitty and bitter and jealous to be reminded of how much I've lost and how little this really makes me happy anymore, because I know full well the people making this content could still hate me.
And while ace discourse was (is? at least, I see it crop up less often now - not sure if it's over, I'm better at avoiding it, a-spec people have just given up and re-closeted, or all three) theoretically a LGBT+ community thing, it was always impossible to separate it from fandom. The first thing that really shook me was the reaction people had to Yuuri Katsuki from Yuri on Ice! Now, Yuuri was honestly more relatable to me than almost any fictional character I've ever come across. The depiction of his anxiety and how it manifests, his low self confidence but desperation to be good at something, hit a really strong nerve for me, and the fact that he was really super ace-coded made it feel like a dream come true. But any time someone tried to make a post about how Yuuri was ace, they would end up harrassed because 'he's gay.' (I lost one mutual participating on a dogpile like this of someone who had literally done nothing more than suggested he could be ace.) Despite the fact that he could be easily read as bi, too. Honestly, the bad experience, and my fear of inserting myself in a place I wasn't wanted, permanently killed the fandom and even the character for me. I still like Yuuri in theory, but I just can't let myself feel strongly about him or I feel awful and guilty and upset.
And this, naturally, is part of a broader attempt to cut off any fandom interpretations other than the 'correct' one. TBH I've never been a type to like enemies to lovers fic or belligerent sexual tension, and I can't stand love interests in otome games who berate the protagonist or try to control her like an object. I've always been critical of those things when portrayed as normal in fanfiction. But I DO like complicated relationships, which sometimes means unhealthy ones. I've written about very bad relationships I would not want anyone to be in IRL. I've written weird, tabboo smut. I've written incest. And that's partly about psychology, finding it interesting to delve into other people's minds, and partly about emotional catharsis, and partly because I've always been drawn towards weirdos who feel shame about who they are as a weirdo who has a lifetime of experience feeling shame about who I am. (Plus, most likely, reasons I'm not even aware of.) But now, it's become normal for anyone who has an interest in these kinds of relationships to be accused of romanticising and glorifying it. I can't count the number of times I've felt awful just because I wrote some edgy incest fic when I was a teenager.
Because harrassment has become acceptable. Bullying is moral, against the right people. And that's not an exaggeration - there are people unironically posting that teenagers should be bullied or they might end up into BDSM. It's literally conservative style 'bullying builds character' but like, woke, I guess?? And just like anyone who opposed torture was defending terrorists, questioning these tactics brands you as someone who thinks we're being too hard on racists. (What they mean by racists - whether actual nazis or just naive white teenagers who are horrified to learn they've said something wrong - is left deliberately vague.) It's purity culture to an extreme, where one misstep leaves someone cancelled forever, even if they have legitimately achieved really great things by working really hard. (See: the amount of people complaining that Steven Universe is homophobic. Steven Universe, literally the first kids' cartoon to include openly queer main characters, including non-binary characters and butch nb women.)
Maybe I'm oversimplifying it to try to bring it down to a single ethos, but I can't help but feel especially hurt by a change in attitude around fandom. It used to be that weird was good, weird was special, weird was wayyy more fun and interesting and authentic and whole than 'normal'. And sure, sometimes that just meant random humour and cringe-inducing t-shirts, but it was legitimately a haven for people like me who never felt like I fit in IRL at all. (I now understand I probably have ADHD and have more than a few autistic traits, so it's also clear that such philosophies are really important to neurodivergent people, too.) But now, it's all changed. People unironically call each other freaks over their ships. They harrass people writing incest because 'normal people know that's nasty.' 'Weird' has become synonymous with 'bad'. I can't help but wonder if this is all because fandom itself is viewed differently. In the 2000s, fandom was very much seen as niche and geeky and strange, and as it was filled with queer people, was very much looked down on. All of us knew going in that we were looked down on by creators and other people on the internet alike, and our obsessions and ships were not something we'd typically tell uninitiated people about. So we created a place that was, well, safe - where people could make weird porn and write crackfic and just be unashamedly strange and overenthusiastic and silly, because we'd had enough shame in our day-to-day lives. Now, people go into fandom expecting to be treated as equals - why shouldn't slash shippers be treated just the same as any other kind of watchers? Why shouldn't LGBT+ people be seen as normal? And I'm honestly so, so happy that these changes have happened and that we've come so far against homophobia! But I feel like it means people these days have so much less empathy for people who are viewed as weird, because they never thought of themselves that way. Fandom never used to have a respectable image - now, the people writing BDSM cast a negative light on the good, pure Klance shippers.
(I am not into Voltron, by the way, and you could not pay me to do so.)
