Nostalgia, (alt. an update to 2021's disconnected musings on fandom)

[superborb]

As I did not manage in the intervening year and a half to update my DW tags to usability, the referenced post is here.

I was going through a periodic phase of Intense Nostalgia, and I wondered if I might end run it by BLOGGING MY FEELINGS. As one does. Also, clear out a bunch of thoughts that had been gathering in the last year and a half that vaguely fall under this theme. X things make a post and all.

1. Back in the LJ days, someone (I have remembered this as troisroyaumes, but no search brings it up, so I can't say for sure) had posted about a term for nostalgia for a time you're going through right now. At the time, I was soon to graduate high school, so I was extremely ready to embrace this concept. After all, I would definitely miss high school, right? Fandom though, didn't seem to have an ending point; we'd connected through the internet and the internet was still there. (Cue the slow demise of LJ.)

I have no solid hypotheses for why I'm so intensely nostalgic over this particular era of fandom, when I have only mild nostalgia for high school or college.

Hypothesis A: Such a huge percentage of people disappeared forever, with no functioning forwarding address, so I continually think about people without the ability to send a quick 'hi'.

Hypothesis B: Fandom has changed so much and the slice of fandom I occupied so tiny that I feel nostalgia because that space has disappeared forever; you're meant to move on from schooling but I didn't think I'd have to move on from that experience of fandom until it was too late.

Hypothesis C: It's lower consequence than feeling nostalgia over the could-have-beens in schooling, and this is all displacement of my real feelings over something else. (AKA grad school damage that warped my priorities to define success in a particular way that I haven't met.)

2. Last year, I tweeted that I had become the person I wanted to be as a teen. The exact tweets were:
it's not that every ttfeb has been like ~insightful~, but it's definitely made me realize that in many ways, i have become the (fandom) person i wanted to be as a teen and had no idea how to become.
how did people have such interesting things to say? where did they get their insights? -- as a teen i yearned for that.
perhaps the gap is most apparent to me bc it felt so sudden, as i did a lot of development away from fandom, and came back and had Things To Say.
who do i yearn to be now, that i might become in ten years? more erudite? more persuasive? deeper knowledge or broader knowledge?

But I know the (fandom) development I'd want in ten years: I want to be a better writer. It's always been my weakest point academically, propped up by being assessed in conjunction with critical reading. I don't have the feeling for how the gradient works in writing, how to assess what is the direction towards 'better'. Deeper knowledge, broader knowledge, the way to improve has been trained in me through years of school optimized for exactly that.

3. I was the poster session kind of good at people. Maybe that's why LJ and now DW appeal to me: I like to present my topic and then have little conversations after it. But spanning the gap from the poster session to a 1:1 conversation -- I find that so difficult. And so I've been unable to really use Discord to chat with people and keep in touch without twitter/tumblr.

4. Fandom had always been a place for inter-generational friendships. But I wonder now at The Youth discussing aging out of fandom if a cause is the cringe of growing up and looking back at actions they'd taken as kids getting associated with being in fandom at the time. And then that barrier gets enforced with thinking it suspect that adults like the same things teens do. (On the one hand, I truly benefitted from those casual interactions with adults as a teen. On the other, current fandom is really... not a place where it's easy to mix like that anymore.)

5. This is a vaguely formed hypothesis: I was thinking about small fandoms and how there's (often, not always) a better sense of community; is some of the more adamant fracturing of large fandoms (e.g. character bashing) an action taken to deliberately create a small fandom niche within a large fandom?

Comments

[yesterdaychild]

these thoughts are so interesting! i have thought the same thing too, that i have somehow become the fandom person i wanted to be as a kid. but my only conclusion was simply that the people i looked up to back then were adults and i just hadn't realised it, or discounted how much growing through those intervening years actually mattered to developing an interesting personality.

if you ever want someone to bounce off writing thoughts or talking about the craft of writing, you know my discord!

pt. 3 - i think however you engage with fandom, or simply other people, is just fine, you know?

pt. 4 / 5 - have you felt a loss, for yourself, in the loss of fandom friendships in younger folk?

[superborb]

Yes, I think you're right that much of it was not realizing the difference the years make! And I look back at some folks who were just a little older than me yet seemed so adult and realize that they were also babies back then.

I am fandom friends with some people who are a bit younger than me, but it's hard to say if I miss anything because I've never really had the experience of a much younger fandom friend; I suppose I would expect that they'd have a very different view on things and especially different fandom spaces / technologies?

