[ SECRET POST #3012 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3012 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.
[One Piece]


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________



16.


__________________________________________________



17.


__________________________________________________



18. [ SPOILERS for Hotline Miami ]



__________________________________________________



19. [ WARNING for incest, underage shipping ]

[Grounded For Life]


__________________________________________________



20. [ WARNING for self harm ]

(Beasts of the Southern Wild)


__________________________________________________



21. [ WARNING for alcoholism ]



__________________________________________________



22. [ WARNING for rape, child abuse ]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #430.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

12. http://i.imgur.com/CfLGk3B.png

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

I "left" fandom five years ago. I was still involved in fannish things; I drew art for Tumblr and I RPed. But I left the fandom community, which, at the time, was LiveJournal. I'm trying to come back. But everything has changed. I don't know where all my fandom friends went. Tumblr fandom is not the same. There's no community. I feel really lost. I should have never left. I feel like the last five years were a mistake.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel your pain, OP. With one or two exceptions, my Livejournal fandom friends haven't moved to tumblr, they've just faded out of fandom altogether. I miss the old days. :(

[(Anonymous)]

Me too, me too.

[(Anonymous)]

I left three years ago, but I feel like there wouldn't have been much to stay for even if I hadn't fallen into a rut around that time. LJ was so dead, so many people had either migrated or left altogether. Can't imagine that it's gotten any better since.

[(Anonymous)]

It's even sadder: LJ is doing this "Bring your friends back to LJ" campaign: http://www.livejournal.com/remember

I'm still on LJ, but all the newer fandoms are on tumblr, which sucks - I hate how fragmented tumblr is. It's so distancing.

We need a whole new platform that combines the best of both.

[cloud_riven]

I got an email about and laughed for a good minute. I'm like, "Please. You think they'd come back for me? I don't even where they are, you dumb :D"

Ahagahaha and then I felt sad.

[(Anonymous)]

da

Oh, me too. And the few people that I still see around? Yup, they're spending all their time on Tumblr, where they don't even write complete sentences anymore, they just post endless series of gifsets.

So I don't see ANYTHING seducing them back to LJ, sadly. Not even my gorgeous self :-P

[diet_poison]

that's pretty sad. LJ shot themselves in the foot long ago, people won't trust them again, and they've moved on. It wouldn't be the same.

I totally agree. We need a platform that has the best features of both (and, hopefully, the worst of neither). I'd be all over that.

[nixitall.livejournal.com]

I cringed when I got that e-mail. I just returned to fandom and most all of my friends are gone and I don't know where to find new ones. I didn't write that secret, but it hit way to close to home.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Yup, I got that email yesterday, and was amused to see this secret today.

I can't participate in fandom the way I used to (i.e. actively) if everything is on Tumblr. I use it just fine, but I sense no potential for conversations.

[elaminator]

That's how I feel, and I left even earlier.

My flist was getting updated less and less (people were commenting less and less, even when I tried engaging at their journals), writing out entries started to feel like such a chore (I used to get a steady stream of comments, but that changed when my flist migrated; eventually I stopped posting entries altogether), and most the comms I frequented slowed to a crawl.

It was a massive disappointment for me because I used to love the whole LJ platform, but most the people I knew had already moved on, and though I clung to it for a while hoping the love would rekindle, it just wasn't the same.

[(Anonymous)]

I think that's a big reason why I still visit FS, to get that fix of daily dialogue. Every now and then I'd have a really cool conversation and think that I'd like to friend the person I was talking to, but alas. The five years I spent on LJ defined fandom participation for me. Without it I've gone back to lurking and passive consumption like I used to be as a shy kid too young for fandom.

[elaminator]

Yea, that's me too. I was a f!s poster (off and on) for years, both anon and otherwise, and once LJ finally hit rock bottom (And f!s moved to DW) I decided to come back because I missed the sense of community and the communication. I've done my share of lurking, but I'm partial to having an account when I can muster up the courage. (I am being totally serious, I have not always been able to, lol.)

F!S reminds me of the olden days of LJ. Maybe it's a bit slower now, but I still prefer it to all other platforms because it's so much easier to use. (If you just want to talk, anyway. Which I do...)

If you have a DW account you can still add people! Though I don't do A LOT of it because I tend to overthink it and worry people might not want me to. That and I've got out of the whole entries thing, so the most I do is IM people on occasion. Still... It's there if you want it! (I do, but can't seem to get back into the swing of things.)

[(Anonymous)]

I still have a DW account. I may have even posted here logged in once or twice? Nowadays I'm committed to being anon because FS really is the only reason I'm here and I keep having people tracking me down about unfinished WiPs when I post under my old username, lol.

FS being smaller now is nice in its own way; we used to have so many members I could only remember a handful, but now it's like Cheers up in here. I don't want it to shrink any further, though, and it'd be nice to have fresh blood. Sometimes I wish the DW community were active enough to make it worth it to keep a journal again -- like, I would totally add you! We've actually talked lots though obviously you wouldn't know me from the next anon, haha.

