#largely because look at this canonical Mary Sue I'm playing

[not-poignant]

Ooh, cool! Thank you so much for the long reply! A lot of this was genuinely completely new to me -- I'd never known there were ongoing discussions that early, but of course it makes complete sense there were, both on LJ and predating it. I think it also goes to show how well we could self-segregate on LJ, I think moreso than we can now.

I think, in retrospect, that a lot of my experiences with 2000s fandom can be summed up with, 'I was a teenager' and thus wanted to be 'cool'. There was a lot of 'not like other girls'-ism going on in those sporking and Mary Sue comms, and I always just assumed we were all teenagers -- it certainly felt that way. The few people I've kept in touch with from those days have largely grown out of it, though it doesn't surprise to hear there were (and probably still are) grown adults who shit on others' fanfics.

(As an addendum, I could add that slashfic and that sort of 'canon non-compliance' was completely okay in the fandom spaces I ran in back then, but people would get very upset about extremely arbitrary things-- 'transfer students' in HP, changing characters' ages, making up a minor oc side character for plot purposes because all ocs were apparently bad (and especially if female), etc. It was strange which hairs people decided to split.)

Anyway! Thank you VERY much for such a long and in-depth reply! It's cool to see how these things have changed and developed, and I'm glad to see my experience wasn't emblematic of fandom as a whole.

Thanks for such a thought-provoking question! It really got me thinking about how Livejournal was really excellent at creating different sort of pockets of experiences, and in a while is really reflective as proto-social media of like, the big echo chambers we have happening now all across social media! That's really interesting to think about.

For me, it's funny, most of the fandom folks I knew were all older than me, many were in their 40s and 50s while I was in my 20s. Very few teens comparatively were attracted to certain fandoms like The X-Files and NCIS some of the other spaces I was in, so while there were definitely teens, it was like... a different feeling. Like, even these days I find it fascinating how there are 'younger' fandoms (in terms of how many younger folk are in it) and 'older' fandoms.

And yeah you're so right about people getting upset about arbitrary things! And also that um, 'not like other girls' which now itself is kind of mocked by fandom, so things really did come full circle on that front where now it's not cool to be one of the people who says that x.x

Honestly it's hard to be a teenager on the internet! All the things that play out like... all the dynamics, a lot just play out online instead, and they still exist. A person still wants to be cool and accepted and liked (and that's not age specific, like, most of us want a degree of at least some of these lol), and cliques can form very quickly. I remember how bad it felt back then even in my 20s when I got unfriended by a mutual who I thought was a really good friend, that stuff was devastating!

"making up a minor oc side character for plot purposes because all ocs were apparently bad"

Ahaha this is one of the reasons I still sometimes have like apologetic tones in some of my comments about the amount of OCs I add, because yeah that was really disapproved of! I remember that and I still have like... shades of that at times. I'm mostly over it now, but oof I remember the first time I did it and I was like 'is this okay *chews on fingernails* I bet people will hate this because of it.' (And then that turned into Fae Tales so).

The Mary Sue stuff was really aggressively unpacked, like in very popular kind of fandom-friendly journalism spaces at the time, I mean that's how we ended up with the journalism site 'The Mary Sue' in the first place. People really took a stand on that one. In a way, we were all kind of looking at our own attitudes, like, *why* is it bad to do this, or *what* does it mean that a girl feels like they can't be like other girls - is that internalised misogyny (and sometimes it was), and I miss that kind of meta discussion because I do feel it happens a little less now.

There was a time when I didn't like Mary Sues, no one did, though I think that was before I found my first meta community where it was like 'oh people are talking about EVERYTHING I thought was like universally accepted in fandom.' Though we never got that far on how racist fandom could be, which is still an issue, but one that does get talked about (it would just be nice if AO3 talked about it too).

I sadly think a lot of people in their 40s and 50s can act a lot like teenagers in fandom spaces sometimes, some of the antis in like teenage spaces today are like 40s kind of 'guiding them along' this path of moral puritanical righteousness and almost role-modelling how to bully others. And some of the folks running public Sporking blogs were like... older folks who fostered connections to younger folk.

LJ was wild tbh :D

Anyway, it's so interesting to think of all the different pockets we ended up in. I'm sure there's like countless more that we both have no experience of, where someone else would be like 'oh I was in LJ fandom what's a Mary Sue?' and that would be entirely legitimate too. Sometimes it's easy (I fall into this trap) to think of historical fandom as being one thing instead of like a thousand things. So yeah, this was cool! Thank you :D

#asks and answers #pia on fandom #i actually still really miss livejournal as it used to be #i like dreamwidth but it's different #also i keep forgetting to blog there lmao

[shy-magpie]

Pre: RQG 162

Look this has been sitting in my notes app for literally years now, so time to either go back to posting them or delete forever. I think I'd regret never posting them so here you go. Heads up I didn't end up finishing the series & don't actually remember when I stopped

Not much by way of pre listening thoughts other than a vague hope Earhardt is going to knock it off now that the Kobolds reassured her they won't object to fighting the dragon that attacked her ship. I mean there are over a dozen lovely things I anticipate coming up in the next few episodes but I trust RQ to get to it when they get to it. Literally the only thing I think they might actually drop the ball on is if they decide not to address if elementals are people. Which would esp suck after that great scene in Paris where Hamid has a moment with one; but no canon is perfect and I'm not sure how much more lore we can get before we lose people who don't live for world building like me. Especially since if they are people it implies systematic enslavement world wide. Which wowee there's a comment on capitalism being dependent on the exploitation of people who aren't seen as people at levels direct & indirect, large & small, but if fandom is reacting this badly to the cohort I can see where neither Alex nor Anil are paid enough to go there.

Oh and as always Azu needs to have a conversation where she isn't the strong one, like I hope mega juicing was cathartic but tell someone she's afraid of something, be petty about something silly, talk about her grief & guilt for her own sake. If she was a Mary Sue I'd wave it as women get to play wish fulfilment characters too, but she is very well played and real people don't do well with being serenely helpful all the time. Although I might be worried just because I like her so much, maybe I'm missing moments where she isn't making herself be perfect because she is perfect to me?

Lastly: names, Alex, 5 of them. When I thought he was keeping a hard line on treating the cohort as one character so they wouldn't take over the series it was one thing; but Meerk likes loud noises, and Skraak remains a delight, so make em canon and give me at least 1 characteristic a piece.

#RQG 162 #rusty quill gaming #live blog thingy #rqg spoilers