[qian]

#5 is an interesting hypothesis, perhaps deliberately but not consciously?

Your discussion of how you've become the fandom person you wanted to be as a teen reminded me that a while ago it struck me that as a teen I was told I came off as a thirtysomething British person (I think this was intended as a compliment, I certainly took it as one haha) and now I AM a thirtysomething British person. Not that the British part was necessarily something I'd been planning on, but funny how things fall out.

[superborb]

Ahaha, I wonder if you still have a thirtysomething British person vibes then, or if it changed!

[adevyish]

i’m coming up on ten years in a very large fandom, and i don’t know. i think a few people have deliberately tried to create fandom niches by getting extremely wanky (blocklists got passed around at least once a year, lmao) but i never got the sense that these attempted schisms created meaningful communities in any way. like, there’s usually groups of 3-or-so people who all agree with each other and then there are looser mutuals and then your mutual of your mutual is your enemy. (it’s more quiet now but during the peak of this fandom on tumblr in 2014, keeping up with who was friends with who was like keeping up with high school drama.)

looking past the (very persistent) moral panic, another part of the reason that generations don't mix might be because fandom is so much larger and more mainstream now. it’s so much easier to form a gc or discord with just like-minded fannish teens. but because discovery mechanisms on social media nowadays are algorithms, searches, and following other people, it’s too hard to find a community unless you’re on the platform all the time. there’s also no way to engage with someone in a fandom-only space, you have to engage with them in a personal-and-fandom space — which i often want to avoid too.

also, as a me problem rather than a them problem, in the lj days i was fairly guaranteed to follow people back if they followed me. but with tumblr i had enough followers that were all posting 20x a day that this was just impossible. there are people who i semi-regularly have convos with on tumblr that i actually don’t follow back bc i’m not in any of their other fandoms.

funnily enough because of everything going on, parts of the fandom i’m in have been migrating onto tumblr and it’s clear many of them have never used a blogging platform or any social media that predates in-body hashtags. idk how they’re finding me but they are somehow!

[superborb]

That's a good point that you're not forced so much to mix with people and adopt their norms when you can just go off and find many other people in your fandom.

I'm surprised at your comment about personal-and-fandom space because my impression from the brief time I was on tumblr was that it was much more fannish! People didn't seem to post about their personal stuff much.

I guess people seem to just follow /more/ people now on tumblr/twitter, when I feel like people would only follow maybe 100-200 people on LJ. Probably the length of the medium, the expectation that most people won't backread everyone they follow, and the size of fandom...

[theladyscribe]

I've been thinking about item 4 a lot myself. I owe so much of my maturation to older fandom friends (not fandom olds, at least not at the time - one of my closest friends when I was in college was ten years my senior but had joined fandom more recently than me!), and I remember thinking at the time that it would be cool to join their ranks and be that older fandom friend for other people!

I think the rise of spaces/cultures where you are expected (or required) to disclose your a/s/l(/other personal info) and be truthful about it by both the website itself and the people who use it has contributed to these schisms, though I also think that it's not that simple. The shift from long-form discussion to more off-the-cuff one-liners and chat-based platforms as primary fandom space rather than supplemental are also factors. As is the fact that there are just more platforms in general which are being used by fandom, and so people tend to focus on one over the others and perhaps gravitate toward those that are more common among their age group. (I also have wondered if the separation of fic and fandom discussion due to AO3's hegemony is a factor here. There was a time when to read someone's fic also meant exposure/access to their other fannish thoughts by default, which isn't necessarily the case anymore. You can be shit-stirring on twitter and posting fic under another name on AO3 and if you're careful, no one would ever know they were both you.)

[superborb]

I think it was usually obvious if someone was in high school / college / older on LJ, but you're right that it wasn't as expected; it would be normal for any references to that be flocked.

In the circles I was in, it was pretty common to have a separate fic comm for posting fic, but it would be more connected to their fannish identity than having a completely separate twitter, that's true.

[chestnut_pod]

Many thinky thoughts; thank you for sharing.

If I had made this post, I'd have added a specific Hypothesis D, which was that specific objects-of-fandom (rather than "fandom fandom," if you will) that were very meaningful to me have since gone away or transformed beyond recognition, and my nostalgia might be, straightforwardly, for them, or for the person they helped me be at that time.

2. Isn't it good to realize that one's grown up? Even when bad things have happened in the intervening years, it's so nice to have developed a broader and deeper perspective.

