that dumb “Rules of the World Cup for Women” list made me livid and @sashayed had some good thoughts about it. I screencapped her tweetstorm so I can refer back to it when I feel anxious about my own way of caring about sports.
projecting all ur issues™ onto fictional characters is a time honored tradition. if kafka can give a cockroach his depression and deepseated fears of uselessness i can give a comic book character my personality disorder and sexual traumas. god’s dead and soon we will be too so in 2018 write all the weirdly specific Coping Fic you want and don’t let people get on your case about it
half the tags on this are apologizing to fictional characters for fucking them up more and the other half are complaining about kafka and yknow what all of yall are valid
tumblr: when people include racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. ideas in their stories it has real life consequences
also tumblr: but ships are never problematic, what’s with all these “antis”? it’s just fictional and can’t affect anything
Just Anti Things: I honestly don’t see any difference between popular mass media and someone’s obscure fanfic
this….isn’t a new argument. we’ve had it before. many times. representation matters, people can also ship what they want. those don’t contradict each other.
if a producer puts something racist, sexist, or homophobic work, it is their fault for broadcasting that out into the media, where it affects hundreds of thousands of lives and portrays an imbalance in the system we live under.
if some average teenager from kentucky has racist undertones in their 20 page, freely-made fanfic, then that just shows that they’re racist. and you can go on with your life avoiding/blocking/not liking them because of that. because racism in people won’t die so soon, but racism in the institution absolutely should.
the internet and tumblr, however, are just places where average people congregate. It is not an institution and absolutely shouldn’t be treated as such. that’s why tumblr isn’t held to the same standard, because their users are average people.
“It is not an institution”
Thank you for bringing this up. Fandom is not an institution. It should only overlap with social politics in the sense that fandom should be inclusive – beyond that, assigning responsibility to everyone in fandom to portray only non-problematic things is not only impossible, but presumes fandom has way more power than it does. A nebulous gathering of people with similar interests in fiction is not an institution that you can or should hold responsible for fixing society’s problems.
Fandom is not an institution is such a good goddamn point
Fandom is not an institution and has little, if any, centralized social power. It’s not formally organized, it has no proclaimed goals and few longstanding traditions; fandom is to mass media what a pick-up football game is to the NFL. I don’t want to downplay the influence that small, loosely organized communities can have on lives, but they’re neither the cause nor the solution to institutional problems – at worst they’re a symptom.
Fandom activism aiming to address social problems is basically doomed to fail. The best it can accomplish is education of individual members, because fandom is not an institution.
“you can love villains/antihero characters but you still have to hold them accountable! If you don’t you’re just excusing their actions!”
hold them accountable how? to whom? they’re fictional. they do unreal things in imaginary places, and how much the fans love or hate them has zero effect on what the writers choose to do with them. Their actions can literally only have consequences within the fictional narratives in question. Fans liking a character has no degree of effect on that narrative.
And to be frank, telling a good story that holds it’s tension will always come first, and sometimes that means that the plot has to move on rather than get mired heavy handed “accountability.” Because let’s face is, the bludgeoning morality plays that people demand these days have nothing to do with genuine repentance and growth in a character arc and everything to with a vicious hunger for punishment and brutal schadenfreude – and that very seldom makes for a balanced and meaningful story.
and really, virtue signalling and trying to shame your peers for openly enjoying pretty much anything…. those are not good looks.
I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.
Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.
woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time
Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?
I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.
The world may never know…
Maybe it’s something mathematical?
I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.
It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.
(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)
“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).
It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.
So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.
100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.
Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.
I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.
someone thought it started with panic at the disco that’s adorable
the reason why fake dating fics are so enjoyable is because they are a combination of slow burn and established relationship fics. the reader is able to picture what a relationship between the 2 characters is like, but there is still an element of suspense and a chance to develop this relationship because they are not actually dating. in this essay i will
I have been rereading the MsScribe saga today, which I now believe was so much more than an account of fandom because to have been able to write it is to understand fandom as it operated. This is important because we spend a lot of time on this website talking about how fandom should be, not about how it currently exists, as actual fact. Charlotte Lennox’s analyses of fandom, particularly, of how MsScribe was able to manipulate fandom, were very sharp, and talked about things that fannish people were not necessarily willing to talk about.
A few things struck me as particularly prophetic about this current state of fandom.
The fandom community is completely defenseless against bad faith actors who know how fandom works.
Consider MsScribe’s meteoric rise. Consider how knowing the right words is the one and only condition to being considered Good.
Fandom operates on a couple of perverse incentives:
Trauma will earn you not only sympathy, which it should, but also earn you authority to speak to a number of topics.
Trauma had become the only way that you earn authority to speak to those topics.
In the times of MsScribe, this manifested in her story about her accident and her stay at the hospital, but it was very interesting how she trotted out the story in irrelevant contexts.
MsScribe has also claimed to have experienced sexual assault.
Now, this is combined with fandom’s de facto policy of Always Believe. This set of rules on which fandom operates does not mean that Always Believe should be done away with, but that we have to understand that it should come as no surprise that bad faith actors will exploit this rule.
Accusations of racism and bigotry elevate fandom to a higher level of importance than it actually is.
I have a post or two about how fandom is not actually important in the grand scheme of things, so I will not belabor the point here.
Fandom still plays a huge part in the lives of fans, however, so it must be important, right? How do we make it seem more important?
I believe MsScribe’s stunt with the racist and homophobic sockpuppets presages fandom’s abuse of social justice language. This is not a new point, but by elevating shipping wars to the levels of racism and homophobia, people can claim righteousness and justify their overzealous reactions.
The thing is that nowadays, fandom no longer even requires sockpuppets to be made. Offences in order to generate appropriate outrages do not need to be odious neo-fascist statements; they are everywhere, manifest. You need to keep up with the latest non-ablest language, or you’re out. This is why fandom will never be able to surpass MsScribe’s sophisticated level of wankatry–there is simply no need for it.
Separately, it amuses me to no end that fandom remembers Dan Savage as the guy who said some unwise things about asexual folks, and not one of the media dipshits who championed the Iraq war.
So a lot of the dynamics that we’re talking about right now have already been in existence in fandom, literally as early as the first true fandom history was written. Scary, no? But this is also why I completely reject analyses like Devin Faraci’s that paint this generation of fans as particularly “entitled,” as though “entitled” is not the right wing’s favorite bludgeon with which to hit Millennials. I also reject Aja Romano’s lol-tastic version of how fabulous and important fandom is in her numerous, brazenly ahistorical posts for Vox.com. I invite the likes of Charlotte Lennox, who has a real understanding of fandom and its history, as well as a willingness to talk about oft avoided things, to contribute to the discourse instead.
****Coming to you soon, maybe: A long ass post about everything wrong with Faraci’s and Romano’s takes on fandom.
i’d never heard of this before, but am reblogging it mostly for @vastderp, who may get a kick out of it in light of his experience with similar scoundrels in other fandoms. 😀
Imagine being a writer, and then after your book’s release and when the hype goes through the roof, you write fanfiction for it, then you tweet “there is a fanfic out there that is totally canon. Try and find it.” Then all your readers are scouring every fanfic website, trying to find which one is yours, meanwhile helping all these fanfic writers get readers.
I mean david gaider did this. david gaider wrote dragon age 2 fanfiction on the kink meme and we still don’t know for sure which one is his
just moving along like everyone else 