#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)]

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)]

da

I know what you mean about always writing for the HEA these days, but at least for me I think that's partly a product of being in RPF fandom. For me RPF is all about the tropes and the romance, which is maybe a little weird, because in fictional canons I tend to be much more about the character exploration, even though that exploration sometimes comes via romantic/sexual relationships. So what works for me in RPF is much less satisfying to me in fictional canons.

This is also my first really AO3/Tumblr-based fandom, though; maybe all the newish fandoms have that same emphasis on romance and tropes.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Hm, you're probably right about RPF versus fictional fandoms, which is what I did before. I can only think of a few very interesting sports RPF stories that explore more than a romance that ends happily. But my impression is the fluff/HEA trend is pretty universal in fandom these days, and I attribute it to a) fandom getting younger on the whole (it's much bigger now and the largest proportion is 25 and under) and b) the world being crappier and more depressing than 15-20 years ago, so people want their fiction/escapism to be a little happier.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I don't know, I remember Bandom had a bunch of fic that was on the creepier scale of things. Though, it also had a dude who had a song about keeping people in his basement.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, baseball rpf fic is notorious for being miserable and adverse to any kind of happy ending, so I'm not sure that holds beyond hockey fandom.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

da

SPN RPF had plenty of legitimately dark fic. And I'm not in the fandom, but the way people talk about Finn/Poe as a ship seems to support the idea that there's a lot of THERE CAN ONLY BE FLUFF. I think as individuals we can see different things from RPF and FPF, but I would hesitate to draw firm conclusions when RPF and FPF canons can develop different flavors of fandoms and we might be dealing with some panfandom trends, here.

(I spend a lot of time grumbling about the Star Wars fandom meta that crosses my dash because it's all so. dumb.)

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)]

Ayrt

Oh, yeah, I definitely agree we shouldn't be mobbing folks or even telling them not to write stuff-- just I, personally, hate seeing fic with harmful concepts in it that aren't acknowledged to be harmful, and I like the trend away from it. I think there's generally a push for asking for all kinds of media to be less steeped in rape culture, homophobia, misogyny, etc, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Does it have to be kid-friendly? No. I have no issue with writing about fucked up things, but I don't think fanfic should be exempt from trying to create a less toxic society. And that means fucked up stuff should be clearly fucked up, not "hey here's a fun romance (btw, he kinda rapes him, but they love each other! It's fine!)"

And I scare-quoted problematic because it's been so overused that it barely means anything, but I couldn't come up with another word.

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)]

NA I agree that a fic such as you are describing needs far better tagging, but it still falls under YKINMK.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

SA I'm not directing this at you, but a surprisingly large portion of fandom seems to think YKINMKATO means "Your kink is not something that gets me off, but doesn't make me uncomfortable and is unproblematic enough that i don't find it objectionable on moral grounds and therefore that's ok."

There is a vague undercurrent surrounding the policing of fic which reminds me of 19th century children's literature and the heavy handed moral instruction some of it contained.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

DA
It's not so much a vague undercurrent as a loud current, and I really dislike it. Like, sorry AYRT had bad experiences when they were 12, but I'm not going to 'think of the children' in writing fic, and if there were 'choose not to warn' labels on those fics or the equivalent, even with those authors' notes, well, thems the breaks.

I've been reading fic for about as long as the AYRT has been alive, and I think the professions of YKINMYATO except for that one are pretty terrible. As are the idea that you need to slap a 'depiction doesn't equal endorsement' label on everything, because it fucking doesn't, and that should be taken as given. Fiction doesn't need to be 'improving literature,' and if you don't read at your own risk, especially things marked as such, the onus is on the reader not the writer.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

da

Heh, I was going to say it kind of reminds me of some of the strictures about fiction in contemporary American Christian culture, which are that fiction should be edifying and preferably not contain anyone doing anything too objectionable, or if they do do something objectionable, they eventually reap the consequences and/or learn the error of their ways. But some things really are just too objectionable to appear at all.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly, HEA fic and romance novels have fucked with my head a lot more than rapefic ever has. They've given me massively unreal expections about romance (not to mention the expectation that I'd ever get to have one - I'm in my 30s and have been single my entire life and no, I'm not asexual or aromantic). They can make my depression a hell of a lot worse.

I mean, I'm not saying we should be warning for HEA here. I'm just saying that you never know what's going to fuck somebody up.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe don't blame the internet for scarring you? I guarantee there's published books just as bad.