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?

I briefly discussed some of this on twitter previously, but wanted to more long-form discuss, which of course means moving to DW!! Anyway, these are somewhat scattered thoughts, but putting it together + talking with people about it always clarifies my thoughts.

I like a lot of things about Discord! I wrote previously that it fannishly descended from the instant messaging programs of yore, and has similar dynamics as places with large group chats to mingle and meet friends and small ones to settle friendships. When it goes well, those are indeed both niches that I personally find essential to a ~balanced social media diet~.

The difference is as fandom increasingly moves to Discord-only, its weakness as a primary fannish platform becomes more obvious to me. There's two main problems IMO: 1) no way to call out important / top level discussion aka curation; 2) difficulty in propagating social norms and thus community feeling. There is also the 3) "difficulty in FINDING a server" problem, but I think that is far less structural.

1: Beyond the obvious difficulty in backreading a busy server, it's really hard to point out a specific message as important without resorting to dedicated 'low traffic' channels or such. Partially, this is a me-problem, as I am completionist... But I also think this means Discord requires an alternate host to serve as repository for longer or more polished thoughts. OR a server with a very strict and different culture than I've usually observed. I wonder if that would be possible with a long slowmode? (For non-Discord users, slowmode means a user must wait a mod-defined amount of time before sending another message, though edits are allowed on previous messages.) In contentious debate, having a slowmode set really helped cool tempers and force a more reasoned argument, but I've never seen it used to force longer thoughts.

Also, "curate your feed" became so central on tumblr, and caused problems on twitter, with its inferior curation tools, that I wondered how Discord-based fandom would deal with it. On Discord, there are even fewer tools to curate other than leaving a group, because everything is intrinsically shaped like a conversation and even blocking people, it's ...shaped like a conversation you're just ignoring one person in?

2: Within a server, you're essentially all in one room with EVERYONE AT THE SAME TIME. And this might work if the group can establish shared social mores, but that's non-trivial to do. One way that LJ had shared norms propagate is through lurking before having to participate; you can still do that, but it's much less interesting to lurk a conversation than polished (or not) public posts. Sure, messaging is probably a native way to communicate for a lot of people in their 20s and 30s, but the norms of that messaging are wildly different (and have changed over time! I was reading an AIM log from LJ days and wow do I message differently now!)

This seems minor, until you have a disagreement and those norms suddenly clash over how you're supposed to resolve a conflict in the first place! One norm I've encountered often is the 'doubling down on shared opinions to distinguish in and out group', which I fundamentally disagree with. However, if you're trying to resolve a conflict and one party is used to seeing conflict as an in vs out group disagreement (and therefore looking for a common opinion) and the other is offended by viewing the world that way, this is not a path to success. Of course, I think the problem of 'how to disagree and still be in community' is at the heart of being a community in the first place, and not a Discord-specific problem.

On the less outright conflict front though, every community has people you like or dislike to varying degrees, and I've discovered that in a Discord server, when you're sharing a space that can't be easily filtered, perceived norms-violations irritate me way more than in any other platform or real life situation I've ever encountered. I don't know if other people feel that way, but I've had enough discussions around it that I think it's relatively common, and more common on Discord than elsewhere. It's the lack of ability to socially get away, perhaps, combined with Discord being a difficult place to transmit those norms?

3: It is unfortunately a really opaque barrier to finding servers; getting access to comms, even if it required an essay, or figuring out a crufty forum feels different than 'make friends and become cool enough to get an invite'. This problem becomes more difficult to solve when fandom is less active on other platforms, decreasing the ways you can make friends! Even worse, you can't easily lurk to learn the social norms beforehand.

However, fandom is just bigger now too, which means there are many more public Discords available, from which to splinter off. In some ways, it's a return to requiring active involvement in order to get access, instead of being able to passively consume from the firehose of public twitter/tumblr. It's harder to go track a specific person you think is cool back to their fannish home, but easier to find someone to chat with at all hours of the day. (And lead to friendships and new servers spawned. Ideally.)

I don't know! I don't think Discord is even a good primary fannish platform, but it does seem to be where people are moving, for better or worse. At least I find it more amenable than tumblr, which means I might not disappear until the next migration?

china_shop prompted: Something about AO3?

Just to uh, calibrate expectations: this is an observational ramble, without a thesis.

From my time and experiences in fic fandom, AO3 represents a particularly unique phenomenon: a centralized repository that nearly everyone uses. You might think, oh, but FFN was just as dominant, but no! For at that time, a significant portion of anime fandom resided on private or communal websites; some of those websites may have encapsulated entire canons or ships, or we might count mediaminer, which served as an alternative FFN-like archive for anime fandom. And jpop and kpop fandom was so locked down that I don't think any of it really lived on FFN. Alternatively, you might argue from the other direction: significant portions of fic fandom live on Wattpad or scattered on threadfics on twitter or one offs on tumblr etc etc. True! But the gravity of fic fandom is towards AO3, in a way that no other archive managed /in my experience/.

