wah wah fandom diaspora wah

[fahye]

(see also: Aja's article series)



Jinah: I'm listening to the slash report on elementary
I agree on some things
but disagree so bad on some others
I guess that is the way of life

me: I am so behind on slash report, I enjoy it but I have so few spare hours in which I am not Reading or Writing, and I can't do that and listen to people talk

Jinah: It's the first time in a long time
that I have used it

me: it also makes me sad in a way that I think of myself as someone for whom fandom community has been very important, but I seem to have lost the knack of ENGAGING in it
I don't read fic, I don't seek out new fandom friends, I don't watch many new shows and I don't take part in meta discussions
which is usually fine! except then I am reminded that there is this huge fandom party going on and i am too tired to do much more than wave through the window

Jinah:yes, I feel like I don't know how to make new Internet friends through fandom/don't have the desire to
but fandom is so great to me still... in theory...
I thought I might make some friends via tumblr but that doesn't really seem to be a thing
(for grownups)

me: no
I really miss how exciting and fun it was being In A Fandom in a big way. BSG! my heyday!

Jinah: YES bsg *___*

me: I tried, with Inception, but it was WAY TOO BIG

Jinah: it's weird because I feel like even if you get really into a new fandom, and you probably know better than me because you do write fics for most new fandoms people are into
it doesn't really lead to anything
other than a lot of kudos (pause to hate kudos)

me: yeah
nobody comments and starts DISCUSSION with you

Jinah: yes. I also feel like the things people post are less material a lot of the time

me: it's just, oh, you produced a thing, I read and approved of your thing

Jinah: but before even if you posted about cereal
your bros would be like, cereal, I dig it

me: yep
and I think it's a bit disheartening because I knew that writing long fics used to be a way to connect with people, they would read them and think about them and comment with character opinions and it was glorious!
and now I'm like, I am spending months of my life on half a novel about a fictional character. and because I am not a BNF it will not garner comments (in a way that, say, gyzym's work does) but just...You've Got Kudos!
which is why I am sending bits of it to a lot of people as I write, because I am becoming demoralised at the projected effort:appreciation ratio

Jinah: we're old, Fahye. Imagine how old people feel.
I just read David Foster Wallace's essay on TV and he pointed out that the main way people he knows in real life have conversations is to sit and stare in the same direction, and discuss what they've seen for commercial-length intervals, which the generation before him didn't know/accept
and I was like man, imagine having to argue that TV's place in culture can't just be ignored out of contemporary fiction
with people who were old enough when TV came around that they mostly lived and had their minds formed without it

me: I think on the one hand having grown up With The Internet we're probably more flexible, on the whole, to the introduction of new ways of being and talking and producing. but on the other hand, it's hard not to get stuck at what we perceive were the ideal ways of doing things
society! media! you are progressing in the WRONG DIRECTION!

Jinah: Yes, it is. And I feel like I am just old enough to remember attention span Before Internet and compare it to attention span After Internet, though not old enough to remember how grown up relationships worked.

me: Yeah, true. We will be the ones standing with our walking sticks and saying, in my day there was LJ for fandom and Facebook for real life, and that was IT!
none of this splintering nonsense

Jinah: :( :(
pretty much

me: I have been telling myself that the lack of positive feedback for a long project is good training for writing a novel one day
it is...sort of helping

Jinah: that is true
I guess that is also what people did Before D:

me: we are spoilt

Jinah: nnnnn
I don't want to be the type of writer/artist who lives in a cave
painting on the walls

me: it is nice having intermittent feedback during the writing process from people I trust, though. my reward for finishing a scene is to email it to you and Del
pff, no, no caves

Jinah: Del is a good cheerleader actually
I might want a cave for minibreaks
but not to live in

~

(and then we started talking about minibreaks)

SIGH. I realise at least half of the problem here is me not walking the walk, ie. not seeking out interesting fics and leaving hopeful thinky comments on them, but man have I ever lost the knack of sifting through the sheer volume to find the gems. I rely on recs, and tumblr does not seem to be rec-heavy in the same way that LJ/DW are.

