What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Weaponized White Womanhood

With that much power already, it can’t be a surprise that many white women in fandom will do pretty much anything in order to keep the statu

Stitch's Media Mix

Here is a very detailed account of what’s been happening in the Star Wars fandom by Stitch, including a timeline of the recent harassment of John Boyega.

It represents a pattern that has historically been present in fandom spaces where a fan – primarily a fan of color – will express distaste in something or frustration with a white fan (or their creation) – and the next thing they know, they’re being accused of bullying or harassment as their fandom circles around the poor white woman fan to shelter her from the sting of responsibility.

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When you refuse to listen to the people talking about how they’re being hurt because they’re not saying it nicely enough to appeal to your inner white savior –

You’re the one showing a pretty problematic bias…

When I talk about how white womanhood is weaponized, I’m talking about how when I and other fans of color who are mildly annoyed by how frustrating fandom is for us, we get subtweeted for days by people who are just so very hurt by our existence criticizing fandom.

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They absolutely do understand what they’re doing when they whip their followers into a frenzy against supposed censorship, put Black fans on anti blocklists (or block our followers en masse, write overlong articles about how “well, actually there’s no racism in fandom, you’re just jealous of our white m/f ship” and smugly share content labeling specific fans of color as dangerous to fandom because they’re critical of it.

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What I do know is that even with this, fans of color feel more comfortable speaking up about racism they witness towards their fellow fans and towards other fans of color. What I do know, is that fans of color are fed the fuck up with fandom mantras like “Don’t Like, Don’t Read” and “Make Your Own” being trotted out when they criticize it and we’re more comfortable pushing back against it.

So this whole minors-in-fandom seems to be the big hot button topic right now, and this post pretty much sums up everything I have to say about the issue. But after reading this post, I had an epiphany while cooking dinner. While I usually don’t jump into The Discourse myself, I needed to share my discovery. So a few years ago I read this excellent article “The Overprotected Kid” - if you haven’t read it, go do it. Now. Seriously. It’s ostensibly about “millennials” but it’s talking mostly about kids that were 5-15 at the time the article was written, i.e. kids who are 8-18ish now. So, basically, this entire white-knight age group of kid crusaders.

Basically, all of this boils down to a generational divide on how we were raised. Like, I could have told you that, but. Really. Basically every line in this article is solid gold, and completely explains the phenomenon we’re embroiled in right now. The article specifically talks about how playing in “dangerous” playgrounds helps children mature and learn how to safely take risks. Well, fandom has long been called a sandbox for a reason, and the parallels are so close it’s bizarre.

Like, navigating your way through fandom spaces that have explicit content or disturbing themes?

“The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.”

Or

“At the core of the safety obsession is a view of children that is the exact opposite of Lady Allen’s, “an idea that children are too fragile or unintelligent to assess the risk of any given situation,” argues Tim Gill, the author of No Fear, a critique of our risk-averse society. “Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”

Or

Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia.

Basically, the problem is this: the 14 and 15 and 16 year-olds on this sight have been, largely, helicopter-parented for every moment of every day of their lives. Many of them have never had to take care of themselves, or navigate difficult emotional situations without parental guidance. When I was a kid, the internet was the wild west, and parents universally told us that everyone on the internet was a pedophile who wanted to kill you, so you had to keep yourself safe. Now, kids always expect there to be a parent there to take care of their emotional needs, and when they go onto online spaces, the just assume that the nearest adult will fill in that role for them, whether that adult is interested or not.

Now, kids are out here saying shit like “i dont know how you dont know that as an adult its your responsibility to maintain a safe environment for children, just as much as it is their parents. for ex not swearing around kids or letting teenagers drink alcohol like every adult knows that.. “

I am not your mother. It’s not my responsibility to ensure that there isn’t underaged drinking. If I walk past a couple of teenagers drinking beers on the street, do you know what I’m going to do about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, because I don’t care and I’m not their mother, and I’m not your mother either. I’ll watch my mouth if I notice that there’s a kid near me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t swear in public, even if there could be kids around me that I haven’t noticed.

This expectation, that every adult is there to monitor you and watch out for you, and if they aren’t willing to do that then they’re a bad person?

“in all my years as a parent, I’ve mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.”

Or how about this chilling factoid?

“When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”

These are the kids on here shouting “I need an adult!” and then getting offended when no adult rushes in to take care. It’s baffling to me, honestly, but. I didn’t grow up this way. My parents taught me how to make good decisions, take care of myself, and navigate difficult situations, both in the “real” world AND online. I… don’t really know what to say to kids whose parents didn’t.

