[ SECRET POST #6534 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6534 ⌋

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


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[Love Bullet]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 26 secrets from Secret Submission Post #934.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - same anon submitting secrets about hating anthros / hating non-anthros with the exact same wording ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

02. https://i.imgur.com/MDcI9Iy.png

[(Anonymous)]

[looks at Transformers fandom]

Oh sweet child of summer.

[(Anonymous)]

I've been out of the TF fandom for ten years because of this, lol.

[(Anonymous)]

Same, LOL. I have an insane collection from that time too, a lot of them still in boxes, and I've just been giving them away to my niblings and cousins for birthday/christmas gifts over the past five years. I'm the favorite Auncle, lol.

[(Anonymous)]

I dunno, it feels like the Doctor Who fandom has been the way since forever.

[sparklywalls]

The joke is it has been like this since 24th November 1963. Or if not that the day One regenerated into Two. Or if not that when it was first broadcast in colour (at the same time as Two became Three) or if not that when... and so on...

(To be honest most "nerdy" media is like this. And I am not immune to getting sucked in but I've promised myself to try recognise when that's happening and wean myself off it and go back to talking about the joy. I'm having much more fun with this approach.)

[philstar22]

So has the Star Wars fandom. There were a lot of similar reactions when Return of the Jedi came out.

[(Anonymous)]

Some fandoms have always been like this (Star Wars, Doctor Who, Star Trek, pretty much all comics…) but it wasn’t the norm for fandoms. I hate that it is now because I miss squeeing with others about the things that make me giddy. But I think there isn’t a lot of media out there that inspires that; it feels like everything is grimdark the last like ten years or so.

[(Anonymous)]

I've found the exact opposite: when I really love something, I like to talk about what I loved about it AND what I didn't like about it, but these days it feels like you can't even say that you disliked a certain aspect of something without people jumping down your throat for "bashing" it.

[(Anonymous)]

Well of course you do. Pissing on stuff and policing other people is 99% of your personality.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for demonstrating the very thing ayrt was pointing out, in a very nasty way, to boot.

[lilacsigil]

I have a different take on this: there's always been parts of fandom very heavily into nitpicking and negativity and shaming (not always all together) but social media being all about making people REACT brings the negativity to the forefront of everything. Like, I had an LJ friend who would use a "squee" tag, meaning that post was for positivity only, and a "critical" tag for the opposite. Easy to work with, you know what kind of discussion you're walking into, and if you don't want to have that kind of discussion you don't join in that post. But now there's 5 million negative takes on [latest thing] trying to drag your eyeballs when you're not even wanting to discuss that fandom right now.

[(Anonymous)]

IME there are definitely spaces where it can feel like
1) no one is allowed to say anything is bad or lacking, if you do you're not a real fan
Or
2) rampant angry rants about how shitty [X Y Z] is/are, and it is relentless angry demands about where [X Y Z] went wrong and that the creators/actors/producers/company/label are ignoring/actively antagonist towards the fans

And both groups can (and have) existed in fandoms.

What's frustrating to me is that often fans are really "all or nothing" when they don't need to be. And it just kills the joy for me. If we can't have nuanced conversations about a thing, I will nope out silently.
We can enjoy a thing but still address the stuff we didn't like.

I think given how most stuff on the internet is all about retaining engagement for as long as possible, the negative stuff is put out with higher visibility, so we often only see the negative "You're either with us or against us!" mentality in more recent times. And so it feels like fandom is nothing but negative shit.

[(Anonymous)]

+1000 to all of this.

I've also found that the relentlessly positive spaces can be just as awful and just as unhealthy for my mental health as the relentlessly negative ones, as well. They can and do often allow a lot of very nasty stuff to go on in the fandom, with no one ever being allowed to vent or even talk about it. Does no one remember Cult of Nice?

[(Anonymous)]

'Remember' it?! We're still living in it, it's just called 'Be kind!' these days.

[(Anonymous)]

What's frustrating to me is that often fans are really "all or nothing" when they don't need to be. And it just kills the joy for me. If we can't have nuanced conversations about a thing, I will nope out silently.
We can enjoy a thing but still address the stuff we didn't like.

It's really just toxic positivity in another form. You MUST like everything about this thing and think it's perfect and without flaws or else you are a bad person.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's always been like this. In my teens (two decades ago), my impression was that it's typical for fans to go through a fannish lifecycle that peaks and declines like this: At the start, you're just mildly into a thing; but then you start getting really into it and reading all there is to read about it and becoming an expert in it, and learning these new things sustains increasing interest and enthusiasm; but then you become so invested in the thing that you have expectations about how it should go; these expectations are not met and you become increasingly jaded and irritated by the direction of thing; without high levels of interest/curiosity/new information to sustain you, the flaws of thing become more prominent and salient; eventually, being in fandom is no longer fun/worth it and you leave; years later, you might then have a bit of renewed nostalgic interest in thing after having some distance from the source material and the fandom.

Whenever I encounter people who are just bitter about a fandom and spend most of their time ranting about it and/or other fans, I think they're just in the tail end of the fannishness cycle and they'll leave the fandom soon (and I'll probably be there in a couple of years too, to be honest). It's always something I had to deal with in fannish spaces, the people who are clearly on that enthusiasm decline but haven't quite reached the "I'm done with this fandom" point.

I agree with what people mentioned above, which is that overly negative fans is probably not an issue of fandom or fans changing, but more like we live in an age of non-forum social media now, where there aren't really fannish communities to flock around, you have no ability to expel excessively negative members from fannish spaces, and it's hard to find your people (the people currently really excited about [fandom]). If this is the issue, the best solution is to find a way to curate your space to have the people you vibe with in there and kick out the people you don't vibe with. Discords and Tumblr Communities (with rules that are actually enforced) are probably the way to go here. Another alternative is just to block/mute people on social media very aggressively. Are they moaning about your fandom and putting that in the fandom tag? Block them.