#23 — Brown Goes Down

[dekedangle_rpf_mod]

This is the twenty-third post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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Comments

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Someone being upset that a poster suggest infidelity against a fandom favorite is bitter. Dude chance of that getting full is low/not happening. I'm sure there is going to be a bunch of new happy ending fics for your ship, that post shouldn't even bother you.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

But you don't /understand/ nonny! Juggernaut shippers are the most oppressed. Most. Oppressed! By those terrible rarepair shippers. OPPRESSED! I Say!

/full disclosure I'm both a juggernaut and rarepair shipper.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt Normally, I'm a big juggernaut fan because it's easier to find fics. Though, I've been more of a rare pair shipper in hockey rps. It's just silly to complain about stuff that won't affect your ship.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

It's just so pointless. I can pretty much guarentee that there will be oodles of fluffy fic for the juggernauts. The occasional angst/dark fic will get exponentially less readers and kudos and will chance absolutely nothing about how much fluff there is.

If it was a rarepair and they were worried I might understand a little. See Ryan Strome who has become the fandom's goto badtouch his brother guy. But for a big ship like Segs/Benn, the random Segs is unfaithful fic will do nothing change that it's a fluffy ship.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I had to stop reading Benn/Seguin because all the fics are such fluffy glurge. Give me some conflict (and I don't just mean pining).

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

na

This was me with Sid/Geno (I never read enough Benn/Seguin to stop reading it). It didn't help that I disliked the team before getting terminally bored with the fic, either.

Honestly, what is with shippers thinking that mutual pining is the only acceptable form of conflict, and that they should police that? I would wonder if it had something to do with teammate ships, since a lot of people like to think that their favorite teams are big happy families 24/7, except that it's a trend that seems fairly commonplace these days. I don't read widely in any fandoms right now, mind. I just kind of pop around to whatever canon has me interested on any given week. Possibly I just get too much Star Wars ship war nonsense at the edges of my dash.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

na

I don't know if it's this fandom in particular or just the general trend of fandom, but I've never seen non-fluff get ripped apart and discouraged like it is these days. I don't mean dark fic, just anything that isn't pretty much cribbed from a romance novel plot. When I started in fandom 15 years ago I would've been embarrassed to read and write as much HEA and trope fic as I do now.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Yeah, I discovered fandom in the early oughts (though I took a 4-5 year break at one point), and this seems new to me as well. The objection isn't to darkfic, but to anything where the characters have a problem in their relationship that isn't " both people are too afraid to admit their feelings," with fans feeling enabled to police their preferred take on ships in a way that is also new to me. And I don't think it's unique to this fandom, though like I said, I don't read widely in others, so I don't know what the driving force is in other places or what fandoms it's most apparent in. Like, this week, I dabbled a bit in reading Burr/Hamilton, which is likely a little more resistant to all-fluff-or-gtfo impulses than some other ships/fandoms.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

It comes down to people not being able to understand that either others like anything besides fluffy endings, ever, or that they might enjoy a pairing for different reasons then they do, I think.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

I think they have to understand that other people may like those things, surely. For one, the existence of the occasional prompt or fic along non-fluffy lines would disprove the idea that fandom has formed a strict consensus. The people who complain are threatened by that fact or think it's wrong for such fics to exist, for whatever reason. Otherwise, there would be no reason to actively discourage other fans from engaging with different tropes and takes on certain characters.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

They should, and I don't get at all why they feel so threatened by other people liking the same thing as them in a different way, especially -like someone pointed out - there's a lot of what they like to choose from.

Whom they do remind me of, to somehow make this relevant to a sports fan perspective is young me who was always so convinced that each call against my team was unfair while the other team deserved a card for the tiniest offense.

But obviously this is a wider phenomenon in fandom,as others have pointed out.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

SA

And hee I realize that I probably totally misread your first sentence. Sorry :/

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

na

I wonder if the need to police others' ships/approaches/interests is partly due to the rise of Tumblr and shipping things for great justice. Much of Tumblr fannish culture is comfortable with judging other people for what they like and how they like it in a way that is completely anathema to fandom as I previously understood it.

YKINMKATO no longer seems to be the golden rule (with occasional skirmishes as to limits and how it's best applied). These days people proudly proclaim their kinkshaming and considers themselves morally superior for it. And I think judging ships and narrative kinks is an extension of that.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Da

I definitely attribute this to Tumble's callout culture where the purity standard is applied to "everything you've ever posted or said" and the tolerance level is zero for anything ever.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I know Tumblr fandom culture is why I've largely retreated from fandom, and don't even have a namespace presence anymore. It's just... not the fandom I grew up with. I mean, some of that is good. I will not deny that some of it is good. Fandom is a lot more aware of things like shitty racism, and even though it was probably the start of the cultural shift, Racefail 2009 was still a damn good thing to have had happened, as was the original Warnings/Trigger Wank that same year. That was all shit that needed to get out there.

But man, I miss things like the kink and darkfic in Harry Potter, the long plotty creepy shit in Stargate Atlantis, hell, going back really far, the completely ridiculous idfic that'd get wanked to hell today in fandoms like The Sentinel. I miss meta that was actually dissecting the plot instead of the politics of a source. And I'm still not a big fan of gifs.

