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superborbAs 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 astroisroyaumes, 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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2023-04-16 11:22 (UTC)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!
no subject
Date: 2023-04-17 02:11 (UTC)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...