The First Post
Dec. 4th, 2018 02:13 pmHello and welcome to my new DW account. If you followed me here from tumblr, you like me better than I probably thought you did, so thanks. I have another DW at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
we_protect_each_other, but most of it is a repository for Dear Author letters, as is described on my profile page here. I decided that tumblr's recent suicidal policy change might be a good time to revamp my presence here. I really miss LJ-style fandom, and I distinctly remember being pretty disappointed that the migration away from LJ went mostly to tumblr instead of DW. To this day, the only thing I'm really sad about losing on tumblr is the photoset/gifset format, but I also think that some of the cultural attitudes surrounding that kind of fandom contribution have been ultimately pretty negative.
I suppose that is as good a thing as any to start a mostly-fandom journal with. It is a concern that has bothered me for a long time, even though in some circles on tumblr it was a very unpopular concern to have. I have been poking around in fandom since about 2002-2003, perhaps a little but even before, though I was a child back then. I became more actively involved about 2006-2007 as a teenager when LiveJournal was still the home of most fandom communities. I was overwhelmed, and I learned a lot of the good, bad, and ugly nature of communities, particularly those that formed around sharing a particular opinion of a character relationship rather than generally appreciating the media as a whole. Back then, though, I still had dial-up, and it wasn't unusual to know a lot of other fans who had the same issue. The internet was mostly-text, and the graphics that people made and cherished were largely 100x100. Header images were the biggest and best images most websites had to offer. Screencap galleries, I believe, were fairly new and were treasure troves for source material for static edits. Because of all of these issues, in order to participate in fandom, a person had to be willing to talk, to describe, and to (on some level) engage with other people.
Bit by bit, tumblr took that away. Later on, if I can find it, I might quote some of the text here or in another post for posterity, but within the past year or two I read an interesting post on tumblr talking about the rise and fall of one of its now most-infamous epochs: superwholock fandom. (A portmanteau mash-up of Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock for anyone who is too young to remember or managed to avoid awareness at the time.) While I'm not entirely sure how I felt about it at the time, I do remember a lot of edits that were combining the shows around 2012. Some of them were absolutely masterful, regardless of your opinion on the disparate parts or the crossover. Some of them, on the other hand, had a tendency to make one want to cringe.
The reason I bring up #superwholock and its legacy, or strange, silent lack thereof is because I think the major change in the tone of fandom on tumblr might trace its routes to that falling out of fashion, in part because of some kind of strange linkage to the Dashcon fiasco that occurred in 2014. My personal experience of tumblr definitely degraded in quality after sometime in 2014, though in my own little world I sort of traced it to how well-received Captain America: The Winter Soldier was in the MCU fandom and in casual, multifandom circles as a whole and the subsequent disappointment with later hyped-up fandom releases and events in the MCU and other fandoms. Regardless of exactly why, the zeitgeist of tumblr took a definite turn for the cynical around that time, and I think that all of these various events may have snowballed together to create such an environment.
#Superwholock, though it is hard for me to speak about it with any authority given how I wasn't exactly an identifying "Superwholockian," was EVERYWHERE for a while between 2012-2014. It was an unapologetic aesthetic that seems to be referenced only in oblique, visual ways now. What I remember is a faint sepia-tone applied to gifs of all of them to make them match one another, crossover concepts and fics, and gifs everywhere. There also tended to be these very meme-y posts that would result in (or from) someone tacking a gif from one of those respective shows onto something unrelated or as a "reaction gif" to a simple statement. Then it would grow and grow and grow. One such example of this which was eventually regarded of the "cringiest" of all involved a lot of various fandoms "taking up arms" to somehow 'defend' themselves against a joking detractor with a bizarrely serious tone. Maybe you had to be there. In any case, I think that this era of fandom's silent erasure is one of the things that made a lot of the fandom populace of tumblr clam up lest they go back down the road of having anyone (including themselves) "cringe" later on.
