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I really miss Metafandom
Like really, really. I miss the links to specific fandom meta, in fandoms I'd never heard of. I miss the links to gonzo acafan analysis, using theories I'd never heard of. I miss several hundred comment posts, full of people who didn't even know each other, but managed to have a great conversation anyway. I miss the discussion chains, hopping from journal to journal over the course of weeks. NOSTALGIA.
1. Yes, Metafandom still exists on Delicious, but (is it just me?) I feel like it's time is over. It's the post Metafandom era. And getting close to the post LJ era. (Not so much in the sense of LJ becoming a ghost town, but rather, it's been for a long time a relic, and with the rise of Tumblr and Anon fandom, its relevance is fading).
2. Don't get me wrong, I love Tumblr, but there's only so long I can follow a reblog convo without wanting to gouge my eyes out (just from searching for the meat of the conversation), or the whole thing descending into a gif party. Tumblr is far from ideal for long and involved conversations.
3. And anonmemes. Love them. Even the endlessly wanky ones. But sometimes I just want to read a twenty page analysis of, idk, Sherlock and Watson's (I don't watch the show) respective eye colours or what have you, and the typical anon meme discourse isn't conducive to this sort of borderline wankery. (Other kinds of wankery? Well!).
Those huge Metafandom-generated discussion of days gone by were one of my primary ways of being fannish. So yeah. Boo to its slowdown, and to its move away from LJ/DW (as a newsletter).
How are you guys finding good meta these days? And not just on LJ/DW. (As a comics and horror fan, I kind of get around).
1. Yes, Metafandom still exists on Delicious, but (is it just me?) I feel like it's time is over. It's the post Metafandom era. And getting close to the post LJ era. (Not so much in the sense of LJ becoming a ghost town, but rather, it's been for a long time a relic, and with the rise of Tumblr and Anon fandom, its relevance is fading).
2. Don't get me wrong, I love Tumblr, but there's only so long I can follow a reblog convo without wanting to gouge my eyes out (just from searching for the meat of the conversation), or the whole thing descending into a gif party. Tumblr is far from ideal for long and involved conversations.
3. And anonmemes. Love them. Even the endlessly wanky ones. But sometimes I just want to read a twenty page analysis of, idk, Sherlock and Watson's (I don't watch the show) respective eye colours or what have you, and the typical anon meme discourse isn't conducive to this sort of borderline wankery. (Other kinds of wankery? Well!).
Those huge Metafandom-generated discussion of days gone by were one of my primary ways of being fannish. So yeah. Boo to its slowdown, and to its move away from LJ/DW (as a newsletter).
How are you guys finding good meta these days? And not just on LJ/DW. (As a comics and horror fan, I kind of get around).
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And, well, I kind of don't find things anymore. Apart from what's on my Dwircle / gets linked there, and some off-site stuff for fandoms that I am currently fannish enough about that I will searchterm them.
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I do understand your pain, I miss metafandom too.
The "meta" tag on Dreamwidth's "latest things" page sometimes has interesting posts.
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I do miss it, though I don't think I would have time to read it these days if it were still as active as it once was anyway!
I miss meta too!
Although, to be fair I found some good, studied meta pieces around X-men: First Class and how it deal with various issues1. But I must admit, the criticisms were mostly cloaked in hugs and a relief by old school fans such as myself that the movie got the Professor X and Magneto's relationship emotionally correct.
1 Like Erik Lehnsherr's implicit acknowledgement of his invisible privilege for example - when Charles starts to wax poetic about finding other mutants, and Lehnsherr goes, "That is how it begins, Charles, identification, then being rounded up and killed" Or the fact that in the movie, although it gave talk to the Civil Rights struggle and was Stan Lee's nod to Malcolm X and MLK Jnr, the optics were dodgy - with all the poc being either dead or evil. But the heartening thing is, that most of these arguments were pointed out by mainstream comic blogs. I also think that online sensitivities are catching up to what fandom sensitivities used to be. For instance, I don't feel as if I have the need to 'explain' things so much any more, considering that up to five years ago, people would jeer at one being an 'aca fan' and reject Moff's law as a given. Lord, this footnote got long!
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Re: I miss meta too!
Can I just say though, that Magneto Was Right continues to frustrate me? Erik's plan has long been 'kill all the humans, enslave all the humans, OR, put them on a reserve!' which, come on. If we're going to do real world analogies, Erik is everything that's wrong with militant Zionist-settler ideology. Although from time to time, Marvel likes to 'prove' him right, by having humans do something spectacularly stupid and awful.
In the XMFC moment he's righteous, but in later films he becomes a villain, and there's a reason for that. It's not so much that he ~couldn't let go, or didn't give peace a chance, but that he decided that a) his people were superior, b) horror should be paid in horror. So you get stuff like his tearing Wolverine's adamantium out through his pores and leaving him for dead, when he could have just as easily killed him by crushing his skull and tossing him into vacuum. He's a nasty character, once you dig under the rhetoric. So is Charles, of course.
I think it's time we move past Charles/Erik as drivers of mutant ideology, and we get some PoC characters, some characters from formerly colonial countries, some characters from different class backgrounds, stand up and present a new model. And none of this Scott/Emma Utopia stuff, please. X-Men writers lean a bit too much on the imminent threat of extinction. There's no nuance, just explosions and Sentinels. Ugh. I remember fondly the days when imminent threat was balanced by explorations of other forms of oppression and prejudice. Also, idgaf about Scott.
