December Semi-Daily: fandom over time

[resonant]

destina, "how has your relationship to fandom changed over the years? By which I mean not just participation in it, but your level of tolerance/interest for the cyclical things about it, the way old arguments never really stop or die, etc, but also the ways fandom changes and new ways of doing fandom evolve. (And old ways evolve out, and terms evolve, etc.)"

I find that I almost never use the word "slash" any more; in any online community that accepts the existence of fanfic, the fact that some of it is gay and some of it is smut is just taken for granted.

Similarly, some of my older stories have a fair bit of groundwork for why this particular character might be prepared to have a same-sex relationship. I mean, not mimeographed-Kirk/Spock-zine level of groundwork, but I still went into the stories assuming that the readers would be assuming that everyone was straight. All that explanation seems a little weird to me now; I think a contemporary fanfic-reading audience is going to assume general multisexuality and you'd have to provide support for why a given character wouldn't be open to a same-sex relationship.

I have a history of either arriving in a fandom after the major fandom-splitting conflict has already burned itself out (Ray Wars? oh, yeah, I've heard they used to have some Ray Wars) or somehow not noticing the major fandom-splitting conflict. terminally_underwhelmed and I spent like half an hour one day trying to figure out where had I been that I managed to miss SuperWhoLock? was it after I abandoned the resonant8 tumblr? was it before I discovered tumblr? did it somehow happen while I was right there and I didn't notice it?

So my approach to fandom conflict is pretty much what it's always been, which is to vaguely notice some smoke and sirens off thataway and hope that it's not going to cut into my smut.





28 -- kass, "What do you like best about where you live?"
29 -- mecurtin, What is the most beautiful sight you see outside on a regular basis? Can be a building, landscape, plant, animal, artwork, people playing, whatever.
30 -- china_shop, "Your favourite book you read this year."
31 -- wolfshark, "what is your favorite story to reread of your own stuff? what was your favorite story to write?"

Comments

[raveninthewind]

I still use "Slash" for tagging, but interestingly enough, most slash stories in recent years have het pairings also or are "Mostly Gen" and the slash and het modify that.

I find that other sites (Reddit and DLP, for example) there are enough folks who are anti-slash that they would want to know to avoid. And of these folks, their default seems to be Het rather than Gen.