fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6028 ]

[ SECRET POST #6028 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6028 ⌋

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

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[Kill la Kill]

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[Back From the Brink]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 37 secrets from Secret Submission Post #862.
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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It was always activism, you were just lucky enough not to be in the group under scrutiny.

That's a silly assumption to make.

Thus spake the voice of privilege

I wish you could see how hard I'm rolling my eyes at your drama and assumptions.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-08 23:46 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 00:03 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 00:07 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-08 23:47 (UTC) - Expand

Bullshit. If you have a point, make it. But no one is going to assume that you're making a deep point here just because you invoked the mantra "if we disagree, I'm right because I'm more oppressed than you."

Eh, if that was their way of saying there were always idiots assuming fandom equals activism, I kind of agree. Even 20 years ago, there were insufferable folks waxing poetic about their enlightened views of gay people, simply because they happened to enjoy a story featuring a gay pairing. Those same people would turn around and accuse everyone else of being ignorant or even homophobic for not being open to reading the same story, whether or not the pairing appealed to the reader personally.

It's just that now, it seems you can't escape these idiots, because they have bigger and quicker platforms to spew their fucking idiocy and they never shut the fuck up. At least back then, it was contained to a user profile or a smaller message board.

AYRT
There have always been people in fandom who treat it like it’s activism. That doesn’t make it so. And I wouldn’t give a shit except people like you make fandom such a hostile and exclusionary place for everyone else. If someone doesn’t agree with you, you go on the attack. And while I usually mean the general collective “you” in this case I mean that but also you in particular because you’ve already done it ITT. For many of us, fandom is about celebration or enjoyment or analysis or any other thing you care to mention. Fandom used to be for all fans but people like you are grinding overtime to make it about what you say it can be about. And you know what? You can fuck right off.

+100000

Make that +200000

This.

>If someone doesn’t agree with you, you go on the attack.

This is a pretty succinct summing up of what I think everyone (who isn't on a crusade) is sick of. Fandom-as-activism has been rampantly coopted into fandom-as-self-righteous-bullying and dogmatism. And apart from being socially corrosive, it's boring as fuck.

+1000

+2000

Not until awful people who were already inclined to be bullies realized that they could use social justice and representation as weapons to attack other fans who disagreed with them or who didn't like the things they liked. Unfortunately, that shit has proven to be horrifyingly effective at running other fans out of fandom spaces, not to mention professionals off of platforms like twitter and tumblr.

Exactly. Activism in fandom wasn't nonexistent, nor is it an inherently bad thing. But it got weaponized, and things could get ugly in the hands of someone who wasn't really interested in diversity, representation, etc. but was interested in beating everyone over the head with the social justice stick until they were the apex predator in fandom.

> Not until awful people who were already inclined to be bullies realized that they could use social justice and representation as weapons to attack other fans who disagreed with them or who didn't like the things they liked.

And that took all of, what, two seconds?

What gets me is how long it took everyone else to understand what was going on and start pushing back against it. And how slow it feels to get that ball rolling. Because what you're describing is what abusers do, and it's what anyone can do, if they just ask themselves "how can this be exploited?" It's not a secret. It's not even hard to stumble across.

Assuming a well-intentioned ideology is impossible to abuse, and must not be challenged or questioned in any way because it's just so perfect as-is, is a recipe for being manipulated.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 09:45 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 11:01 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 13:17 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 14:16 (UTC) - Expand

Existed in ways like women's fan letters helping Star Trek not get cancelled, sure. But in the way that it exists today, nope. Not till the early 2000s. Fandom existed before you were born.

This. We really need ways to differentiate between all the different things that "fandom activism" has meant, over the long term, and the very coopted, damaging thing that's taken the term for itself in the recent past.

Fandom can be activism, but it is not always and doesn't have to be. For some people it's escapism, or just a fun hobby. And activism or hobby, both are fine. What's not fine is when people step in and say if you're not using fandom as activism then you are a privileged twat, that's when the problems arise. Let people have fun. Marginalized groups need to let off steam and have pointless entertaining hobbies too. Not everything has to be activism.

On the scale of my priorities of things I need to concerned about, real world things like climate change, access to healthcare (including sexual and reproductive healthcare), voting rights, fairness in the justice system, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, etc. are way higher than fandom things, let alone which imaginary characters other fans want to read about. And activism in the real world or online activism about the RL things has a much higher chance of making the changes in the world I would like to see.

As for fandom being activism, how do you mean? Do you mean asking for another season of a favorite show or letting TPTB that there is interest in particular types of properties and seeing a variety of people and relationships depicted in shows and movies? Are you referring to the people demanding that TPTB or authors or showrunners make their pairing canon or make the story go the way the fans want it to, and pester actors with questions about ships and show them explicit fanworks? Or are you referring to creating/consuming fanworks?

Re: pretty sure you're just trolling, but

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 03:43 (UTC) - Expand

Re: pretty sure you're just trolling, but

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 05:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: pretty sure you're just trolling, but

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 05:02 (UTC) - Expand

Re: to someone who doesn't sound like they're trolling

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 10:45 (UTC) - Expand

Re: to someone who doesn't sound like they're trolling

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 13:27 (UTC) - Expand

Re: pretty sure you're just trolling, but

(Anonymous) - 2023-07-09 10:19 (UTC) - Expand

Big assumption on your part. Some of us, even those of us in a minority group, used fandom for fun. It's not that the activism or reasons for that activism didn't exist, it's that it wasn't an automatic one-for-one exchange.

Nah. The fandom-as-activism thing didn't really get going until the late 2000s. Shipping for Great Justice really took off after fandom moved to tumblr around 2012-2013 or so. That's when fandom-as-social-justice really took off in a big way, and ruined many fun fandoms in the process. (I was in Pacific Rim fandom and it was fun for about three weeks until the SJ wankers found it.)

This is not true. I'm part of several groups that get targeted early when people start hand-wringing about the children and the abuse survivors and the tender sensibilities of innocents. In the 90's and early 00's fandoms I was a part of online, though, that kind of behavior - throwing people who were more gay and darker and writing scarier kinks than you under the bus in the hopes that normies would accept more vanilla fandom just as long as you weren't associated with the actual worst - was seen as betrayal and cowardice.

That's been a thing before, and we could have that again.

I have always been that very vanilla person that made others ask “what is this kid even doing in fandom if they don’t like X and Y?” and nowadays even I am problematic by young kids’ standards so I can agree with this comment.

But the internet has changed, and it’s so associated with our RL lives nowadays that only us oldies seem to write/read for emotional catharsis anymore. Back then we could expect our fic or whatever fanwork to be a well-kept secret. So maybe kids who grew up in this new Internet can’t (or don’t want to) separate the spheres that well. Hell even I find trouble doing that now, even if I avoid doing things like post pictures online. What I am trying to say is that these changes should be attributed to changes in the way the WWW works more than people’s attitudinal changes, do you agree?

On the Internet, no one knows that you are a cat, unless you tell them.

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