#m: fandom meta

[canichangemyblogname]

Please, please, please reblog for sample size. Make this a very popular poll on this site.

[sweetmeatdale]

It’s sorta fandom meta but I love the tendency for non fans to just assume Chat Noir is a girl at first glance. Only part that makes it better is the long term fans who agree with them.

[howdidthisevenhappenanyway]

ok I’ve talked before about how, if you don’t want what you’re reading and kudosing on ao3 to be associated with you as an author or whatever that a lot of people have reading accounts that are seperate to the fics they post and I just came across a delightful example. I hope they don’t mind me pointing it out, but when I saw this on a fic today I let out the most delighted laugh

their account just has bookmarks on it, so I’m guessing that they just read on this account, leave reviews that are exactly what the times would say about books and bookmark shit. king shit.

[pocketseizure]

“I can fix him” okay but I can fix the narrative. I can recontextualize events and bring out depths of character. I can shift priorities and strengthen relationships and show that anyone can change with enough kindness and support, and that what you admired in him has been inside yourself this whole time.

[my-castles-crumbling]

Guys PLEAAAASSSSEEEEEEEE stop using AI for fanart. I know so many amazing people who literally spend HOURS creating art. HOURS. And they do it for free, or for very little. To use AI for fanart so incredibly insulting to them.

Want art? Find something that's created and boost their work by reblogging!

Better yet, commission an artist! So many of these people are using commissions to pay for rent, or other bills, or fucking top surgery. Don't take that from them.

Stop using fucking AI.

[bruciemilf]

Me when I think about DC unintentionally making Batman so female coded. We’re constantly reminded his identity is based and fed by a shitty man. That he wouldn’t exist without him.His trauma is either diminished to be a point of ridicule, or invalided entirely. He’s expected to know everything, to have a perfect reaction all the time, to be somehow devoid of emotion yet shamed for having empathy. DC trying so hard to push the father optic on him yet the fandom sees him as a mother. He’s the problem and the solution and the root of destruction. He keeps Gotham alive, but he’s not raising it. He makes everything and belongs nowhere.

[fulltacs]

IT’S A MIRACLE Y’ALL!!!

@codslut ROSE FROM THE DEAD TO BLOCK AND UNBLOCK ME AFTER MY LAST ADDITION TO HER/ @sheheal ‘s POST!!! HALLELUJAH!!!

bitch.

[chaotic-autumn]

never let anyone convince you that your excitement isn't beautiful. what an incredible thing it is, to notice and be overcome by any bright spot in this too-dark world.

it doesn't matter what you're excited about, how small it seems to other people, your joy deserves to grow as big as it can. nurture it. help it grow strong so that when you are hurting your joy can lend you its strength.

[conarcoin]

the concept of "lore" ruined discussion of mcrp because like. people use it to mean some kind of weird hybrid of plotline and worldbuilding but ONLY if the server is drama-focused otherwise it doesn't count i guess.

so you get people saying like. hermitcraft isn't a lore server. smplive isn't a lore server. sdmp isn't a lore server. and it's like yeah this is true because "lore server" is a meaningless slop category you guys made up. they very much have plotlines and worldbuilding though 💀

[olderthannetfic]

hi, as someone who is tragically gen Z and only ever read AO3, can I ask: what was so great about LiveJournal? Like, I know that there were fics posted there (and I've even read about the "purge", so I get why it isn't used anymore) and that it was sort of a forum-type thing. But what I don't understand, wouldn't Tumblr fill in the latter function? How was that site any different? I see a lot of people reminiscing about it and I'm confused

--

A big factor in LJ's greatness is timing and nostalgia.

It was genuinely great, but it wasn't quite as great as all of the Lo, shall the Golden Age ne'er come again? posts suggest.

LJ arrived at a pivotal time in the development of the internet both in terms of technical stuff and how many people had access. Many fans who are now in their thirties to fifties first discovered fandom through LJ and many were at a time in their lives when they were feeling energetic and up to making lots of new friends—and to figuring out how to make a site work for them.

I got on LJ in 2002 when it required invites. Fandom arrived in droves in 2003, first via coordinated campaigns to get invites to key people and then when LJ opened up free account creation to everyone. Back then, LJ's features sucked. It was impossible to search properly, among other things. At its height (2005-7, let's say), there was a reasonable site search, and fans had developed all sorts of community resources for finding each other.

