I've seen discussions sometimes about how fanfiction-based fandom culture is heavily influenced and dominated by people who are not cis men.
One thing I haven't seen discussed as much though is how much of fandom in general is shaped by neurodivergent people.
I mean, you have autistic and ADHD people with special interests or hyperfixations collecting information and writing detailed meta, connecting very strongly with characters and fandoms. I would not be surprised if the percentage of autistics in fandom communities was significantly higher than in the general public.
And that's not even getting into other types of neurodivergencies and how they influence fandom culture.
I sometimes see people try to divorce fandom culture from the idea of being a "geek", and I understand that this is sometimes because of the association with the sexist geek stereotype, but I also know that there is a connection between the two concepts, and it's probably us neurodivergent people.
I also think this is why at first I was like "my fandoms can't be special interests, that's just how fandom is"
Yeah, because a lot of people in fandom have special interests
I’ll go slightly further here, and say this (well. this plus ableism) is the root of a lot of current issues in fandom.
Back when I started being in fandom, a couple decades ago, I’d argue that damn near every single person in fandom was autistic or ADHD. You’d only join fandom if you were obsessive and were chill with doing things that weren’t socially acceptable. (Because being a fan absolutely was not socially acceptable at the time! We went to ridiculous amounts of effort to hide that we were fans!)
And fandom culture was absolutely shaped by this. The standard behaviors in fandom were those of happy autistics. That’s how you were expected to act. You remember “squeeing”? The visual image of it is generally someone so happy and excited they can’t physically contain it so they make a high-pitched noise and flap their hands and - a squee is literally just a happy stim. And so many fans at the time did happy stims that we gave it a special fandom name! So even if a neurotypical person happened to stumble in, they’d learn that the “social norm” in a fandom space is basically just “act autistic/ADHD” and assimilate.
But then... fandom got mainstreamed. It became socially acceptable. And then the neurotypicals started showing up in large numbers. And instead of assimilating like they did before, when they were the minority, now that there were a lot of them they started going “what the heck is this! why are people here acting so weird! this is embarrassing!”
...and then we got cringe culture within fandom.
No one says “squee” anymore not because fans don’t squee anymore - happy stims don’t just go away - but because the neurotypicals showed up and told us “squee” is a cringy word and concept. Which they had ALWAYS told us out in public, but we used to have fandom as an insular autistic/ADHD-dominated space where we were safe and free to be ourselves.
You know how everybody talks about how cringy and embarrassing 2012 tumblr was? Dude. We were literally just acting like happy autistics, because that’s what we were. It’s just that - like you always have - you think autistic/ADHD behavior is cringy and embarrassing.
This isn’t new. “Cringe culture” isn’t new. It’s just a new euphemism for the exact same ableism that’s always existed, with the only difference that now it’s coming from inside fandom.
All those posts saying “if these people were bullied more they wouldn’t act like this”? They’re not just bizarrely tasteless jokes. They’re because the people making those posts were bullies. Are bullies. Fandom used to be where the sort of people who were victims of peer abuse went - where we went to be safe from bullies and be openly ourselves - but now the bullies are in here with us.
On the happier side, while mainstreaming has resulted in a lot of neurotypicals showing up, autistic/ADHD people are absolutely still the backbone of fandom. We’re the ones collecting tiny bits of info and connecting the dots to write galaxy brain meta. We’re the ones churning out new content every single day, rain or shine. We’re the hyper-verbal ones writing 250k fics and the ones who hyper-relate with the characters and make incorrect quote posts so spot-on they sound canon. They may think we’re embarrassing - but they still need us.
SO MUCH THIS!!!
Fandom would be nothing without neurodivergent people. Because there’s nothing on this earth that can rival the white-hot intensity of an Autistic or ADHD person in full-blown hyperfocus or special interest mode.
I agree with this broadly but I don't agree with the assertion that cringe culture comes from neurotypical invasion. This is not to victim-blame neurodivergent people. It's more that we do ourselves a disservice to pretend that neurodivergent people don't leverage neurotypical norms and ableism against each other, because we do, and acknowledging that is the only way we can have actually safe spaces. On the whole neurotypical people are of course responsible for more ableism, but because fandom has historically been SO full of neurodiverse people, you would see a particular kind of cringe culture that comes from neurodivergent manifestations of strict dogmatic rule following. For example, the prohibition on Mary Sues was very much mandated and enforced by fandom people and most of those people were neurodivergent. It's only recently that fandom has become at all kinder to OCs and self-inserts and other more indulgent forms of creation, the idea of being fiercely kind to children's creations, and those circles are relatively small and fiercely guarded.
Also I think that even back in the “Squee” days you are still overestimating how many neurodivergent people were in fandom
I have never heard anyone actually say “squee” out loud earnestly, even back in like 2012
And apparently people have forgotten about the whole “Mary Sue hunting” and “mean spirited parody of a fanfiction I think is bad writing” subcultures on like livejournal and deviantart
None of this is new, literally nothing is new it’s always been here
The cringe has always been here
I bet it probably still happened in the Star Trek zine days
It’s been around for longer than any of us have been alive
