Snowflake Challege: Day 3
Jan. 3rd, 2025 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chibifukurouIn your own space, talk about a fannish opinion you hold that has changed over time.
So this had been a hard challenge for me to figure out how to address. I know how much someone saying things full chested can feel like an attack. No matter the initial intent. Please read with caution. I'm cutting in case its easier to avoid that way.
My entry into the Tranformative Works community was what I'd consider pretty standard. Geeky teen who loves to read finds fanfiction and millions-billions of words of free fiction to read. Goes hog wild.
Eventually, I became an adult and started writing fanfic of my own. 16 years ago fandom was still a pretty niche subculture with some counterculture branches tucked in among the group. If you wandered into the right comms you were likely to hear discussions about fan morals when it came to pirating media and how to support importers when the foreign language film made it to a US release.
The transformative works community was a bunch of volunteer fans from scanlators, to slashy fanartists, to the person who ran a geo-citied shrine site that colated weird fandom theories about an ongoing show. It wasn't some subcultural utopia, I'm not trying to was nostalgic. You lived in fear of getting cease and desist or having your dirty laundry dragged out for all the normies to see where it might end up effecting your brick space life. But you generally had each others back and could assume a shared wall of silence that protected not only your browsing taste but discussion of your queerness and socialism.
In a lot of ways the post Ao3, Legal protections and make a living through fandom changes we've seen over the last decade have been a boon. Less silod, less gate kept, easier and safer for new fans to navigate.
But I also have come to think that these changes taking us mainstream means we need to reckon with the fact that like so many other subcultures that move into the mainstream, Transformative Works is no longer a semicohesive movement. We are no longer just the socially fringe niche where the queers and queer adjacent folks hang out.
We older weirdos are still here and getting new baby queers and weirdos. But we are also getting mainstream transplants finding their way to Ao3 from social media compilations of if you like this published exfanfic writer then you have to try these fics on Ao3. Or articles from online media organizations talking about how Ao3 is free and making records for number of users.
I am not trying to discourage anyone from getting access to all the free and awesome fanfiction out there. But I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that interacting with someone in fandom spaces means they are counterculture by default.
This was never fully the case but particularly now, I worry about the assumption that the members of this community are assuming an unspoken rule of cohesion when the community has been so thoroughly fractured by the move to non messaging/community spaces both in social media and archives.
Then again maybe I'm just old and crochety
So this had been a hard challenge for me to figure out how to address. I know how much someone saying things full chested can feel like an attack. No matter the initial intent. Please read with caution. I'm cutting in case its easier to avoid that way.
My entry into the Tranformative Works community was what I'd consider pretty standard. Geeky teen who loves to read finds fanfiction and millions-billions of words of free fiction to read. Goes hog wild.
Eventually, I became an adult and started writing fanfic of my own. 16 years ago fandom was still a pretty niche subculture with some counterculture branches tucked in among the group. If you wandered into the right comms you were likely to hear discussions about fan morals when it came to pirating media and how to support importers when the foreign language film made it to a US release.
The transformative works community was a bunch of volunteer fans from scanlators, to slashy fanartists, to the person who ran a geo-citied shrine site that colated weird fandom theories about an ongoing show. It wasn't some subcultural utopia, I'm not trying to was nostalgic. You lived in fear of getting cease and desist or having your dirty laundry dragged out for all the normies to see where it might end up effecting your brick space life. But you generally had each others back and could assume a shared wall of silence that protected not only your browsing taste but discussion of your queerness and socialism.
In a lot of ways the post Ao3, Legal protections and make a living through fandom changes we've seen over the last decade have been a boon. Less silod, less gate kept, easier and safer for new fans to navigate.
But I also have come to think that these changes taking us mainstream means we need to reckon with the fact that like so many other subcultures that move into the mainstream, Transformative Works is no longer a semicohesive movement. We are no longer just the socially fringe niche where the queers and queer adjacent folks hang out.
We older weirdos are still here and getting new baby queers and weirdos. But we are also getting mainstream transplants finding their way to Ao3 from social media compilations of if you like this published exfanfic writer then you have to try these fics on Ao3. Or articles from online media organizations talking about how Ao3 is free and making records for number of users.
I am not trying to discourage anyone from getting access to all the free and awesome fanfiction out there. But I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that interacting with someone in fandom spaces means they are counterculture by default.
This was never fully the case but particularly now, I worry about the assumption that the members of this community are assuming an unspoken rule of cohesion when the community has been so thoroughly fractured by the move to non messaging/community spaces both in social media and archives.
Then again maybe I'm just old and crochety