This has significant upsides: for all the lack of an API, encoding troubles, tagging battles, a centralized interface is so much easier to navigate. You can just reskin everything permanently! You can easily navigate to all the works by an author without having to figure out where their masterlist is, or how they tagged their fics in their LJ. And it's significantly easier for authors to navigate too, having to figure out how to upload once and not fighting html unless they want to.

On the other hand... centralization shoves everyone together and makes it hard to establish norms and boundaries. Having no social media directly attached makes some problems easier (harassment is harder and it's easier to disengage), but some problems harder (really difficult to establish norms when there's no place everyone hangs out hmm). And I say boundaries because it's really clear that different circles of fandom have wildly different norms-- and now we've all been shoved together and those edges are sharp. How much easier would it be to avoid t/b wank if we just had separate websites / comms / mailing lists we hung out on? (Though that's also a tumblr-and-twitter caused problem, not unique to AO3.)

Also we come to the problem with centralization that it makes it hard for alternatives to spring up. If people still regularly posted their fic elsewhere, would those places be more vibrant from the extra foot traffic? Yeah, I know there are AO3 clones running around etc, but would fandom be more flexible from the choices offered? Maybe not, fandom is so big now that it seems that there ought to be enough people who'd try out a new platform and bud off if it offered something better. But are people still interested in trying new ways to post fic? People are dissatisfied with any given social media platform, so move from tumblr to twitter to discord, but every complaint about AO3 and suggestion to 'make something new' tends to be very... AO3 like in structure. Add tags! Add warnings! Change how fandoms are grouped! Get rid of tags!

(OK I am still partial to June's suggestion of getting rid of all stats like things to make AO3 a more pure repository of fic.)

Still, with fandom scattered on social media, it's nice to have one place where people can mingle, such as it is. It used to be (...still is, apparently) that to get on jpop LJ comms, you'd have to submit an essay. With people increasingly turning to more closed social media (private discords, locked twitters) (just in my observation, obviously), AO3 remaining public is nice to serve as a connectivity point between all these different fandom circles, even if it sometimes feels like, once again, you have to submit an essay to join.

Back to masterlist <- Also, there's still space if people want to give prompts! 

1. Diaspora vs Chinese-from-China feelings on culture. Growing up diaspora means living through racism that completely colors the perspective -- it's hard to explain why wearing qipao as a costume is A Problem or cultural appropriation broadly to people who haven't had the experience of it being uncool and othering when you do something and then cool when a white person does it. From someone who grew up in the dominant culture, it just seems like a good thing that people are interested, right?

Anyway, this leads to a feeling (a logical one!) of possessiveness over the tidbits of culture that you can claim for yourself.

2. The nuances of cultural erasure for a canon that was created by the dominant ethnicity and culture of Somewhere Else. As point 1 says, I highly doubt Chinese-from-China would feel as possessive over MDZS/CQL as diaspora fans do. They have many canons that reflect their world; as diaspora, there is relatively few canons that speak to the Chinese diaspora experience. So we attach ourselves to the things we can see a glimmer of ourselves in, in familiar faces, even though we aren't really their target audience.

I personally don't like most modern AUs or really, fic that gets too removed from the Chinese roots of the canon and just /feels/ wrong. It's just not what I enjoy reading. But I'd argue that it's way more erasure to celebrate [insert vaguely often American modern AU here] through its ubiquity and influence on the fandom. I know I fall more on the "this is a transformative works" fandom side of things generally, though I also know that fic and fandom can be deeply racist. But blanket bans on what kind of transformative works are permissive... MDZS/CQL are out there in the world! We can't erase it by any fanworks.

I do fully understand /why/ people are uncomfortable with certain transformations, I just think that in the absence of criticism of transformations that are similar, it leads to point 3.

3. I am so, so, so uncomfortable with anti-Semitism in a world where the alt right is resurging. Adding to the previous tweets I made a while back, characterizing Jews as "greedy," "taking over" are clearly dogwhistles. Please, I beg you, do not. The double standard where Christian AUs don't get backlash? Also seriously anti-Semitic.

As a nonreligious person who grew up in the US, where Christian Chinese are common, I absolutely 100% really do not like Christian AUs. And hey-- I can skip them when they're tagged. The fic getting backlashed was tagged as AU and Jewish from the very beginning.

In conclusion, I don't really want to be ~discourse all the time~ like I feel like I've been recently. I wanted to do two things: a. to push back on the narrative of "you're pushing out diaspora folks!" a bit and b. leave an opening for my ideal, a more nuanced discussion about why certain things feel like erasure and certain things do not. I think it would be revealing.

~Inspired~ by the end of year memes, I was curious what my actual AO3 reading history was like. These data were directly scraped from the history page, so they're only as accurate as that. Namely, AO3 only gives you the date you last opened a fic and dynamically updates things like word count; also, some fics I might have opened without reading all the way through etc etc. So pretty fuzzy here.

Some interesting graphs for my own edification:

The number of works that I've read this year looks like a substantial increase over previous years, BUT remember that only the most recent visit "counts," so if I had a long fic that I most recently read in 2020... (I say to myself to make myself feel better.)

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