Posting art and whatever else I want since 2014!
She/Her or They/Them
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61 posts tagged Fandom
how has being active on social media changed your perception/attitude towards ds9 fans (if it has at all)?
It hasn’t. I’ve been active online since DS9 was on the air, on old school BBSEs and newsgroups like rec.arts.startrek.current and alt.tv.star-trek.ds9, so our fans are pretty much exactly what I’ve always expected/experienced.
And I love you all.
Yes, even you way off there in that special little fandom niche.
Some of my followers have expressed confusion as to the dead dove situation! That is okay.
There is a show called Arrested Development. There is one specific scene where a character finds a bag in the fridge. The bag is labeled “DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT!” The character looks inside the bag. It is a dead dove. The character looks up and says, “I don’t know what I expected.”
The bag warned specifically what was inside it. The character looked anyway and found what the bag warned about. It was not the bag’s fault he looked, nor the fault of the person who labeled the bag, because, hey, they warned anyone who looked at it there is a dead dove in this bag. It is entirely the fault of the character who looked, and he admits that by saying he didn’t know what he expected other than what he was warned for.
This warning phrase has become a tag for authors, mostly because people are looking at the warnings, reading the fic, and then complaining about things they were warned about beforehand. It is the authors saying, “You read the tags and looked anyway. That is on you, not on me, because I warned you. You made the choice to open the fic and read it. You made the choice to open the bag.”
I’ve found that when I find this tag on a fic, it’s because it deals with some pretty heavy stuff, so I like it as a reminder to check the tags carefully and read any notes the author may have before I decide to dive into a fic. In the end, what you consume is your choice, and if you read something you don’t like despite the author’s warnings (like I did yesterday), that’s on you. I should have closed the window when I realized what was happening and I didn’t, and that’s on me.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.
Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.
You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.
The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.
That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.
Cringe culture literally does not exist outside of the internet.
I take my Minecraft backpack to college and I get tons of compliments on it. My boss’s son plays Minecraft and he’s elated to have a “resident Minecraft expert.”
Lots of things that fall under “cringe” are very dear to me and my friends. Good people recognize and celebrate that passion, no matter what it’s for.
cringe culture exists online and in high school, that’s literally it
cringe culture exists
online and in high school, that’s
literally it
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Literally one time I was on an airplane and this 50 year old dude noticed my pokeball phone charger and it turned out he was a big pokemon fan who used to work on card development and gave me a rare pack of German misprinted pokemon cards because he was flying to visit a pokemon merch unwrapping youtuber channel so being public with your interests can be good actually
maybe making consuming pop culture a huge part of your identity was never a good idea to begin with
I read that article. The article was thoughtful and good and ends with a plea to donate to transgender causes. Also people can be obsessed about any number of things. Sometimes it’s because they have ADHD or autism, but sometimes they don’t. And consuming pop culture forms both personal and cultural identity? There are people that form large parts of their identity around sports teams, or making movie-perfect stormtrooper armor. This behavior is normal and you can’t just call it pathetic because it’s something you personally don’t like, especially when the person in question understands the nuances of it and its problems.
I am a transgender person for who Harry Potter was a big part of my identity and I am here to say that the cis person who wrote this article knows their place and knows where they are in all of this and understands that there are no easy answers to any of this.
smug ableist are once again mocking neurodivergent people for our hyperfixations, what else is new
Yeah but also don’t make fun of neurotypical people for having interests either. My grandma is as neurotypical as they come and she knows a lot about and is super into the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Human beings have interests. Human beings have interests that they incorporate into their personal identities.
Ain’t it interesting how the person in the article is literally talking about divesting HP from her identity, but the clowns at the top of this post are making fun of her to… read a different book? As if that isn’t exactly what’s going on? They’re literally making fun of her for doing what they want her to do.
Sometimes y'all tell on yourselves. Don’t pretend you’re all about change when all you really want is a righteous reason to bully people.
Man, Anne Rice sure did traumatize whole generations of fanfiction writers.
Also let me throw out there that I don’t want this to seem like it’s punching down on someone who just died and is mourned by her loved ones. Anne Rice’s legacy is complicated, as many older authors are. She could have done better, she could have done far worse, and it’s always okay to feel sad when you like the work of someone who’s just died.
It’s just than, man, I was there Gandalf when this was the biggest threat to fandom. It’s wild, man.