I’m not your mom. If I want kids, I’ll have my own. And I won’t raise them the way your parents raised you.

@athingofvikings

I also strongly suspect there’s a certain element of sampling bias at play. My childhood was a weird one, and I got into fandom at the stage where I was overprotected. When I was damn near imprisoned in my home because my mother was terrified of the outside world, fandom and Internet culture was my “world” and primary connection to the rest of the world.

I didn’t always want to be there. I wanted to be playing basketball, going to after school clubs, and biking around with my friends. Of those three things, I only got the last one, and only under certain and extremely constrained conditions. I didn’t get to do anything else due to my mother’s fear.

I imagine that we overgeneralize a little when we talk about so much of Gen Z being coddled and overprotected…but I think a lot of that is because the ones who weren’t, are less likely to be ‘here’ in the first place.

While Gen Z may or may not be more protected than previous generations, I suspect “the type of kid who turns to fandom as a primary time-passer” probably heavily skews towards “kids who cannot go outside/elsewhere for social interaction and psychosocial stimulation”.

I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.

Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.

But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.

Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking. 

Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it. 

Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.

That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.

But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.

A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This is what stories are supposed to be.

This is what stories are.

Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.

Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.

Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.

We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

@nyxelestia I just read your deeper explanation and it just. Makes so much sense. Thank you for breaking it down. Because I’ve been having so much trouble understanding *why* people could possibly be advocating censorship, when we’ve fought so many hard fights to keep expression free. This explanation of their logic is immensely helpful.

@calliopinot, no problem, happy to help! :)

I did this because while I do not agree with the cyberbullies, extremists, antis, etc. - I do sympathize with them, because I actually have pretty much the same problems with fandom as they do. I do think fandom is full of lots of justification and apologism for abuse, racism, sexism, etc.

The difference is that I don’t care about the dark fic/fucked up stuff where the authors knows it’s fucked up and tagged accordingly…and that I know that harassing other fans doesn’t really accomplish anything.

I give zero fucks about authors writing rape-fic, torture fic, and other types of dark fic. They usually know exactly what their work is and tag it accordingly. I’m more concerned about all the “romantic” fics and tropes that are really abusive traits, as well as the pervasive racism, sexism, and heteronormativity in the characters that fandom does and doesn’t write or create about.

But neither of these problems are unique to fandom; fandom just reflects the exact same problems mainstream media has. Knowing this also contributes to why I don’t actually agree with antis: if puritanism and censorship actually solved anything, then we wouldn’t be having these problems in mainstream media, now would we? Mainstream media is subject to far more censure and censorship than fanfic/fandom media, so if censorship hasn’t gotten rid of all the abuse normalization in the romance/rom com genres of movies, nor racism from Hollywood in general, etc. - then why would I expect it to do shit here?

Still, it is very much my understanding of racism and sexism and whatnot as systemic social problems, my understanding of media as an industry as well as a medium, and my knowledge/experience with pre-social media fandom platforms, that makes me understand how useless harassment is and why puritanism doesn’t accomplish shit.

The reality is that if I didn’t have these things - if I didn’t know what fandom was like prior to Twitter/Tumblr, and if I didn’t have the knowledge/education to understand systemic vs individual problems - then I would almost definitely be a puritanical anti, too. Not because I really believed in it, but because I would feel like that was my only other option of doing something. Either that, or just “give up” and accept the fandom is a shitty, unchanging place full of shitty, unchanging people who don’t care about anyone other than themselves and their interests. Intellectually, I know it’s not true…but when I run into so much racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc etc in my fandoms, it sure as fuck doesn’t feel like it.

The problem with puritans and antis isn’t that they’re irrational. The problem is that they are very, very rational…it’s just that they are making their rational decisions with an extremely restricted set of knowledge/information, and responding rationally to a set of circumstances that only partially exist as they think it does.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

Anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to amass haters will know how true this is. You could post something innocent and ordinary, but then it gets reblogged by a hate account. The people following the hate account all see it, and they start adding their hate into the mix. Gradually the perception of you and your post gets worse and worse and suddenly there’s this whole ecosystem of users who have this crazy distorted imaginary view of you that doesn’t resemble reality at all. All of this building and evolving on it’s own completely out of your view. It’s even possible you have no idea that it’s happening until finally one user pushes their way into your sphere and confronts you with wild accusations and opinions of you that make no sense.

