The slow death of fandom culture (rant)
Just a disclaimer: I have a lot to say, this is gonna be VERY long. This rant will be divided into sections.
Hello, I've never posted here, but I wanted to talk about this for a long time.
To put this into perspective: I am currently 19 years old, I'm an artist and passionate roleplayer and I've been participating in fandom culture since I was about 9-10 years old.
When I joined the internet, fandoms were overall more lively. We didn't have TikTok, C.ai wasn't a thing, but what we had was: Wattpad, Ao3 (which is still holding on to this day), DeviantArt, Amino and so on. (I'm mentioning apps where I was active)
Another important thing about the internet in the 2010s is this: nobody really cared. Let me elaborate further: no one cared who you shipped (whether it was legal or not), how old were authors of fanfictions, etc. etc. Now, let me say this; I don't think shipping incest, proship etc. and other actually illegal things are okay. It's still morally very wrong, but I hope I'm getting my point across.
Now let's get to the actual topic of this post:
I noticed this already around 2020. My friend actually recently pointed out to me that the pandemic is where fandom culture started slowly disappearing as we know it. I decided to dissect each thing that I feel like it's contributing to this and put it into points, in some sort of chronological order:
fandom culture becoming mainstream
uprise of AI + death of roleplaying
A) fandom culture becoming mainstream
During the COVID pandemic, we were all isolated and so, people took to the internet.
The main issue is that fandom started to be extremely toxic. A lot of bullies entered fandom spaces and what used to be a safe space, isn't a safe space anymore.
In my opinion, fandoms should be gatekept to some extend. They're places for us weird kids where we can be ourselves and shouldn't be a space where bullying takes place.
Of course, it was never all sunshines and rainbows, but I'm gonna touch on that in the next points.
With fandoms becoming mainstream, we're seeing an uprise of cringe culture.
People nowadays sort of lost spark?
Again, this is mainly because of TikTok and its nature. What I'm often seeing is people harassing others for just having fun, for the same things nobody would care about in the 2010s fandoms.
Cringe culture is also incredibly ableist. When you watch "cringe compilations", you might notice a pattern: the people in the compilations are often neurodivergent, have some unique style and more. This brings me back to point A where I mentioned how fandoms became quite hostile.
The last thing I'm gonna touch on in this part is headcanoning. I didn't put this as a separate point since it's gonna be quite short and falls under this category. I'm gonna say this a lot throughout this post, but before, nobody cared. Yes, we did have headcanon wars and ship wars, which were quite insane, but I'm saying "nobody cared" as in "it didn't have to make sense". Headcanoning isn't supposed to make sense, it's just fun and should be fun. As fandom culture is transforming, I'm seeing more and more people say stuff like "this isn't canon" or "this wouldn't make sense" and being literally mean about it.
General rule is: if you don't like it, just scroll away or be respectful about it.
This is going to be a lot of explaining first. Yet again, I'm going back to "nobody cared", which was honestly my favorite thing about fandoms in 2010s.
What do I mean by correctness?
Well, people became really uptight and sensitive. Too sensitive.
Before I dive deeper, I'm gonna rather say this again, so I don't come off as someone who's condoning these things:
I do not think stuff like pedophilia, incest etc. is right, it's absolutely morally wrong. Moreover, I also don't think underage people having access to pornographic content is right.
I hope we are on the same page, let's get back to the correctness.
So, as I mentioned, I've been participating in fandoms for ±10 years, basically since I was a kid. I did have unrestricted internet access, yes, a lot of us did. I also used to write fanfiction (starting at 11 years old), I started roleplaying at the same age too.
I remember seeing a lot of nsfw fanfiction (written most likely by my age group back then) be labeled as 13+ or 16+ on Wattpad and this was kind of the norm.
Currently, this wouldn't slide. Yeah, it isn't 100% correct, but let's be real. What is. I feel like people became sort of detached from reality and became almost puritan with everything.