It's sad, really. Because while I don't really have a ton of affection for two of the shows that make up the Superwholock 'universe,' I really admired a lot of the creativity and discussion that was filled with so much passion that came out of it. People were willing to tack onto other people's stuff, to discuss, to burst into spontaneous fic, and it had the spirit of nested commenting ev en though tumblr never had an effective, native commenting system. (I even installed Disqus in my first few months there, but no one ever used it. tumblrites just adapted to the terrible formatting for discussion, learned it, and used it as-is.)
When I joined in 2011, I do recall a certain learning curve about the etiquette of adding comments to "pretty" posts. Basically, when people posted large, decorated, or otherwise evocative fandom images, there was a sense that unless you were writing profound meta, you should probably keep your comments in your own tags. There were tumblr extensions that allowed people to read the tags on any post, later on at least, and you could see the tags of people you followed, but it was a matter of keeping the post "clean" because of the nature of content distribution on tumblr via "reblog." People wanted the proliferation of their hard work, but they didn't necessarily want silly, spurious, or short and simple comments making the post longer and longer. There is an extent to which I can sort of see the point, especially in the early days, because it didn't tend to be too harsh in terms of being something anyone complained about. Back then, people tended to be vocal and helpful, willing to send an ask and even to maintain conversations through asks in order to communicate effectively. People used tags to communicate even before @tagging was implemented at all. People figured out how to make this clunky website which was in no way set up for an effective interactive fandom experience work to do just that.
But bit by bit, the interaction trickled out. It reached a point where I saw, read, and even sometimes tired to adhere to guides written by bloggers, often quite a bit younger than me, who had figured out how to game the present culture of tumblr in order to gain followers. The point, of course, of gaining a lot of followers was to get enough people viewing content at any one time to have some percentage of them spread it and engage with it. For a time, it seemed that even blogs with relatively low (200 or less) follower counts could find people willing to interact with them. Several years in, however, I noticed that unless you had one or two friends who constantly tagged you back in "ask memes" or writing prompt posts, it was next to impossible to get anyone to stop long enough to bother sending you a prompt, even if they turned right around and reblogged the prompt list from you, hoping for that very same kind of interaction.
Any social contract that existed on tumblr broke down only to be replaced by something else. Something weird and esoteric that I'm still not entirely equipped to understand. If nothing else comes out of the apparent fall of tumblr, I hope that it might be an awakening of some of the dead-eyed, constant-scrolling types of fans who are lonely and want to engage about their fandoms but never, ever do any of the things that are required to have what they would like.
One of the metrics most-often used to talk about the trend I'm referring to is fic-comment frequency. It has dropped astronomically in recent years, and there are tons of theories as to why. I think it is a combination of factors:
1. The availability of the kudos button on AO3. There is nothing wrong with a kudos button, but I think it has enabled a lot of people who are perfectly capable of being social to be antisocial. Back in the ff.net-only or private archive days, there were plenty of readers who were too shy or too busy to comment on fics they read, but the ratio of readers who did leave at least a basic comment was MUCH higher. I don't think that's a coincidence. The Kudos or Like button gives an illusion of interaction that is very person-doing-the-kudos-ing-based. It is a very private, selfish form of engagement. That's not to say it's useless or shouldn't be used at all, but I think people should think about what they would do if the kudos button weren't available.
2. The conflation of social activism and fandom. I could write a whole other controversial post about this, but the aforementioned concept seems pretty self-explanatory. While it is wonderful that tumblr has had the overall impact of having been a hub for people to learn and understand issues about sexuality, politics, news reporting, social justice, and all sorts of topics that mainstream media and education do not expose teenagers and young adults to, I think that the fact that many of them were first-exposed through discussions of demographic representation in fiction and on the same platform where they were participating in fandom mostly had a very strange, rippling impact on the tone of fandom "discourse" today. In a way, it took away the innocence of engaging in fandom just to make oneself happy, and it made it fashionable to consider one's identity and the various facets of it while also creating a soup of ideas that made it very easy to absorb the "fandom" part of all that as part of one's core identity that reflected everything about oneself.
