You hear all these “you’re not a real fan unless” and it lists a hundred things, but I met a dude today who saw my Deadpool pin and asked what my favorite story arc was, and I explained that while I loved Deadpool, I was new to Marvel (I only really got into it a year and a half ago) and hadn’t been able to find a lot of the comics. Instead of making a face or a derogatory comment, he just offered to send me all the stuff he had. That is a true fan.
I told the guy at the comic shop when I went in for Black Widow that I’d seen a few Harley Quinn panels on Tumblr and thought it looked badass but didn’t know where to start because my entire involvement in DC fandom was watching the Batman cartoon as a kid. This guy sitting at one of the tables playing Yu-Gi-Oh, wearing a comic shirt and carrying a definitely-hardcore-fan amount of swag, spins around and goes “dude! You’ve never read DC? Check out the back issues wall. They’ve got all kinds of Harley Quinn.” He then proceeded to explain how “New 52″ was a spinoff, and had some split opinions in the fandom, but either continuity is good as long as you pick one and stay with it so you don’t get mixed on what’s going on.
True fans love to see other people loving the stuff they love.
See how easy it is to be “that cool person who helped me get into X” instead of “that asshole who made me feel bad for not knowing everything about X”?
IT’S NOT EVEN DIFFICULT TO NOT BE A SHITLORD. YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE. And you never had one.
i’d be really curious to know what percent of queerbaiting is
a) an intentional marketing scheme to stir interest in the project and attract certain fanbases (lgbtq people and young women) vs.
b) members of the creative team genuinely wanting to write queer characters but the corporate side of things force them to tone it down but they still leave little hints vs.
c) they legitimately did not know how gay something would come across
The answer:
A is 100%. Because B and C are not queerbaiting. The literal meaning and definition of it is A.
i know this isn’t gonna reach any of the people actually doing this, but I really need to stress to people making “”””joking”””” threats online, especially targeted at creators, that we don’t know who the fuck you are.
just because you seem harmless to yourself, just because you know there’s no way you could or would carry out those threats, does not mean the person you’re threatening knows that. Credible threats to even moderately popular public figures happen. There’s no fucking way of knowing whether this threat from you, a hostile stranger, is credible or not.
“My age is in my profile!!!!” You do know that people lie about that shit, right.
Like, all else aside – artists and panelists at cons are now warned not to accept food or drink. They’re sharing strategies on how to prevent their merch being destroyed or stolen by people who object to their ships. They’re limiting meet and greets and increasing security, because maybe you’re personally harmless, and maybe your friend is too, but there’s thousands of you, and it only takes one person taking things too far.
Dont fucking threaten strangers. Don’t make somebody dig through your profile to figure out if you might want to actually hurt or kill them, or if you’re just angry about fictional ships. It’s a monstrous thing to do.
So it’s pretty much been agreed upon that the majority of antis are teens. What I’m curious about is what caused this specific generational shift in mindset. Much of the shared psychology of a generation is either a pushback to the generation that raised them or a response to some notable event, so what do you think caused this reemergence in puritan thinking?
I think it’s a combination of anti-sex messages in school and media, and just a thing where people often react really negatively to sex when they personally aren’t ready for it, and they can’t regard it as “okay for other people, but not what I want to do right now.” Also some of it’s just social things; tumblr in particular has built an environment where people feel like they genuinely have to be like that to make friends.
Agreed on all of the above. In fact, I think that being an anti is the Cool Thing To Do for younger folks right now because of a combination of things:
the powerful appeal of being righteously angry
it feels like particularly effective social activism. You’re educating bystanders and shutting down/running toxic people out of a safe space
belonging to a highly cohesive in-group. Bonus: it has clearly bounded rules of conduct that make it relatively easy to tell if you’re conforming or not
having a designated out-group to exert control over is a relief from the powerlessness elsewhere in your life
it feels rebellious and independent b/c almost everyone significantly older than you hates it
but even more than all of the above, everyone under the age of 20 is too young to remember 9/11.