But, am I just out of touch now, then? I remember a post about how as people grow up they become less tolerant of young people and more conservative, and that this tends to happen at around 30. Is that what's going on? But my issue isn't that young people are becoming too progressive or left-wing. Exactly the opposite - I feel like conservative ideas and values are overtaking LGBT+ spaces as LGBT+ people become more mainstream. Take the whole idea of 'mogai' identities: while there are certainly a lot more unusual ones than when I was a teenager, and I can't see myself ever taking on one now, I really love that there are so many people working hard to define their own existences and come up with identities that are meaningful to them! If an identity exists, it's because it's worth something to someone, and I'm really happy they have that tool avilable to them! My issue is with the other young people (predominantly, anyway) who go out of their way to mock and bully anyone using anything they deem 'mogai'. Hell, the very idea is literally just 'ummm I identify as a demi-pan fox otherkin half microwave lolz' 4chan bullshit humour masked as gay-positive. And maybe they are right - maybe writing abusing relationships and unusual kinks IS harmful. I don't usually believe that, but... it's possible.
However, I can't sit here and act like things have only become worse, either. I brought up people being too willing to point the finger earlier, but that could only happen because of how much more aware fandom has become. As a teenager in the 00s, I fought homophobia and was angry at bi-erasure, but I didn't consider myself a feminist. I was into Kirk/Spock for months after the '09 movie before I saw someone suggest that a person could oppose Spock/Uhura for racist reasons, and it was really startling to me. Racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, and more was unambiguously more common back then than it is now. As a white, cis person who didn't consider myself neurodivergent back then, it was easy for me to not notice it. So there's a very real chance fandom back then WAS a very hurtful place, just not to me.
And to an extent there was bad stuff that I just couldn't name - the way Spock was treated in fanfic, and the way Vulcans were treated in general post-TOS, always really upset me, but it felt so stupid to feel bad over a fictional race being mistreated. Only later did I come to understand it - the Vulcans are essentially autistic people, and in them being villified in a way they never were in TOS (where, ironically, they both stood for and championed diversity; only later did the writers decide that they didn't actually want diverse cultures which were still positive, and derailed the Vulcans into being intolerant) made me feel bad about those autistic traits in myself.
And that brings up something else that's easy for me to forget: hostile, bullying behaviour isn't exactly new in fandom. When I was thirteen - and I vividly remember that I was exactly thirteen - I discovered pottersues and the HMS STFU and fandom wank and sporking and all of a sudden I was SO determined to prove myself the Smartest and Most Mature thirteen-year-old by gleefully watching as badfic authors were mocked and viciously insulted. Flaming was a thing. Character bashing was prevalent - it was normal to see a fic that was totally normal except one character was written as an evil unlikeable asshole just because the author didn't really like them, or even see them constantly subjected to abuse and humiliation by the other characters for that same reason. And a lot of that was tied up in misogyny.
So maybe that's it - fandom stayed just as hostile, except the insults changed from 'you're a dumbass' to 'you're a freak'. And I was always able to situate myself as a Good fic writer, who also never posted any fic until I was an adult so I never had to face being flamed. In terms of the acceptable target becoming bigots, that's genuinely a positive, especially given that in earlier fandom, mocking cringy teenagers and kids was incredibly common, and in retrospect really shitty. But somehow, I feel like the venom behind attacks has gotten substantially stronger. Before, there was a lot more 'haha, this guy's just an idiot.' Now, it's 'fuck you, you deserve to die you piece of shit. Oh wait are you a rape victim? Are you writing this to cope? Tell me so I know whether you need to die.'
Maybe I was just more out of the loop back then. I never heard about Winterfox until recently, though admittedly I was never really into fantasy as a teenager. I came after Ms Scribe. I was never invested in the Harry Potter shipping wars, and didn't get into Supernatural until long after its peak. Maybe I would have felt just as hurt and alone if I joined 00s fandom the age I am now.
And there's always the mistake of seeing more people speaking out about an issue and assuming that means things are worse. I was never part of the ace or aro communities until the last couple of years, even if I supported them from the outside. I've learned so, so much more about racism and ableism and transphobia in the last five to eight years. And that's not just about groups popping up in fandom - the world has changed. I'll admit that while I was in uni, it was easy for me to believe that things were just getting better. Same-sex marriage was achievable, and women were being listened to, and sometimes a show would even include - gasp! - a bisexual character! (Never a cartoon, though. The idea of LGBT+ people in kids' shows still seemed futuristic.) I became interested in feminism, and started to identify as that, but there was no real sense of urgency. Conservatives sucked, but we were winning. And then Gamergate happened out of freaking nowhere, and it was like the top was taken off of a canister of densely concentrated white male anger. Suddenly, more and more young people were espousing these conservative ideas - ideas that in the late 00s/early '10s I saw everybody my age laugh off as ridiculously old-fashioned and stupid. And then everyone couldn't stop talking about how awful immigrants were, and Trump was actually getting supporters, and Brexit happened, and Trump was elected...