People often remember this phase but not the early days of suckitude.

This development parallels how Tumblr used to not have that private chat feature and how a lot of fuckyeah[whatever] type tumblrs have helped curate the site and make it much more usable for fans. Fandom draining away from LJ after strikethrough also parallels people draining away from Tumblr after the purge.

There are people who talk about Tumblr the way my cohort talks about LJ...

And to the shock of no one, they are people who came of age on Tumblr, who found fandom via Tumblr, who were on Tumblr during pivotal times in their lives and ones when they had energy to make friends and figure out how a site worked.

Those same Tumblrites are now making all the same geriatric-sounding posts we LJers do about how other sites lack the required features to be good for fandom while missing that 90% of tumblr's "features" at its height (2012-2016, let's say) were actually fan-created and were basically the same as any fandom newsletter or links page or all the versions of this kind of personal curation stretching back to long before the internet existed.

What life phase you hit a site at matters.

--

With all of that said, no, LJ was not a forum. It was a blogging site with threaded comments.

The key point to understand is that conversation was always happening in a specific person's space. Unlike on a true forum, people were in the comments on a particular post in a journal owned by another fan. (On a forum, there's the first post in a thread, but it's still more of a communal space with less of a hierarchy.)

Overall, the LJ format can have a feeling a bit like you're over at someone's house for tea. There's more of a sense of intimacy and also behaving yourself in front of community members.

Tumblr being obscure and impossible to find anything in does give it some of the same vibe relative to Twitter, but it's still part of modern social media that tries to shove every rando into the face of every other rando.

But it wasn't just vibes: LJ also had robust privacy features where you could lock a post to this or that group of friends. You could moderate your comments section properly. Tumblr has far fewer controls to force people to behave or leave on a technical level.

--

The biggest thing many people miss about LJ is the threaded comments. At least by late LJ and on Dreamwidth, you can expand and collapse threads, making it far easier to deal with a massive comments section. But more than that, things are properly threaded with multiple levels of hierarchy that are all easily visible in the same place.

On Tumblr, it used to be extremely difficult to find all of the actual commentary on a post. Nowadays, it's far easier, but you still have to scroll chronologically, and multiple versions of a post with a long chain of commentary may be much more divorced from each other than what would happen in a LJ comments section.

--

But could we use Tumblr pretty much how we used LJ?

We could.

I do.

--

The key things that people tend to miss about LJ, aside from the younger and more excited version of themselves or the friends they've lost since then, are:

Heavily text-based

It may sound odd on the modern internet, but there are a lot of people whose brains don't like or handle an image-heavy site well. They were everywhere in SF book fandom. They were everywhere on the early internet. Today, they're hanging out on Dreamwidth and still going to their SF cons. They're usually not on Tumblr.

You could follow the discussion

Threaded comments help, but a lot of it is about having some place you can check for updates. It wasn't actually that easy to follow big LJ discussions unless you were subscribed to comments and reading along as things were happening instead of coming along after the entire mass of comments had been left.

The tone of the discussion is intellectual and one's enemies are "idiots", not "problematic"

All this requires is a penchant for longwindedness and an itchy blocking finger to remove anyone slinging ad hominems from the comments section.

On tumblr, it's as simple as conversations happening in the replies on a popular account and that person not tolerating suibaiting and threats.

(And make no mistake, a lot of LJ discussion was in the comments on popular accounts, not spread equally between everyone's.)

It does require that multiple people like that tone and want to engage in that way, but lots of people do want to.

--

These days, I interact with tumblr by checking my askbox and reading my activity page. The vast, vast majority of my posts are ones where I'm the OP, so if I block someone, they're booted from the discussion entirely.

For me... yeah, Tumblr functions almost exactly like LJ.

Also like LJ, while I'm hosting the conversation, if you hang around, you'll see the same people again and again in the comments. They may or may not also host that kind of conversation in their space, and there's a larger pool of lurkers who have some notion of which people count as regulars. Other people are watching from the shadows, enjoying or deriding the takes of the usual crowd.

