A brilliant article on why fandom is batshit crazy

[vostoklake]

Abstract: women are socialised into passive-agressive ways of dealing with conflict, and the targets of such hidden aggression develop a paranoid approach to interpersonal communication in self-defense. The majority of online fandoms are women. Fandom mainly consists in taking a "paranoid" attitude to canon texts anyway (i.e. ransacking them for gaps, buttsexsubtext, hidden meanings, etc). You do the math.

Comments

[jophan.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wish that people would put disclaimer below texts that use the word fandom in its new, nontraditional, fanfic sense. Makes for easier reading for us oldtimers who are active in fandom.

Well, well, I understood it after a little while.

[laputain.livejournal.com]

Good point. I had to make that mental shift myself a few years ago when I started moving in "new-school fandom" circles. Plus, I had the unnerving experience of dealing with people who thought that by definition fanfic was smut.

Actually, this opens the door to a whole new rant - about how the generation who got into old school (conventions) fandom in the early 90's were the Last Generation, and overwhelmingly the new school (online) fans don't see the need for actual human interaction of that nature. At least it appears to be that way in NZ, where the youngest generation at natcons seem to be in their early 30's (apart from children of older fans). Jess is of course an exception to this rule.

[jophan.livejournal.com]

This is a subject I have done a bit of observation and thinking about. My tentative conclusions are that the human interaction part of us oldtimers was/is mostly because that was the only way we could interact before the web and the web communities, not because we were looking for FTF interaction per se. What we were looking for was communication with people with similar interests, and because the river always takes the easiest path, the web has now become the communication channel.

What I observe here in Sweden is that after a while these community members get to know each other fairly well, and inevitably someone proposes an IRL meetup, which leads to another, and eventually these guys interact FTF too, but it takes a few years before they get there. And it never takes on the same proportions, because the tiniest bit of shyness can keep you away; you don't have to meet people to interact with them.