#whywasmaddie

!!! HELLO!! I'm sorry it took me so long to answer this, I've had a VERY busy week!! First off, don't you date apologize for the long comments, I am still riding the high from those comments (and you brought up some really interesting points in them!!! I liked your alternate perspective on how intentional some of the character work was a lot). Thank you so much for taking the time to read my monster meta. And thanks for taking the time to come here and chat!

As for your questions:

How did I get into researching the DSMP

Well. See, sometimes, I get very specific fic cravings that are more about the themes than the characters. When I do, I have the habit of just going chronologically through tags and reading anything with a specific trope to fill that craving (particularly if I'm between fandom interests). In late 2024, I was doing just that with the Gladiators tag (a favorite of mine). I hit a certain year and went, "Hold up, WHY are there so many Minecraft creator RPF fics here?" One looked cool, so I clicked and read it. It was good! I went to that author's profile and read the rest of the fics there, which were also good! and had lots of themes I enjoy! I went, "Oh, man, I know this fandom was mega-huge for awhile. I wonder if there are other fics with themes I like that I can read? RPF is soooo easy to read fandom blind and I'm looking for some brain popcorn, let's see what's here!"

I started looking through tags I like.

I started reading.

I went, "uh hey what the FUCK is going on here?"

I sure was incorrect about the fandom blind thing, and also there was so much weird stuff!! There were so many things that made me go "but WHY??"

And the more I looked into it the more tangled threats I was finding, and then suddenly it was all I was thinking about in the shower, and then suddenly I was researching, at first just to get some answers for myself. And I also had thoughts about writing something about RPF trends for a while! I've done mini-presentations to friends on powerpoint nights on similar topics, because it's interesting and something I've thought about a lot. So all these interests started coming together and then one day I opened up a word document, thinking "surely this will be like 5K of thoughts?"

Over a year later, I had 33000+ words lmao.

2. Did I find active communities (and where)?

Honestly, a lot of my research come from looking at things in retrospect—I was going through blog archives and other archive pages to find stuff published at the time to fandom was at its peak rather than exploring what people are going right now. But I also went through more recent tags on tumblr, which was a big help, and discovered that lots of people in my sphere of people were in some way involved in or closer to this fandom than I knew! Talking to them was really, really helpful. I also thankfully worked up the guts to DM @antimony-medusa a few months in the project, who was an invaluable resource for articulating the change in vibe over the years, first-hand accounts of things I was seeing in retrospect, and also a fantastic insight into how people in the space are feeling right now (if you're looking for active communities in the space, the events she runs are great places to start).

And really, there are so many other things about the fandom space worthy of being discussed! I've had people in the comments of the meta ask why I didn't get into the whole gen vs. ship dynamics in the space, and the answer is "oh my god unpacking all of that would have taken another 20,000 words I didn't have in me" lmao. There's SO MUCH that falls beyond the scope of what I was talking about (mostly meditating on attitudes towards RPF) that's worthy of being picked at and picked apart, and I think all of it says a lot about fandom in general and also how fandom was feeling during the pressure cooker of the COVID lockdown. It's a fandom that had to reinvent certain fandom principles on its own terms, and looking at it in that regard gives really interesting insight into greater fandom culture as well.