5. I think this gives People Who Wank more credit for intentionality than I would personally attribute them. I think that's a side-effect, but my taxonomy of small-fandom-space-creation would also involve the creation of a material space, even something as loosely networked as a linked tumblr/blogosphere, or as low-initiation-energy as a new Discord server.

[superborb]

I suppose I think of that Hypothesis D as falling under Hypothesis B: the tools make the space, just as the people do?

I think creating wanky Discord servers is not uncommon...

[chestnut_pod]

I think creating wanky Discord servers is not uncommon... -- right, I guess I just see a difference between "creating a wanky Discord, for wank, and thereby creating a community," and "wanking all over the Tumblr tag in the hopes that you drive the others away, with the eventual effect that you've shrunk your fandom space."

[superborb]

Ah, I guess I suppose that much of what I consider fracturing attempts fall under the former (create a space where X is considered the Correct Opinion, often in via servers or interconnected webs of people who agree) and not the latter (I've not seen it in the wild, maybe because I'm not on tumblr, though I'm vaguely aware of the phenomenon).

[jetsam]

On 4 - I think community (not necessarily inter-generational, but as a side effect) was something that had to be consciously created as part of getting your content and thoughts out at a certain point in time - because no one would find your fic or your meta on lj unless you were in the community or friends with the right people. I remember thinking very seriously as a teenager making early steps off ffnet to try and figure out how the different writers were connected (and they were! because I could see beta credits/thank yous) and how to find a way in.

These days, everything seems to run off an Algorithm (or the Void, in the case of tumblr) and the technique is to throw out as much as possible and see what takes off in the mix rather than curating those links within the niche. Of course, it's not impossible to publish and get known without, if you are on the right tag, if you know someone who will boost, if you're lucky)...

I am also at a loss for how you have 3 and 4, as equally a poster/commenter. My fandom community is not far off friends/friends-of-friends from 10 yrs ago

[superborb]

Hmm, I did see a lot of jockeying to try to connect with the BNFs (as they might be termed) on twitter, so maybe it's not as common on tumblr? But that aspect of it does seem to still exist.

I'm not sure what you mean by the last point re: 3 and 4? Unfortunately, only a small number of people I knew from 10 years ago are still actively around in spaces I use, so I think the vast majority of my fandom community I met within the last three years.

[sophia_sol]

3. I was the poster session kind of good at people. Maybe that's why LJ and now DW appeal to me: I like to present my topic and then have little conversations after it. But spanning the gap from the poster session to a 1:1 conversation -- I find that so difficult. And so I've been unable to really use Discord to chat with people and keep in touch without twitter/tumblr.

ohhhh I love this framing of it so much -- poster session kind of good at people! -- and this really resonates with me. I find myself so much more intuitively comfortable with communicating on platforms like dw/lj, and I think nearly all of the internet friendships I have successfully made have happened here.

[superborb]

It's a very different mode of conversation!

[vriddy]

This is a vaguely formed hypothesis: I was thinking about small fandoms and how there's (often, not always) a better sense of community; is some of the more adamant fracturing of large fandoms (e.g. character bashing) an action taken to deliberately create a small fandom niche within a large fandom?

It's hard to tell because there are also people for whom their fandom experience seems exclusively focused on what they hate rather than what they like, but I wonder if that's the whole "common enemy helps with bonding" in action. I keep noticing it in work too, where otherwise pleasant colleagues demonise some team or other who's also trying their best with the constraints they have, and then I hear others do the same to us. I don't have a lot of patience for it (mostly because I've worked with or in most of these teams before, haha), even less so in fandom... But I can see how not only bonding about X character or ship but also how superior it is to ship or character Y seems to help group gel even more.

I guess for smaller fandom, the common enemy can be mainstream people who don't have taste sophisticated enough? :D But either way, yeah, the best way to find community in a large fandom seems to be to find a small pocket of it that fits sort of right...

[superborb]

Yeah, I wonder if it's because the enemy / hate aspect of it makes it feel more immediate, so that it intensifies the natural bonding over a commonality.

[yourlibrarian]

I tend to agree regarding the generational mixing in the 2000s which is less true today. Of course, technically one can't know the majority of ages we interact with but there are often clues via discussion.

That's an interesting question about the fracturing deliberately creating a smaller fandom. I think it's semi-deliberate, in that if there is a large enough group, people will self-select groups that share a lot of their interests, whereas if there isn't, people will connect on whatever points there might be of a fandom.

[superborb]

OTOH, I suppose that fandom now is larger -- and with the tendency to self-select groups, people may more easily find a closer-in-age group than in the past.