Fandom 50

Fandom 50

Kind of late for a first entry but here is one.

Has fandom changed or have I?

I was never in a fandom until the 2000’s. I did not know what a ‘zine was. I did not know what a con was. I never heard of fanfiction. I was a Star Wars fan from way back.

I got into the LOTR fandom right after the first movie came out. It was quite hostile, to be honest. There were wars between character writers and real person writers, between shippers of different pairings, between hetters and slashers. It was ugly. There was gatekeeping then, too.

I decided early on that I came into this not to fight but to enjoy and I did. I had my own website and ran a Yahoo group that hosted at least 100 stories a week in its heyday. I welcomed all. It wasn’t perfect but it was good.

Is today different?

I think so. I think we have a reflection of our divisive society in fandom. There are things we’re not ‘allowed’ to write now because they might upset someone. There are people who want to police Ao3 to make sure it doesn’t hurt their feelings and that it does reflect their ‘moral’ codes. An example is someone once complained because characters were eating meat and I did not warn for it.

Ao3 was born to combat gatekeeping and censorship in fandom. Other sites caved. Fanfic dot com made their site completely shite when they kicked all the adult stories out. I never bothered with them again. Livejournal was sold once then again to some Russian oligarch who decided to purge all adult anything, because there were rumblings of kiddie porn, and by that, I mean stories with underage fictional characters. Ao3 was born out of frustration over these events and others like them.

So what do you do about these things?

As of today, we do still have freedom of speech here in the US, where Ao3 is based. I say let people write what they will, as long as they are not inciting specific violence. Writers write violence, rape, child abuse out of a need for catharsis many times. Or maybe they are angry and rather than take it out on a real person, they write something violent. Let it be. We write for our own reasons and we don’t owe any explanations of those to anyone.

Oddly enough, the young seem to be the ones who want to gatekeep. Life is hard, kids. If you don’t want to read certain kinds of fiction, then DON’T CLICK ON IT. It’s that simple.

Fandom has changed but not that much. There will always be those who want more rules and to control others. That’s life. We must guard against that and keep fandom and fans free to express themselves.


*Crossposted at alexcat

What are you fannish about?
♥ Movies?
♥ Hedgehogs?
♥ Baking?
♥ Fictional characters?

Why not post about all of them this year? This is a challenge to make fifty posts about fandom things. They can be whatever kind of posts you’d like - movie reviews, recs, a story about meeting a fellow fan, cosplaying … anything!
The challenge runs for a year (well, 10 months), so a pace of one post per week plus a couple would do it.

If you’d like to do a theme, feel free. Some ideas:
♦ 50 fictional characters that I want to meet in real life
♦ 50 fanvid recs
♦ 50 television episodes that were lifechanging
♦ 50 fanfic plots I’ll never write

You don’t need to do a theme if you don’t want to. You can make fifty random fan-adjacent posts.

If you’d like even more structure or if you’d like to share your Fandom 50 with others, you can commit to the challenge by signing up.

To sign up, comment on this post with the following:
<b>Name: </b> <b>My Fandom 50 entries will be posted here:</b> (your tag URL) <b>My theme (optional): </b> <b>My journal status: </b> (locked/unlocked, any content warnings, willing to add to my circle, etc.) <b>Anything else people should know? </b>
Post a link here to the community for each fandom 50 entry you make on your journal.


Disclaimer: I nabbed this from swannee's Fannish Fifty from 2023 and with their permission.