What am I looking for in fandom?

[superborb]

Overly emotional late night posts are obviously always a good idea, right?

A locked post on my flist was talking about bygone fannish communities; as I'm still in between fandoms and driven by the fact that I'm trying to decide if I should give Tumblr another shot or return to Twitter or whatever*, I fell back into contemplating what I'm looking for in fandom and if I can still find it in 2023.

*It's totally fine to come back six months later, crossposting, right? :D? Also, I'm especially curious what people have to say and it is late and my judgement-- questionable.

Because my kneejerk reaction is community, right? That's what drew me into fandom, the love for a canon but also the search for other people to talk about it and explore it with in a way largely separate from any commercial transactions. And yeah, I'll always seek out people I find interesting and who are easy to learn from, but if that was all, I'd still just be RSS feeding it up.

But I feel like I do have that, so what am I doing wrong?

On DW, I have a reasonably active flist, though it is nearly entirely media recs, with some personal and fandoms-I'm-not-in posts mixed in. I guess it doesn't scratch the fandom itch because even if a book is being passed around (very fun!), it's still at most one discrete post per person + comments.

Mastodon is not quite active enough to feel like a community yet, just a somewhat scattered group chat.

I guess the closest I have right now is Discord: I moderate a cnovel reading group where we're currently reading Little Mushroom and so chat multiple times through the week about it (unfortunately, Little Mushroom IMO is not... good enough to stand up to this treatment...)! In two separate servers, I now have weekly watch parties!

And I'm reading fic and assembling a DCU recslist (tentative subtitle: 20 years of DCU), so I'm doing something concrete with fannish energy, even if it's a fandom where I chat with one other person in.

I guess I have a few horrible hypotheses, some more horrible than others:
1. I miss scrolling through stuff and keeping up with a busy large group. On LJ, I would routinely be ?skip=100 daily; on Twitter I used to spend around 1.5 h daily keeping up. This would suck because it would imply that I'm superficial and primarily satisfied with parasocially looking at people's (fannish) lives lol.

2. The obvious: I'm not really emotionally invested in any fandoms right now, and idly chatting about jpop or BLs or cdramas are not the same as being all in on a single canon, thinking about and reading meta/fics. But I was (probably?) satisfied looking at fandom from afar for the decade I was out, with only sporadic commenting as engagement.

3. The most impossible to fix: displaced stress over something completely different.

4. I'm looking for something that isn't present in those existing avenues: lots of in depth meta. While I stayed subscribed to lots of authors on AO3 and found new authors to subscribe to, the meta writers slowly changed Tumblrs (which broke my RSS connection) or left fandom and I didn't search out more. Maybe fixable? Tumblr meta is so much harder to find, and also I'm older now and my standards have gone up (as I discovered when I was going through my old Pinboard links), but it... still exists somewhere I'm sure.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe I'll try Tumblr again and focus on meta writers?

Comments

[china_shop]

I miss scrolling through stuff and keeping up with a busy large group.

Ha, I always look back on the golden age of LJ and wonder how on earth I managed to keep up with everything. /o\

Btw, I didn't mention this on your "Rec me a fandom" post because I figured you'd probably have already tried / considered / rejected Guardian, but jsyk, we're doing a rewatch on sid_guardian, with weekly meta discussion posts. So if you want a DW-based fandom with chewy meta conversations, ijs...

[superborb]

The other downside to hypothesis 1 is I'm not sure that level of time consumption is like, sustainable. I definitely read fewer fics and original stuff than I would have otherwise!

I did try Guardian, but I bounced off the first couple episodes IIRC... (Also, when I was first contemplating the fandom in 2019, there was that big wank, which has uh, colored my impression of the fandom, though I think that was more poor timing.) Maybe I'll try it again!

[china_shop]

Entirely fair on both counts! I think I got seriously hooked during episode 8, but I was enjoying it up till then so my experience may not apply to you if you continue to bounce off. And yeah, that wank was nasty.

There's less going on on DW now than there was back then, but things are peaceful now, and there's still active engagement. We're having fun with our rewatch (though fair warning, if you jump in before you've finished watching, it will spoil you terribly).