She had a huge impact on modern vampire fiction as we know it (for better or worse) but its not problematic to point out that she was racist, sometimes cruel to the point of delusional, and a terror to not just fandom but her fandom specifically.
May her memory be a blessing to those who knew and loved her but her death doesn’t absolve her.
Honestly, I think that’s the best take. It’s fair to talk about the complexity of her legacy after her death. It’s also fair to point out her fiction was important to a lot of people, and her family is grieving their loss. Such is the nature of being a polarizing public figure.
I’m a minor, and I’m going to be for a couple more years. I know some people don’t really like interacting with minors as much, but I want to make fandom friends. I haven’t told anyone but I can’t meet up with people or buy as much merch, and I don’t want to wait to be an adult to participate in fandom. Do I just not tell anybody or should I make friends who don’t care?
I grew up in the generation where every adult in our lives made it excessively clear that revealing the fact that we were young online was dangerous behaviour. I’m regularly horrified to see teenagers post their ages where anyone can see them. My initial, gut reaction to this question is dear god don’t tell anyone you’re a minor.
I’ll leave the actual decision around whether to reveal your age up to you, but I recommend talking to your parents or another trusted adult before you do. If you’re not comfortable doing that, then please read up on some privacy tips for teens to help you stay safe online.
You don’t need to meet people in order to participate in fandom. You don’t need to buy anything to participate in fandom. All that you have to do is join the online community of people who are nerding out, squeeing, creating, celebrating, and talking about your favourite characters and stories.
This might mean that you’re a silent lurker, looking at art and reading fic without commenting or reblogging at all. It might mean that you become a fanartist or a fic writer or a podficcer or fanvidder or a cosplayer or a fan crafter or any of the myriad other types of creators that exist in fan spaces.
It will probably also mean that you’ll be somewhere on the spectrum between the two, and that your involvement will change in type and degree as you move from one fandom to another. There are some fandoms where I’m a lurker, some where I’m a commenter/reblogger, some where I’m a writer or an artist.
Try lurking in a community first and picking up the vibe. What are the people like here? What are the rules? Do these people have the kind of community I want to be more active in? You can always reveal your age later if you feel like you want to.
People are online are going to assume you’re an adult until you tell them you’re not. Lurking will also give you a chance to see if you’re comfortable with the kinds of conversations those communities are having. If you’re not, then it’s okay to back out. You can come back some other time if you want to give it another go. In the meantime, there’s always another group of fans for you to meet.
If you want to be more involved in fandom, but worry about interacting with adults, I suggest looking around tumblr or other social media and seeing if there are any discord servers in your fandom specifically for minors (I’ve seen some for a few of my fandoms).
Discord is a great way to interact with other fans, and you can even just be a lurker in one too if you want to judge the general vibe of other fandom members.
As always, be careful and stay safe. Being a minor on the internet is hard, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun while you’re here <3
Oh, definitely lurk and don’t tell me your age. I also suggest not having explicit back-and-forths with people.
If you’re hanging out discussing like, who would win in a fight, how powers work, things like that, just interact as normal. If you want to discuss how powers would effect sex, keep it educational as opposed to explicit (think Waifu catalogue). If someone tries to pull you into an explicit RP remember that you can both get in trouble for that.
OP, as a parent whose kids grew up online, I’ll give the same advice I gave to my own kids:
Lurk all you want. Chat politely sometimes. Don’t tell anyone how old you are.
(We used to know that “A/S/L?” meaning “age, sex, location?” in a chatroom was a sure sign of a creep. I hate that it’s become common to put that info in your profile.)
Do not provide verification for your age. (Get comfortable asking, “What are you, a cop?”) Don’t give out your real name, the city you live in, where you to go school, or ideally, what region or state you live in. NOBODY ONLINE NEEDS TO KNOW THESE THINGS.
(Yeah, you’ll lose out on some merch that way, unless you have a local adult who’s willing to be an address for you.)
Do not meet with anyone. Do not give out your phone number. Ideally, don’t give out your email, or make a separate one for your “I’m an adult, really” account.
Talk to YOUR parents, or another trusted relative or adult mentor, about your worries. Please. It’s important to have an adult you can trust, who can help you spot the difference between “those are just grownups talking about grownup stuff” and “those are f'n predators; stay away from them.”
Safety doesn’t come from sticking with your own age group. There are predator teens, AND there are predator adults who pretend to be teens. And teens can’t usually recognize them.
