Aging in fannish years
I'm at a really weird place in my life right now. My career is moving forward, and I feel more mentally healthy and stable than ever before, but I'm not making friends in my new town (is it still new by the end of my second semester?) as easily as I did last time around. So I could really go for some nerd bonding, even if it's only online, just get some genuine, unforced social contact. At the same time, I'm gearing up for a period of high activity/stress related to SCIENCE!, and I really miss having fandom nonsense to dive into between bouts of Serious Business to keep different parts of my mind active. But the fandom landscape has changed, and nearly everything I'm interesting in fangirling over falls into one of more of the following categories: obscure, dead, popular with people who are so much younger than me that I feel acutely uncomfortable about the existence of anything that's not totally G-rated, or awash in tropes I absolutely cannot stand for one more bloody prompt, including AUs based on Supernatural and crossovers with Supernatural and (ugh!) the increasingly ubiquitous "omegaverse" or "A/B/O dynamics" AUs. Yes, I'm kink-shaming. Hard.
I really, really miss being in an active fandom that based on a source text I like. Yeah, part of my problem is that I'm just getting older and naturally moving from "lol, fifteen-year-olds writing bad smut, I'm so glad that I was soooooo much more mature when I was their age and didn't have internet access!" to "Fifteen-year-olds reading smut? But they'll internalize damaging messages! They're too young for their imaginary boyfriends! Think of the children! And eat your vegetables or you'll get scurvy!" Meanwhile, older fans have moved on from where we were back then, but I seem to have moved in very different directions than most older fans. I've become increasingly sensitive about misogynistic portrayals of female characters and sexual abuse and over-the-top gross-out violence and the glamorization of allegedly sociopathic characters and the the glorification of arrogant, snarky dudes who deserve to get away murder because they're sooooo much smarter than everyone else. But when I look at what's popular on the internet now, I get a sense that online fandom as a whole has either stayed the same or gotten more desensitized to those things. So I'm the weird dumpy grown woman wandering around the YA section in search of something "safe" to read while most of the grown-ups are watching Game of Thrones and Hannibal.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/81466.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
I really, really miss being in an active fandom that based on a source text I like. Yeah, part of my problem is that I'm just getting older and naturally moving from "lol, fifteen-year-olds writing bad smut, I'm so glad that I was soooooo much more mature when I was their age and didn't have internet access!" to "Fifteen-year-olds reading smut? But they'll internalize damaging messages! They're too young for their imaginary boyfriends! Think of the children! And eat your vegetables or you'll get scurvy!" Meanwhile, older fans have moved on from where we were back then, but I seem to have moved in very different directions than most older fans. I've become increasingly sensitive about misogynistic portrayals of female characters and sexual abuse and over-the-top gross-out violence and the glamorization of allegedly sociopathic characters and the the glorification of arrogant, snarky dudes who deserve to get away murder because they're sooooo much smarter than everyone else. But when I look at what's popular on the internet now, I get a sense that online fandom as a whole has either stayed the same or gotten more desensitized to those things. So I'm the weird dumpy grown woman wandering around the YA section in search of something "safe" to read while most of the grown-ups are watching Game of Thrones and Hannibal.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/81466.html. Please comment there using OpenID.