Anyway! Magneto is kind of right, but he's also kind of wrong and he's emphatically not a hero, the end.
I think you're exactly right about Tumblr. It's ideal for explosions of squee. Not so much for conversation. Although, I find that newsy and political people have an easier time keeping discussion going on Tumblr. Or, it seems to work out better at least. Maybe it's the decreased liklihood of your conversational partners bowing out with a bunch of mocking gifs, idk. One thing that would improve things tremendously, is if people would just recognize that the reblog trail has gone on too long, and start a new post, linking to the old conversation.
Re: I miss meta too!
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Thanks for the links. I didn't realize there was 'meta' on DW new stuff page. I will definitely be checking that out. Other than Supernatural, my fandoms aren't producing much meta. I wonder what a mass poll of different fandoms, on different platforms would reveal? Is there a giant meta slowdown, or has it hiding (from us)?
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Re: I miss meta too!
Yeah, the thing with Magneto severing his ties from Charles was the fact that with his actions, he allowed the mutants to have a proper conversation. I maintained that if Magneto and Charles would have been in lockstep, the important dialogue would be lost.
Magneto isn't right - will never be right, but in the spirit of the comics, that wasn't the point. The point is, by each man representing a side, it was up to the individual mutant to look to either one, weigh the arguments, and then come to their own understanding. It's like - Freud and Jung- and how they started out on the same side, but Jung found his own way. You stand on shoulders of others, not allow their thinking to drag you down,
The point of Magneto is, one could see how a man could be embittered, could turn into the monsters that he loathed and feared, and look at it as a moral fable and fear.
X-men was a lot more diverse in the 90s man- Bishop, Jubilee, Storm being more than just a king's wife . Then you had motley characters like Cecilia Reyes and Maggot (Puerto Rican and South African respectively). I honestly don't know when X-men started moving so white.
But yeah, the mutant world is post Magneto and Charles, in that - well, yes, the homo sapien isn't going any where in a hurry, and the homo superior hasn't wiped out their lesser beings yet... so new understandings have to be crafted. If we want to take the metaphor of the sixties and ferment - Magneto and Charles allowed mutants to declare their independence - how are they going to grow from it? You can't be separate but equal- or can you?
Did you see, also, the uproar over racist imagery in Florence and the Machine videos? There are few counter arguments being made, so that's also encouraging.
Yeah, I've seen the uproar, but I haven't seen the video. But yeah, it's been heartening to see people speaking out, and that they aren't getting the whole, "Why you so sensitive?" argument.
Re: I miss meta too!
MOTTO!
Re: I miss meta too!
90s X-Men! Bishop, Cecilia, Maggot! Generation X! I miss those days.
Aaand I wholeheartedly agree with you regarding the schism between Charles and Erik. It was necessary for what came after, and it's always been a great moral dilemma for characters to navigate.
Re: I miss meta too!
The problem with Magneto Was Right is it was never meant to be taken literally. It was conceived intra-diegetically (look at me using fancy words, I hope I'm not doing it wrong) as an easy but ultimately shallow sound bite to criticise the status quo, and embraced by fandom extra-diegetically as an easy sound bite to criticise the X-Men's direction (whatever it may be) or to express fannishness for the character in a way that has probably to do with how fascinating he is than as political agreement (besides, Magneto was right? Where, when, as written by whom and about what? It's not like he's that consistently written as a character).
The former is what's really key here. Magneto symbolises the alternative. It doesn't matter that he be right so much as it matters that the X-Men be not right, and that using Magneto is the most obvious (but not accurate or deep) way to formulate that criticism. And that's also what's interesting about him as a character, not that he is right, but that he's just right enough to challenge the PoVs of the protoganists - mostly so they can be better (which is where a lot of X-Men writers fail, in that they often instead default on making Magneto more wrong - as if he needed it, he's wrong enough already - in order to make the X-Men look better instead of making them look better by making them right-er).
Re: I miss meta too!
Oh, wow, YEAH.
I hate that supposedly the only choices are X or Magneto, or now Logan vs. Cyclops.
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How are you guys finding good meta these days?
journal hopping/stalking/being a creeper. that's how i put together my meta recs list for xmfc - http://hincksia.livejournal.com/10780.html
it makes me sad though that a lot of these are really thoughtful and would have had a trillion very interesting comments of discussion if they had been linked somewhere like metafandom of old.
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when i posted that link, i had this in mind: But sometimes I just want to read a twenty page analysis of, idk, Sherlock and Watson's (I don't watch the show) respective eye colours or what have you
i had this problem with xmfc. i wanted to read smarter people's thoughts and discuss the movie. and i *knew* the fandom was getting popular bc kinkmemes + tumblr + a thousand fics. but where was the meta?
i thought at first that there was none, woesadnesswat, but desperation drove me to get stalky and then TA-DA!
what i'm trying to say is that there probably IS a "twenty page analysis of Sherlock and Watson's respective eye colours" out there! someone thinky and meta inclined probably DID put it together (thinky, meta inclined ppl will always exist!). but it's been kept in personal journals and never cross-posted or linked, maybe even bc of the loss of popularity of the lj/dw format (so there are also less people to pimp it out). AND THIS IS ALL VERY SAD. AND SHIT.
erm.
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But you're right, the meta is out there. We just don't know where, yet.