It’s not just on tumblr either. I’ve seen this sort of cycle repeated on many sites, from Twitter to 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. The way the internet is designed right now is to create hundreds of isolated pockets of people. And with no way to universally confront or moderate all these isolated pockets, they quickly become breeding grounds for hate and harassment (or worse).

We DESPERATELY need to rethink and redesign how the internet functions and works, because right now it’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

The problem isn’t that the Internet isn’t working the way it’s supposed to.

The problem is that the Internet is working exactly the way it’s supposed…as per the owners and profiteers of these websites and platforms.

Reblogging again because I caught a different thread of this.

Case In Point

As I’d pointed out above…

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist.

And as @treefrogsoup​ pointed out in yet another thread:

Look at how disorganized and chaotic that is - and that’s just the first six hundred reblogs. As of right now, I’m seeing that this post has at least eighty-four thousand notes! Even if you assume only a tenth of that is reblogs (which is unlikely), that’s still at least 840 reblogs, far more than this chart.

If you assume something closer to a quarter of the notes are reblogs…you’re looking at several thousand nodes in that map.

And no way to tell which ones have have comments on them and which ones don’t, without individually visiting each one, or happening to be online to see it in the notes yourself when it actually happens.

Is it any wonder so many fans resort to passivity in the face of this mess?

Or you visit it in sidebar view and scroll through the actual comments.

But yes, without workarounds, it’s a nightmare. I’ve been looking at old meta of mine, and following the actual conversations is nearly impossible–all the more so because tumblr has fucked up enough things in the interim that that ‘see post on dash’ thing doesn’t work half the time.

I’m gonna add that for whatever reason, sidebar view isn’t always available/accessible. It’s pretty much always available if I click on a specific post in my recent activity - but if it’s not from my activity, then I have to use work around links…which only work about half the time. In other words, if it’s not “active”/recent, it’s difficult to access or read. Archiving, or reading context from a long time ago, etc. becomes even harder when sidebar view is difficult or impossible to access.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

This is an excellent read on Tumblr fandom, and encapsulates some of the things about the platform that give me pause before posting.

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

Likes and drafts are private - you can collect posts in a place where no one sees them but you. It doesn’t have to be a public statement. It can just be a thing that caught your interest for whatever reason, that you wanted to be reminded of.

I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t already to read this essay on how web 2.0 has changed fandom

it’s not just tumblr, or twitter, it’s a fundamental shift in how people act online in the era of social media and algorithm-driven interaction towards advertising revenue

I am kind of fascinated by this. My first experiences of fandom were as a teenager on mailing lists and Usenet.(Age context: I’m considered on the “hub” of Gen X and Milennial, and my siblings are Milennial, although I strongly identify as Gen X for reasons.) Older fans – my precious boomer elders that you will not disrespect near me if you value your life – nurtured me, mentored me, bought me zines. Without ever meeting them, they were my community.

An important part of this was off-topic lists. You talked about the fandom on the main lists, you made friends in the off-topic sub lists.

I met my wife on a mailing list.

When fandom transitioned to livejournal, the friendship became even stronger. One of the best things about livejournal was the mix of public interaction (comms, unlocked posts) and person (yay friends locks and filters.) It fostered really knowing people.

I really only transistioned to AO3 after livejournal went down the loo.

BUT, and this is really important disclaimer: I don’t feel like a “content provider”.

Tumblr is only a tiny part of my fan interaction. Right now, I write for AO3, and I use Discord.

But isolated? No. And maybe the difference is that I feel that writing is communication. I have met people who are seriously important to me, who I consider family, because they liked my fic or I liked theirs or both. There are people I have never interacted with outside AO3 comments who I really value.

I don’t know what my point is–answer AO3 comments more? tells self as well.

But I don’t think community is unachievable if you reach out and are emotionally available.

(Also, as to likes rather than reblogs, yeah, I do that a lot. I don’t want my own stuff lost in a torrent of reblogs. And I appreciate likes, so don’t listen to reblogged posts saying that by hitting like rather than reblog you are letting content providers down. Like kudos, it makes me happy that you say “I was there, I saw it and I liked it”.)

We might never get back the perfect fandom balance that was livejournal. but things aren’t bleak, either. Meet the world with love, and there is love to get back.

(Also I can be an arrogant bitch sometimes. For all I try to be a Hufflepuff the Ravenclaw still dominates. But at least no one on Tumblr has accused me of setting minions on people, so that’s good, huh?)

my sister is the kind of friend who has no hierarchy in terms of content. She doesn’t pay attention to author’s names oh, she just wants more of whatever the thing is that she’s enjoying and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a new episode of a TV show or a new chapter of a fan work.