There's also the issue of TIMEZONES; it seems a lot of the interpersonal discussion aspect of fandom is moving back to realtime chat.

~

tl;dr - I MISS RP, I MISS FANDOM COMMUNITY, I MISS COMMENT THREADS

/pouting session

Comments

[skygiants]

I also am a cranky old lady. :(

[fahye]

Your icon is the crankiest! I approve.

Having dinner with Milliways folk was a reminder than fandom can be a delightful RL thing as well, though sadly my #1 fandom-babbling companion is going to live in the US for a year. BOO, AUSTRALIA! *shakes fists*

I promise you at least one meta-filled post on Princess Tutu for discussion purposes :)

[skygiants]

Tiny pissy baby Ian McKellen is the crankiest of all, I want to pinch his cheeks.

I live in a fandom-babbling environment! But it is weird to see it happening less and less on journal sites. :(

THAT IN ITSELF will be payment enough for sending the discs to Australia. >:D

[fahye]

Yeah, I do not live in a fandom-babbling environment AT ALL, so it is distressing to me that my only source of it is drying up and spreading out.

woooo FEELINGS ABOUT BALLET

[aria]

Yeeeah. I've been hit less hard than I might've been, I think, because I've moved to a place in which all my RL friends can fandom-engage with me. But -- wow am I not really reading as much fic as I used to, definitely not engaging in as much delightful threaded discussion as I used to, and sometimes it makes me sad!

(Omg pause to hate kudos. I have heard so many arguments in favor of them! I totally understand why people love them! I DISLIKE THEM WITH PASSION.)

[fahye]

Aria my Black Widow fic is at 21,647 words I THINK I HAVE A DISEASE

[aria]

It is a disease in which when you post it I will leave you a comment full of paragraphs instead of a kudo! PRETTY EXCITED ABOUT THIS FIC.

[fahye]

\o/

I just wrote a flat-out action movie scene and it was so confusing, HOW DO I CHOREOGRAPH THIS, can't she just have feelings in nice prose instead of shooting people.

[schiarire]

Haha almost didn't comment on the post where we complain about how nobody comments to anyone! NOOOOOO. I CANNOT DO THAT TO US. ;_;

[littledust]

It is SO DIFFICULT to have a demanding Real Job and participate in fandom the way it has involved. Tumblr and Twitter are such realtime things, you're right. Even though I live on the U.S. East Coast, I don't have time for a ton of realtime shenanigans. I enjoyed being able to come home, read a bunch of text posts, maybe read a fanfic or two, and leave comments.

Of course, I've quit reading fic because 98% of what's being posted in my current fandoms is crap. I've always been incredibly picky and getting older has only increased my crotchety nature.

LET'S BE BITTER OLD FANDOM QUEENS TOGETHER... says the girl with the Tumblr and Twitter accounts. But I miss PEOPLE!

[nextian]

Oh, are you and Ji and Aria all part of the antikudos brigade? Disheartening! When I was posting fic on LJ or on AO3 pre-kudos, I did not get a lot of comments. At all. Now that I am posting fic on AO3 with kudos equipped, I get at least one or two a day. That's a huge uptick in feedback for me. I admit that I strongly, strongly prefer getting a comment, but usually I did not get comments, I got deathly silence...

[fahye]

I hadn't thought about it that way because to me, the joy of feedback was that you'd get a rush of comments for one or two days after posting, and then deathly the silence the rest of the time, except for the occasional blip when someone discovered an old fic. That encouraged me to finish & post things.

And...I don't think of kudos as feedback, I suppose that's the root of the issue. It's the equivalent of the 'Like' button. It says nothing about what you enjoyed or why. I'd rather five comments with examples of good lines, or a comment on how they interpret a character, then the information that means 'fifty people read this and vaguely approved'.

[fahye]

Requisite reply to comment to encourage old-time threading!!

[schiarire]

I have more icons on DW!

