#fandom old

Look at me.

Look at me right now.

AO3 protects you.

AO3 protects you and your works. 

It protects your works from copyright strikes and DCMA takedowns.

It protects your work from advertisers.

It protects your work from overzealous legal challenges.

It protects your right to post adult content.

AO3 is non-profit and AO3 will never try to use you or your work to make a profit for themselves and AO3 will go to bat for you if someone tries to legally challenge you or your works.

Back in the 90s and 2000s when I was first going online, you had to go out of your way to communicate and interact with people.

Browsing websites was a solitary experience, not a social one where everyone who was in my circle knew roughly what I was up to at all times.

I saved pictures and fic I was interested in to my harddrive rather than immediately and essentially automatically forwarding it (reblogging it) to an entire mailing list (followers).

Chatting with people was deliberate and intentional. I had to specifically open my AIM, or log in to IRC and join the channels I was in.

In order to communicate with people, I had to deliberately open lines of communication.

Being on the internet used to be a quiet, solitary experience for the most part, with interactions being deliberately sought out. You had to choose to go out of your way to interact with people.

I'm so glad my fave player doesn't have socials, because that fandom went boundaries? What are boundaries?

I’m gonna have to disagree with you here, chief, at least in regard to framing this as a problem unique to *that* fandom. The unfortunate truth is that it’s pretty much all fandoms these days. And it’s getting worse as fandoms get bigger. I personally believe that social media is the primary accelerant of horrific fandom behavior, and has overall inflicted much more harm on humanity as a whole than benefit, in ways that go above and beyond fandom. However, monetization of fandom is actively killing it.

To be clear, there have always been unhinged fans who behaved abominably. There have always been clout-chasers who want to stir shit for no good reason. But they didn’t used to directly benefit from interaction via monetized social media profiles. And even though it’s only a small percentage of modern fans with enough following to effectively do that, it feeds an environment of increasingly extreme behavior to get and keep clicks.

Add in that media corporations realized they could use fandoms as a steady source of revenue and free advertising, and actors for whom social media following is becoming a resumé item that casting directors care about, and we have a toxic parasitic death spiral in which only the corporations really win.

Because the stickiest part of this mess is that people tend to feel like they are owed a return on their investment. People in fandom know that they directly contribute to the livelihoods of the people making the entertainment they consume. It’s not necessarily right, but it is logically foreseeable that openly courting a fandom is going to result in some level of return expected. Ass gas or grass no one rides for free, you know? Again I am not saying this is a morally laudable position, just that it’s a very simple point a -> point b line to draw.

And then add that tangled web to the very modern sensibility that anything other than forthright radical honesty is a lie. And that all manner of despicable behavior is permissible in the ever-expanding hunt for “representation.” And the moral purity Olympics of virtue signaling via bad faith interpretation of every single damn thing anyone does or says.

And this drives out the more normal and old-school fans who just wanted to share gifs and meta and fanworks without it being such a fucking trial all the time, leaving the nuts the loudest voices in fandom.

Modern fandom is self-cannibalizing across the board, it’s just that *that* fandom is A: huge, B: new, and C: breathtakingly hypocritical given the point of the story they are fans of. So it does make for an absolute case study.

To go through this bs and CHOOSE to be kind, to make art, to give appreciation to artists, and to just be an awesome member to whatever community you join...