On Blogging & LJ Nostalgia
[mood:
Contemplative]
[music: Imagine Dragons - Tip Toe]
When I realized it's only a few months shy of a year since I've last posted, I a) hung my head in shame and b) figured I'd better get in gear and actually post. I've been consumed by entire series, interests and fandoms in that length of time--of which there's not even a whisper here. Yikes, I'll be correcting that ASAP.
These days, I primarily use LJ to keep in touch with the wonderful friends I met through it, not so much for fanwork and communities. Thinking about that made me nostalgic for the days when LJ was an epicenter for communities and fandom. When lively discussions in the comments were a regular thing. It was a go-to. It still is for certain things, but I felt a little sad thinking of the rise and fall of so many communities from my halcyon days of comm. participation--writing essays about SasuNaru, making IchiUri birthday posts and manips, the long, interesting and funny yarns being spun in comment threads. Capslock Bleach hotdogs. Wow, do you remember all that?
It's not just LJ of course. Things like the Bleach and Naruto fansites, power houses of members in their day, have diminished or vanished altogether, as have a sizable contingent of those fans and the series' time as the "hottest of the hot"...
Don't even get me started on how sad it makes me that IchiUri/IchiIshi (Kurosaki Ichigo x Ishida Uryuu) offerings used to fill the shelves, but now it's once in a blue moon a new one crops up. This month, I managed to order "Quincy Bread" by Lunachord, an August 2013 offering I'd come across, but that's the first in what feels like ages. Bleach in general barely merits a section on the big DJ sites anymore.
I remember when nearly all Japanese artists had individual websites. I followed a long list of favorite artists' galleries for IU updates let me tell ya. BLAST, I miss you so much my heart hurts. Many Japanese artists still have them for doujinshi/offline event information or doodle blogs, but image respository sites like Pixiv and Tumblr are ebbing away at that, too.
I mean, geez, if you weren't in Bleach fandom a few years ago, you'd have no idea that Isshiken (Kurosaki Isshin x Ishida Ryuuken) was even a thing. Why? Because it was in its prime when all of these artists had their own sites. I think there's a whopping 3 or 4 pieces of Isshiken art on Pixiv, but in its day, it was a pairing with some of the most amazing artists Bleach fandom had to offer (Leon/Nikita) and entire DJ anthologies of its own ("Your Eyes Only")--it even attained mpreg gloriousness. Raica and Nikita's Isshiken & IchiUri family series remain some of my most prized DJs. It just makes me kind of sad newer fans probably have no idea. And probably won't unless they do some real digging. The fandom that's left certainly doesn't seem to be aware that IchiUri rivaled (and often surpassed) any het combo of Bleach in the amount of fanwork produced, held a lot of IU-only events and had its own cosplay cafe. I remember perusing Comiket booklets for a look at the plentiful IU circles participating.
Nowadays, fandom communities are scattered and spread between many platforms, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses. Tumblr seems to be a big draw these days. I can see why. It has a fairly intuitive tagging system and a bevy of active artists for all sorts of fandoms, but I've found the tags are only as helpful as the users' consistency. Also, I dislike that a post's initial tags automatically roll into the overall site tags of the same name without a way to turn it off, either overall or post-by-post. It's especially frustrating when a tag is generic enough to have multiple interpretations or is dually used, ending up as a very disjointed tag that pleases no one.
By contrast, in an individual LJ or comm, a tag would be used to mean one thing consistently. Tumblr doesn't allow this handy functionality, so to keep things blog-specific or personal, it necessitates personalized tweaks to the tagging, which in turn makes it more difficult for people interested in that content to find it. Finding how someone refers to a couple in Tumblr tags is more time consuming than simply searching for a community dedicated to what you want. Tumblr also heavily favors portmanteaus for couples/ships, which often require being in the "fandom know" to even find (Thor x Steve Rogers is Thundershield; that's not exactly a new fan's immediate guess). What's more, work is produced by artists, and artists are by nature creative, so pairing/OTP tags are often personalized even further (e.g., "OTP: Are you getting sleepy" is a user's Thundershield tag).
Portmanteaus can be a nightmare when they aren't consistently decided upon. Let's take Teen Wolf as an easy example: Sterek is the ship name for Derek Hale x Stiles Stilinski, and it's a universally used, consistent tag. I doubt you'd see much use of something like Halinski or Diles (even though I think the latter would be funny since diles [dee-leyhs] is "tell them" in Spanish). However, if you're hunting for Teen Wolf's Jackson x Isaac, you're met with variations on their first and last names using x and +, name order switches, Jisaac, Jasaac, and Jasac.
Another reason I'm reluctant to utilize Tumblr for blogging is because I don't consider it a very good place for stories or group discussions. People can easily edit other people's posts to remove content/credit at will (and frequently do), reblogs don't automatically reflect changes made in the original post (so misinformation can prance around long after the original is updated or deleted), and the longer the comment threads, the more confusing it gets regarding who said what and to whom--not to mention you can't really privatize things for a select group or ban trolls. I vastly prefer a blog style for long posts and commenting. At least with blogs, being a shady jerk requires a bit more of work via copying/pasting/re-posting to mess with the original post.
Ultimately, I feel like I'm lacking a one-stop shop these days. I know it's only natural that social sites evolve, grow and decline as people migrate to new platforms, just like we do with ideas, practices and products, but I miss LJ as it was. I have fond and not-so-fond memories of it (strikethrough, anyone?). Guess I'm just experiencing more of that "I remember when" generational divide these days...growing older is a strange, amorphous, daunting thing.