[fandom] I still follow some people from Band of Brothers fandom on tumblr

and it looks like I was right to a) pretty much leave the fandom and not go on the newest discord, because it looks like people are being assholes about one of the people I still follow

b ) not

I have never seen a fandom so small and so toxic

and most of these people were little kids when BoB first ran!

but they've apparently decided that that's what fandom is, for them

oh the hbowar fandom is a weird, weird place

the wife and I just stay in our own corner and geek out together because it's not worth interacting with kids almost a decade younger than us who think they know more or are more entitled to it than we are

it really, really is weird

I still like the source shows! and read the books I bought! but I started out in Generation Kill fandom a decade ago

and I was reading stuff about BoB when I was in high school in 2005

I mean it's a problem with any fandom you've been into for a long time but just on a different scale because it's not like there's many other niches to go into? I've found parts of the disney fandom to be the most toxic fandomy places on the internet for example, but there's a lot of other places I can go to enjoy it

hbowar it's like a super small population of people currently interested in it enough to write fic or make graphics or whatever at any given moment and it's always been that way

so if the people doing that are assholes... kind of unavoidable

yeah, it's a really small fandom, which does make it tough

were you around for the wank a couple of years ago over a big bang fic?

the one where they made one of the characters out to be a rapist/some kind of lolita-ish scenarios?

Yes, I think it was a teacher-student abuse thing. I didn't read the fic

everything had been deleted by the time I showed up so I just saw the public apology from the author

I think that's genuinely one of the issues too is like

people forget that this is based on real people who still have living relatives?

like as a historian I do find any amount of fandom around historical folks to be a bit weird, although obviously I'm into it and actively doing it myself so I'm not trying to say you're a monster for daring to do any of it!! especially because a lot of the portrayals in the show are very ficitionalized

but also like... be respectful??

and when you're a dumb kid who isn't quite mature yet you can do some cringey things or don't think all the way through about why you probably shouldn't be writing and publishing fic like that

Yeah, I'm not sure it was a good idea to write the fic, but the main furor wasn't over respect to the real people

It was more "you're endorsing child abuse, you pedo"

I meant that as like "this is my big issue with the fandom"

Oh, yeah

It's so weird to hear of this as a fandom