What's the worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years, and what's the worst thing about fandom that's always been true of it?
The worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years has been the incentivizing of fandom-as-conflict: not merely as a field in broader culture wars but as the field for endless intra-group battles.
This manifests in many ways: as seven hour videos complaining about The Last Jedi, as Twitter backlash campaigns, but also as stans defending their faves from any and all criticism real or imagined, as the endless boom-and-backlash cycle to any fandom meme or joke you see on Reddit, and as the drive for people to look for evidence other people discussing a thing they like are hysterical illiterate dolts, before anything else.
Or, in other words: a lot of fandoms are full of assholes these days, whose main interaction with fandom is using it as a reason to be an asshole, and to defend being an asshole. The actual âfandomâ part of fandom no longer really exists for them. The discourse more or less is their fandom; someone whose main fandom activity is sharing videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) isnât in the Steven Universe fandom, theyâre in the videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) fandom. I mean, the chief fandom for many people is their side in the fandom war. What type of fanfic you write is secondary to what your affiliations are vis-a-vis battles over fanfiction
(One trend I've noticed is people who aren't at the stage where they only talk about what they hate and not what they love, but are at the stage where they can only talk about what they love in relation to what they hate. "I love this movie...and it proves this other movie is bullshit made by a hack". No ability to say just "I love this movie", period, end of sentence. This is how like two-thirds of Film Twitter talks about film, the remainder are all the grindhouse people going "man you've GOT to see Wrong Turn 5")
Another one, that I think is related, is that fandomâs become...more transitory, maybe? Thereâs Big Fandoms that are inescapable and then everything else feels like itâs here for a weekend and then itâs gone. And weâve always had fandoms that endure and fandoms that vanish quickly, when the show runs short or turns out to be bad/boring, but we did use to have a lot of enduring if small fandoms for Okay shows most people hadnât heard of and now you donât really. Or they burn themselves out fast.
So weâve reached this stage where fandoms are either so big they have seven hour long discourse videos, or theyâre a smattering of fanart over the course of two weeks last August. But that isnât really the fault of fans so much as modern media release schedules.
A lot of fandom activities of old are just...impossible now, with many shows? The slow build of speculation and fan works and in-jokes and theorizing and analysis simply canât exist in a world where the premiere comes out the same day as the finale, and you canât talk about the finale because you have no way of knowing if the person youâre talking to binged it all in one weekend or is still on episode four. That was the kind of thing that sustained the fandom of something that wasnât a big hit, or even something that was. My fave fandom experience ever was watching the online Lost fandom wildly theorizing for all six years of Lost, and weâd never get âand what if the Smoke Monster is a dinosaur but only the head?â under a Netflix release model. Now at a base level, we either have shows nobody can discuss because nobodyâs sure whoâs seen or what, or shows where everyone just discusses the finale right away, and where you get One Week of Show and then a massive hiatus, which either kills all momentum or...drives fandom in the direction of hyper-analyzing everything and fighting because, well, what else is there to do? And that plus the outrage cycles of social media plus the fact that âman who yells at Star Warsâ is now a viable career choice result in, well. *gestures upwards* All that
(Really, shout out to Cartoon Network for engineering the Steven Universe fandom to Be Like That through their inscrutable strategy of dropping episodes during one random week every five months or whatever)
As for something that's always been with it...cliques and a certain fannish elitism, like, that sees engaging with media in a fandom sense as more creative or analytical or intelligent than your average person. You see it now in the form of, like, people holding up fanfic above published fiction as more representative or authentic (Iâve seen more than one post on here strongly implying queer rep doesnât exist in mainstream non-fic storytelling???), or going âwell, we think about shows, unlike those normies watching sportsâ. But that was probably way more pronounced a thing in the past, in the 40-50s sci-fi fans were calling non-fans "mundanes" and calling themselves "slans" as an in-group signifier (a reference to a book with superintelligent psychic mutants known as slans). Like at the very least we should be happy no oneâs calling non-fans âmugglesâ anymore. In the evolution from âmundaneâ to âmuggleâ to ânormieâ normieâs probably the least bad one