I’ll never forget the first time I sent her a story to read in a shared fandom and she said ‘oh I’ve already read this’ because she had read it on fanfiction.net but had not left the comment because she had never actually parsed that it was written by her sister. that was when I realised that my sister passively consumed content and that I was just another content provider as far as she was concerned. and it didn’t matter that I wrote it, it could have been written by anyone, as long as it featured her favorite pairing she didn’t actually care if it was any good.

and it’s a really weird feeling because you would think that I would be chuffed that she treats fan works as just as important as canon, except it’s not a particularly discriminating kind of taste.

It doesn’t matter if it’s crackfic or a meticulously plotted perfectly written story that slides into series canon completely seamlessly. all of it is dragged down to the same base level of I want more give me more yay more.

and because there is no actual discernment taking place it doesn’t actually matter if what I wrote was as good, or even better than canon. all that mattered is that it’s scratched the itch for more and as soon as it was consumed it was forgotten.

So this is interesting to me too because on the one hand, I think passive consuming is fine. It isn’t an interaction, or a communication, but it’s absolutely valid.

On the other hand, I know some people obsess over views. I don’t even look at them, because they give me no information. Was it a passive consumer? Was it someone who hated it and made use of their backspace? Was it someone who got bored and didn’t finish? Someone who downloaded my 80,000 word fake marriage epic and never got around to coming back to hit kudos? Is it someone who loved it and is on their second (or seventh, or twentieth) reread? I will never know. So there’s that.

And kind of complicated by (I hope you don’t mind me mentioning this @taraljc) taraljc is a friend I made through livejournal (and maybe even listserv) days and even though we have been in different fandom circles and not interacted so much these last few years, will always have a spot in my heart reserved, and always be considered a real friend.

Not “just” a fandom friend, a friend.

With passive consumption, that never would have happened.

(Unless of course, since I just stumbled on you on Tumblr, you turn out to be a stranger with the same username, which would be sad but hilarious.)

See, this is interesting, because as a younger fan myself it never really occured to me that fanfiction should be treated any differently from original fiction (with all that implies— if you read something that disturbs you in regular fiction, you don’t send fucking death threats to the author).

I leave comments and kudos, and there are certainly some usernames on here and on AO3 that I make a note of because I know that they’re good writers and/or I’ve had a lot of positive interactions with them in the past, but I don’t really feel the deep sense of community that older fans always seem to rave about.

And most of that is almost certainly me. Fandom is the thing I turn to when all my energy has burned out and I just want to relax and wallow in whatever special interest I’ve settled on for the moment. As a result, I don’t usually have that much energy left to put back into it. Sometimes I’ll read something and then leave the tab open all night, because I want to comment on it but I can’t, so I have to wait until morning when my energy supplies have been repleted.

But it never occured to me that it might also be a generational thing.

A bit of both, I think. There have always been people who mostly passively consumed. They bought zines through the mail or browsed webpages. They were just much less visible.

Also, there have been times and places where accessing fic at all required a certain level of social involvement. Too much lurking = no fic 4 u. (Frankly, I would rather not go back to that.)

But I saw a “lurkers are the backbone of fandom” vs. “Uh… lurkers don’t <em>do</em> anything. I who build the website am the backbone of fandom!” argument in like 2001, so…

Part of the problem is that people who want heavy interaction who don’t already have a tight group of actual friends have trouble finding it these days. It was never as easy as people’s nostalgia suggests, but it’s harder now. All of the really fun, nonjudgmental fandom chats I’m in are based off of offline meetups or cons. A lot of these are with people who’ve known each other for decades.

But even though I have some friends like that, there are plenty of people I’d like to get to know who are hard to approach because that’s what their social life looks like: completely private and locked down with their existing friends. It’s sad to me that there aren’t more easy online options that are somewhere in between.

From the broader tech viewpoint, this is also likely a reflection of a much broader trend in society at large.

Millenials (and increasingly now that they are of age, Gen Z) are increasingly encouraged to “brand” ourselves/turn ourselves and our identities into a brand to gain employment or accrue business. Small businesses and start-ups are increasingly tied to the personal identities of their founder, owner, or leader. Social media influencers are constantly trying to leverage themselves into profit/“views”. We’re less and less able to be respected members of a company or group. More and more, people are pushed into one of two extremes: turning your life or yourself into a business for audience and profit, or becoming faceless, nameless, and passive (i.e. gig worker, minimum wage employee, etc.).

