I loved this! It took me a long time to get through it but I thought it was very well-written and gave me a lot of insight.
I agree with most of what you've said here, with the addition that I would also say that while choosing to do or not do certain things that will make other people think you are a douchebag is a person's own personal responsibility (which I agree with tremendously-- I am going to do things because I don't want to make someone feel badly, not because they tell me I have to), it's also my personal responsibility to avoid someone if they are continually a douchebag to me. I think one of the things that people don't often bring up in fandom is that you don't have to include someone if their behavior is hurtful or otherwise unacceptable to your general mental health. It took me a long time to learn that it was totally okay to defriend people and refuse contact with people who I thought were complete jerks-- and, in fact, that it was my responsibility to do so.
I would be really interested in hearing more about the kind of pressure to conform you see in HP fandom. I have always been very much on the outskirts of the fandom and it is mostly just a peripheral interest to me that I mostly got into via roleplaying.
Thanks for reading! I am unfortunately prone to using a lot of words, because whenever I use few words, I never seem to get my meaning across.
I think with any fandom, different people experience different types of pressure to conform -- for example, I would say there are sub-sections of fandom where the pressures are directly related to the "guiding policies" within that sub-section (i.e. members of fandom_wank may feel pressured to act aloof and disinterested even when they care about a particular topic that comes up in a wank report, because the whole premise of f_w is that it's uncool to get worked up about fandom shit). My main area of fandom involvement is fiction, and the particular pressure that I feel affects the fanwriter corner is the idea that we're a group of writers rather than fans, and thus we are expected to care about things that writers traditionally care about (such as recognition) usually at the expense of fannish concerns (such as canon adherence, among other things). For consumers of fic, there is constant pressure to idolise writers, and this is hugely compounded by the "we're writers first, fans second" mindset.
I agree with most of what you've said here, with the addition that I would also say that while choosing to do or not do certain things that will make other people think you are a douchebag is a person's own personal responsibility (which I agree with tremendously-- I am going to do things because I don't want to make someone feel badly, not because they tell me I have to), it's also my personal responsibility to avoid someone if they are continually a douchebag to me. I think one of the things that people don't often bring up in fandom is that you don't have to include someone if their behavior is hurtful or otherwise unacceptable to your general mental health. It took me a long time to learn that it was totally okay to defriend people and refuse contact with people who I thought were complete jerks-- and, in fact, that it was my responsibility to do so.
I would be really interested in hearing more about the kind of pressure to conform you see in HP fandom. I have always been very much on the outskirts of the fandom and it is mostly just a peripheral interest to me that I mostly got into via roleplaying.
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I think with any fandom, different people experience different types of pressure to conform -- for example, I would say there are sub-sections of fandom where the pressures are directly related to the "guiding policies" within that sub-section (i.e. members of fandom_wank may feel pressured to act aloof and disinterested even when they care about a particular topic that comes up in a wank report, because the whole premise of f_w is that it's uncool to get worked up about fandom shit). My main area of fandom involvement is fiction, and the particular pressure that I feel affects the fanwriter corner is the idea that we're a group of writers rather than fans, and thus we are expected to care about things that writers traditionally care about (such as recognition) usually at the expense of fannish concerns (such as canon adherence, among other things). For consumers of fic, there is constant pressure to idolise writers, and this is hugely compounded by the "we're writers first, fans second" mindset.
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