Comments | schmevil: Your fandom is not Fandom

schmevil

Your fandom is not Fandom

Jan 06, 2010 18:02

Coming Clean: 2009 & The End of Dumb Things, by 2-perseph

I imagine that those of you who are interested in this sort of thing have already read the post. I found it a few days after the fact, via a post on my flist. I haven't been keeping up with things, what with being sick, but I made time for this, since it's Relevant To My Interests.
Fandom was a ( Read more... )

Comments 19

penguinparity January 7 2010, 19:20:47 UTC

Ugh. That post is infuriating on so many levels. You've already outlined the biggest annoyance, but her sense of elitism in the post grates me as well. It very much seems like a sentiment of 'I've been in fandom longer and you're doing it wrong, let me tell you.'

Not to mention her sweeping claims about the history of fandom, the history of communication technology, the subversive nature of fanworks, the relationship of fen and TBTB, and the commodification of fandom are just factually incorrect.

schmevil January 8 2010, 02:24:14 UTC

Yeah, it was fun to see all those claims debunked. Six years of anecdotal evidence is just a drop in the fandom bucket. There are plenty of people on LJ and elsewhere, who measure their fandom participation in decades! And the elitism got to me too. I may not play in fandom on MySpace, or god forbid 4chan, but whatever man, if that's what kids these days are into... *shrug* I don't need to learn them The Ways And Mysteries of Fandom.

Eta: In fact, they may have something to teach me about being in fandom.

(The comment has been removed)

schmevil January 8 2010, 02:30:51 UTC

Thanks for reading! It was a pleasure to write. :)

Here via WFA... mechanicaljewel January 11 2010, 19:13:37 UTC

Thank you so much for this-- the Fandom = fanworks mentality baffled me even when I was still fic-writing, and started to piss me off after I stopped. I've been "in fandom" since I was a wee geek, before the Internet, and unless my friends were also into my show/book/movie, I was often a fandom of one (as far as I knew or cared). I didn't know what fanfic was until I was 12. I didn't attempt it till I was 13. I didn't publish any till I was 16. I wasn't always reading fic, or taking part in comms all those years, and currently I'm too busy with school and my personal life to spare much for time for even the most cursory fan-activities, but damn anyone to hell who tries to tell me I wasn't "in fandom" back then OR now. I was (and am) in fandom by virtue of the fact that I was always into something that meant something to me on multiple levels, that had a profound effect on my perception on myself and the world around me ( ... )