To be more specific: people under 20 are too young to remember the moral and emotional shift of American/Western focus from personal freedom and responsibility to collective safety and the awful terror of understanding the authorities cannot actually protect you. They’ve grown up in a world of ‘if you see something, say something’, school mass shooting safety drills, a steady erosion of privacy in the name of pre-empting people who would harm you, daily world news about mass murder attacks from extremists of all kinds, and constant exposure of the bias and oppression perpetrated by the people in charge.
Of course many people under 20 believe that safety is more important than freedom. Of course they believe that we should pre-empt the possibility of harm by not allowing dangerous things to exist or be mentioned. Of course they feel that taking personal responsibility for what you consume isn’t enough. Of course they think people should share their personal history so they can decide if that person is dangerous or not. Of course they believe in callouts and mob justice.
do you ever get mad because there’s so much wasted potential in characters and relationships and plotlines in some shows
i basically divide up fandoms of continuing media into Fandoms Of Potentia and Fandoms Of Re.
i’m still developing this theory, but it sort of goes like this: there are some pieces of media that attract enormous followings not necessarily for what they are, but what the watchers think they could be, and build castles basically on those dreams of potential.
whereas a fandom of re is a fandom of what the work is, oftentimes a finished work to which no more will be added, which has proven itself in entirety.
And the interesting thing to me is that Fandoms Of Potentia are oftentimes bigger than Fandoms Of Re, bigger and more active, and there’s a couple of reasons for that – one is that a finished work leaves less room to add onto, and a finished work also leaves less need to add onto. The primary driver of fandom works is incompleteness, whether because the work is not yet finished or because it is finished in a way that the audience feels is incomplete.
Fandoms of potentia also have the bigger drama, because the fact is, not every content creator is up to living up to the potential the fans see. Creators are only human after all. So when the story doesn’t live up to the big finish the fans dreamed of, there’s a lot of disappointment, anger and hurt. You see less of that with Fandoms Of Re.
I guess where I’m going with this, is that whenever I see a huge fandom gathering for a work that I think is absolutely not deserving of it, I stop to ask myself whether it might be a Fandom Of Potentia. In which case, they’re fans of something I don’t see at all – they’re fans of the dreams of what might be.
Try categorizing the Tolkien fandom according to this principle. Try it. I double-dare you.
Challenge accepted!
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as texts succeed in achieving a beautiful wholeness. From “there and back again” to “well, I’m home” is an arc so emotionally and thematically complete and satisfying that Tolkien’s main works seem to perfectly inhabit the grounds of a Fandom of Re.
But! Tolkien himself was devoted to the idea of unendingness, of possibilities just beyond the edge of the page.
He filled the main story with songs, poems, and references by characters to Middle-earth’s legends, heroes and historic tragedies, planting in a million fans the seeds of a poignant yearning to know more.
He wrote appendices that gave us sketches of characters’ childhoods and loves and deaths and ancestors, crying out to be explored further.
And of course, he himself, despite knowing that realistically his biggest “hit” was done and complete, never stopped writing more stories in his own universe, with a special love for the ancient days and strange, dark downfalls of its peoples that he assumed the general reading public would never care about. Thus leading to the publication of The Silmarillion after his death.
And the type of fans who love potentia arrived, and revealed in the tragic mess, and began creating in that beautiful broken space, and have never stopped.
And then! Peter Jackson made a series of films for The Lord of the Rings that are pretty much reverent tributes of Re.
And then! Peter Jackson completely fucked up his Hobbit films, but with such a mix of brilliance and disaster and lovable elements and utter stupidity that he created a Fandom of Potentia for The Hobbit that wasn’t even there before!
Amazing.
And the type of fans who love potentia arrived, and revealed in the tragic mess, and began creating in that beautiful broken space, and have never stopped.
tumblr: when people include racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. ideas in their stories it has real life consequences
also tumblr: but ships are never problematic, what’s with all these “antis”? it’s just fictional and can’t affect anything
Just Anti Things: I honestly don’t see any difference between popular mass media and someone’s obscure fanfic
this….isn’t a new argument. we’ve had it before. many times. representation matters, people can also ship what they want. those don’t contradict each other.