That’s the economic take on social media’s influence on society, but fandom seems to be a reflection of that same trend. Fans either really have to put themselves out there almost aggressively just to find new friends and make connections…or you have to be a really passive consumer, not making many deep connections or any at all, and not really able to steer your fandom experience.

I think it’s telling that fandom connections and community are mostly coming back through the rise of a platform that isn’t social media at all - Discord isn’t a social media/content propagation centric site like Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook are. It’s a chat app, where you can talk without having to make every word a public statement by default. That’s a far cry from places like Tumblr, where the moment you post something, you no longer have significant control over the content. Anyone can like or reblog, propagating your content to entire secondary or tertiary audiences, and apart from the ultimately feeble mechanism of blocking - which is easily circumvented anyway - there is nothing you can do to control it. Every word has to be a public statement because as soon as someone reblogs it, they extract your words from its context, and the content moves on without you.

100% this.

This is also one of my problems with tropes in fandom.

When people write darkfic, rapefic, noncon, sex slavery, underage, etc etc., I tend to not care…because they almost always and invariably have warnings and tags and notes and indicators and general ~meta-text~ all around their fics indicating just how Fucked Up™ this story is.

What bothers me in fandom is the fics that don’t have this. The fics that have severely dubious or outright non-consent, but don’t warn for it and don’t even see their trope or story as anything other than consensual. The stories that are chalk full of abuse apologism, but written by authors who don’t - and often actively refuse - to see their characters’ relationship as abusive.

For all that so many fans like to picture fandom as somehow removed from society and above it, the reality is we are a part of the society we were born and raised in, and a reflection of the mainstream media. And this includes how many fans and fanwork creators are a reflection of authors like Stephanie Meyer, E.L. James, and countless other authors: the problem isn’t that their story is fucked up, but that they refuse to acknowledge it, leading to their audiences consuming these tremendously toxic narratives about relationships (and many other things) unchallenged.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

Anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to amass haters will know how true this is. You could post something innocent and ordinary, but then it gets reblogged by a hate account. The people following the hate account all see it, and they start adding their hate into the mix. Gradually the perception of you and your post gets worse and worse and suddenly there’s this whole ecosystem of users who have this crazy distorted imaginary view of you that doesn’t resemble reality at all. All of this building and evolving on it’s own completely out of your view. It’s even possible you have no idea that it’s happening until finally one user pushes their way into your sphere and confronts you with wild accusations and opinions of you that make no sense.

It’s not just on tumblr either. I’ve seen this sort of cycle repeated on many sites, from Twitter to 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. The way the internet is designed right now is to create hundreds of isolated pockets of people. And with no way to universally confront or moderate all these isolated pockets, they quickly become breeding grounds for hate and harassment (or worse).

We DESPERATELY need to rethink and redesign how the internet functions and works, because right now it’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

The problem isn’t that the Internet isn’t working the way it’s supposed to.

The problem is that the Internet is working exactly the way it’s supposed…as per the owners and profiteers of these websites and platforms.

Reblogging again because I caught a different thread of this.

Case In Point

As I’d pointed out above…

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist.

And as @treefrogsoup​ pointed out in yet another thread:

Look at how disorganized and chaotic that is - and that’s just the first six hundred reblogs. As of right now, I’m seeing that this post has at least eighty-four thousand notes! Even if you assume only a tenth of that is reblogs (which is unlikely), that’s still at least 840 reblogs, far more than this chart.

If you assume something closer to a quarter of the notes are reblogs…you’re looking at several thousand nodes in that map.

And no way to tell which ones have have comments on them and which ones don’t, without individually visiting each one, or happening to be online to see it in the notes yourself when it actually happens.

Is it any wonder so many fans resort to passivity in the face of this mess?

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

Here’s the visualisation of the OP, for a recursive example: 

Yup.

Even on this post, I’ve seen one or two replies entirely by chance, but like…there are just way too many reblogs, and Tumblr doesn’t differentiate between “reblog” and “reblog with comment”, except when it’s live.

So if I happen to already be online or looking at my activity, then sure, I will see whether or not a given reblog has a comment or not…but I have no way of seeing if, say, a reblog from someone else might have a comment (that is addressing my reblog/comments), nor would I have a way to come back to this post later and see which reblogs have comments, short of clicking every single reblog to see whether or not it has one.