maybe do adjust your set
Soooooo.
Here's what it is. In the last few weeks, I watched through most of The Walking Dead for the first time. It was mostly idle curiosity, but I did end up finding a great deal more of interest than the incessant complaints about it (which was my only exposure to the show before this) had led me to believe. And though I tried to scribble out a bunch of the random thoughts I had on the show, and/or my exasperation at fandom reactions, something about the push-pull between those two things kept becoming too incoherent to actually post.
So I gave up, and watched the five extant S8 episodes of Show'o'MyHeart instead, and LOVED THEM. And then made the mistake of glancing around online.
At which point, piling onto the morass of TWD grousing, Show's fandom's response pretty much broke me.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
That was several days ago (other rl crap has slowed me down some, as par for the course). In that time, the only conclusion I've come to about fandom generally is that I may as well be standing around on clifftops shrieking "Inconceivable!" I just don't get it. I don't, and I never will. It's dawning on me (I'm slow) that I did the equivalent of wandering into Chuck E. Cheese's in the expectation of haute cuisine. Which is not a value judgement; what fandom is is just not what I'm looking for, not what I enjoy, and definitely not what I have the energy for. Also, while there are adults around, they're hard to find and harder to converse with in any meaningful way. (I count myself lucky to have found as many of you as I have, considering how little I explore; as I've said many times, I ❤ my flisties.)
When I got involved in online fandom, it was to engage in stories and storytelling, not in a dry, academic way but with both intelligent analysis and heapings of squee. Story is fundamentally communal in nature, and I came looking for communities that have grown up around the particular stories I have time to invest in.
I don't know why it should be now that the disparity between what I care about, and what fandom cares about, should hit me so hard. Sure, the response to SPN S8 has been an epic blame-game bitchfest, but that's not new for this fandom, except possibly in terms of scale and saturation. (Who's got two thumbs and the trollingest Show around? Oh yeah, baby.) Once that was merely a matter for my daily popcorn intake levels; now I want absolutely no part of it, I don't even want to skim it. When even the most measured, thoughtful, equitable voices in the fandom have to spend ~paragraphs~ detailing and explaining why Sam isn't being selfish (what. the. everloving. fuck.), there is simply no way to engage any discussion without it becoming framed in those terms, with a side order of asses and umptions all around.
So now I've just sort of been standing here, trying to figure out what comes next.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time. -- George Bernard Shaw
This is what I love: discussing what a story is doing. The operative paradigms of a story's world-building, and how the characters interact with them, how they change and grow and (preferably) learn to navigate them well, together and apart, and in turn impact each other and their world within those paradigms. What they choose, and why, and how the consequences then inform their understanding and subsequent choices. And how all of that can be told skillfully.
And then - once the question of what the story is, in itself, has been meaningfully engaged - comes evaluating what it's expressing about us in our wider reality. Skip the first step (or fail to review and reassess it periodically), and all we do is uncritically project our own understanding onto the story, often trying to steal the story's voice for our own (and reacting poorly when it fails to say what we think it should) rather than listening to what it has to say for itself. (... Which is another way of saying CONTEXT MATTERS, which, yes, I would go around screaming at people just like that if I thought it would do any good whatsoever. Maybe a t-shirt design of some kind?)
I realised I don't know how to do that in fandom. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it's that I don't know how I can do that; I don't feel like I have a lot to offer that fandom wants. I'm not going to lie, there was a moment or two there where I gave serious consideration to peacing out. But there's very little I like about that idea, and at the top of the list of what I don't like is losing all you guys. I love your voices and passion, and watching whatever you're into pop up on my flist, even if for the most part I'm an awkward penguin and have nothing worth saying or can't join in. And I still want to write about the stuff that I love, still want to explore the stories that interest me and why, even if in the end I'm just burbling away here to myself.
I guess what I'm saying is that I lost any desire to be involved, at least on any level beyond you, the immediately personal. I don't expect anything, I'm not trying to be part of anything, all I really want to do is say hey, look, I think this is interesting, and welcome anyone if they want to join in. I don't know if that makes me part of fandom or not, but I'm not much fussed either way.
Coming soon: hey, look, The Walking Dead.
