Fandom Has a Real Branding Problem

I'm going to go on a rant about an article I haven't read yet. It's this one from The New York Times. The journalist is a tech writer - so AI upsets fits to her field pretty neatly. I'm aware, so aware, that reporters rarely get a final say in their headline. But boy did the framing of this article really awaken something in me.

A meltdown around Heated Rivalry fan fiction.

First, I know it's a reputable newspaper but considering 'fanfic' and 'fic' have been around for decades can we at LEAST use 'fanfiction' as a legitimate term? Like that's not even my main complaint that's just something I saw in the last thirty seconds and riled me up. Fanfic may be a neologism (it's not) but it's a real word.

Okay second. I absolutely hate the use of the term meltdown here. It has the same aura of referring to Beatles fangirls as the screaming histronic masses. Everything in fandom is drama, sure, we love a scandal, but to call it a meltdown implies that it's a breakdown of society in some way. It's the opposite. BECAUSE the HR fandom is so prolific, and hyper, and engaged, the response to fanfic being written by AI was extremely passionate. I'm sure it crossed gross boundaries because no one, especially fans, know how to engage with each other online anymore, but the 'witch hunt' to address the problem is part of the process.

I'm just..it's just tiring feeling like I'm explaining this over and over again.

It seems like everyone has discovered this wonderful world of play and no one realizes…it’s old. It's old as fuck. Fandom has had generations of conflict and wank and sorted a lot of shit out before you even got here. And obviously the younger fans are going to be shitty teenagers doing shitty things, but the important thing to learn is that fandom elders DO exist and we(I'm over 30)/they DO serve a purpose in the community.

Like maybe the wank over AI wasn't a meltdown. Maybe it was part of the process of rousting out AI and getting people involved, of building a consensus within a group of people. Too often western morality takes disagreement as catastrophe, and fans, being the passionate assholes that we are, love to play around in radioactive goo and then scream about how it hurts. We like it here. It's nothing the write home about.

I think that's a major issue, honestly. People are ‘writing home’ from summer camp. “I love it here but everyone keeps talking about how horny they are.” Well I'm sorry you signed up for the Queer Outcasts Get Freaky In The Comments Getaway package.

Wider society has no idea how fandom works because the frameworks we built are intentionally outside the normal systems. YOU wouldn't let us distribute gay sex magazines legally, remember? So now our conversations don't and shouldn't cater to your sensibilities and modes of understanding.

The reason the wider internet is seeing these meltdowns is because fandom has been forced into the social media sites that three companies insist we all use so they can put ads in front of our faces and then scrape our ideas for data and AI. Reporters are picking it up because it originated on Twitter, then moved out to Reddit and Tiktok and Threads or whatever. Fandom, sweet sweet fandom, still living on Twitter is painful to me (it's where all my friends are getting their fic recs) but it also means that a tweet about Connor's fat ass that gets 10k likes is going to attract attention. These meltdowns used to happen all the time in the margins of the internet without any comment (were there even any articles about strikethrough?), there was no need to get The New York Times involved. The mistake is treating fandom as a hobby culture - or rather, not differentiating hobbyists from fen.

Fandom is an equalizer term now, so anything that gathers fans together is called a 'fandom,' and marketers can use the terminology to sell 'fandom' back to the fans. Linguistically, it makes sense, but it excludes the unmarketable, slash-driven, zine-sharing, gift economy fans of the last 50+ years. Star Trek has a fandom, and then it also has a fandom - the women who came up with 'The Premise' and wrote and wrote and wrote zines about it. There was overlap but they were distinct, and a lot of it was for legal reasons!

For me the word ‘fandom’ means slash, although I recognize that at this point that's a very narrow definition. Still, the history I know and have an interest in revolves around it - and obviously it's still huge today or we wouldn't have Heated Rivalry being pimped out to the normies. People who I regularly talk to about fandom don't even recognize the term slash, though, so

The re-integration of fandom to mean every type of fan means that anything that was once purposefully hidden away is now fair game. We've had an influx of people new to fandom at an exponential rate and it's been impossible to onboard everyone. Not even doubting the genuineness/viability of the terms ‘fan’ and ‘fandom’, there are new people across the board, in all sectors - vidding, cons, cosplay, content creation, and especially fic and AO3. It means that information is not being dispersed at the rate it should be. There are no longer older fans guiding younger fans around the dealer room and letting them in on the secret mailing lists. Now it's a free-for-all on Internet 2.AI. It's lead to doxxing and hatemail and incredibly vile and vicious behaviors being labeled as fandom. The more we misunderstand what fandom is, the further it gets from its original tenets.

• if you ever have writers block, I suggest getting really worked up over something small and petty
• okay I have read/skimmed a large section of it and OH MY GOD stop describing the names and plots of fics in the NEW YORK FUCKING TIMES
• I believe Emmy was doing her best though. Emmy, I believe you were doing your best.
• they've recently been spotted together in Toronto. start the clock.
• remember going into your local TV Guide (assuming you're American) and highlighting all the episodes and movies you wanted to watch that week? The closest thing I have to that now is the TCM schedule.

Movies highlighted in yellow are ones I think are particularly interesting, might want to revisit, or have been on my list, movies in green are newly interesting to me from reading the synopsis. It's a lot easier this month because of Summer of Stars - I may or may not update later in the month

• I was recently on an episode of I Love This So Fricking Much, talking about my love of blorbos. You can listen here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Hxc5xe20zSfdwJw5RDG7b (or apple, or pocketcasts, etc)

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