[fandom] Today the western Precure fandom ganged up on a teenager because she had a shitty take on boys in the franchise. And it’s made me realize that I need to fucking stop exposing myself to this shit and start curating my fandom experience.
Today was also the day that someone asked me what I got from interacting with fandom beyond my friend group because it kept making me frustrated. And that is honestly a good fucking question.
I keep getting my nerves rattled because of controversies over something I care about. It has to stop. It has to fucking stop and I have to be serious about it this time.
I no longer wish to be adjacent to this kind of activity. Fandom has become part of my identity and whenever someone is shitty about it I just. Take it personally or care too much.
I don't know. I try not to look unless I know I'm prepared, but even then I get frustrated. Usually I just watch things and then gush to my friends about them.
expired milk
: the problem isn’t someone had a bad take. The problem is the person with a bad take was thirteen but the fandom decided to gang up on them anyway
yeah, I basically stepped out of fandom entirely outside of, like... what I create and what my friends talk about? like, most of my fandom contact is through DWRP at this point.
this is despite the fact that, as you may have noticed, i am a fandom gremlin who cannot shut up about my fannish fixations, either online or IRL. sometimes i am a little sad about not being fully IN the fandoms i'm in, but then I think about it and I'm like. yeah. nah. i'm good.
personally fandoms don't really matter to me so I'm 100% an outlier, part of what helped me with that (beyond self isolation) was not so much curating or creating an echo chamber, but consuming different things and focusing on my own stories and such. it's much, MUCH easier said than done for some people though
this was probably easier for me because I don't really have other social media (besides Facebook which doesn't count) but I didn't find it that hard to disengage once I started moving away from Tumblr tbh
might also help to step back and be like: hey, what do I actually want out of fandom? is there a way to get this without All That Other Junk?
like. is it community? is it conversation? is it debate? is it art and writing? is it (as it is for me) the opportunity to write several dissertations a week of unrequested meta?
that seems like it might be a place to start? trying to find debates that aren't responses to existing fandom, but are maybe about the canon or news about it?
yeah i just dodge a lot of stuff tied to a lot of fandoms i'm in and focus in on what works for me. 100% curating and knowing what i do and don't have energy for about [show/thing here]
you share fandoms with enough friends here too that even just hosting like. every weekend putting up a plurk that says PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THIS WEEK'S PRECURE EP HERE could possibly get you a curated experience where it's all friends discussing a thing you like?
like i've been considering just putting up a dumping ground for sherlock & co Thoughts every tuesday because i keep having them and i'm curious what the like. two other people on my timeline i know who are also listening to that podcast enjoyed each week
it might also be fun to do asynchronous anime club or something like that where every season you put up a poll of like 3-4 shows you wouldn't mind seeing and we all vote and then we do a not-quite-livewatch of one of the seasonal animu
yeah i agree with everyone else that the best way to do it is to simply stop engaging in fandom spaces outside of your own small curated bubble (plurk, for me)
we can sometimes grow this sort of addiction to anger, whether that's being angry that someone is wrong on the internet or it's righteous indignation at a real injustice, and it leads to us seeking out things to be mad about and purposefully putting ourselves in situations that we might get to feel mad about
(like starting a debate with someone that you know is going to disagree and probably not reasonably or politely, giving you an excuse to be mad at them)
and maybe it's not anger for you specifically, maybe it's some other kind of dopamine hit, but either way it's a good idea to detox yourself from that and reset your brain's reward cycle
and I am much happier for it
like. is it community? is it conversation? is it debate? is it art and writing? is it (as it is for me) the opportunity to write several dissertations a week of unrequested meta?