Safety comes from seeing a broad range of communications, including about sensitive topics, so that you know what’s normal and what seems creepy. Safety comes from not giving people contact info they don’t need for online activities. Safety comes from recognizing when a conversation makes you uncomfortable, and quitting it - and blocking the other person or people involved, if you want. Safety comes from seeing people argue badly and the apologize awkwardly, so you realize that anger isn’t a dangerous emotion on its own. Safety comes from learning where your boundaries are, which means going places where you might reach them.
SAFETY DOES NOT COME FROM IGNORANCE. It does not come from isolation. If you’re mature enough to be on Tumblr asking anonymous questions, you know enough to put yourself at risk. From here on out, safety comes from knowledge and practice.
So practice in ways that can’t get to you physically: in places where nobody knows your real name or where you live or how to contact you, so that if you drop out of a Discord you have effectively vanished.
(I am so damn sick of ageism in fandom. All the “separate areas for minors and adults!!!” thing does, is leave minors vulnerable to predators and guarantees they’ll keep that vulnerability into their mid-20s.)
Small caveat: Laws about what’s legal to share with minors vary by country and state. Go learn yours. Please avoid tricking adults into committing felonies by letting you see art that’s illegal for you to see.
But as far as 90% of fandom discussions? Age is irrelevant, and I wish more communities would acknowledge that consciously instead of setting up a system where the rule is, “minors can be here if they lie.”
As per my favourite metaphor for this sort of thing: think of it as though you’re in a bar. Now, the thing about bars[1] is this: bartenders generally aren’t too worried about people who are under the legal age for alcohol service actually *being* in the bar - you’re allowed to be in the bar, you’re allowed to even buy stuff from the bar. What you’re not allowed to do is buy alcohol - you can buy soft drinks, bottled water, counter meals, chips/crisps, packaged nuts, but you can’t buy alcohol, and you can’t get alcohol purchased for you. It’s also considered sensible not to cause a ruckus, or draw attention to yourself in any way; and you’re always going to be getting a better reception from the bar staff if you show up in the company of adults (usually parents or family members, but well-behaved older friends will count) rather than on your own.
If you’re sensible, you’ll abide by the rules of the pub, sit and watch, not draw undue attention to yourself, and learn how to behave in an adult space through participant observation. (Given Australian pubs were the main venue for live music for most of the thirty years between the 1960s and the 1990s, a lot of teenagers used to go to pubs to hear their favourite bands. Again, so long as you didn’t do anything stupid, you were welcome to be in the space).
If you’re not sensible, you’ll do stupid things like use a fake ID to attempt to gain either entry or alcohol, or you’ll throw a fit about how there’s alcohol on sale and you’re a MINOR!!! (gasp, clutch pearls) and how could they be so horrible as to attempt to corrupt you!!! At which point, the bar staff will invite you to take yourself out of the space because clearly you’re not ready to be there.
[1] Caveat: I’m speaking as an Australian. This is the legal position here in Australia - minors are allowed into pubs, and can buy food and drink at pubs. What they can’t buy is alcohol.
I’ll also add that even if you have a second account for talking to friends vs talking to parents/using for school-related purposes, a separate account just for fandom is also helpful. When I was a minor in fandom in the late 90s/early 00s it was possible if not always easy to use one account for all things without anyone knowing where the various different groups you were in, but that’s not true any more. Maybe moreso with Tumblr, but every other site is going to out you with the algorithm eventually.
fandom is a hobby, not a form of activismadult women aren’t inherently creepy for being in fandom and having hobbies apart from raising babies and doing taxesthe vast majority of people pushing back against the worrying trend of instigating harassment over fictional characters and relationships aren’t incest supporters or pedophiles, actuallyliking a m/f ship doesn’t make someone a dirty heterosexual invading your spacepreferring gay ships doesn’t make you ‘’woke’’ and good
no one owes you a disclaimer that they are a good person who recognizes that their favorite fictional villain’s actions are evil and that they don’t condone those actions irlliking a fictional villain is in no way comparable to advocating abuse/murder/genocide/etc and you’re a fucking idiot if you believe thatjust because a woman is attracted to a fictional villain doesn’t mean she’s promoting toxic relationships or going to end up in a toxic relationship. assuming women can’t tell fiction and reality apart stinks of internalized misogyny some rando’s a/b/o fanfics have none of the level of influence that popular tv shows and movies spreading propaganda haveno one owes you a detailed description of their traumas and mental health problemsabusive relationships are not the same as enemies to lovers shipsy’all need to chill the fuck out over people, relationships, actions and events that don’t actually exist and learn how to enjoy and discuss them like normal peoplefandom is a hobby, not a form of activism
do you ever notice how like, we have our own language for fanfic that only readers understand?
for example
“36k wip destiel hs au on ao3”
I can’t believe I understood all those words
oh my god
this is so legit
there’s only one real word in that sentence.
