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

[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!