[elaminator]

I keep having people tracking me down about unfinished WiPs when I post under my old username

Ooo, that sounds unpleasant. Maybe you should have changed usernames? Though, geez, it seems like people would move on if your WIP's haven't been updated in a while... some people don't like to let go. That's as good as any reason to go anon.

Ahaha, yes, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. (Or in this case, where you know everybody else's name.) Big communities can be exciting but there is something special about ones where you feel you know the majority of people. There are even a few anons that I've given nicknames because we've spoke so often. (Are you H50 anon? I'm leaning towards no BUT as you say, it can be somewhat challenging to differentiate.)

I don't want the comm to get any smaller either, which is why I'm glad we've seen a few new named users lately. New anons are welcome as well, but obviously I wouldn't recognize them.

Yea, sometimes I miss making entries and ranting about my favorite shows/games/etc, and commenting on other people's entries about said shows/games/etc, but f!s is a nice alternative even if things aren't the same. Change man, it's brutal.

...Do you want a nickname? I don't know what you're into, so...

[(Anonymous)]

I may eventually get a different account and start posting un-anon again, just because it's really true that having more named users keeps the community going when activities start to flag. Another perk is getting to use icons again. I used to be obsessed with them (props for your excellent icon game, btw, you are a credit to the addiction).

Anonymity is cool for more than being a lazy ficcer's witness protection, though. You can get embroiled in wanky threads (if that's your bag) without developing a reputation! You can flit in and out of conversations on many and varied topics like a smooth vigilante! For instance, see if you can recognize me from any of the following:

1) Fashion!anon who appreciates the hipstery teal scarf from yesterday's no 1 secret.

2) KnB!anon who is grumpy about Kuroko/Aomine fans throwing Kagami under the bus.

3) Seb Stan anon who can't watch bad movies but keeps seeking them out.

4) One of the many, many overly invested Tolkien anons who make those threads the heights of awesome!

That's a trick question and I'm actually all of the above :)) You'll never see me coming... until I inevitably cave and get that new icon-filled account I obviously yearn for.

[praetorian_guard]

I know some of the bigger fandoms still have fan forums - you try one of those, if you're fortunate enough to be in one of them? If not, well. Good luck, OP. :c

[kallanda_lee]

OP, you friends will possibly have moved on to other places )- but, you can make new ones. It sucks you feel like you made a mistake to leave, but you can't undo it - but you can build something new.

[a_potato]

I know what you mean, OP. I left for awhile myself, and when I was finally inspired to come back, everything had changed. I really want to be a part of fandom, so I've worked at it and made some connections, but it's taken a really long time -- tumblr definitely makes it harder!

The strange thing for me, though, is that even though I liked livejournal, it still felt a little...off. I'd first gotten into fandom when it was still fan sites and forums, and as that era began to wind down and everything started to center around LJ, I started to lose interest. It's part of why I wound up leaving! It just makes me think that a large part of the reason so many of us are having trouble isn't because tumblr isn't inherently bad -- it's because we were introduced to fandom under a certain set of circumstances, and now we're being forced to adapt to a new set, and it's weird, and we're used to interacting with people in a totally different way.

[(Anonymous)]

I've only been gone a year or so, OP, and I feel the same way.

Even before I left (and partly the reason I did) though, it was becoming increasingly clear that fandom as a whole is a very different entity to what it was five years ago. Instant gratification is up, attention spans are down. If you don't jump on the zeitgeist for a certain fandom in the first twenty minutes, you're too late and no one cares what you think/create. As soon as you do get into something, everyone's into something shiny and new. Fanfics are less stories as they are SJ manifestos. Everything's problematic and even if it's not then it needs a sixty-page meta to justify why you have so much as a passing fondness for it.

You can blame/credit (depending on your POV) Tumblr for that, but honestly it's probably just the way fandom's evolving with the current generation of fans and how they interact with their world.

[(Anonymous)]

Instant gratification is up, attention spans are down.

In a nutshell, yes.

The weirdest part for me is that some of the best fic writers in my fandom migrated to tumblr and promptly stopped writing anything longer than 2 or 3 sentences. If someone had told me 5 years ago that would happen, I would have laughed myself sick.

I know it's an oversimplification, but sometimes I wonder if the continual diet of shiny is making people stupid.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I don't know if it's making people stupid as much as it's making them complacent.

When you can get three-digit notes on Tumblr for a 500 word stream of something that isn't even a drabble, why put the effort into a 5000 word - or god forbid 50,000 word - fic just for a couple of comments on AO3?

I found zero gratification in that, either as a reader or as a creator, so I quit. No one was interested in lengthy, complex fic that a reader needed to engage with on even a slightly deeper level than fluff/PWP/character studies masquerading as fic. And besides, if you didn't write it in the first couple of weeks of a fandom's Tumblr existence then as far as fans were concerned it didn't exist. You'd missed the boat.

It's like anything else; if you don't have to work for something then you see no value in it. Fandom's become very transient that way.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeeeep

[(Anonymous)]

I must be really lucky or something, because this hasn't been my experience at all. I got into one of my fandoms almost two years late and there's still activity and interest in fic.