Here's what it is. In the last few weeks, I watched through most of The Walking Dead for the first time. It was mostly idle curiosity, but I did end up finding a great deal more of interest than the incessant complaints about it (which was my only exposure to the show before this) had led me to believe. And though I tried to scribble out a bunch of the random thoughts I had on the show, and/or my exasperation at fandom reactions, something about the push-pull between those two things kept becoming too incoherent to actually post.
So I gave up, and watched the five extant S8 episodes of Show'o'MyHeart instead, and LOVED THEM. And then made the mistake of glancing around online.
At which point, piling onto the morass of TWD grousing, Show's fandom's response pretty much broke me.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
That was several days ago (other rl crap has slowed me down some, as par for the course). In that time, the only conclusion I've come to about fandom generally is that I may as well be standing around on clifftops shrieking "Inconceivable!" I just don't get it. I don't, and I never will. It's dawning on me (I'm slow) that I did the equivalent of wandering into Chuck E. Cheese's in the expectation of haute cuisine. Which is not a value judgement; what fandom is is just not what I'm looking for, not what I enjoy, and definitely not what I have the energy for. Also, while there are adults around, they're hard to find and harder to converse with in any meaningful way. (I count myself lucky to have found as many of you as I have, considering how little I explore; as I've said many times, I ❤ my flisties.)
When I got involved in online fandom, it was to engage in stories and storytelling, not in a dry, academic way but with both intelligent analysis and heapings of squee. Story is fundamentally communal in nature, and I came looking for communities that have grown up around the particular stories I have time to invest in.
I don't know why it should be now that the disparity between what I care about, and what fandom cares about, should hit me so hard. Sure, the response to SPN S8 has been an epic blame-game bitchfest, but that's not new for this fandom, except possibly in terms of scale and saturation. (Who's got two thumbs and the trollingest Show around? Oh yeah, baby.) Once that was merely a matter for my daily popcorn intake levels; now I want absolutely no part of it, I don't even want to skim it. When even the most measured, thoughtful, equitable voices in the fandom have to spend ~paragraphs~ detailing and explaining why Sam isn't being selfish (what. the. everloving. fuck.), there is simply no way to engage any discussion without it becoming framed in those terms, with a side order of asses and umptions all around.
So now I've just sort of been standing here, trying to figure out what comes next.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time. -- George Bernard Shaw
This is what I love: discussing what a story is doing. The operative paradigms of a story's world-building, and how the characters interact with them, how they change and grow and (preferably) learn to navigate them well, together and apart, and in turn impact each other and their world within those paradigms. What they choose, and why, and how the consequences then inform their understanding and subsequent choices. And how all of that can be told skillfully.
And then - once the question of what the story is, in itself, has been meaningfully engaged - comes evaluating what it's expressing about us in our wider reality. Skip the first step (or fail to review and reassess it periodically), and all we do is uncritically project our own understanding onto the story, often trying to steal the story's voice for our own (and reacting poorly when it fails to say what we think it should) rather than listening to what it has to say for itself. (... Which is another way of saying CONTEXT MATTERS, which, yes, I would go around screaming at people just like that if I thought it would do any good whatsoever. Maybe a t-shirt design of some kind?)
I realised I don't know how to do that in fandom. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, it's that I don't know how I can do that; I don't feel like I have a lot to offer that fandom wants. I'm not going to lie, there was a moment or two there where I gave serious consideration to peacing out. But there's very little I like about that idea, and at the top of the list of what I don't like is losing all you guys. I love your voices and passion, and watching whatever you're into pop up on my flist, even if for the most part I'm an awkward penguin and have nothing worth saying or can't join in. And I still want to write about the stuff that I love, still want to explore the stories that interest me and why, even if in the end I'm just burbling away here to myself.
I guess what I'm saying is that I lost any desire to be involved, at least on any level beyond you, the immediately personal. I don't expect anything, I'm not trying to be part of anything, all I really want to do is say hey, look, I think this is interesting, and welcome anyone if they want to join in. I don't know if that makes me part of fandom or not, but I'm not much fussed either way.
Coming soon: hey, look, The Walking Dead.