Then and now- a look back at how fandoms have changed over the years
Fandoms are funny things. I think the last one I had before this was a brief fling with V for Vendetta back in 2007, and before that Weiss Kreuz in 2005. I went through countless ones as a young un. From a personal experience, my fandoms always seem to come about when I’m going through a particularly tough time. Sometimes they last weeks, other times years. My brain’s funky little way of saying “screw this world, my imagination’s better!”
Recently I’ve made some interesting observations about how much has and hasn’t changed in popular fandoms in general. Most strikingly, fan art has improved significantly over the past decade, both in quality and quantity. Back in the early 2000’s, most fanart was what you saw on deviantART (or its crappy predecessor, mediaminer.org), and most of you reading this would be aware that the quality of dA is… questionable. Yes there are some masterpieces on there, however they’d get posted so much around forums and LJs that it soon became a task to find anything decent, new and interesting. Much of it was drawn by teens who saw the rise of the internet and got on board. I’m guessing these teens grew up and continued to post their works on the internet, and with support from fellow fans and constructive criticism to hone their art, went on to become excellent artists. That combined with easier access to graphics programmes (open source stuff like GIMP, faster download speeds for pirating) and the general attractiveness of the interwebs as a place to share art, in my opinion, seems to have raised the bar significantly for fan art. Artists are also encouraged to go to cons and sell their fan works and get recognition. The Avengers art I’ve seen is of higher quality than most of the stuff I saw in my Weiss Kreuz days outside of doujinshi. It’s brilliant.
Of course, there are some things that will always stay the same, and while fan art overall has ascended in quality, fan-fiction is still rooting around in the mud. Naturally I’m speaking in generalisations, but the Avengers section of FanFiction.net looks exactly like the Gundam Wing section did back in 2001. The stories are still all the same, with the same tropes, stereotypes and large amount of illiterate writers. Part of this is likely due to the website itself- it attracts a certain crowd and it’s easy for categories to become echo chambers where authors all use the same tropes, stereotypes and catchphrases because they’ve been inspired to do so from other works. But at the same time, FFN is still the largest collection of fanfiction on the internet so if the quality is bad on there, it can drag the whole genre down.
You really do have to hunt around for good fics these days, and most of the time it’s not on FFN. LiveJournal, although mostly abandoned, still remains an active hub for such authors. Why that is, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s the communities and that it’s a text-based form of social networking unlike tumblr. Generally the quality of fics has always been better on LJ, and if there are other gems out there then people will tend to link to them on their favourite communities.
Another thing that hasn’t changed is the popularity of m-pregs, incest, and genderswap. Admit it ladies, even if Thor and Loki were blood brothers you’d still be happily shipping them.
Music videos are a new thing too. Even comic books have their own videos of scanned-in images flashing across the screen to the auter’s favourite songs. This genre used to exist purely for AMVs, but now there’s so many of the non-anime genre that seems to be a new category that exists alongside the fic and art practices. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have predicted that would take off, particularly with crippling slow download speeds.
It’s all very interesting. I wonder what the next ten years hold?