[schiarire]

Basically though, I enjoy dire, eschatological pronouncements that everything is the worst since forever, so now the world is over, even when the same things were worse before in other ways.*

That said, although I also didn't get a lot of comments before (or write a lot of fics before!), and may have gotten some kudos since then on AO3 (?), I actually turned off kudos notification emails. I don't know if kudos are empirically better or worse than nothing, since everybody feels differently about leaving/receiving them. I'm sure no one leaves them thinking, "This isn't good enough to comment on," and that they are actually thinking, "Oh no, the stove is on fire" (just me?). But I don't get really any buzz out of receiving them, so the "EMAIL!" excitement** to "KUDOS!" excitement ratio was too disproportionate for me. So it was just like, I don't need to be alerted to /everything/, especially things that don't need a response from me.

Which I guess suggests that part of the problem is the even more hyper-stimulatory nature of the entire Internet environment I am plugged into, or else maybe I WOULD be like, "Oh a kudo! From whom? Should I friendshippotentialstalk them?" D: I mean, the most tenuous of things can lead to that as well. We were friends because of Metaquotes!

* ps That is why I'm your Matt, Fahye.
** Excitement slash feeling of "Oh no! Now I need to do something!"

[fahye]

I wanted to have a talk about the ways in which you are my Matt!

ps. you met on METAQUOTES??

[nextian]

Responding here so you both get the notification!

I'm sure that I am going to be leading the charge on the "fandom is terrible now that it is different from what I like" in the next round so I can't throw stones. I am already doing this with pairing names and the absence of searchable tags. I don't care that Tumblr doesn't preserve slashes, your "johnkar" tag hurts me inside, the more when half the time you tag it "good boys do it different."

Anyway, yeah, those are pretty good reasons for eschatological pronouncements. There's no point in me saying that kudos mean something to me when they... don't mean something to you... particularly when they mean so little to you that you actually turned off notifications of them. And this post is intentionally hyperbolic, &c. I'm also very plugged into a single fandom right now which is a much better environment in which to receive kudos for the very reason that if someone goes through and reads all my Homestuck fic, I can follow them back and friendshippotentialstalk them (good compound word.)

I also understand that if a predominant goal in posting fic to be a great writer than to entertain others then it's going to be absolutely infuriating to get a notification that just says "someone likes your story but will not tell you why!" I admit that that's not mine. I'd like to be a great writer, and I'd like feedback for that purpose... but I'm pretty fine with just knowing that people enjoyed my xeno sex pollen fic enough to click "like" on it. Augh, god, every way I can think of phrasing this either sounds incredibly passive-aggressive or like I have no desire to write well, so I'm just going to trust that you guys know what I mean.

But I also disagree that kudos aren't feedback! They're not super informative feedback, but I get information about what parts of my life my friends enjoy when they like my posts on Tumblr, and I get information about which of my fics work better than the others by my kudos counts.

Have you considered going back to posting solely on LJ/DW, so that comments are required? It's pretty interesting seeing how many people still comment on things like S2B2 where there are no other options available-- I suppose I was expecting there to be more of a drop-off.

(also re: Metaquotes: yes. yes we did. There's no story there, I just thought it was normal in 2005 to follow someone home to their journal because they were really funny and then not leave. SORRY, JI.)

[fahye]

I do get what you mean! And I think that's a good point about the usefulness of it, for you, specifically as a way of indicating interest and allowing you to expand your fannish-friendship base.

I have actually got a policy of posting things on LJ/DW FIRST, letting them sit a few days/linking to them in relevant communities, and then posting to AO3 after that. I find that almost nobody FINDS the LJ posts and comments on them after that first period, because AO3 is where people predominantly go to seek out fic by pairing etc.

[schiarire]

UM IF YOU LEAVE, I will kill you Bmo style. Departure was never an option!

I think when I complain about the Internet, I am really complaining about myself (I'm so disengaged from fandom now!), which isn't really fair to the Internet. If kudos make you feel good and help you make friends with people, then they are obviously able to be good things also, and are not just redundant in and of themselves. So as far as I'm concerned, you win the point of "are kudos good or not."

They may not do a lot for me, but I'm not really in a fandom; the only thing I even have kudos on is a Yuletide fic. So they're not for me, you know? I think it's most important that they put a bit more gas in the tank of the fannish engine, and if they do that, then, they are working.