Still locked on main because being random racists’ hyperfocus remains distressing as hell, but if you’re already who already follows that Twitter account here’s the link to the thread. I also suggest reading these pieces on revisionist fandom history and the insistence that we as a unit be grateful to our beige fandom foremothers for… something.
Revisionist fandom history is so annoying because:
– it’s always people in their 20s and/or who’ve been in fandom for like nowhere near as long as EYE have lecturing people about how shitty the youth these days are (like being awful in fandom is new or exclusive to The Youth)
– it’s always very white fandom history UNLESS it’s someone tagging in like Japanese creators and/or appropriating the term fujoshi for their own ends (my feeling on the term is simply that if you’re not Japanese, you probably can’t ACTUALLY reclaim it. The end.)
– Because it’s almost always white queer/feminist fandom history (from and about white queer people) there’s no reckoning with the fact that fanwork & shipping oriented fandom spaces have always been VERY hostile to and about fans, characters, and performers of color
– They always pretend that “discourse” – as in the act of having opinions in fandom at any volume whatsoever – is new. As in they ignore that people have always wrote long pieces on fandom, about issues in fandom, and sometimes yes they were dead wrong in what they wrote. – There’s this obsession with essentially canonizing a legend where white women in Star Trek/Sherlock/etc fandoms paved the way for modern fandom that never once engages with a) music and sports fandoms AND b) the presence of QPOC across fandom history
– The end message is always a smug “and here’s why you need to be grateful to and worshipful over middle aged white women on the internet (but also mid-30s white women who made the AO3) because they MADE fandom and without them you would have/be nothing”
I’d say “read a book” but the majority of fandom history texts are written by people who ALSO are invested in canonizing a very beige version of fandom’s past that is solely celebratory so I don’t think it’d be very helpful
OMG, I know this doesn’t matter, truly, but the creators of AO3 are all in their fifties. Maybe the second round is in their thirties now, idk, but NaomiCescaCorp defs middle aged. Sorry, I just LOLed.
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It does matter!! Because I didn’t know and so sometimes I’m like just genuinely sitting here like “what’s a reasonable age to estimate when complaining about this situation” and I always assume they’re closer to my age than anything?? I don’t know why??
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I can see that. But no, Naomi is 48, Francesca is 51, and most of their cohort is right in that area or slightly older.
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One of the things that completely frustrates me is, having been a long time lurker in fandom spaces, seeing how few people remember the work that Te (THE TE of TELAND) did relating to Characters of Color and fandom bias. Mostly to promote works with Characters of Color.
There’s so much fandom history that gets ignored, because frankly the hegemonic white fandom prefers not to acknowledge that this is, and has always been, an ongoing conversation.
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Te is one of the reasons I’m here. I try to create and consume in a way that reflects back to everything I learned from being an avid fan of her DC work back when I was… Definitely a smidge too young to be reading it 😂 And she is the kind of fandom old that we should be looking at and being like: someone advocating for delicious dark and fucky content AND who recognizes that racism shouldn’t have the place in fandom that it clearly does.
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