People presumably do like reading my lengthy commentary or they wouldn't be here, but my tumblr wouldn't be popular like this without a healthy pool of other people who chime in regularly. It's not just that there are more people: it's that you see the same people over time. There's a bit more sense of place and community than on some parts of the internet.

--

So, in my opinion, the failure to just recreate LJ fandom on Tumblr was a skill issue.

Threaded comments were great, but LJ culture came from mailing lists, and mailing lists had the same issue as tumblr with the diverging threads.

We solved that back then by clipping out only the parts we wanted to respond to (you'd write "snip" around the quotation to show it was incomplete). We solved the smaller LJ issue by linking to other posts we were referencing and doing discussion link roundups. We solve it on tumblr by, again, linking to what we're talking about and even quoting multiple reblog chains in our own reblog of just one chain.

--

Tumblr's technical features and even general crap-ness aren't really the problem. 90s and early 00s sites regularly went down for periods of time unthinkable today.

The missing piece is people.

When one is in an active fandom with others who curate or with friends who let one know what's up, a site with imperfect features is easy to figure out and retrofit for fandom's needs. When one already feels out of touch and is between fannish passions—or at least fannish passions anyone else cares about—seeing the potential in a new site is hard.

--

Threaded comments are different and better.

LJ's built-in way to see everyone's blog in your own style was better. The automatic timestamps and the ease of seeing a paginated archive of an entire blog was better than tumblr's endless scroll and lack of clear date labeling. But some of that can be fixed with xkit or knowing your way around tumblr well.

A lot of it is nostalgia for the lj era and a refusal to take the time to figure out how to use tumblr in an oldschool internet way.

--

So by all means, people, weigh in about what made LJ great or how the culture felt at the time...

But if I see one more god damn response going "You can't have a conversation on tumblr!" in reply to my tumblr, which contains nothing but conversation, I am coming for you.

[insanitysilver]

I've talked about how much I long for more fandom meta to be archived on ao3 for both preservation's sake and easier access, but a specific kind I'm always ravenous for is translation analysis.

Yes, tell me more about the cultural connotations of this word, tell me about this pun or double meaning that didn't fully translate, tell me where the English translation took liberties. Can't get enough of it.

[nothingenoughao3]

I recently got a long, beautiful comment on a fanfic which featured something like "I don't want to write an essay and it's embarrassing for me to gush".

And. Like. They DID write an essay! It was a long and beautiful and not-at-all-embarrassing comment that made me feel good about something I worked very hard on!

My niblings in fandom, please take this route, please write the essay.

I wrote extra unplanned scenes into my latest series because one (1) person commented that they liked my OC. I have written entire fanfics because one (1) person sent me a "thanks for writing this!" comment and I decided to write more. I picked up a series I had abandoned years prior because one (1) amazing person decided to do podcasts of the older fics in the series.

Write the essay. The essay is the lifebringer. The essay is the little-life that brings total unity of fandom

[perseidlion]

Can I take a moment to say how impressed I am with the post-production effects they did on Lukas Gage's eyes as The Cat King?

You can see from the BTS photos that he's not wearing contacts, so the slit eyes are all CGI. Not only are they not distracting, the effect was great and otherworldly without taking away from Lukas' performance.

There's also delightfully subtle things like the eye shine in low light. Lukas being able to see and not be distracted by uncomfortable contacts likely helped his performance, as well. It could have easily been too cartoony or weird, but it wasn't.

Anyway, it's a small thing but I really appreciate it.

[my-castles-crumbling]

Reblog to see how chaotic we are!

[bruciemilf]

I’m actually really sad I have to communicate this, but yall should REALLY consume fandom media created by actual, human people, not AI.

[feelingthedisaster]

something about kevin and the queen. the queen (kayleigh) dies, but a pawn once it gets to the other end of the board (the end of his career), can turn into the queen, resurrect her.

something about seth and the pawn. one must sacrifice it to win the game.

something about riko and the king. the most powerful figure that doesnt do any of the dirty work, that needs to die for the chess match (the story) to end

something about neil and that pawn that makes it to end. unimportant enough to not kill it, important enough for being the reason of the win

something about the king's men being called the king's men. the king lost all his pieces (all his perfect court transfering to other teams) and all that is left for him is to die, ending the game and consequently, the books