I absolutely will not deny that fandom has a huge importance in my life or that what I like reflects something about me as a person. However, I think that the intensity of the lens used in these cases is kind of backwards. It was as if, in order to be an adequately "critical" fan who was interested in seeing good change in the stories they were being sold, catharsis had to go out the window. The playground of ideas had to be governed with the exact same ethic as did one's public presentation of one's values, one's participation in civic life and fandom were the same. I think that some of this may have been a case of surrogacy. Teenagers and young adults who found themselves isolated or trapped for the very reasons social justice discussions were relevant to them found that they could find at least a sense of being involved in direct action if they directed that action toward... fandom, which is really not the source of the "problem" or the solution.
3. The self-consciousness spawned by the "bar" set for useful tumblr comments. A lot of people who have spent most of their fandom-lives on tumblr have this natural sense for what belongs "in the tags" on a post and what might be worthy of adding to the post itself. I think that another thing that might have caused such a downturn in commenting frequency is the fact that a lot of people have learned to keep their enthusiasm, their theorizing, the "squeeing" (wow that's an old word) "in the tags." Then, when they got to a fic archive, they do not think they can come up with "anything to say" in a comment, because the tumblr etiquette has kind of told them that whatever it is they want to say isn't worth putting "in the post" when that was exactly the lifeblood of the kind of commenting that most fic writers used to get. Essay-comments have always existed, but they were the exception, not the norm.
Communication is so important to life itself, and in particular to storytelling. And what is fandom if it isn't a community based on storytelling? Whether a person actively engages in writing fic, making gifs, or otherwise producing "content" for a fandom, a person who spends more time on a particular medium than simply consuming it is probably invested in that thing. They probably daydream about it and talk about it with friends who will listen. I'm not really sure what, exactly, has made silence so contagious on tumblr (even after the implementation of a terrible messaging system no less.) However, I really think that it is one of the most disheartening things I've seen in my half-a-lifetime in fandom, and I really hope that whatever is going to happen to fandom now will perhaps see a resurgence in nerds actually talking to each other.
Why don't you leave a comment and talk to me? There is no bar. Come on in, whatever you have to say is fine.
we_protect_each_other, but most of it is a repository for Dear Author letters, as is described on my profile page here. I decided that tumblr's recent suicidal policy change might be a good time to revamp my presence here. I really miss LJ-style fandom, and I distinctly remember being pretty disappointed that the migration away from LJ went mostly to tumblr instead of DW. To this day, the only thing I'm really sad about losing on tumblr is the photoset/gifset format, but I also think that some of the cultural attitudes surrounding that kind of fandom contribution have been ultimately pretty negative. I suppose that is as good a thing as any to start a mostly-fandom journal with. It is a concern that has bothered me for a long time, even though in some circles on tumblr it was a very unpopular concern to have. I have been poking around in fandom since about 2002-2003, perhaps a little but even before, though I was a child back then. I became more actively involved about 2006-2007 as a teenager when LiveJournal was still the home of most fandom communities. I was overwhelmed, and I learned a lot of the good, bad, and ugly nature of communities, particularly those that formed around sharing a particular opinion of a character relationship rather than generally appreciating the media as a whole. Back then, though, I still had dial-up, and it wasn't unusual to know a lot of other fans who had the same issue. The internet was mostly-text, and the graphics that people made and cherished were largely 100x100. Header images were the biggest and best images most websites had to offer. Screencap galleries, I believe, were fairly new and were treasure troves for source material for static edits. Because of all of these issues, in order to participate in fandom, a person had to be willing to talk, to describe, and to (on some level) engage with other people.
Bit by bit, tumblr took that away. Later on, if I can find it, I might quote some of the text here or in another post for posterity, but within the past year or two I read an interesting post on tumblr talking about the rise and fall of one of its now most-infamous epochs: superwholock fandom. (A portmanteau mash-up of Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock for anyone who is too young to remember or managed to avoid awareness at the time.) While I'm not entirely sure how I felt about it at the time, I do remember a lot of edits that were combining the shows around 2012. Some of them were absolutely masterful, regardless of your opinion on the disparate parts or the crossover. Some of them, on the other hand, had a tendency to make one want to cringe.
