#my two current hyperfixes r clashing

[sirenvrse]

if Bradley was in f1 he'd be a Scuderia Ferrari driver

[acecademia]

What fandoms have you been a part of (both currently and in the past)? How do you feel like fandoms have changed?

Hi, nonny!

I've been in more fandoms than I can count, honestly. Looking back, the ADHD is super obvious. I hyperfixate on a piece of media for a while and then suddenly lose all interest in it. So there have been a lot of those that have cycled through. There are a few that I routinely come back to, usually when I'm between my more brief hyperfixations.

The ones I tend to come back to every few years are Star Wars, Narnia, the MCU, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Dragon Age, and Merlin. And there's probably a couple others I'm forgetting.

I'm the kind of person who's been very into things my whole life. I do not enjoy things casually--I get very invested and have to learn absolutely everything about my new obsession and then infodump to everyone I know. (Do you see the ADHD yet?) The piece of media that introduced me to fandom was a French cartoon called Code Lyoko. That was my shit in elementary/middle school. One day, when I was like 10, I googled it. And the first link after the official website was for a site called lyokofreak.net, which sadly is no longer around. This is what it looked like around the time I first found it. There were links off to the side called things like "ships" and "fanfiction," and I just started clicking through all of them and stumbling further and further down the proverbial rabbit hole.

From there, I found fanfiction.net which brought me to other fandoms and fansites, and then it was just like game over. I'd found my thing.

That was around 2005, so I've been kicking around in fandom for about 16 years now. And a lot has definitely changed. I think there was a pretty big shift in fan culture around the time that Glee and Twitter were on the rise. Twitter was one of the first places where fandom stuff was not just public but on a very public platform. Glee also referenced some fan culture stuff (like shipping). Between the two of them, fandom started becoming more mainstream. We saw another shift around the time of Dashcon (Sarah Z (@dingdongyouarewrong) did a great video on that) where fan activities started to be considered more "cringey" and we went from being unironically enthusiastic about things to feeling like we needed to inject some level of irony into our fannish behaviors to avoid embarrassment.

Sites like Twitter (and other social media platforms) also broke down some barriers between fan and creator. Sometimes, this is a good thing, like when fans have an easy avenue to reach out to a small creator they love to gush about their work. And sometimes.... it's a garbage fire. I think we've all heard enough horror stories about celebrities and creators being bullied off of social media by asshole fans to know what I'm talking about here.

There are also some generational differences within fandom. As always, I'm in a weird position on the cusp of two generations. I'm young enough to be considered part of one fandom generation, but I've been in fandom longer than most of them since I found it so young. I could write a whole book on the shifts in fandom culture, but suffice to say, younger fans are much more likely to be openly vocal about things like fanfiction and shipping and whatnot even when talking to creators than older fans are. A lot of older fans still carry that fear of being literally sued over writing fanfiction (thanks, A*ne R*ce). Now, we see younger fans getting mad at AO3 and the OTW for not following the purity culture trend while older fans tend to be utterly confused by this behavior as, like, literally, that's why we have AO3??? Because of all the purging and rules and bullshit we went through on other platforms?? And it's often these same younger fans who get confused about the existence of disclaimers that older fans still habitually include in their fics as an ingrained form of self-defense. There's a general lack of understanding, and it often feels like a huge culture clash. Because these younger fans didn't experience fandom and the internet the same way that older fans did. The internet and social media changed fandom to a completely unknown degree. I'm definitely not an expert on this, since I'm still fairly young and also have only been in fandom since 2005, but one of my goals is to do a lot of in-depth interviews with "fandom elders" and really get a sense of how fandom has changed from their perspective. That'll be a book I write (or co-write) one day.