[superborb]

Hmm okay that's good to know!! I feel like a lot of shows are like that -- there's an earlyish episode by which you know if you'll like the series, but it's not always the first or second one haha.

[nnozomi]

Jumping in very late to, not surprisingly, second the Guardian recommendation, although no pressure if you decide it doesn't work for you (I think the crucial elements are a) being invested in the main pairing and b) finding at least one or two of the main side characters/themes interesting as well. Or at least that's what did it for me. That and Zhu Yilong's eyes).

In general, curious to hear more about the kind of in-depth meta that interests you, in whatever fandom; I wonder if there's a way to work back toward more of that. I often like reading meta posts even about fandoms I'm not really in.

(If you have any untranslated cnovel recs for someone whose reading level is still at "use the dictionary or guess wildly once or twice every sentence," I'd love them!)

[superborb]

I think I especially like meta that puts things in greater context or reframes things!

I liked They All Said I've Met a Ghost, though it does have a translation! Not too much vocab iirc; it was also the first cnovel I read it Chinese! The other ones we've read have more specialized vocab...

[nnozomi]

Very late reply, sorry, but thank you for the recommendation! I'm looking into the one you mentioned. I am definitely not up to plowing my way through specialized vocab yet :)

[superborb]

I think "I ship my adversary x me" was actually simpler, now that I think about it, but it has a lot of references to music and stuff, so it felt more specialized... Anyway I don't have a great sample size to rec from, unfortunately!

[shati]

I hadn't gotten to hypotheses, but I have been thinking I miss having any actual fannish emotional investment in anything, and 2 through 4 are all true for me, lol. Unfortunately that means I have no suggestions.

(I wouldn't blink at anyone coming back to Twitter, but it is also less active now, FWIW. Although I also never followed that many people.)

[superborb]

Yeah, I've been checking on Twitter sporadically the last week, and in a "jpop fandom still is on LJ" redux, it seems that the most activity on Twitter is... jpop fandom hahaha. But at the same time lots of people don't seem to have moved anywhere...

[halfcactus]

h lol I’ve been meaning to ask you re: what you thought about Little Mushroom—I could feel the lack of enthusiasm—but I guess I can wait til we’re done! Presumably you’re going to write about it.

I’ve been really enjoying the weekly chat format in book club! It works a lot for me, since I’m no longer checking Discord as much.

I still really use Twitter as my main hub bc it’s just my ideal format—shortform and casual. With the caveat that I actively avoid following a lot of people, and I now have a separate fandom account that I only log on to when I have something to post there. It’s been less pleasant though, because dunking has become too normalized and crypto bros keep adding you to weird lists.

As a platform for meta, it kind of irritates me, unfortunately. :( But I’ve also found that my ability to read meta or even regular has been destroyed didjkdkspsps I miss having a more patient brain

On the whole I’ve also been feeling a bit uncomfortable with community norms. It feels like I’m now 1 or 2 degrees away from wank when wank used to be things that happened to distant BNFs. And I’m hyperaware that because I’m never part of any “in” group, no one’s ever going to have my back in a bad interaction and that people are going to be okay being racist or whatever to me, lol. *feeling increasingly cynical about fandom*

[superborb]

Yeah, we're almost done anyway! It's not like TERRIBLE, but I think doing it this slowly and chewing over every detail is not treatment it could stand up to aha.

In general, I do like the weekly chat format, but I guess it depends more heavily on the source material when we're not spending most of our time struggling with reading comprehension.

Twitter is a terrible platform for meta lol

I do kind of feel like wank has gotten more poisonous and-- faceless, if that makes sense? Now it involves like, tons of people you'd never have talked to whispering without sources, when before at least the majority would have a name they're invested in and therefore care a little about their reputation among the community.