The reason I bring up #superwholock and its legacy, or strange, silent lack thereof is because I think the major change in the tone of fandom on tumblr might trace its routes to that falling out of fashion, in part because of some kind of strange linkage to the Dashcon fiasco that occurred in 2014. My personal experience of tumblr definitely degraded in quality after sometime in 2014, though in my own little world I sort of traced it to how well-received Captain America: The Winter Soldier was in the MCU fandom and in casual, multifandom circles as a whole and the subsequent disappointment with later hyped-up fandom releases and events in the MCU and other fandoms. Regardless of exactly why, the zeitgeist of tumblr took a definite turn for the cynical around that time, and I think that all of these various events may have snowballed together to create such an environment.
#Superwholock, though it is hard for me to speak about it with any authority given how I wasn't exactly an identifying "Superwholockian," was EVERYWHERE for a while between 2012-2014. It was an unapologetic aesthetic that seems to be referenced only in oblique, visual ways now. What I remember is a faint sepia-tone applied to gifs of all of them to make them match one another, crossover concepts and fics, and gifs everywhere. There also tended to be these very meme-y posts that would result in (or from) someone tacking a gif from one of those respective shows onto something unrelated or as a "reaction gif" to a simple statement. Then it would grow and grow and grow. One such example of this which was eventually regarded of the "cringiest" of all involved a lot of various fandoms "taking up arms" to somehow 'defend' themselves against a joking detractor with a bizarrely serious tone. Maybe you had to be there. In any case, I think that this era of fandom's silent erasure is one of the things that made a lot of the fandom populace of tumblr clam up lest they go back down the road of having anyone (including themselves) "cringe" later on.
It's sad, really. Because while I don't really have a ton of affection for two of the shows that make up the Superwholock 'universe,' I really admired a lot of the creativity and discussion that was filled with so much passion that came out of it. People were willing to tack onto other people's stuff, to discuss, to burst into spontaneous fic, and it had the spirit of nested commenting ev en though tumblr never had an effective, native commenting system. (I even installed Disqus in my first few months there, but no one ever used it. tumblrites just adapted to the terrible formatting for discussion, learned it, and used it as-is.)
When I joined in 2011, I do recall a certain learning curve about the etiquette of adding comments to "pretty" posts. Basically, when people posted large, decorated, or otherwise evocative fandom images, there was a sense that unless you were writing profound meta, you should probably keep your comments in your own tags. There were tumblr extensions that allowed people to read the tags on any post, later on at least, and you could see the tags of people you followed, but it was a matter of keeping the post "clean" because of the nature of content distribution on tumblr via "reblog." People wanted the proliferation of their hard work, but they didn't necessarily want silly, spurious, or short and simple comments making the post longer and longer. There is an extent to which I can sort of see the point, especially in the early days, because it didn't tend to be too harsh in terms of being something anyone complained about. Back then, people tended to be vocal and helpful, willing to send an ask and even to maintain conversations through asks in order to communicate effectively. People used tags to communicate even before @tagging was implemented at all. People figured out how to make this clunky website which was in no way set up for an effective interactive fandom experience work to do just that.
But bit by bit, the interaction trickled out. It reached a point where I saw, read, and even sometimes tired to adhere to guides written by bloggers, often quite a bit younger than me, who had figured out how to game the present culture of tumblr in order to gain followers. The point, of course, of gaining a lot of followers was to get enough people viewing content at any one time to have some percentage of them spread it and engage with it. For a time, it seemed that even blogs with relatively low (200 or less) follower counts could find people willing to interact with them. Several years in, however, I noticed that unless you had one or two friends who constantly tagged you back in "ask memes" or writing prompt posts, it was next to impossible to get anyone to stop long enough to bother sending you a prompt, even if they turned right around and reblogged the prompt list from you, hoping for that very same kind of interaction.
