the passing down of fandom history

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I've got a tiktok account where I post videos about how to use AO3. It helps people who are new to the site learn how to navigate and search/filter etc. and I also get to teach people who've been around for a while some new tricks they might not otherwise know. 

Yesterday, I someone asked about the Citrus Scale, so I posted about that. Which lead to posting about the FFN purges of 2002 and 2012. Which led to posting a brief and incomplete timeline of fandom purges. 

And somewhere in there, someone left a comment that said, "Wow. I hope AO3 never purges adult content."

And that's when I realized that so many people who are either new to fandom or new to AO3 have no idea how it came to exist or why it is the way it is. 

So I guess I'll add that to my list of things to make videos about? 

Brainstorm time: what do you wish your fellow fans knew about? What are cool tags or tropes or traditions or history that you think would be interesting to share? 

Comments

[hannah]

Not so much a specific thing as a general attitude: I've noticed a return to cloistering as one would have had in the mailing list days, and I'd be happy if we brought back more of a sense of fandom as a general culture beyond the single TV show or series of movies.

About a year ago, I started to hang out in a monofannish space that I quickly found out went beyond "we're here to talk about this one TV series, and maybe the spinoff sometimes" into "we don't know what Yuletide is." They legitimately hadn't heard of it. They'd never been in a space where it got talked about because they'd so effectively closed themselves off from everything that wasn't this one fandom. Not "this is a little space just for this thing as it was in the bygone days". Rather, "we're not leaving our bunker."

I get writing and reading pretty much exclusively in a single fandom. I don't get avoiding fandom as a whole. And I'd like people to find ways back to a larger sense of community. Beyond having the same handful of people all writing and beta-reading and commenting on each other's works, which leads to some unfortunate trends in the fic, fandom as a communal, common space is one of its joys, and I'm saddened they're deliberately cutting themselves off from it.

[independence1776]

Serious question, and I'm not trying to pick a fight: if they're that monofandom, why does it matter what other fandoms are doing? They're not going to be able to participate in any panfandom events requiring multiple fandoms if they only write for that one fandom. Also, the Internet is large, and so is fandom, and people can't know everything.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a bit of an assumption that all fandom is one fandom when… it's specifically Western media slash fandom that started AO3, with Yuletide being a part of that fandom culture, and it's what a lot of people call "fandom." But it's not the default fandom. Tolkien fandom for many years was very much separated from Western media fandom and I honestly like that aspect; I think our fandom culture has suffered from being more drawn into that orbit (at the same time there are upsides to it). But Tolkien fandom is also significantly more monofandom than general fandom, so I guess I just don't understand the problem with not paying attention to things that are irrelevant.

[hannah]

Because for a lot of them, they've gone beyond monofannish to only engaging in the fandom by reading fic about one pairing. A few people have told me they won't even read gen on the principle that it doesn't include their pairing, or they'll only read their favorite pairing in certain kinds of stories - beyond excluding squicks and triggers, it has to be unabashedly one way or another or else they won't even consider giving it a try.

When Festivids landed, some of them said they wouldn't watch them because they didn't know the fandom. I had to explain the fandoms included non-fandom things like "marble racing" or "furniture restoration" for them to think about clicking on the link to the collections.

So it's less "all fandom is one fandom" and more it going beyond disinterest into hostile avoidance.

[independence1776]

That hostility is far beyond anything I expected to hear. Yes, in that case, definitely being more open to other things is a necessity!