oh hey, i just emerged from an immersive-game induced haze (do NOT download crusader kings 3 with the game of thrones mod if you're as susceptible to its world as i apparently am)
question: do you think the centralisation of what were once separate niche fandom communities into massive common websites/social media (like tumblr, twitter etc.) where everyone can be easily exposed to everything was what led to the modern puritanical turn in fandom/ships discourse?
also, fuck marry kill botic, zizou and alejandro
OK so... this is a fucking excellent question and I had Some Thoughts (TM) about this. I started writing just a Tumblr answer but no, you're going to basically get an essay about it. Strap in for some fandom history kids!
I don’t think it caused the modern puritanical turn in ship discourse but what it did do was change the terrain.
Back in the days of mailing lists, LJ comms, and webrings, we had smaller, semi-closed spaces where norms were shared, and expectations were - if not universal - at least coherent within that space. If you joined a Harry Potter slash list or a Gundam Wing fic archive, you knew what flavour of fannishness you were signing up for. And crucially, you couldn’t just stumble in. Often you had to be invited or at least know where to look. When I joined LiveJournal back in 2004, as an example, I needed an invite code from an existing member before I could even make an account. That barrier to entry meant you usually arrived with some context: somebody had vouched for you, explained the etiquette, or you’d lurked long enough to figure it out.
And if it wasn’t for you? You left. That was it. There was no algorithm dragging you back into a space you didn’t enjoy, no “recommended for you” serving up fic you’d rather not touch. Discoverability was word-of-mouth, a carefully curated recs page, or a friend slipping you a link. Fandom could be sprawling, but it was navigated through trust networks and self-selection, not platform mechanics.
That structure shaped how we handled difference. Communities developed their own vocabularies and practices - warnings lists, squick disclaimers, “don’t like, don’t read,” “Your Kink Is Not My Kink and That’s Okay.” These weren’t just niceties; they were hard-won tools for living in shared spaces with wildly divergent tastes. They put responsibility on the reader to manage their own experience.
Compare that to Tumblr or Twitter, where there’s no initiation and no buffer. You don’t need an invite code; you don’t even need to know what fandom is. The algorithm drops you into the middle of everything, often at its most decontextualised. Suddenly, everyone was in the same room. A Hannibal fic rec or a Supernatural incest gifset could land on the dash of someone whose only fannish exposure was Marvel films, and they’d react not with “scroll on” but with wider cultural scripts: this is bad, this should not exist, and the people who like it must also be bad.
And because Tumblr/Twitter reward outrage with visibility, that framing got amplified and spread. Worse, the more those people interacted with the “bad” content - quote-tweeting, arguing, subtweeting - the more the algorithm assumed this is what they want to see. And so it kept serving them more of it. People who didn’t understand how algorithms work thought they were being “bombarded” by problem ships or tropes, when in reality they were training their own feeds to deliver it nonstop.
But here’s the crucial point: this purity turn isn’t new in fandom. It’s imported and re-clothed. We’ve been here before. There were anti-slash campaigns in the ’80s and ’90s, when zine editors argued that homosexuality in fanworks was corrupting? Or LJ’s 2007 Strikethrough, when journals were purged for “inappropriate content,” disproportionately targeting fic with queer and underage tags? (I survived, not sure how, but many of my friends lost everything). Even AO3’s founding documents were shaped by this history: its TOS was built to defend against exactly this kind of purity panic, insisting on maximum inclusivity as a protective measure.
The difference now is scale and permeability. Those earlier battles happened in mostly walled gardens. Centralisation means we no longer have those walls. Fandom sits in the middle of the algorithmic square, where people outside fannish culture stumble across our works and bring their own moral frameworks in. And because fandom is porous, recursive, and always negotiating its boundaries, those outside frameworks don’t just bounce off - they seep in and reshape discourse.
And it goes both ways. It’s not just that “they” are more aware of “us.” We’re more aware of them. Instead of living in our sealed-off bubbles, we see every moral panic, every culture-war skirmish, every trending outrage, because it’s all on the same timeline. Fandom discourse gets braided into larger cultural discourse, and vice versa, until sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether you’re watching a shipping flame war or the latest front in the culture wars.
So no, centralisation didn’t cause the puritanical wave. But it set the stage for it to flourish. Fandom has always wrestled with purity panics, but the collapse of boundaries has made us more visible and more vulnerable. We’re living through a handmaid’s-tale-flavoured reboot of old battles, accelerated by algorithms and amplified by moral outrage.
In other words: this isn’t new. It’s the same fight, dressed up for the 2020s.
As for FMK? Fuck Botic, Marry Alejandro (for his cats), sorry Zizou :(
