Things I Am Crotchety About, Rant #2
So my last mega-fandom was SGA, and the thing is, I could pretty much go anywhere with SGA, because in a way, the characters were paper thin: you tell me John Sheppard is a robot, I say sure! A dogwalker? Fine! A barista--with that hair, absolutely! He wears lingerie under his uniform: makes perfect sense. And Rodney--you could do anything with
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But I do think there has been a huge shift in fanfiction as that fourth wall tumbles down. And it's related to the appropriation of fanon. And by that I mean that the new influx of fans don't particularly give a rat's ass about canon or even established fanon. It's a free-for-all. Basically, you get the names right and bob's your uncle. I noticed this with the explosion of next-gen and cross-gen fic when the HP canon ended. All of a sudden you had kids with nothing more than their frigging names (literally) and gobs and gobs of fic about them. Of course, there are some wonderful writers who are writing HP cross-gen and next-gen, but I can't read their stuff because I have nothing invested in these characters. I can't care about them because, um, they don't actually "exist," if you know what I mean.
This sense of appropriating a concept and just twisting it into anything you want seems "new" to me. Canon roots used to be important. I don't that's even remotely true anymore. It's wresting the fantasy away from the creators. I'm something of a canon whore so for me this doesn't work on a bazillion levels. I need those fanon anchors for any bit of fanfiction to make "sense." However, I think the new wave of fans really couldn't give a flying fuck about any of this.
And I think this contributes to the disintegration of fandom into, well, tumblr. Because if you don't have anchors in a fandom, then you don't have something to rally around. It degenerates into largely GIFs and manips. I think the epic fics that used to be generated from fandom on a regular basis are less and less of a given staple because (a) tumblr doesn't lend itself to that kind of interaction, and, yes, you can link to A03, but it's not immediate; it's still a click away; and (b) you don't have people building off of established (and tacitly agreed upon) "rules," therefore as a writer you don't have as much immediate buy-in by your readers (and the cornerstone of community building). I've always felt that fanfiction was a snapshot of what the fandom was like at the time. If the fannish hive mind doesn't have a sense of history, if you will, then the fanfiction isn't a showcase for the progression of the fandom or the medium. It's timeless in a way, but NOT in a good way. Which is why I think people are leaping from fandom to fandom in search of the shiny. Because there is not much "there" there.
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