Snowflake challenge #1

[firecat]

snowflake_challenge is an annual January celebration of fandom, fan works, and getting to know other fans & creators. There are fifteen prompts covering a variety of topics.

Snowflake challenge #1: Update your fandom information

I tweaked my DW profile, and when I went to read what other people say about their fannish interests and activities, I noticed that I feel less settled than others about exactly what I’m doing fannishly. I can say what I *have* done and a little about what I *do* but not so much about wha I *will do*. Maybe that’s because I’ve been doing it for less than five years.

Anyway, I started posting fanfic in spring 2020 and I’ve posted coming up on 1m words at AO3 (firecat ). I’ve been a dabbler (I’ve written in almost 120 fandoms) but I also have some faves — my most-written fandoms and characters have been Lucifer TV, the Loki-centric portions of MCU and other Loki variants, ancient Greek myth, John Constantine, Jack Harkness, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Trek (original series and Next Generation). I’m fond of crossovers. I’ve participated in a lot of exchanges. I tend toward explicit smut and sf/fantasy/horror, but other genres and less explicit works are respectably well represented.

My Dreamwidth journal has lately been mostly fannish stuff but I sometimes post about my life or stuff I’ve come across that made me think.

What are your thoughts about the phenomenon/communities of fandom today?

Comments

[snippy]

I am having some interesting moments around having briefly been in convention fandom as an outgrowth of being in Usenet SF/F fandom, in that there are some modern fans who think it extraordinary that, for example, I have been thanked in an author's note or have many, many signed books or have had dinner or walked around the art show with various famous names.

I am most distressed by the open admission, nay, proud claim, of so many that they will not read an unfinished series (whether that be fanfic or trad pub) and have explained over and again that one encourages authors or they mightn't finish - either with praise on chapters or by purchasing the first and subsequent early books in a series as appropriate.

May I recommend the podcast Fansplaining if you'd like to further explore fandom as its own thing.

[firecat]

Yes, the differences between those communities are fascinating!

I’m glad you’re explaining why it’s important to follow series as they’re being created! I understand the disappointment when one commits to a series and it’s never finished or it veers in a direction one doesn’t like but refusing to engage with any such series seems extreme to me, and yes, damaging to creators.

That said, I have sometimes wished for more one-shots and miniseries and fewer Supernaturals and Anita Blakes. The art of ending a story well has been a bit neglected, it seems.

And I don’t like the opposite trend either, fans who abandon a series the minute it’s finished. I’m often showing up in fandoms that have shrunk a lot because the series is over.

Thanks for the podcast recommendation!

[teigh_corvus]

Here via Snowflake

Honestly, I'm not sure what I think about communities within fandom. I've spent the last few years - or last several years - mostly living on AO3, before slipping back onto tumblr about a year - year and a half ago. And even there I'm distant from the Discourse.

Personally I've been missing the pre-2012 journal-based community. It felt much more tight-knit, which also somehow inspired my fanworks. So... I guess I worry about the Twitter nonsense and how it feels like things are splintering further around the edges.

But fandom's tricky and resilient. I'm looking forward to how we next adapt.

[firecat]

I keep hearing about the good old days pre-2012 (sometimes it’s earlier)! I’ve been on LJ/DW for a long time so I was adjacent to it but didn’t engage with fanworks much. It matters a lot to have a smallish group of people to encourage each other and to squee with. But yes fandom will surely survive in one form or another!

[silveradept]

It's much easier to be a fan and find other fans these days, and that's been double-edged through and through. Having a visible entity like AO3 means a lot less of trying to scour the Web and find the correct shibboleths to get to what you are interested in. But it, and increased visibility on social media, make it easier for fan groups who would otherwise be cheerfully unaware of each other to be jammed right next to each other, and to have nosy algorithms putting antagonistic groups in greater contact with each other, in favor of engagement.

What I find must interesting about current fandom is the way that it's shifted from copyright and the author finding out as the greatest concern to a lot of spilled pixels over the morality of doing certain fan works and ships. The collective attitude about copyright seems to be "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," with perhaps the occasional forbearance if the creator in question turns out to be litigious, but that pause is almost always limited to the life of the creator themselves. Having decided there's too much of it now for everyone to get sued individually, it seems like the discussion has gone back to the first major unresolved flamewar about whether the Kirk/Spock shippers are moral degenerates or not.

[firecat]

Good point about The Algorithm shoving groups with similar interests and different views into cage fights! I hear more often about The Algorithm isolating people in bubbles of “everyone I know agrees with me.”

And the shift toward “fan works are fair use” (aka “fuck ‘em”) has been really interesting to watch. I approve. And I also wonder how it might be changing professional creators.

I find the growing moralism fascinating and distressing at the same time. It hasn’t affected me much personally, even though I use the dead dove tag a lot, probably because I’m a fan/creator of very small name and don’t meaningfully participate in Twitter or tumblr. But I remember being highly indignant when I came across people who morally objected to >15 year age gaps regardless of the age of the participants. I lust Tom Hiddleston (at 42, twenty years my junior) so I’m a creeper and a groomer. I hang my head in shame. Oh wait, no I don’t.

[silveradept]

The accusation is that the algorithm puts people into echo chambers, but that's much more a function of which platform you choose to use, setting your baseline for what you want to see. The algorithms that we have prioritize "engagement," and therefore are more than happy to dump people into cage fights, especially people who would otherwise not see each other organically. People do want to have a general sense of agreement with the people they're around, but it's not the algorithm that's helping them. (They're usually fighting the algorithm, with liberal use of block and mute, to build that specific coalition they're looking for, and that only lasts as long as they can beat the algorithm.)

I approve of the shift as well, and I think the change it allows for professional creators is to be able to use their fanworks as part of their portfolio, should they desire to do so. It depends on what they're trying to do, honestly, as to whether that's a good idea or not, and there are still lines that fandom has to learn how to draw again about how you interact with creators, even if they're fans in other contexts. Art is more welcoming to people who can demonstrate their style, but also how to mimic another style. Writing, on the other hand, seems to still want to not acknowledge that someone may have been practicing writing a lot before pitching their novel or short story.

The moralism in fandom often comes from a misunderstanding of the space being stepped into, in my opinion. It's much more analogous to the person who steps into the kinky space and then starts loudly complaining they were expecting to see family-friendly kissing and light petting at most. And then starts flexing their cultural power to do just that, and now they've become a useful tool for other forces to work through.

The thing I really need for the people coming into fandom to recognize is when they are in their own space or a place for them, so they can be a gracious host, and when they are in a space that is not for them, so they can be a gracious guest.