(no subject)

[anghraine]

I've been thinking a bit about modern fandom, and one of the things that's struck me is how much the whole purpose of being in fandom IME seems kind of out of sync with where it seems to be going? There's so much conscious cultivation of fandom personas and backlash against "cringe" and it's odd. I know people have always made attempts to cozy up to BNFs and gain the appearance of above-it-all coolness, but it always seems such a ridiculous thing in fandom spaces in particular, which were kind of inherently cringe for a long time.

I don't exclude myself at all from this, btw. I use fandom to babble about the things that the people in my life find boring or pointless or embarrassing. One of the things that makes Tumblr hard to quit is that people will engage with me over almost anything where virtually every other site but AO3 is like screaming into a vacuum. Most of my (tiny) number of Twitter followers never interact in any way and I don't know what they're around for. People only occasionally say anything on Dreamwidth or Wordpress (love them, but it is what it is) or interact on PF (when it's operational). But Tumblr is like ... I've picked up what followers I have purely through rambling about things most people find dull or embarrassing. So the really self-conscious cultivation of a fannish persona with the active goal of gaining a following is ... both weird and very un-fun from my perspective.

IDK, this isn't going anywhere. I'm just really weirded out by how much deliberation and self-consciousness I see in fandom atm. 

Comments

[lizbee]

I have a theory that one of the reasons fandom has become so ... calculated and normy (one of many reasons, obviously; fandom is not a monolith) is that the fan-to-professional pipeline has become very visible, and sometimes people see fandom as a stepping stone on the path to something else.

And I'm not exempt from that! I totally see people being openly fannish around actors and writers and think, "Nooooooooo, I want that person on my podcast one day, don't be off-putting and spoil my chances!"

But there's this ... hmm, expectation that you can and should monetise your coffeeshop AU, versus the backlash Tamsin Muir got for writing some fucked up Homestuck fic. It's a weird sort of respectability politics.

[alias_sqbr]

Huh! You may have a point, but it's funny because that's been the case much longer with fanart yet I feel like fanartists still only became so focussed on being normal at the same time as fic writers. Maybe we're too small of a minority to have had the critical mass to change the culture.

*starts rambling and realises I've reached 'make my own post' levels of rambling tangent and goes off to make it*

[anghraine]

I didn't think about fanart, but it's interesting that it both overlaps and has a somewhat different history ... I'm looking forwards to seeing your post :)

[anghraine]

I think that may well be part of it. "Calculated and normy" is a good way of putting it, and yeah, there's definitely an increased (I'd say dramatically increased) push towards monetization and other kinds of "how can I profit off this, though?"

I do understand it at one level. Like, I'm not super popular or anything, but if I could wave a magic wand and convert the following for my fanfics into a following for my original fic interests and work, it'd be a temptation to sever the fan/pro division and go for it. But there is this weird way it's tangled up in both profit and respectability as not just things that given individuals want but which everyone can and should pursue that's really questionable (and joyless in some ways).

[lokifan]

^^^^ to all of this, as an explanation, how I'm not exempt from it, and the weird respectability-politics element.