[halfcactus]

Yeah I think the pace was okay for me in book 1, which was mostly episodic, and started being a liability from book 2 (Roses) onwards. ^^;

The struggle of wanting to accumulate the vocabulary/experience to read more widely VS the actual experience of reading ahaha

Re: wank - On Twitter specifically, it doesn’t help that both fandom discourse and regular-person discourse share the same space. /o\ But yeah, it feels way worse now, because on top of how easy it is for anyone to start wank, everyone is just so primed to pick fights and dunk on everyone they see on the platform, it’s become a culture. I used to be more interactive with strangers on Twitter and now I don’t bother and it baffles me when people do.

Anyway, good luck for the hunt for meta + platform for meta! I think there was a short window of time where Medium was a thing (since it’s linked to your Twitter) for more essay-type thoughts and I did use to read those, but now we’re in the era of threads. 😂

Maybe it’s time to just embrace the Youtube video essay format XD

[superborb]

Even though the plot really got going in book 2!

I may experimentally try some recommended cnovels without translations, but I don't think there's enough people who want to do that to sustain a reading club... maybe...

Never the video life! q_q

[halfcactus]

Do you have a list somewhere? I’ve had better luck vibing with untranslated/incompletely translated novels but I never get far in them. ISMM is my only exception but I think it was pre-pandemic. Different times, different brain, ha.

[superborb]

I'm going to try https://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=2105361 next! It's a baihe which has Central Asian characters (and isn't racist about it, according to the rec).

[halfcactus]

snsjsksjsk I hate that that actually is a big achievement in cmedia. Ty!!! I’m not sure I have the ability to read this one without a translation to fall back on, but if you start reading it, I’d like to know~

[superborb]

I think after LM is done! I will try!

[eglantiere]

my off-the-cuff opinion is that the old-form, communal fandom is on its way out because there's just too much media going on at all times, and this media is all getting released at once, so there's no time to build up a shared space of reactions, predictions, discussions, expectations, wanks and so on. in short, there's no shared timeline - be it the airtime for a tv show or an anime, or a book publishing schedule - to anchor everybody to, you know? i gave up on being fannish on tv shows because by the time i muster enough attention to sit through one, everybody already binged it, expressed their feelings on it, wrote their three fics and moved on.

the really big fandoms all got built on this scheduel, didn't they? HP in the hiatus between two books, supernatural-sentinel-doctor-who-whatever in the bits between series. now there's just Too.Much.Content.

i landed on dw+ffa combo, but while it makes me feel at least somehow abreast of fandom gossip and exchange scene, it doesn't make for a whole community, alas. but, as your point 3 says, it's also, like, depression and overwhelm.

[superborb]

That's true, though I do think my last fandom (the Untamed) managed to have some staying power for a few years before the nonstop wank drove enough people out.

Actually, that point makes me understand why it feels like my friends moved towards jpop and the more general cdrama and Thai BL space -- there's the constant shared timeline of new material, and so a communal space can build up with that expectation and in the spaces between.

I wonder if the anime fandoms still have that then. I've been out of them for some time now, but I felt like (in the last few years) my acquaintances writing for those fandoms kept in the same show for longer than the ones writing in Western media / TV show fandoms.

[x_los]

Tbh media saturation explanations don’t really resonate for me, because most fandom used to be for finished texts? Like that was the norm.

[superborb]

Hmm, but weren't the big Western media fandoms already big while the media was ongoing? And then lasted for a while after?

Though I guess most of the anime fandoms were based on the anime, even if the manga was ongoing. IDK I think there are big examples either way on this one, but my instinct would be that the hype / building up phase for most of the fandoms occurred while it was ongoing. Even recently, the Untamed relied on MDZS having some previous in-roads, though most of the fandom was of course after the whole thing aired.

[x_los]

In the case of classic fandoms like Star Trek or ACD Holmes, the fandoms developed and persisted almost entirely after the canon had well and truly ended. B7 was the same. Most fandom from the 70s through to the aughties was Post Object, so that’s the whole infrastructure of what it is to do a fandom in the west.

[superborb]

Ah, I see!

[chestnut_pod]

I think there is some truth to that! Fandom has always liked episodic media, and hiatuses are fruitful. It's not always the case -- cf Tolkien fandom, for example -- but longevity thrives on both rest and renewal.