...and I understand that. I understand the fear and the desire to destroy ANYBODY who might be even SLIGHTLY hurtful to you, because that's the only way you can feel safe. (For a-specs, that means not being safe anywhere, now, though.) I understand feeling so powerless and hurt and wanting something you can control, some understandable target you can vent your frustrations towards. I understand wanting to be able to escape all of that awfulness, and feeling so angry at people who come into this space trying to discuss and disect it and cope with it in a totally contradictory way. And society really is divided. It's not that everyone is equally more conservative - the progressives have in many ways gotten more progressive as all of this has happened. (Apart from the ones complaining about mogais and kink, anyway.)
So... in the end, I don't know. Maybe fandom really is more toxic these days, because of changing expectations around fandom and really shitty real-world happenings. Maybe fandom people are just as angry, but the targets have changed. Maybe fandom is less bad overall, and I'm just more aware now of what's going on. Certainly, all three feel real to an extent - there are fandoms where I will not check a random tumblr unless I've seen them discard exclusionism and antis, but others which feel more healthy and reasonable and accepting than the ones I knew as a kid. And maybe that's it - maybe I've just grown up and changed. I always tried to be accepting, but I'm so SO much more aware now of what groups I ought to be accepting of than I was back then, or how to actually do that. Which is tough in itself. I want so badly not to hurt anybody, to create things that will make people happy, but the more awful things I'm aware of the more scared and ashamed and guilty and worried I feel, until the negative feelings are overwhelming.
I don't know if fandom on LJ and DW was ever better. But I think, at least for now, it will be better here, if only because the typical age range is a bit higher, not to mention the ability to lock posts or the greater ability to write long posts and explain yourself in the comments.
And if being on DW doesn't make me kind of feel like I don't deserve to be alive just because of who I am, well, that's a pretty good reason to try spending some more time here.
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Date: 2018-12-09 08:09 am (UTC)I'm kinda hoping we'll all start using this website more. I like it here.
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Date: 2018-12-14 11:46 pm (UTC)On the other hand, without a tag, for something to be visible you need to post it to a comm, here. And so that does put a lot of power into mods' hands. If the mods are willing to shut down fighting an insults, that's great. But if they decide that X thing actually is completely awful and so is everyone who does that... well, it could be harder.
But it's much harder to be anon here and the average skews a lot older. And though you can still post screencaps of things other people post to mock them, you can't reblog the post themselves and force the person to look at what you're doing, which is a big relief - honestly by now I'm constantly worried that if I post something other people might disagree with people will end up reblogging it just to talk about how dumb it is/I am.
Welp, so far it's definitely better. And I've always referred to be tolerant yet critical rather than ban things outright or use personal attacks, which seems to be the general atmosphere here.
And, y'know, more commenters like you would definitely ease my worries a bit :P
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Date: 2018-12-12 04:35 pm (UTC)It's still not perfect, of course, but it does help.
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Date: 2018-12-16 07:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 05:45 pm (UTC)As someone who was part of the GAFF bullying culture that passed itself off and "concrit writers should be grateful for" and being apart of Bleach fandom (which was the VLD of LiveJournal in its heyday) it wasn't always a happy haven. The biggest difference was that most places had some kind of moderation to keep the trolls and assholes in check, that Tungle dot hell does not. We had ship comms so those who wanted to enjoy their ships in peace without wank (even though many didn't check the bashing of other ships which I hated), and there was so little in the way of queer content and resources that there wasn't time or energy to decipher out who "deserved" protection or to gatekeep supposed "fakers."
But for the most part, I prefer what we had then to the wild wilderness that Tumblr is, which basically caters to such a wide net of people with the only "moderation" being self-proclaimed gatekeepers from all intersecting communities. That's how you end up with all this BS purity politics and ageism when it didn't exist as recently as five years ago.
Plus, as others have said, people can be hateful and rude with far less effort than it used to take, which is why the only place that was even remotely as toxic as Tumblr is were the Godawful Fanfiction site. In fact, when I started seeing the whining about purity and bad ships when I first got to Tumblr early last year, I thought it was a holdover from that site and not a whole damn movement within the site being spearheaded by the very marginalized people who came to fandom to escape.
And ace discourse is just baffling to me entirely. The only explaination I can think of is much like what happened with the nerdy girl I knew who made cheerleader in middle school and proceeded to be a bitch to everyone as a way to prop her own stock and take away from the fact that she'd grown up in 8 foster homes
I've seen aces being blamed for the NSFW ban and I wanted to break things. It's exactly like you pointed out: people are just taking conservative think tank respectability politics and slapping a big ol' pink gay hat on it. It's not even old people doing this (although there's certainly a couple of Log Cabin Republicans I know of, and neither is in fandom), but young kids just parroting their parents' ham-fisted tactics, which is something my own mom (who grew away from being dedicated to the church but sees no problem with forcing prayer in school and just being a pushy shit in general for pet causes) does.
Oh, well. I hope this and PW takes off. I miss communities and having a small circle of trusted friends. And from what I gathered from all the fandom olds I met, the only reason they were at Tumblr was because that's where fandom had ended up after 2012, but hardly anyone over the age of 25 who remembers any different seems to enjoy the platform.