Any social contract that existed on tumblr broke down only to be replaced by something else. Something weird and esoteric that I'm still not entirely equipped to understand. If nothing else comes out of the apparent fall of tumblr, I hope that it might be an awakening of some of the dead-eyed, constant-scrolling types of fans who are lonely and want to engage about their fandoms but never, ever do any of the things that are required to have what they would like.
One of the metrics most-often used to talk about the trend I'm referring to is fic-comment frequency. It has dropped astronomically in recent years, and there are tons of theories as to why. I think it is a combination of factors:
1. The availability of the kudos button on AO3. There is nothing wrong with a kudos button, but I think it has enabled a lot of people who are perfectly capable of being social to be antisocial. Back in the ff.net-only or private archive days, there were plenty of readers who were too shy or too busy to comment on fics they read, but the ratio of readers who did leave at least a basic comment was MUCH higher. I don't think that's a coincidence. The Kudos or Like button gives an illusion of interaction that is very person-doing-the-kudos-ing-based. It is a very private, selfish form of engagement. That's not to say it's useless or shouldn't be used at all, but I think people should think about what they would do if the kudos button weren't available.
2. The conflation of social activism and fandom. I could write a whole other controversial post about this, but the aforementioned concept seems pretty self-explanatory. While it is wonderful that tumblr has had the overall impact of having been a hub for people to learn and understand issues about sexuality, politics, news reporting, social justice, and all sorts of topics that mainstream media and education do not expose teenagers and young adults to, I think that the fact that many of them were first-exposed through discussions of demographic representation in fiction and on the same platform where they were participating in fandom mostly had a very strange, rippling impact on the tone of fandom "discourse" today. In a way, it took away the innocence of engaging in fandom just to make oneself happy, and it made it fashionable to consider one's identity and the various facets of it while also creating a soup of ideas that made it very easy to absorb the "fandom" part of all that as part of one's core identity that reflected everything about oneself.
I absolutely will not deny that fandom has a huge importance in my life or that what I like reflects something about me as a person. However, I think that the intensity of the lens used in these cases is kind of backwards. It was as if, in order to be an adequately "critical" fan who was interested in seeing good change in the stories they were being sold, catharsis had to go out the window. The playground of ideas had to be governed with the exact same ethic as did one's public presentation of one's values, one's participation in civic life and fandom were the same. I think that some of this may have been a case of surrogacy. Teenagers and young adults who found themselves isolated or trapped for the very reasons social justice discussions were relevant to them found that they could find at least a sense of being involved in direct action if they directed that action toward... fandom, which is really not the source of the "problem" or the solution.
3. The self-consciousness spawned by the "bar" set for useful tumblr comments. A lot of people who have spent most of their fandom-lives on tumblr have this natural sense for what belongs "in the tags" on a post and what might be worthy of adding to the post itself. I think that another thing that might have caused such a downturn in commenting frequency is the fact that a lot of people have learned to keep their enthusiasm, their theorizing, the "squeeing" (wow that's an old word) "in the tags." Then, when they got to a fic archive, they do not think they can come up with "anything to say" in a comment, because the tumblr etiquette has kind of told them that whatever it is they want to say isn't worth putting "in the post" when that was exactly the lifeblood of the kind of commenting that most fic writers used to get. Essay-comments have always existed, but they were the exception, not the norm.
Communication is so important to life itself, and in particular to storytelling. And what is fandom if it isn't a community based on storytelling? Whether a person actively engages in writing fic, making gifs, or otherwise producing "content" for a fandom, a person who spends more time on a particular medium than simply consuming it is probably invested in that thing. They probably daydream about it and talk about it with friends who will listen. I'm not really sure what, exactly, has made silence so contagious on tumblr (even after the implementation of a terrible messaging system no less.) However, I really think that it is one of the most disheartening things I've seen in my half-a-lifetime in fandom, and I really hope that whatever is going to happen to fandom now will perhaps see a resurgence in nerds actually talking to each other.
Why don't you leave a comment and talk to me? There is no bar. Come on in, whatever you have to say is fine.
