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superborbOverly 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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 12:48 (UTC)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!
no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 22:12 (UTC)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).
no subject
Date: 2023-07-17 22:21 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-19 11:56 (UTC)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!)
no subject
Date: 2023-07-19 14:41 (UTC)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...
no subject
Date: 2023-08-03 14:20 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-04 00:37 (UTC)