fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1907 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1907 ⌋

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

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[Disney's Gargoyles]

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[X-Men: First Class]

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[keanu reeves]

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[keanu reeves]

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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

11. [SPOILERS for Death Note]

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12. [SPOILERS for Kuragehime]

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13. [SPOILERS for The Walking Dead]

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14. [SPOILERS for Supernatural]

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15. [SPOILERS for Mass Effect 3]

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16. [SPOILERS for Mass Effect 3]

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17. [SPOILERS for Mass Effect 3]

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[ ----- TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

18. [TRIGGER WARNING for sexual abuse]

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19. [TRIGGER WARNING for rape]

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20. [TRIGGER WARNING for rape]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #272.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - hit/ship/spiration ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1) Depends how you define that? I started writing fanfiction when I was in third grade, but obviously I had no one to show it to. I first found internet fandom in about seventh grade when I first got access to the internet. That would have been in 2001, I think. I browsed a lot of old Tamora Pierce fansites (geocities yay!) before stumbling on fanfiction.net. Wow I feel old.

2) It has changed so many times over the years. I grew up writing for book fandoms - Tamora Pierce was my first internet fandom. From there I jumped into games (Final Fantasy and such) and then anime. While I got into gaming from watching my older brothers play, I got into anime because I saw a lot of people online were into it. Currently I'm into Mass Effect. For the last few years I have been most active on anon kink memes. I mostly write/read anon porn these days, haha.

3) Heavily. I was a bookworm as a kid, and the friends I made throughout my school years were all also bookworms - we traded books and shared favourite authors and discussed stories. A good chunk of my friends I met through similar fan interests. I first got into writing through writing fanfiction. I majored in Japanese (and achieved fluency) because I'm such a goddamn otaku - been to Japan, made some close Japanese friends, plan to go back and work there. Fandom introduced me to feminism - from reading Tamora Pierce as a kid to the advent of LJ SJ. It also made me clue into issues of race and inequality in general. I'm kinda at a turning point in my life - just graduating from university - and I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet (I plan to write, though), but it's important to me to have a career or volunteer activities in my life that effect positive change in the world, and tbh I wouldn't have cared if not for fandom.

It's kind of a cliche at this point, but fandom probably saved my life. The friends I made through fandom supported me when my life was pretty shitty. I never would have gone to university if not for my passionate desire to learn Japanese. I probably would have sunk further into depression and killed myself without fandom, honest to God. At the worst time in my life I had Ragnarok Online to keep me hanging on (barely). "I can't kill myself now, my priest is almost to level 50". Sounds pathetic, but it's true.. Without that? I shudder to think.

4) Each platform has its own character. LJ made fandom kinda cliquey, I think, breaking things down into comms and flists where fanfiction.net was more open and about purely the writing (Individual fansites and forums before that were more isolated and bound to individual fandoms. I had a little experience with mailing lists, and they were even more cliquey than LJ, imo). tumblr is kinda... it removes a lot of dialogue, tbh, and I'm convinced it's the cancer that is killing LJ. I like the gifs but it doesn't have the same level of social interaction. I don't have an iphone so I don't have any reason to use twitter. Personally I don't like the constant, bite-sized communication that tumblr and twitter offer. It's for people who are addicted to their cellphones, imo, and instead of sitting down for a long conversation they just send single bits and bytes, quick gifs and texts instead of lengthly, engaging dialogue. I find it vapid and symptomatic of a short attention span. //old fogey I can't write/discuss the volume I want on twitter or tumblr. Is there fandom on facebook? I thought it was just for catching up with RL friends. But maybe it's more relevant for people who go to cons.

Edited 2012-03-26 00:54 (UTC)

5) Creators are more open to criticism and more accountable. Racefail and the racebending fiasco are good examples and it had a pretty big impact on fandom. Racefail had more impact than the racebending fiasco, though, and that's basically because a lot of fantasy writers have LJs and blogs and they are much more engaged because they are comparitavely small-time. M. Night Shyamalan doesn't give a flying fuck what people are saying because he's Hollywood and they're fucking entrenched, untouchable and don't engage with their fans because they don't need to - they're sitting on their stacks of money and laughing.. A place where fans have had an effect (pun intended) though is regarding the Mass Effect promotions - after fans bitched extensively, promotions for ME3 began to include female Shepard. Fans bitched, and ME3 had less asari strippers, a female krogan and female salarians, gay romances. Progress! The Mass Effect fandom is seriously a gold star example of fan interaction making the product more progressive. We'll see how this fiasco with the ending turns out. I'd like to see more of this - fans interaction making media more democratic instead of a one-way road of indoctrination. I fully believe that media have a social responsibility to their viewers to present a variety of points of view instead of just the heavily biased views of the privileged few - the publishing and media industries - online fan interaction can go a long way to doing that. I'd better shut up before I start spewing a Chomsky monologue, though. :P

tl;dr man, tl;dr. Wow I hit the comment limit.

Comment limit, wow! =D

Thank you so much for your reply! I agree that Mass Effect is a really interesting example; I was actually working on my proposal and was going to make the paper only about TV/film fandoms, but I HAD to talk about it. And while ME isn't perfect in terms of gender and things (the Broshep promotion was a lot more numerous than FemShep promotion), but I think the fandom's really been great for that.

And as someone whose closest friends are either from Japanese class or from JPop fandom, I can relate :)

Thanks again!! I REALLY appreciate it! :)

[ SECRET POST #1907 ]

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