Your fandom is not Fandom

Coming Clean: 2009 & The End of Dumb Things, by 2_perseph

I imagine that those of you who are interested in this sort of thing have already read the post. I found it a few days after the fact, via a post on my flist. I haven't been keeping up with things, what with being sick, but I made time for this, since it's Relevant To My Interests.

Fandom was a subcultural mental space created initially by artists and writers, and then vidders, for the reason of creating works that were against the grain of mainstream culture, to satirize, criticize, and flaunt conventions and things held sacred. We’ll get to the why at the end, though of course we all know why.

It was a place without windows or doors to the outside world, as the creations, like certain seeds needed a dark, warm space to grow. The nature of fandom, its ultimate goal was nothing more and nothing less than entertainment.

My initial response to 2-perseph's post was quite simply, NO. But plenty of people had already pointed out the factual inaccuracies in her model of fandom history, so I passed on adding my two cents. (This comment, by ithiliana is particularly good for background). What I'd like to do here, is talk about how we model fandom, and how we can do it in a less blisteringly exclusive fashion. I'm going to lay this out really plainly: it offends me when my fellow fen model fandom in such a way as to invalidate my fannish experience, and that of my friends. ( Read more... )