Disenchantment

Since Good Omens took my interest, I have been using my newer tumblr (now located at indulgentcrowley surprise, surprise) some. I guess that in a way, it feels like the easy thing to do go get a lot of visually thoughtful content poured into my eyeballs, but the older a fan I get the more I despise the constantly-updating, never-gratifying experience of the tumblr dashboard. In the past, I have enjoyed twitter in spite of that, but that was mostly as a way to interact with my friends. Now that I don't have a ton to say about our common interests, even that seems to be hard to engage with. It doesn't really seem like a fandom platform to me. Every time I post in a fandom tag, I get no responses except possibly months later. It seems to be, moreso than tumblr, a platform where only trending stuff matters at all except among your mutuals.

In other news, I decided to give watching Merlin a half-assed shot. It was my LIFE back in 2010 or 2011, but then I somehow didn't quite make it through the last season. I think I remember why I didn't finish the series the first time around. First off is my weird aversion to watching shows while they are currently airing. This has less to do with impatience and a desire to binge-watch all the time as it does with the fact that specifically week-to-week TV show style fandom discourse has always exhausted me when I experienced it as a present-age fan.

Merllin was my main fandom when I made the jump from LJ to tumblr back in 2011, I recall. I started using tumblr on spring break from university that year after a conversation with a friend who had switched over while I was lamenting how LJ comms were slowing down. And now look at where we are.

Back in the LJ days of being a part of fandom, I felt like it was more possible to feel a more personal connection to being a part of whatever pocket of fandom one found oneself in, for better and worse. I experienced both the good and that bad of it in Doctor Who fandom, and specifically Doctor/Rose fandom. When I was on LJ, I was part of a comm called time_and_chips which was primarily a shippy comm but which also pretty openly welcomed those who were just their for gen Doctor and Rose content. I was about sixteen at the time, and so this environment was a good one to get in on, while I also wanted more fervently and miserably shippy content.

That's when I found oh_she_knows. One has to be logged on to see the actual post, but they have a "Vouching Post." I think I recall that this got even more scrutinizing when I was last involved with it. Basically, it was a Doctor/Rose shipping only community. Initially, it seemed like a "safe" space for those who really intensely shipped the Doctor and Rose and didn't want to have the bummer of that person who would always swoop in and be like "I think this scene just means they're really good friends fam" (though fam wouldn't come into vogue for many years, you get the idea). However, I got into Doctor Who after S2 had completed but before S3 began airing. See, therein would lie the problem.

Apparently there was at one point some user who used to be fandom notorious for pouncing on any and all content that pertained to Rose to preach the gospel of how much better Martha was and how trashy Rose was. I really don't know if Martha had even appeared outside trailers when this happened, but it may have only occurred once S3 started airing. If that is the case, then it makes the latter comm's existence seem a little bit more petty than I remember feeling at the time.

Once nice thing about being in OSK (as we referred to it) was that every Saturday night (I think it was Saturday - it may have been Friday give me a break it was like 2007 and 2008 that I was around it) we had a scheduled AIM chat. It was a sort of type-it-in and you knew it'd be there situation because back then chatrooms were sort of summoned that way rather than necessarily always extant. But it was nice knowing that it would be there but that you didn't HAVE to be the whole time or every week.

People didn't take it for granted, and so people were much more likely to be personally invested in the chatroom's content and presence. And that is sort of one thing I miss about pre-tumblr fandom. It really feels like tumblr was the watershed moment when everything was Always On to the point that it became more impersonal out of necessity. Now no one really wants to hear of that kind of organizing, even with the reemergence of chatrooms like that through Discord Servers or whatever. There isn't any sense of scarcity, so there are a lot of basically silent servers for niche interests, which is sad.

However, when S3 finally did start airing, I became less and less comfortable with OSK. First of all, their obsession with Vouching new members seemed to become less about making sure that one wasn't there to troll us and more with how much of a purist one was. I don't remember a lot about the specifics of our chats except that it was encouraging to me as a teenager that so many of my fellow fans were people who had become young women with husbands and even sometimes kids who seemed reasonably responsible in continuing to participate in fandom. But I do remember the specific moment when I started to feel that maybe I didn't belong in their clique, no matter how much I shipped Doctor/Rose at the time.

Back then, we would sort of group-watch, but it wasn't required to be in-tandem to count. Where dial-up hadn't completely gone away and streaming video to share with each other hadn't really come into vogue, most of us torrented episodes. I did it on dial-up overnight or, worse, even taped it airing on SciFi. Those were the days. Anyway, I just remember there being this moment when one of them said that Martha was okay but that she was like cake and Rose was like pie, and that someone who'd tasted pie would never choose cake. And for me, that was a slow deal-breaker set into motion. At the time I just sort of argued with it a bit, but then it settled in how much they were not willing to accept Martha as even a character due to their allegiance to the Doctor/Rose ship and the one-itis of it. And it occurred to me even as a sixteen year old how much of a slippery slope that was about racism, even when it wasn't intended as a racist sentiment.

And anyway, I bring all of that up just to point out that while it wasn't all good, I miss that it was even possible for me to have those experiences - good and bad - as opposed to just having this overwhelmed feeling of never being enough. Even now, I still feel like I am catching up and have been for the past five or ten years.

I really like that i have at least somewhat gotten back into this format of blogging, but it also feels quiet and hard to make a lot of really fandom-y posts. I just feel to brain-gunked a lot of the time to say a lot about things even when I am into them. I need to find a quiet in my spirit to let me create. I also reallllllly need to learn to create more concise stuff. I have been working on what was meant to be a oneshot and it's well over 4k probably, and I honestly wish I knew HOW to get in and get out as far as oneshots are concerned.

I want to participate damn it.

Anyway, Merlin is so camp and silly and cute. I just wish that it weren't SO Magneto Was Right toward the end.

Edit: Looking back on LJ, there was a time when underscores weren't viewed as "losing" or "lame" pre-tumblr and I forgot. Even when 15 characters was all you had to work with. Wow.