#say how twitter was a medium built for cool dunks on bad opinions and not for genuine discussion

[antigonewinchester]

Would be interested in your thoughts on how fandom has changed. I have some ideas (beyond the scope of the recent post about “content” versus community) but t it does feel related at the same time.

Some preliminary thoughts…

I think "this thing is The Best" and "this thing is The Worst" as 2 sides of the same coin, and fandom now feels caught between these 2 extremes, maybe skewing negative. Fans have always complained / disliked their fandom source material but there does seem to be a certain hostility that I don't remember previously. A strange contradiction of anti-fandom fandom, where ppl can strongly dislike something but still engage w/ it fannishly. I think of, say, peak MCU fandom of writing about all the Avengers living together in Stark Tower, or the flurry of fic that happened after The Winter Soldier, and how different that feels from fandom culture now. There’s a lack of sincerity or earnestness in fandom now, maybe.

Fandom has become more of an open community… where everybody sees everybody else's opinions all the time. Theoretically this openness should discourage echo chambers but I find ppl still get entrenched w/in their little groups and then fight & argue with others just as much. Compare tumblr to LJ, where LJ you could have a small group of friends and just talk/write fic within that group and never have to bother w/ seeing other opinions or get involved w/ fanwank. And that the norms for fandom discussion seem to be based around dunking & trash-talking vs. good faith conversations.

Very subjective, but fanfic feels more generic now. Less stylistic creativity than there used to be, and that a lot of fics are written in a certain voice / style that gets bland when you see it over & over again. Shipping also feels like the main way of fandom engagement much more than it used to be. Obvs shipping has always been a thing in fandom but I swear there used to be more genfic, casefic, character studies, etc.

Last thing: the breakdown of the 4th wall between fandom & creators. That kind of audience awareness can, IMO, go on to warp both fandom and the source material, in that fandom can believe they get to tell creators to write they story they want to see, while creators can be reactionary, in the literal sense, with their storytelling, writing a story based on fandom attitudes instead of just... telling the story they want to (either positively, in trying to write to what they think fandom ‘wants,’ or negatively, in going against what the fandom ‘wants’).