Here’s the thing:
Fiction does not equal reality, nor does fiction have a 1:1 influence on reality.
However, good fiction — even (and in some ways especially) speculative and genre fiction — REFLECTS reality.
An example could be film noir, which experienced a boom during and directly after World War II because its gloomy moods, jaded protagonists, and disillusioned view of the world mirrored that of wartime and postwar America. Another could be the influx of ‘fuck the system’ films like “Bonnie and Clyde” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” during the countercultral 60s and 70s (granted, this was also partially due to the lifting of the Hays Code and the end of the Hollywood Blacklist). Yet another could be the theory that zombie and vampire films experience surges in popularity depending on who’s president (according to the theory, zombies are rightists as seen by leftists and vampires are leftists as seen by rightists). Every piece of fiction, ultimately, is in at least some small way a product of its time and its creator. Even the most out-there fantasies or the grittiest thrillers have universal archetypes at their core. When someone sets out to write a story, they are at the core of it either writing about their own experience, or writing about some aspect of the human condition that fascinates them. (Which is where “problematic” content comes in, because let’s be real: many, many aspects of the human condition aren’t pretty.)
So, the anti-anti/pro-fiction belief is as follows:
1: Fiction is not reality. Writing about something does not mean that you condone it IRL. 2: Fiction does not directly influence reality in a ‘monkey see, monkey do’ sense. Someone who had no plans to commit an atrocious act isn’t suddenly going to start making those plans because they read in a novel about said act being committed. Furthermore, someone who is psychologically able to distinguish reality from unreality, and morally able to distinguish an acceptable action from an unacceptable one, isn’t going to start condoning atrocious acts committed by other real-life people because they read about them in a novel. 3: Fiction does reflect reality. Representation matters because everyone deserves to see their own reality reflected in the stories they consume — and, for the general betterment of society, everyone needs to see other people’s realities reflected in the stories they consume, because the old adage about not judging someone’s life until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes holds true. Furthermore, if stories are being produced that are sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist — especially if it’s a recurring trope — that needs to be addressed because it reflects the sexism/racism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism present in culture at large; for example, the “Bury Your Gays” trope, which originated with restrictions present in the Hays Code, draws such backlash because LGBTQ+ audience members want fiction to reflect that our culture has grown in acceptance of LGBTQ+ people since the Hays Code era.
TL;DR: “People should be allowed to write and read what they want because fiction isn’t reality” and “Representation matters because fiction should reflect ALL realities,” are not mutually exclusive ideas, and, in fact, both are important to understand in order to criticize media responsibly.
I suppose I shouldn’t be suprised that this is what ended up happening to the post, but I think it’s good opportunity to point out something
for like 90, 95% of cases, “antis” (wish there was a better term) and antiantis actually agree
I literally agree with everything the person above said.
Most antis are NOT saying you shouldnt be allowed to reflect reality. For some reason, antianti’s understanding of anti’s position is almost always this strawman
People aren’t saying you can’t show murder, or pedophilia, or racist things
We’re just saying you shouldn’t be condoning them, or romanticizing them. That’s it. Whether that’s in fiction or fanfiction or in posts online.
Point 2 is something I really agree with! That’s why “video games make people violent” is wrong.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about a monkey see monkey do kind of thing.
“Furthermore, if stories are being produced that are sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist— especially if it’s a recurring trope—that needs to be addressed.“ This is all I’m saying. This is literally the whole “anti” argument.
It’s frustrating that most people reblogging this post now will probably never see my clarifications, but I hope a few people will.
Also this is exactly why “anti” and “antianti” are such bad terms. Anti WHAT? The long but more accurate terms would be “believes even fan fiction and shipping can spread problematic ideas” and “believes fan fiction and shipping don’t have that kind of power.”
Okay but jumping back a few posts… “the difference between mass media and obscure fanfic” seems to be referencing the major difference being the size of the consumer base… but like, since when was how much you were influenced by a piece of media dependent on the number of people who also read that media?
The thing about the fanfic community is that, yeah, each individual fanfic could have no more than 20 readers they might potentially influence, but that’s still 20 people your work might have real life consequences for, 20 people you might have an impact on.
