fan+ rant
The original context for this rant was the Onion AV Club's latest post about The Big Bang Theory, because in comments there were some Penny/Sheldon shippers piping up and of course, getting mocked by other asshole commenters. I commented with it there and I'm copying it here too.
I'm so sick of the nerd hierarchy, especially regarding fandom. It's just a fucking hobby, okay? Like fantasy sports leagues or collecting action figures. It has its own jargon and references, like any hobbyist community.
Fandom is responsible for tons of cool stuff that "normal" people on the internet benefit from-- whether it's images and screencaps of media and celebs you like, video clips uploaded to YouTube that you watch, quotes and transcripts available for your reference, game mods you play, manga that's scanlated and anime that's fansubbed... all those things are produced by fans who get passionate about actors, musicians, shows, comics, or media and devote time and energy to making resources available for other people who like the same things.
That kind of passion also produces canon discussions, shipping, fan fiction, and fanvids. People shit on those things and mock them as internet-weird or creepy or whatever crap they say. And then they turn around and use Google Images to find pics on fan galleries for their avatars, set their desktops to fan-created wallpapers, and torrent episodes that fans record, upload and seed. Fuck off with your scorn.
I'm so sick of the nerd hierarchy, especially regarding fandom. It's just a fucking hobby, okay? Like fantasy sports leagues or collecting action figures. It has its own jargon and references, like any hobbyist community.
Fandom is responsible for tons of cool stuff that "normal" people on the internet benefit from-- whether it's images and screencaps of media and celebs you like, video clips uploaded to YouTube that you watch, quotes and transcripts available for your reference, game mods you play, manga that's scanlated and anime that's fansubbed... all those things are produced by fans who get passionate about actors, musicians, shows, comics, or media and devote time and energy to making resources available for other people who like the same things.
That kind of passion also produces canon discussions, shipping, fan fiction, and fanvids. People shit on those things and mock them as internet-weird or creepy or whatever crap they say. And then they turn around and use Google Images to find pics on fan galleries for their avatars, set their desktops to fan-created wallpapers, and torrent episodes that fans record, upload and seed. Fuck off with your scorn.