[ SECRET POST #5966 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5966 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #853.
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

[(Anonymous)]

Wholeheartedly agree.

I miss the days when fan content was just... creations by fans, and they were authored by people not chatGPT, and you could talk to that person and ask "hey, what was your inspiration for this, do you like this song too?" and make friends... with a person, not chatGPT.

I honestly don't care for the final product when it comes to art more than I care for the process, but I know I am with the minority here - in that I am the kind of person who goes deep into one ow two fandoms at once instead of mass-consuming, don't mass-consume fan/works (or at least go more than surface deep into each of them when I do), have actually studied Art academically etc. I think there were more people like me in fandom back then. Nowadays... feels different. People are REALLY into the whole "consumption" shit.

[(Anonymous)]

I think there are still plenty of people who feel like you do. "High-engagement, few canons, relevant academic training" would have described nearly the entire student body and a sizeable proportion of the faculty, at most of the liberal arts schools I considered in the US. I doubt that's changed. And, of those three, I think the having-formally-studied-it part was the most uncommon: I remember there being a lot of solidly working-class older women in fandom and homemakers. I think we just have a harder time finding this style of engagement online now because, one, free web hosting disappeared as companies decided web addresses were valuable, and two, the people who would have been spending money for new entertainment every time they got bored with the last Big Thing "discovered fandom" and flooded in. Closely followed by the people who hoped they could be enticed into e-spending.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT - Maybe that's just me but I have a hard time seeing this "us vs them" that some of you see.

I never felt like "one of them" back in the Livejournal (and before) days. I can't say I feel less of a part now than I did before. I just never felt "a part". But I always managed to find a few (very few) people who like the same things that I do and share my wavelength. Having fun with those few is what the good fandom experience is to me ...

But then again, I am not US-based (or UK for that matter), I am not one of the wealthy (I happened to have PCs at home when I was very young only because I am the kid of a nerdy programmer) and I seem to have vastly different life experiences than most. I didn't know many (if any) "fandom people" IRL. When my friends who were movie enthusiasts and such became "fandom people" I thought that was a positive thing, since we could speak the same language, in a way, and it make me feel like less of a freak.

Of course I quickly learned the bad side of it all the hard way, such as losing privacy and so on. But my point is that any discussion based on "us (fandom oldies) vs them" absolutely doesn't concern me, because I don't feel like this at all.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT again - forgot to mention I didn't mean I study Art academically in a "I am Trained" way, just in a "I am really passionate about Art, not just media" way. But I think most people who are like that are leaving fandom, either because they're aging out of it or because its current ethos doesn't interest them. And I get it. But agreed that the "end" of free web hosting (well it hasn't technically, but) played a big part in the shift, and just the way capitalism "learned" to deal with the Internet in the 00s-onwards.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

*shrugs* It's not that I wish to be needlessly divisive. But people who are into consumerism have always felt sharply foreign to me. I can't tell how much that's something other fans actually want and how much people are bringing that into the space artificially in the hopes to create customers out of non-customers. But when I say "them," it's not a matter of when someone joined so much as what kind of relationship they build (or don't build) with the stories.

My impression is that, the less the basic infrastructure for fan engagement online is free, and the worse the economic situation gets, the fewer people can afford to socialize and be visible here. And that's hardly the only possible disruption: I went without an online presence for years, when I married and emigrated to another country, simply because the amount of things I had to remaster in my day-to-day life - starting with the language - were prohibitive. However, fandom has gotten huge over the past two decades, to the point that it's also gotten much easier for me to find people offline and signal to them. I'll fight tooth and nail for the AO3, and similar, but fandom was not born on the internet. And my observation has been that most of the people who have to leave merely accumulate some ash over their embers. The right sort of material and environment bring the fannishness right back, full blaze.

[(Anonymous)]

SA

I would put to you that the idea that people "age out" of fandom is hurtful to older fans. There is really no age line in a place where people need no money to enter. Nor should there be. That's just another (sneaky) way of trying to stamp fandom out of existence - by raising the lower limit and lowering the upper one. I would have missed out on so much about the anarchic, early internet if I'd waited until I was a legal adult to start exploring here. And honestly, I don't want a day to dawn when I am alive, but feel like this space is closed to me.