Comments | wombat_socho: One less convention I'll be visiting

wombat_socho

One less convention I'll be visiting

Jul 24, 2011 20:52

haikujaguar, who recently wrapped up the most excellent "Spots The Space Marine" web serial here on LJ, recently made a trip to Readercon and posted about it hereI'm glad she did well there, but I completely sympathize with her decision not to go back for a while - if ever. The knee-jerk political and anti-religious attitudes on display there aren't unique to ( Read more... )

friends, convergence, the bush of fandom, culture & politics

Comments 10

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wombat_socho July 25 2011, 21:21:06 UTC

Because these people are ignorant fuggheads who think all "Christers" are the same? Honestly, I don't know either.

3fgburner July 25 2011, 03:16:06 UTC

These are people whose heads would go all 'splody, if they wandered into Barfly Central at any con where there were 2 or more Baen fen present. The first quivers of freaking out would come when they saw the multiply-perforated targets posted on the walls, most of them shot by the ladies in the bunch.

wombat_socho July 25 2011, 21:38:40 UTC

I can't imagine the people we're discussing going into Barfly Central any more than I can imagine them buying and reading anything by Drake, Kratman, or Ringo.

kishiriadgr July 25 2011, 05:50:09 UTC

Heh, I was just talking to a longtime friend of mine about how all my east coast anime friends have evolved into kneejerk liberal Democrat douchebags. Only two are religious, with one being Catholic and the other fuzzy-bunny Wiccan. I once would have said that it follows that being an SF/Fantasy fan would lead towards one being liberal, except that most of my west-coast SF/fantasy friends are libertarian, with me being the most conservative of the bunch. I don't know where Readercon is, but maybe part of that is locale?

wombat_socho July 25 2011, 21:37:09 UTC

Judging from my experiences in conventions between DC and Minnesota, I'm afraid it's not a local problem; this is something that seems encoded in the fundamental DNA of SF and its fandom.

kishiriadgr July 25 2011, 21:50:10 UTC

Yes, but as I said, the SF fans here in SoCal tend to be more conservative than the east coast.

wombat_socho July 25 2011, 22:02:29 UTC

I wonder why.

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wombat_socho July 26 2011, 09:31:05 UTC

I think the influx of fantasy fans also feeds into this. I've lost count of the number of fantasy novels I've seen where the Catholic/Christian Church (or a sloppy imitation of it) is the obvious heavy in the story, and I daresay that trope wouldn't be so widespread if it weren't popular.

And I don't think you have to be immersed in the culture - I really haven't been since moving down here - to see that something's wrong.

433 July 26 2011, 02:34:29 UTC

I tend to think there are not as many capital-C Conservatives (meaning the people who call themselves Republicans these days), but sci-fi fandom is remarkably liberal. There are quite a few small-L libertarians as well as those who have mare varied positions, but the assumption is there because of the data.

wombat_socho July 26 2011, 09:34:01 UTC

Yeah, but why is that? Is there that much of a counter-cultural element in fandom because most fans are too socially inept/lack the skills to make it in mainstream capitalist, Christian America? What happened to the kind of fans who read Heinlein and Clarke (for example) and became engineers in NASA? Did they all fuck off to the combat SF ghetto? Inquiring minds want to know!