#mainstreaming

Mainly community building, cringe, and the mainstreaming of fandom.

So, back in the day, on my old blog, I had a decent foothold in the Persona fandom. I was one of the first people to cover Goro Akechi (aka Not Ken) and post theories about him. I was one of the original ShuAke shippers, and Goro was my favorite character for many, many years.

I (mostly) left Tumblr behind for Twitter after the 2019 porn ban. Royal promo was coming out and while I enjoy Royal now for what it is, it wasn't exactly what I wanted back in the day. Twitter fandom was also much more brutal than Tumblr fandom, a lot of drama went down, and while I tried to run events and things, my love for the game was dying and I lost a lot of connection with the fandom. I swapped "main" fandoms to Genshin during COVID (around '20-'21), but I never really had a "community" like I did with Persona. Going to this convention made me realize how much I missed that.

Online fandom has changed a LOT since the mid 2010's. Everything's faster, and everyone's snappier now. Fandoms come and go like trends now, and if you say the "wrong" thing, suddenly you've got a whole bunch of teenagers coming for your throat. I don't have the confidence I once did to just post batshit theories on main because I'm worried I'll be turned into a sideshow spectacle. I do most of my fandom stuff now for the love of the game but my god is it hard to connect with people now.

I'm back into Persona now, mostly 4 because it was my first love in the series. But I have no goddamn idea how to talk to people about it anymore. Something's missing from the online space, and I'm so socially anxious in real life I can't even tell someone I like their cosplay, let alone ask them what they like about the series. The line between casual fan and "fandom" has also started to blur, where you're not allowed to "take things too seriously" or have weird, off-the-cuff ideas anymore. It makes me worried for Persona 4 Revival because I think the discourse about it is going to be so goddamn nasty.

I don't know. I both want community, and want to stay in my niche. It's just kinda lonely out here.

Best to start from #KISS the left is based on trust and open culture. Moving away from this the left has distroid itself over the last 40 years. * The #fashernisata embracing of postmodernism * The soft left embrace of the “common sense” of neoliberalism Combined, these have undermined the foundations the left has been built on. This leaves us helpless to compost the current mess, as our shovel…

When dealing with #mainstreaming people, there is a strong #blocking from their incompetence, paranoia and mental health issues. This is draining, we need good social paths to mediate this mess that 40 years of head down worshipping a #deathcult has left with us to work with.

Most academy is about building consensus on how to name things. Am at a Oxford seminar on Deepfakes & Disinformation (Cassidy Bereskin) which is doing this, maybe discourse after, let’s see. The events are status games, to establish a place in #mainstreaming hierarchy with the subject they are working on. There is little if any time spent talking about the issues outside this, is this actually…

The current media coverage of tribal struggles in the Middle East is fraught with complexities and contradictions. The situation in the West Bank and Gaza, with Israel’s establishment of settlements and the resulting occupation, is a source of intense debate and contention. As highlighted by Ms. Pillay in her statement, successive Israeli governments have ignored international law by creating…