fannish culture

Feb 02, 2014 10:25

There is this person on my Tumblr dash who recently changed fandoms, and is having kind of salt-and-burn-the-earth feelings about her old fandom. I understand this.

Recently she's been really angry about people reblogging her old edits and photosets, and making posts about how she hates seeing them in her Tumblr activity and if people don't stop doing it, she's going to go back and delete them. I do not understand this.

I sent her a message, talking about how I know it's weird when people comment on my old fic in fandoms that are dead to me, but I try to think of it as a compliment and be glad that something I made is still giving people joy. Maybe that would work for her?

No, it's not a compliment, it's annoying, she can understand why I can feel okay about old fic because I made that, but she has no emotional connection to her edits and she doesn't want to see them anymore and why do people care about old things.

...I don't know how to interact with that, so I dropped the conversation. Because this is a new fannish norm that I really don't get, and it makes me feel old and weird.

Semi-relatedly, recently I was queueing things for Fandom Like Fine Wine, my fandom reaction gifs tumblr (what is my life), and I was going to make a joke about fandom_wank in one of them. I ended up changing it because I realized that for 90% of the people who would see the post, "fandom_wank" would be meaningless gibberish. And I got to thinking about how fandom down the road just a little bit will look back and piece together what we did with no context, like how we piece together ancient societies from their garbage.

"People used journaling platforms, and they had this concept called we're not gay we just love each other, which is so weird and unenlightened because didn't they know about sexual fluidity? Anyway, they spent a lot of time fighting about what show creators intended, because nobody was on Twitter giving that info out. It was really primitive. Oh, and nobody DVR'd or uploaded the episodes ever, because they prized the ephemerality of the experience."

WON'T THAT BE EXCITING? No.

The Internet: forever weird.

The Dreamwidth copy of this post has
comments. Comment there or here, as you like!
Previous post Next post
Up