[jo_lasalle]

Given that you seem to have quite a bit of in-depth fannish or fandom-adjacent interactions going on (e.g. your reading group and watch parties strike me as significant focused fannish engagement; it's more than I have going on, and I still have a current fandom), I would suspect #2, the obvious contender. The drop from being in a fandom to being in between can be pretty difficult, IME. It's clearly just a hypothesis on a hypothesis, but if you're feeling fannishly meh with these activities going on, would reading more meta really help?

This would suck because it would imply that I'm superficial and primarily satisfied with parasocially looking at people's (fannish) lives lol.

I say this with full awareness of the downsides of Twitter and what it can (also) do to one's brain, but I don't think it would make you shallow to miss casual interactions and the Twitter-specific style of "hey there are people out there and these are bits of their lives". That's IMO one of the strengths of Twitter. (Or used to be when it would still semi-reliably show you tweets.)

[superborb]

That's true -- I suspect a lot of the meta I used to read has been largely (for lack of better word, emotionally) substituted by starting to read long form news articles, anyway. It feels weird because I feel so adjacent to many fandoms right now as to nearly be in them, but I guess it's not the same.

I wonder if that's why I struggle with Tumblr -- it often doesn't have those hints of a personal life the way LJ/DW/Twitter often did/does.

[x_los]

I think also the standard of meta has declined dramatically because it’s no longer an active tradition. I don’t tend to write it because I feel like the audience isn’t there. People don’t want to hear lit crit, they want like, The Secret One True Chinese Meaning of Meng Yao’s Hairdo.

[superborb]

Yeah, true, it does feel like meta has become synonymous with... cultural factoids of varying accuracy, and everything being interpreted through that one lens. And without the framework of refinement and discussion, nothing can reach the highest standard.

[x_los]

Right, and also the findability of information and the presumed group knowledge of it has been shot to hell, so we’re not really working with a shared and stable body of knowledge.

[superborb]

I wonder how shared meta was even back in the day though -- I was going through old meta bookmarks, and most of them were not widely shared/known. I suppose fannish newsletters would have covered it if they existed for that fandom, or shared comms, but I don't know how shared that really ends up being. I guess the meta was on a more (presumed) stable platform on LJ / websites though, vs the ephemerality of most modern platforms.

[x_los]

Well okay so with Best Enemies, people posted it like fic to comms, it was tagged with meta and everything it was about, the tags were searchable, and if it was quite important it would also be stably linked specially at the side and/or included in relevant round up posts. And then comments also referred to it, in discussions. So we had all read about the same body of stuff, as a thousand person group with a few hundred quite active members at the end.

[superborb]

Oh wow, that is impressive. I wonder if it's having the central comm + people putting the infrastructure work in with the tags and links that enabled it? Or something about the particular size and activity of the fandom that also helped...

[x_los]

Yeah I feel like size and intensive infrastructure were everything here

[forestsofpine]

I was thinking about similar questions yesterday. I had a pretty stressful week irl and just wanted to bury myself in fandom-y stuff and not think about anything serious, but didn't have anywhere to bury myself. I've been drifting out of MDZS lately and towards Thai BL, but most Thai BL fandoms are much, much smaller than MDZS and the last couple fandoms I've been in, so there's a limited number of people to interact with to begin with, and by the time you eliminate the teenagers and the wankers, there's even fewer. On top of which I'm shy even online, so I really only have one close friend to talk about it with currently (and her taste in media doesn't always overlap with mine so we're not always wanting to squee about the same shows), plus a few more I've been tentatively trying to chat more with here and on Twitter.

I've been in between fandoms before, and it's always kind of frustrating, but at least there's the reassurance that eventually something else will catch my attention. In this case there's stuff I want to be in fandom for, but I just can't seem to find the fandom! Nor is there enough activity in most of the fandom tags on AO3 to keep me happy as a lurker just reading fic like I was in MDZS. It's possible I'm just spoiled from having been mostly in juggernauts previously, but this is a new situation in fandom for me and I'm feeling kinda unmoored and lost right now as a result. I hope we're both able to find a more satisfying fandom community soon.