Fun story!
My friend and I once did a presentation in a linguistics class about language in fandom. There was a question about a particular concept, and we turned to each other for a second to discuss it in fannish terms before we could explain. When we turned back, the class was sort of staring at us like 0_0. The teacher just said, “And there’s a good example of code switching.”
“Code Switching” is when speakers who share fluency in different languages flip between the languages during conversation, thus confusing the hell out of everyone else.
Fanfiction is becoming people’s primary form of entertainment right now because most media right now is so cheap, bland, recycled, and sponsored by people who love money more than the source material. Fanfiction is written for free by people who genuinely love what they’re writing about. That’s why it’s better. That’s why it’s more satisfying. Fanfiction is a home-cooked meal made for yourself and for your friends. Media today is junky fast food spoiled by too much grease and the knowledge that the people producing it are being criminally mistreated and underpaid.
kind of tempted to leave a review every time i go through someone’s ff.net/ao3 and reread everything but i also dont want to freak people out with the wave of emails
Please for the love of god do this. In the last… oh, I don’t know, seven-ish years since I first discovered fandom, the culture has made a huge shift. It used to be that, whether you yourself wrote any fic or not, you reviewed every goddamn chapter of every goddamn fic that you read. Usually in detail. And plenty of people (myself included, at times) would leave a review on every chapter even if there were already twenty or thirty chapters in the fic before I ever stumbled upon it.
But we’ve moved away from that. Now, plenty of authors (particularly those who aren’t Big Name Fans) practically have to beg for reviews to get even a small amount of acknowledgement, and that’s not fair. The SE fandom is better about it than plenty of others I’ve been in, but we’re not immune either.
So if you wanna go all out and leave ALL OF THE REVIEWS… I say do it.
D O IT
I’LL JOIN YOU
I remember the time with a custom to REVIEW EVERY SINGLE CHAPTER YOU READ AND GIVE FEEDBACK TO AUTHOR IN DETAIL. In less than 10 years it has changed to “I consume but don’t interact” (why? what has given peeps the belief that authors don’t want to have comments and feedback from you? That leaving your comment is “bothering” them and they think you are stupid? WHERE DOES THIS SILLY IDEA COME FROM?)
Let’s bring it back, the habit to comment plenty!
You can always tell when, shall we say, someone Slightly older discovers your fic, because not only do you get hits, you actually get kudos and what can only be described as a Review at the end of each chapter. Usually followed by a question because they Want to engage. They Want you to know they enjoyed your thing and want to read more from you.
I can’t tell you how discouraging it is for some of my work to have literal actual thousands of hits and 10 kudos and 0 comments. And then people who have never left a single note of their presence come into my messages months later like “hey you’re my fave writer why did you stop :(”
Because. It. Feels. Like. No. One. Gives. A. Shit.
Nothing makes an author’s day faster than seeing that someone is reading a whack of their stories in a row, or re-reading one, because coming back for more is the best compliment we can possibly get. But we only know that is happening if you leave kudos or comments! So, go for it. Feedback is love!
I recently had somebody go through, binge-reading all of one of my fics, and leaving comments on each chapter, and I looked forward to tracking their progress.
I would love to get reviews on every single chapter.. It really affects the writer’s confidence in themselves as writers and in their stories. Leave reviews! 😇
Oh God, this.
Can I just really stress this point that was made? :
I can’t tell you how discouraging it is for some of my work to have literal actual thousands of hits and 10 kudos and 0 comments. And then people who have never left a single note of their presence come into my messages months later like “hey you’re my fave writer why did you stop :(”
Because. It. Feels. Like. No. One. Gives. A. Shit.
Because same. I’m not a big name, and the reason I still create is because of a handful of people still encourage me. But the overall silence of people consuming but not leaving comments/reblogs/likes/kudos is disheartening.
I have a habit of finding an author I like and then consuming every single thing they’ve written in that same fandom. I’ve also left reviews on all of it and even when I was having a crummy day, getting the notifications that I had personally made someone’s day was amazing.