And unless you’re writing in a void, chances are, you’re not just a single obscure fanfic that might influence 20 people but part of a trend, one fic of many that also follows those same trends which those 20 readers and more are specifically searching out and consuming in as great a quantity as they can. There’s a huge difference in influence between consuming one piece of media with Thing in it and consuming many pieces of media with Thing in it, with the higher consumption side being more influential in favour of Thing… and fanfic readers are wont towards consuming fanfic en mass.
As someone who grew up in fanfic… recurring problematic things in fanfictions had way more of an influence on me than problematic things I encounter in isolation in mass media. Especially regarding things I, as a lonely preteen and later lonely teenager (right up until I wasn’t), had no experience with in the real world like social behaviours and norms portrayed in fanfic after fanfic.
Also, “obscure” doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect real people, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it exists in a homogeneous bubble. There are people who are part of fandom communities who feel unwelcome and attacked by not only being surrounded by racist (etc) content (and it can’t be blocked because the kind of racism that we deal with is very rarely acknowledged by the creators), but also because we know that fandom will make every attempt to silence posts like this. We’re not talking about a kink here (no, really, degrading marginalized people is not a kink), we’re talking about racism and other things that hurt members of the community.
It’s funny, because When I respond to a “fiction doesn’t affect reality” post by saying that I don’t have to be accepting of racism in my fandoms, the answer is always that they didn’t mean racism. Racism is different, they just mean harmless kinks. Then they get upset because they never mentioned race in a post about a topic that is racially charged in most fandoms.
But here, the OP opens with racism, and are immediately mocked, followed by people “explaining” that racist fics don’t affect anyone. Which is objectively, undeniably wrong.
And the fanfiction community does go out of its way to protect certain people. It uses trigger warnings and talks about expression as a way of coping – unless that person is coping with racism.
TL;DR: If you accept racism in your community, no matter how obscure, don’t be surprised when someone calls it out. Yall can write and consume whatever you want – that’s on you – but no one has to accept racism in their community in silence.
hey asking for a friend but uh. what’s it gonna take for fandom to relearn the difference between “canon” and “word of god”?
★ canon = the text itself; the show/movie/book/comic; the actual up-on-Netflix content; anything a casual fan would reasonably interact with ★ word of god = anything else, i.e. interviews with cast/crew/showrunners; DVD commentaries; comments from the crew on social media or at cons; literally any written or verbal remarks about the text made by writers or showrunners or actors
word of god does not equal canon, and yet i increasingly see fandoms conflating the two and acting like word of god comments from The Powers That Be count as canon and are equivalent to canon footnotes to the text and i’m. NO. listen. it’s not. that’s not what canon means, and word of god comments should not be treated as part of the canon text. this isn’t just me being a pedantic text purist, this has actual negative consequences for shows and fandoms and people’s experience of the stories, i mean:
it privileges the creator’s interpretation of the text as the only “correct” one. death of the author? no one’s heard of her. writers and showrunners get to tell fans how to interpret the text, and a solid 80% of fandom is going “okay, if you say so!”