Damn it, I miss wearing onions on my belt.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Na

Same, nonny. I cut my first fandom teeth on SGA and HP and it's all changed. I miss it all, and I don't have a fandom presence. I miss it. And in some ways fandom is better, but mostly it's different and I feel like a Fandom Old. It's laughable that 20 somethings are often called "too old" in fandom, but I think even they remember how fandom was different

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

da

I came into fandom when "literary" fic with complex endings was in vogue, and I do miss that. It wasn't necessarily dark fic, it just wasn't structured like a romance novel; it was about relationships and characters without "getting together" being the point (and also less sex). I don't even remember how to write that kind of fic anymore, because I'm so used to approaching everything as a HEA story now, and also there isn't really an audience for it. I don't deny the romance/porny kind of fic is satisfying, but I wish there was space for more variety, without feeling like people would be nasty if they don't just ignore it.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

a the ayrt rt

I do think that tumblr culture, or the wider culture as practiced on tumblr, has a lot to do with it. I think there's a bizarrely black vs. white view being espoused, where if you like something bad, even that bad something is constrained to the realm of fiction, you're bad. So ship wars, kinks, etc. have to be held to a certain moral ethical standard. And so we get a lot of tortured meta about x thing only looks bad but actually is totally morally defensible but y opposing thing is actualfax the worst. I saw a conversation the other day about hating public defenders who defend guilty people in court (U.S. context), and I have a ton of problems with the justice system as its practiced, but people occasionally getting capable legal representation is not one of them. I'm more upset about the many, many people who don't have adequate legal representation.

Why in a fandom context this strict moral binary manifests as NO CONFLICT BETWEEN MY FAVES, I'm not really sure, except the idea that if they're not getting along, one person has to be wrong, i.e. the bad guy, and that's this all encompassing thing these days. The last time I brought this up, I got, "well some people don't want to deal with lowkey abuse in rl and then read about in fandom." And, man, there are so many ways to have conflict between people where neither party is abusing the other. Why the hell do you assume I'm talking about abusive dynamics when I say I want more conflict? And that's before we get to "no one can make you read a fic you don't want to."

I'm fandom-ancient. Sigh.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. I mean, I think some of this arises from realizing that fandom absolutely affects real-life perception and doesn't exist in its own little bubble. I was in fandom at the tender age of 11/12, so around 8 years ago, and there was a lot of.... Really gross stuff. And I don't mean YKINKM kinda stuff, which I consider to be "This fic contains a scene that is nonconsensual sex due to alcohol intake" at the front of the fic-- okay, you've been warned, everyone knows this is a Fucked Up Thing. I mean like authors writing a scene where one half of the OTP gets the other half who has clearly said he doesn't want to have sex blackout drunk & fucks him, and neither the narrative nor the author seems to see anything wrong with it. I mean "maybe slight dubcon, but he likes it!" in the a/n of a story shere the character is screaming no. Not to mention rampant misogyny. Ironically, this was mostly in fics that were written as fluffy romances, so I don't know if the drastic reduction in that sort of thing has affected the diversity of fic. But generally, I don't have a problem with wanting fanfic to be less "~~problematic~~". I 100% took gross lessons from reading those harmful ideas as a kid, and I want those fics to go away.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

sa
*YKINMK

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

I don't think it's fair to hold fanfic authors to a standard of "what is appropriate for children." We certainly don't hold professional authors to that standard. And while I agree that there are plenty of stories out there that espouse values I disagree with or just completely lack awareness of what values they're espousing - we talk about fics like that often in the fic discussion thread - I don't think that means those authors ought to be harassed or even that those fics ought to be made to go away.

Wanting fic to be less problematic (not sure what your tildes and scare quotes are for) is entirely different than actively trying to police it or get one's pet mob to dogpile the author for it. I think those latter activities are really harmful both to the victims specifically and to the general creativity and diversity of fandom.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

da

I cut my teeth in Buffy fandom, and there was a lot of fucked up stuff. Some of it was "fic doesn't seem to know this is rape" and some of it was "the only way to hook Buffy up with a dude is to make her way less powerful than she is in canon through emotional or physical trauma" and some of it was "the ship war where we try to decide which canonical rapist was better than the other canonical rapist specifically in terms of the types of rape they committed."

BUT what was a harmful exposure for you might have been perfectly benign or beneficial for someone else, and when we're talking about fanfic, we're also talking about the writers' (mostly women) fantasies. And treating these things like they have no function but a harmful one carries an air of saying that women just passively soak up, internalize, and regurgitate the ideas of any fiction they're exposed to. It's a bit more complicated than that. And even if there was a blanket ban on ~problematic fanfic~, that wouldn't prevent women or children from finding those same ideas in pro media.

I am all-for content warnings and for calling fic out when it's offensive (things like Haiti fic in SPN RPF), but I do not think it's icool to police what kind of fanfic can be posted, especially when we're in the realm of people's sexual and romantic fantasies. And where we are now, it's policing anything but conflict-free HEA, when that is not necessarily free of problematic elements or bad messaging. Because HEA does not have an instructional purpose either.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

What do I have to do to get some good wank material from the kinkmeme nowadays? Something other that writing myself, that is.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I definitely spent a moment here going "Actually, kinkmeme has been really wanky recently?"

But anyway, what kind of material are you looking for?

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

LOL an attempt was made to differentiate. I do actually have a couple of in progress fills, so I don't want to be too specific, but I'm a sucker for the usual suspects in this fandom. I'm usually pretty easy to convince of new kinks, too, so it's pretty much just... less arguing and plot, pls.