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I've spent the last couple of weeks devouring This Week In Fandom History, starting with the episodes that covered topics that I'd at least vaguely heard of: from the rise and fall (and rise?) of Cassandra Cla(i)re, to that time Diana Gabaldon took EXTREME OFFENSE at the concept of fanfiction (and foreshadowed many elements of the purity wank that exists in fandom today), to the popularity of SuperWhoLock, and so on. If you're looking for objective journalism, this is probably not the podcast for you; the hosts don't try to hide their biases. Nor will I hide mine: not only is their general subject area so very much my jam that I have long maintained a whole tumblr tag about it, but for the most part, I already agreed with their values: Ship And Let Ship, earnest joy will always beat cringe culture, censorship is bad no matter where it occurs, and amateur creators (especially teenage girls) deserve the space to create awkward, self-indulgent art.
Even when I ventured outward into discussions of media or incidents with which I was much less familiar, I still usually found something that resonated with me, because in some ways, fandom has always been fandom. For example, I barely even knew what genre Starsky & Hutch was in before I listened to the relevant episode of TWIFH, but I loved hearing what fic exchanges and challenges, not to mention fanvids, looked like in the pre-Internet era. My familiarity with The X-Files comes from exactly one episode (Season 3's "Pusher," which Elle showed me because the villain of the week has mind control powers) and a lot of cultural osmosis, and I did know that the fandom essentially originated the term "shipper" as we would recognize it today... but I was still delighted to hear more about the specific context in which it took off, back in the days of mailing lists and message boards.
In the same episode where they talked about early X-Files fic, the podcasters also talked about the once-popular trend of "sporking" supposedly unworthy fanworks. They think that the practice has always been inexcusably cruel, and I do sympathize with that assessment, both despite and because of how much time I once spent reading and posting to LiveJournal communities that mocked strangers' self-insert fantasies about the stories that we all loved (primarily in another franchise that started with X). It's one thing to vent to my friends in a closed conversation about things in our subculture that upset or frustrate me, whether those are individual fanfics or recurring arguments and trends. I still do that. It was quite another to declare that a fellow writer was showing their fannish love in the "wrong" way and parade their creative expression in a public forum for others to tear to shreds. (Do I feel differently about takedowns of published works such as Fifty Shades of Grey? Maybe. Do I think that fanworks, individually or collectively, are inherently above criticism? I don't. But those debates are outside the scope of this post.)
If you used to be involved in sporking other people's fic, particularly their self-insert fantasies, my goal is not to wag the Finger of Shame and make you feel bad. But I do regret my participation in "Mary Sue" bashing, possibly more than I regret the majority of the fic I actually wrote during the same time period. At least my dubious plotting and characterization choices were unlikely to hurt any real people - just fictional ones - and I made most of those choices because I was (a) relatively ignorant of how storytelling worked, and/or (b) Working Through Some Stuff. I joined the Mary Sue bashing squad because I was protective of the fictional characters whom I thought the real authors were slighting, and because I thought there was a Right Way and a Wrong Way to be creative and share our love for those characters, and that the other community members and I weren't just venting our frustrations but might even be doing a service by defending (what we saw as) the Right Way.
Which is also not that different from what motivates some present-day purity crusades.
Fandom has always been fandom, for better or for worse.
Even when I ventured outward into discussions of media or incidents with which I was much less familiar, I still usually found something that resonated with me, because in some ways, fandom has always been fandom. For example, I barely even knew what genre Starsky & Hutch was in before I listened to the relevant episode of TWIFH, but I loved hearing what fic exchanges and challenges, not to mention fanvids, looked like in the pre-Internet era. My familiarity with The X-Files comes from exactly one episode (Season 3's "Pusher," which Elle showed me because the villain of the week has mind control powers) and a lot of cultural osmosis, and I did know that the fandom essentially originated the term "shipper" as we would recognize it today... but I was still delighted to hear more about the specific context in which it took off, back in the days of mailing lists and message boards.
In the same episode where they talked about early X-Files fic, the podcasters also talked about the once-popular trend of "sporking" supposedly unworthy fanworks. They think that the practice has always been inexcusably cruel, and I do sympathize with that assessment, both despite and because of how much time I once spent reading and posting to LiveJournal communities that mocked strangers' self-insert fantasies about the stories that we all loved (primarily in another franchise that started with X). It's one thing to vent to my friends in a closed conversation about things in our subculture that upset or frustrate me, whether those are individual fanfics or recurring arguments and trends. I still do that. It was quite another to declare that a fellow writer was showing their fannish love in the "wrong" way and parade their creative expression in a public forum for others to tear to shreds. (Do I feel differently about takedowns of published works such as Fifty Shades of Grey? Maybe. Do I think that fanworks, individually or collectively, are inherently above criticism? I don't. But those debates are outside the scope of this post.)
If you used to be involved in sporking other people's fic, particularly their self-insert fantasies, my goal is not to wag the Finger of Shame and make you feel bad. But I do regret my participation in "Mary Sue" bashing, possibly more than I regret the majority of the fic I actually wrote during the same time period. At least my dubious plotting and characterization choices were unlikely to hurt any real people - just fictional ones - and I made most of those choices because I was (a) relatively ignorant of how storytelling worked, and/or (b) Working Through Some Stuff. I joined the Mary Sue bashing squad because I was protective of the fictional characters whom I thought the real authors were slighting, and because I thought there was a Right Way and a Wrong Way to be creative and share our love for those characters, and that the other community members and I weren't just venting our frustrations but might even be doing a service by defending (what we saw as) the Right Way.
Which is also not that different from what motivates some present-day purity crusades.
Fandom has always been fandom, for better or for worse.