[superborb]

Yeah, I think fandoms being smaller is also an impact, though I guess my friends joke all the time about the ideal fandom being you and your three close friends. (I find I need the broader acquaintance level connections too...)

[forestsofpine]

Yeah, it's great to have a core group all vibing on the same wavelength, but I agree that I need the broader connections, too. Bringing home shiny things like art and meta and headcanons from elsewhere that I know my friends will love is one of my primary ways of expressing affection to them, so I need that big garden of shiny things to pick from. And bringing in stuff like that from outside to talk about or as starting points for brainstorming sessions is one of the best ways to keep the discussion going and the creative juices flowing, too.

[chestnut_pod]

Any of 1-4 would be plenty unpleasant, but I admire your thoughtfulness in picking them out. They definitely ring familiar as influences that help or hinder feeling "at home" at a certain point. I have definitely found 3 to be especially pernicious, because it seems to just intensify all the others, or make them seem to be mountains when maybe they might be surmountable molehills in other situations.

[superborb]

3 is so hard, isn't it! And hard to fix, too...

[sophia_sol]

those all seem like reasonable theories! I hope you can find what you're looking for!

For me, I think what I want most out of an online fandom experience is to be able to read people having conversations about it. Meta, yes, but then conversations about the meta thoughts. There's something excitingly generative about the back and forth, with fans building off each other in their passion to talk through things about the characters and relationships and the canon and fic ideas and whatever else. Participating in these conversations is also fun! but I need to be able to follow along with other people having them at a minimum.

Much of my early fannish life was as a lurker on forums, reading other fans meticulously dissecting everything about my fandom at the time, and every time I've had to change what platform I'm on as fandom has moved around, it's taken me time to find the places that have what I'm looking for in this, but so far I've always found it eventually.

[superborb]

That makes sense! I guess I kind of mapped those mentally together, but you're right -- it's only that on LJ and DW, the comments are attached to the original post so easily, and often meta is kind of part of an ongoing conversation anyway?

I'm glad you've always been able to find the places you'd like!

[lirazel]

Agreed both that a) the DW community is absolutely wonderful, but what it provides (media recs, book reviews, and personal life posts) are not what I think of when I think of fandom and b) Mastodon feels like a group chat. I'll also add that I genuinely love Tumblr, but I love it for pretty graphics and shitposts/memes. It does not scratch the itch of my past fandoms.

For me it really comes down to platform. I could be totally into MDZS/CQL fandom. I certainly read and write enough fic, and when meta does come across my dash on Tumblr, I'm delighted (it's almost entirely accidental when it does, so I feel you re: it being hard to find). But there is no busy community focusing on it on DW, LJ functionally does not exist, and there are no message boards like there were in my early fandoms. Discord doesn't work for me (though I know it does for a lot of people), Twitter doesn't work for me...so I'm just out here chilling waiting for a new fannish platform to emerge. It will. I just hope it works for me when it does.

I wonder if, if you found all those meta writers on Tumblr, you would still be dissatisfied because there's not the kind of ability to have conversations there that there is other places. That's the thing that keeps Tumblr from scratching my LJ-and-message-boards itch.

[superborb]

Yeah, I mostly MDZS/CQL fandomed on Twitter/Discord, but I would have /preferred/ it on a DW like platform. Looking at Guardian though, it seems still possible to do in this day and age, just requires a lot of effort now that the center of fandom has moved elsewhere.

Someone pointed out that a lot of the silly things that used to get posted to LJ moved elsewhere (I guess into shitpost energy), and without that, the tone of DW ends up much more serious and intimidating. I think that does make sense...

I guess step one is finding meta writers on Tumblr ahahahahahaha

[lirazel]

Hmmm...that is certainly possible about the silly things! I think there's some truth to that, though I think also that the average age of the DW user is higher than the average age of the LJ user, which might contribute as well. We've kind of mellowed. I know I have.

Good luck finding them! A good meta writer is worth their weight in gold!