#fandom

[black-quadrant]

this couldn’t be said any better

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

Reblog if you love AO3 and appreciate their volunteers who are working harder than God, fighting battle after battle, making sure the place that is a safe space for every fandom is staying up and running for all of us

[prokopetz]

It's always fun to see people manage to turn niche interests into serious undertakings, particularly if you've been passingly familiar with their work for a long time. Like, I'll see a post with a username I recognise cross my dash and think "hey, that's the person who used to draw pictures of Patchouli Knowledge with a dick the size of her forearm like a decade ago – I should go see what they're up to these days", and it turns out the answer is "their solo-developed bullet hell shooter about cute android girls is trending 100% positive on Steam".

[sallomezz]

My baby?....

[tangledinink]

he doesn't like the jutu.

a vote for swanatello is a vote to remove swannie from the jutu.

[the-bar-sinister]

"People mostly write and read very character driven, specific ship focused fic, because what most people want out of fanfiction is to focus on the romance between characters they're not getting in canon so they can soak in the vibes."

Yes, absolutely. And thank hell for all the authors who write character-driven, ship focused fic for us to soak in the vibes to.

But also…

thank hell for all the authors who write angst, whump, and hurt no comfort, for us to luxuriate in blorbo's hurt and pain and cry or cackle.

thank hell for all the authors who write cheating, love triangles and affairs for us to consume large quantities of popcorn to and yell 'oh no, they didn't'.

thank hell for all the authors who write case fic, mission fic, and intricate, plot-driven stories to replicate the feel of canon, when canon has stopped or gone wrong.

thank hell for all the authors who write 'fix it' fics when canon has betrayed us with bad vibes, plot holes and deaths.

thank hell for all the authors who write poly ships when what we need is just for everyone to get along and screw instead of screw up.

thank hell for all the authors who write gen fic when we're not interested in romance.

thank hell for all the authors in fandom, and all the wonderful, different kinds of fanfiction they write for us.

[lizardsfromspace]

What's the worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years, and what's the worst thing about fandom that's always been true of it?

The worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years has been the incentivizing of fandom-as-conflict: not merely as a field in broader culture wars but as the field for endless intra-group battles.

This manifests in many ways: as seven hour videos complaining about The Last Jedi, as Twitter backlash campaigns, but also as stans defending their faves from any and all criticism real or imagined, as the endless boom-and-backlash cycle to any fandom meme or joke you see on Reddit, and as the drive for people to look for evidence other people discussing a thing they like are hysterical illiterate dolts, before anything else.

Or, in other words: a lot of fandoms are full of assholes these days, whose main interaction with fandom is using it as a reason to be an asshole, and to defend being an asshole. The actual “fandom” part of fandom no longer really exists for them. The discourse more or less is their fandom; someone whose main fandom activity is sharing videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) isn’t in the Steven Universe fandom, they’re in the videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) fandom. I mean, the chief fandom for many people is their side in the fandom war. What type of fanfic you write is secondary to what your affiliations are vis-a-vis battles over fanfiction

(One trend I've noticed is people who aren't at the stage where they only talk about what they hate and not what they love, but are at the stage where they can only talk about what they love in relation to what they hate. "I love this movie...and it proves this other movie is bullshit made by a hack". No ability to say just "I love this movie", period, end of sentence. This is how like two-thirds of Film Twitter talks about film, the remainder are all the grindhouse people going "man you've GOT to see Wrong Turn 5")

Another one, that I think is related, is that fandom’s become...more transitory, maybe? There’s Big Fandoms that are inescapable and then everything else feels like it’s here for a weekend and then it’s gone. And we’ve always had fandoms that endure and fandoms that vanish quickly, when the show runs short or turns out to be bad/boring, but we did use to have a lot of enduring if small fandoms for Okay shows most people hadn’t heard of and now you don’t really. Or they burn themselves out fast.

So we’ve reached this stage where fandoms are either so big they have seven hour long discourse videos, or they’re a smattering of fanart over the course of two weeks last August. But that isn’t really the fault of fans so much as modern media release schedules.

A lot of fandom activities of old are just...impossible now, with many shows? The slow build of speculation and fan works and in-jokes and theorizing and analysis simply can’t exist in a world where the premiere comes out the same day as the finale, and you can’t talk about the finale because you have no way of knowing if the person you’re talking to binged it all in one weekend or is still on episode four. That was the kind of thing that sustained the fandom of something that wasn’t a big hit, or even something that was. My fave fandom experience ever was watching the online Lost fandom wildly theorizing for all six years of Lost, and we’d never get “and what if the Smoke Monster is a dinosaur but only the head?” under a Netflix release model. Now at a base level, we either have shows nobody can discuss because nobody’s sure who’s seen or what, or shows where everyone just discusses the finale right away, and where you get One Week of Show and then a massive hiatus, which either kills all momentum or...drives fandom in the direction of hyper-analyzing everything and fighting because, well, what else is there to do? And that plus the outrage cycles of social media plus the fact that “man who yells at Star Wars” is now a viable career choice result in, well. *gestures upwards* All that

(Really, shout out to Cartoon Network for engineering the Steven Universe fandom to Be Like That through their inscrutable strategy of dropping episodes during one random week every five months or whatever)

As for something that's always been with it...cliques and a certain fannish elitism, like, that sees engaging with media in a fandom sense as more creative or analytical or intelligent than your average person. You see it now in the form of, like, people holding up fanfic above published fiction as more representative or authentic (I’ve seen more than one post on here strongly implying queer rep doesn’t exist in mainstream non-fic storytelling???), or going “well, we think about shows, unlike those normies watching sports”. But that was probably way more pronounced a thing in the past, in the 40-50s sci-fi fans were calling non-fans "mundanes" and calling themselves "slans" as an in-group signifier (a reference to a book with superintelligent psychic mutants known as slans). Like at the very least we should be happy no one’s calling non-fans “muggles” anymore. In the evolution from “mundane” to “muggle” to “normie” normie’s probably the least bad one

[roseletterchan]

Adriennette, not the emo ones this time

[maddybthorne]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Sir Leon the Long Suffering is one of the best tags ever invented.

[toadsarebitches]

I LOVE jealous Arthur

Actually… no scratch that

I love jealous AND oblivious Arthur

Like he’s so confused why he doesn’t like other people looking at Merlin (or touching him or even TALKING to him) and he just thinks it’s because Merlin is HIS manservant

He starts following Merlin around and interrupting conversations he has with others

And disciplining people who flirt with him

And Merlin is completely oblivious to all this

[sallomezz]

💚Juanaflippa 💚

Cómo profesora hippie que ama de las plantas, que regaña y da a chanclasos a sus hermanos pero al mismo tiempo te da consejos

[all-or-nothing-baby]

unlucky traumatised arseholes somehow managing to find each other against all odds in a world of molten shit is my sexuality actually