ye olde lj fandom

[alexiscartwheel]

I've seen several posts floating around Tumblr in the last week lamenting the demise of old-school LJ fandom, which prompted me log on and check my old f-list, which came with the pleasant surprise that some old friends have been posting recently! (I mirror all my posts at LJ, but because my f-list seldom shows much besides posts from communities I

Comments

[jo_blogs]

I'm thinking so much about this at the moment. When I joined Tumblr I started conversations and found people who seemed interested in having them. But it didn't continue. There is literally one person in my fandom who is *like me* - i.e. female, over 30 and primarily there for old-style fandom, fanfic and writing. The fandom gatekeepers make things really difficult and it's hard to encourage conversation about things I'm interested in.

I came across an anon thread just before I joined The Fosters fandom on Tumblr with a post I found amazing. The longer I stay there, the more amazing and correct I find it. I don't know if you've seen it but if not, it's here:

http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/131867.html?thread=687489819#cmt687489819

"It's the belief that "bad art" can LITERALLY directly cause bad things to happen, and therefore the only morally sane approach is to make as much "good art" as possible, but everyone's too terrified to do it because if they make "bad art," not only will they be dogpiled and excommunicated, but God will kill a kitten"

Yeah. This is exactly where I am right now in my criticism of the fandom. I don't like it and can't fight it, so have cut back on posting on Tumblr. And generally just keeping on keeping on with my mini-rebellion against the moralising by writing my fic and getting on with my thesis.

[alexiscartwheel]

The few people that I have found through Tumblr with whom I have conversation about fandom are mainly friends of friends. And primarily, we don't actually have those conversations on Tumblr, they're through email, text, or even twitter. The fact that all my conversation happen somewhere else highlights how ill-suited the Tumblr format is for conversation.

(That's not to say that I don't really enjoy Tumblr. For instance, I think it's much easier to find interesting content on Tumblr from outside your circle of followers. Tumblr also is a much easier platform to use for images, video, and audio than LJ/DW.)

I've never come across that thread before, and I find it fascinating. It reminds me of that every reoccurring discussion about whether women who write slash fic are betraying their gender by not writing more stories about women. (Because, yes, slash fic is what's wrong, not that the most well developed characters on any given TV show are probably white men.)

What I end up doing is reblogging pretty/funny/otherwise amusing things on Tumblr, and then discussing fandom more critically elsewhere, usually one on one.