thoughts on fandom wank and history repeating
I was lying in bed last night, sometime after midnight, and my brain kept chewing on the idea that some kinds of "discourse" just seem to come up again and again and again.
(this is where I got Miss Shirley Bassey's History Repeating stuck in my head on a loop)
My theory about why it happens is clumsy and poorly articulated and needs a lot of work and has probably been done better by other people before, but it's lodged in my head, so let's dive in. Just know that i'm stereotyping here to a degree I don't like, but I don't yet have a better way of getting the idea across.
Okay, so a lot of people enter fandom in their teen years*. This is also a period of time when they're becoming more socially conscious and politically aware and just actively expressing their opinions to others. They're being exposed to a lot of ideas - both in fandom spaces and outside of them - and some of those take root and become passionate beliefs.
Examples of these beliefs might be:
old people shouldn't participate in fandom
writing about rape or child abuse makes you a rapist or a child abuser
only bad writers use the word "said" all the time in their dialogue tags
Whatever the take is, they get really loud about it because it has become a core belief and they are passionate. Older people or people more versed in fandom or people with the opposite opinion argue with them about their take. Everything becomes chaos and drama and fighting and hurt feelings for a while, and then it settles down.
Until it all starts up again.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, I would see the resurgence of these worn out arguments, and I'd think "we already talked about this. why are you all bringing it up again?"
Because I was thinking of the situation like a normal distribution curve:
But I think it's actually more of a sine wave:
Because the thing about 16 year olds or new members of fandom or whatever the core group is that I'm attempting to talk about is that there's a new batch of them every single year. They just keep making more of them.
And for those new people, the conversation hasn't happened yet. They haven't talked about it, argued about it, blocked people or made friends because of it. They haven't discussed the history of the last five rounds of this same conversation yet. They weren't here last time.
And that's why it actually makes sense that the same discourse and wank come up over and over again. Every time the conversation flares up, you'll catch all of the, say, 14 to 18 year olds who are currently active in fandom. You'll catch the people who have started participating online in fandom spaces in the last year or two.
Have the discourse. Enjoy a few years of detente. Have the discourse again. It's the circle of... strife? There's probably a better pun there, but I couldn't find it.
Anyway, there isn't really a huge point to this massively long post beyond just me realizing why it seems like I've been on this merry-go-round a few too many times already. That's just the joy of getting older. I've seen a lot of things more than once now. But thinking about it this way helps me contextualize why the conversation is never over.
We have to keep talking about these things because there are always people who are just learning it for the first time. I'm on the other side of the xkcd 10,000 People comic.
*this is the stereotyping I'm talking about. I don't think it's necessarily about age etc. but that was what I was thinking about at almost 1am and so I haven't figured out a better way to express this idea than through that lens. I know it's not right, but I'm not sure what 'right' would even be here. this is just me throwing a heater for the big boy and seeing what sticks (if you got that reference, let's be friends)