it stifles fandom debate and analysis, because fan analysis of the text at hand is rejected outright by other fans on the basis that “well the showrunners said it’s like this”
it contributes to fandom bullying, in which word of god comments are used to harass people who have the audacity to want to interpret the work differently, or who disagree with the powers that be, or just don’t want to consider those comments at all in their understanding of the story
word of god comments may be confusing; they may change over time or contradict earlier statements; they may even contradict the text itself. all of which leads to fans frantically trying to reconcile word of god comments with actual canon, rather than going “okay fuck this, it doesn’t make sense so i’m disregarding it”
again: this only creates more arguments in fandom; if creators say x at one point, and y at another, you end up with more fandom slap-fights over which comment was the ‘correct’ one and which interpretation ‘wins’
it encourages lazy and unsatisfying storytelling. if fanon will accept word of god comments as canon, showrunners develop an attitude of “it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense, we can just handwave it in an interview”
this results in poor writing, or important plot points being explained in word of god comments rather than in actual canon
this in turn makes the story confusing and incomprehensible to anyone who’s not knee-deep in fandom. casual fans, kids, someone bingeing the series 5 years from now on crunchyroll… they’re not reading the interviews or tweets or watching the comicon panels. those viewers still need to be able to understand the story, and we are slip-sliding towards a creator-fandom model in which they won’t be able to, because word of god comments run the risk of becoming required reading for understanding the story
this has serious implications for how stories handle representation: if fans start accepting word of god as equivalent to canon, it means shows can keep canon rep (particularly queer rep) vague and ambiguous, and prop it up with word of god comments that “confirm the representation”. there’s no incentive to actually commit to unambiguous, clear canon rep if stories can lean on word of god to compensate for the utter lack of actual diversity in the canon text itself
the canon text has to stand alone. word of god should serve as a trove of fun trivia or behind-the-scenes tidbits about the writing process; it is not supposed to be a substitute for clear, concise, and comprehensive storytelling. a story that doesn’t make sense unless you’ve read 8 different explanatory interviews by the writers is badly written. showrunners who treat interviews as a place to offload all the character development or plot explanations they didn’t bother to include in the actual text are lazy hacks who are bad at their jobs.
word of god can be handy and fun and informative, and for people who are interested in creator comments or interviews there’s no harm in paying attention to that stuff. but it’s not canon. the canon is the text itself. anything else is supplementary to that, and fans are absolutely allowed to disregard anything not in canon if they choose.
and with anything published by a corporation – such as all tv shows ever – there’s likely to be pressure put on writers and actors to say things that the corporation thinks will appeal to the mainstream. or, as OP says, to use offhanded mentions in interviews as a substitute for actual representation, because joe random trump voter needs to be able to say dumbledore isn’t really gay or they might organize a book burning.
the fact that the book burning would be great publicity, and trumpkins have this weird tendency to buy things to destroy as a poorly thought out protest, does not seem to have occurred to mainstream media moguls.
I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.
Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.
The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.
Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.
Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.
Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.
By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.
There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.
1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.
2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.
3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.
So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.
this is great!
It also complies with the “killer theory”. I don’t remember exact names, but people in online games are generally divided into four groups:
– explorers research game opportunities, they don’t mind playing alone, usually don’t hurt others, but sometimes they can exploit game weaknesses
– achievers play to win, to gain points, popularity. They need both explorers who know all perks, and socializers – as their followers and support
– socializers – they play because their friends are all here, they like to be together, they are usually most of the players, they can be easily led astray
– killers – for some reasons they come to hurt others, be it hurtful remarks in the chats or disturbing behavior
A tiny amount of killers is manageable and even profitable. (All four types are important). Killers raise stakes for the achievers, give socializers something to talk about in their groups and give explorers incentives to invent something new.
Angered explorers are the top predators here – but they must be seriously offended, and since they play on the outskirts of the game, killers rarely fight them. Killers usually go for the weakest (socializers) or most noticeable (achievers).
But if the game, by its design, somehow attracts to much killers, who scare socializers, leave achievers without their rewards and – by choking the environment – make it boring for the explorers (what I gonna explore here? ten kinds of dick-related-nicknames? Pff!) – they effectively kill the game.
This is awesome. In fandom terms, I think whether a fandom tends to be, in general, a pretty decent place to be with a small tire fire here or there, or one big flaming dumpster fire, probably has a lot to do with who the 1% in that fandom are. If you’re unlucky enough to be in a fandom where a couple of the tire-fire people are the ones who run the exchanges, or the most influential shippers of your particular small pairing, or the big BNF, you are screwed. Even though the vast majority of the fandom undoubtedly still consists of sane and decent people, it’s going to be really hard to avoid the 1%, and they’ll actively drive people out.
On the other hand, some of my best times in fandom have been in calm, sane corners of fandoms that I knew had raging dumpster fires going elsewhere, but I never had to deal with them because my part of the fandom was quite nice.
Large fandoms are a mixed blessing that way … more and bigger tire fires (and more visible to outsiders), but also, with more people and more ships, it’s easier to find cozy little pockets of sanity in which to nest.
Stressed, Depressed, and Story Obsessed 