It can be lonely, writing fanfic (writing in general, to be honest) and sometimes the greatest thing is being able to reach out and tell someone “I like the way you put those words together”.
Give us a book report, srzly it’s the best!
I am turning 24 soon and I can't help but freak out. I know what I am about to say next is going to sound very trivial compared to what is happening around the world now but I can't stop thinking that there will come a time when I would be considered too old to be in a fandom. Like what would happen when I turn 35/45/55?? Won't it be awkward? Would it be creepy if I still read ao3 fics in my 60s? I don't want to go away from the fandom space. It helps me so much to cope in this world.
my advice is to block and mute anyone who makes you feel that way and enjoy posting about batman with the other well-adjusted adults who like to enjoy things on the internet
I also have to ask, like, who do you think runs fandoms? Who’s paying for and coding AO3? FFN? Tumblr? Fanwikis? Who do you think is running fandom events like theme weeks and big bangs and watch parties and fic exchanges and holiday events MOST of the time? Coordinating big charity events like the Fandom Trumps Hate auction, or the Fandom Loves Puerto Rico charity auction? Who do you think organizes and makes up the majority of attendees for fan conventions? Who do you think is out there writing gorgeous 100k+ novels full of rich life experience? Who do you think is out there writing knowledgeable, hot smut?
I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s not thirteen year olds, and it’s probably not even 15 or 18 year olds for the most part either, especially when it comes to doing anything with large quantities of money, like paying for servers or doing complex coding or auctions. I remember being in fandom at 13, 15, 18, 20…. the spaces started out for me as “I am aware I am visiting an adult space, which I will learn how to navigate appropriately until I am able to help build with them.”
Like, listen. There’s teenagers in fandom space, but fandom space isn’t specifically a teenage space, and CERTAINLY not a teenage-only space. Fandoms are places where you might get in the door as a teen, but the majority of the residents and creators of the spaces aren’t teenagers. They’re people who grew up here surrounded by the supportive adults that formed the spaces, and that have helped to maintain the community into their adulthood so that future generations can continue to enjoy the same as they did.
Getting to be 25, 35, 45, and on, that’s not you overstaying a welcome in a place you don’t belong. That’s you settling into a neighborhood that was built for you, one you have probably helped to build, and one you will continue to help shape through whatever time you desire to stay.
I love that teenagers are here, I love that they’ll get to share experiences similar to my own when I was a teenager, forming friendships and having access to a huge number of stories and art and a vast, diversely populated and largely loving community that just isn’t available in most real-world spaces and communities. I’m So glad they have these resources. But I also hope that those teenagers remember that they’re in a space that, while welcoming to them, was not made specifically for them, and that it certainly is not a space where they can come into and say to the folks who built it or grew up in it before them: “you don’t belong here anymore.”
I started ficcing in 1995 with a notepad and pen. I started posting fic online in 1999 and I have zero intention of stopping. You know why? Because it’s not about what other people want - it is about me enjoying the thing I love and spreading that love around.
The world will tell you that people in fandom - especially female and queer people- shouldn’t be old. That it’s creepy. That it’s weird. Because queer folk and womenfolk are not allowed to do things they enjoy for fun and pleasure most of the time, but especially not when we’re aging. It’s not socially acceptable. We’re meant to quietly go back to being out of sight and out of mind. Look at modern media. Look at the dearth of older female and queer characters anywhere.
To the people who think that, bugger you backwards with a rusty fork. I love what I love. I will continue to do so. I will continue to embrace my joy and I will continue to share my joy with like-minded people. I’m not letting any ageist/sexist/miscellaneous-ists tell me how and when and why I should stop.
@spockslash was 77 when she died. Her children have kept her blog up and all her posts. She had an NSFW side blog for her Kirk/Spock slash interests. She was posting actively on Tumblr right up until like a week or so before her death.
I am 50. I just spent the past half hour folding laundry and singing the songs I wrote for my favorite OC/canon ship when I was 17.
There are plenty of fandom grandma’s. People who will give you the rundown of ye olde Star Treck fandom. It’s only weird if you make it weird.
You never age out of fandom. Never. Don’t let anyone tell you so.
If the sports fandom can cope with having old men in it, the geek fandom sure as hell will have to learn to cope with having the rest of us.
Because that’s not true, and it’s not acceptable behavior.
I’m 35 and have been in various fandoms most of my life. My parents met at a scifi convention. My mom’s 70 now, and she still writes Doctor Who and Supernatural fanfic.