"You can't this because of that"
In my humble opinion, being overly uptight just doesn't go well with fandoms. Nowadays, everything is deemed problematic. If you're not doing genuinely horrible or illegal shit, who cares that someone's writing smut at 13, I did too. (This might be a hot take)
This brings me to another point:
Do you guys remember Tumblr nsfw ban?
Yeah, this made me think.
I think that nsfw content whether written, animated or drawn is an important part of fandom culture and internet overall. Even life. And we shouldn't erase it.
Especially spaces on the internet should be safe to share whatever you want (as long as it's legal of course) and such spaces shouldn't be adjusted for younger audiences when they were previously not intended for them.
I don't know what's up, but I've seen so many people shame others for enjoying nsfw content. Particularly in fandoms, it's art like any other. If someone's not comfortable with such things, they should simply avoid them and not step into nsfw spaces and shame people. I feel like I might be jumping back and forth between the points, but everything's more or less intertwined.
This one is very closely tied to cringe culture, but I wanted to give it it's own category.
Yes, we did have ship wars, but at least shipping wasn't dying. And why is it dying? People forgot to be respectful. Simply said: "ship and let ship"
Again, I'm gonna mention TikTok because of course it's TikTok (I sound like a senior, I'm sorry for that). People on TikTok don't have shipping etiquette and they often attack people not because they thin XYZ would be better with someone else but because it doesn't canonically make sense.
I would like someone to enlighten me why people hold onto canon so much. Back when I was more active in fandoms, crackshipping and crossovers were SO common. Rare pairs too. You think these characters would be great together because their eye colors match? Go for it girl, why not! Where did this go?
E) Uprise of AI + death of roleplaying
This point is the entire reason why I decided to write this post. And I also have a reason why I put these two seemingly different points together.
So why did I put them together?
And I'll get back to it in a minute.
As we're all seeing, AI is everywhere at this point. Whether it's text, music, art... it can do anything. Which is certainly bad.
AI art - I'll just mention this briefly, most people here will definitely agree that it's horrible in all ways possible. I feel like some people tend to just be lazy and rather than actually learn to draw, they'll generate themselves fanart using AI. What's even worse that such "art" is being sold at conventions in artist alleys.
Now let's get to C.ai and why I think it's equally horrible as AI art is. Basically, it's the same concept in a different medium.
Back when I started, roleplaying was all I had aside from fanfiction. Especially Amino was a great roleplaying platform (but horrible in different aspects). Character AI takes all the fun out of roleplaying, chatting with AI will never be as good as having a real person on the other end.
Thanks to c.ai, people might tend to isolate themselves and just talk to bots. What's great on the real roleplaying is the social aspect; you just have to go and dm random people if they'd be interested in roleplaying.
This can lead to actual relationships. Roleplaying gave me great friendships, despite some being short term, I even met my partner thanks to a rp. With c.ai, it's just inorganic and inauthentic. I know, talking to people is hard, I have social anxiety myself.
Another thing c.ai can't give you is what's happening OORP aka, between the brackets (roleplayers use brackets to talk out of rp). Nothing's better than seeing a text from your rp parner saying: (I have an idea).
Overall, roleplaying gave me a lot and I think it's pretty sad that the new gen is missing out on this because of AI bots. I wouldn't be writing this text if I didn't start roleplaying at 11 cause I wouldn't know english. For me, roleplay is a niche genre of art, it too takes practice and c.ai is at least for me roleplay equivalent of AI art.
Thank you all who made it this far in this post. I sort of needed to get this off my chest because I'm sad that fandom culture as I know it is falling apart. I am posting this here intentionally, since Tumblr is one of the few places that has fandoming preserved.
Now this will be my very personal take so don't take this seriously at all:
Even the bad things are sort of part of the experience. Unrestricted internet access definitely did some damage to me, but I look back, especially at my days on Amino in its prime with fondness.
Let me know if you have anything you could add to this long ass rant and thank you once again for reading.
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