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extrapenguinI haven't actually been doing ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sunshine_challenge, but I did clean up my sticky post and add my friending policy there. I've also meant to give some Guardian fic recs for a bit. Today's post, however, is mostly inspired by sewn's post on fannish identity.
Like sewn, I, too, am Finnish, but came to Anglophone fandom instead of FinFanFun. (I basically exclusively read English-language obscure sci-fi, which has zero fic fandom in Finnish. At least on the Anglophone internet, I can connect with the one other person who's read the book and wants to chat fic.) Nevertheless, I'm Finnish. On the internet, one of my primary identities is "not American". I wish I could make people grok that I don't want to have to give a fuck about the US issue du jour, but alas, that is hard.
But the reason I'm writing this slightly incoherent post is communication styles. I watch people do that squeesplosion/cutesy communication and I just ... can't. I can sort of follow, but if I tried to mimic it, I'd cringe so hard my brain would escape through my ears. I'm most at home in content-first, dry-humor communication styles, and that's what my posts and comments reflect.
So. I'm direct and get to the point if I have one. I don't habitually shroud my opinions in a veil of caveats and insecurity. And I'm much happier amongst oldskool types than the modern fandom youth of today, communication style -wise. (And I am very grateful that Guardian fandom is mostly people for whom 15 is a distant memory rather than present reality!)
sunshine_challenge, but I did clean up my sticky post and add my friending policy there. I've also meant to give some Guardian fic recs for a bit. Today's post, however, is mostly inspired by sewn's post on fannish identity.Like sewn, I, too, am Finnish, but came to Anglophone fandom instead of FinFanFun. (I basically exclusively read English-language obscure sci-fi, which has zero fic fandom in Finnish. At least on the Anglophone internet, I can connect with the one other person who's read the book and wants to chat fic.) Nevertheless, I'm Finnish. On the internet, one of my primary identities is "not American". I wish I could make people grok that I don't want to have to give a fuck about the US issue du jour, but alas, that is hard.
But the reason I'm writing this slightly incoherent post is communication styles. I watch people do that squeesplosion/cutesy communication and I just ... can't. I can sort of follow, but if I tried to mimic it, I'd cringe so hard my brain would escape through my ears. I'm most at home in content-first, dry-humor communication styles, and that's what my posts and comments reflect.
So. I'm direct and get to the point if I have one. I don't habitually shroud my opinions in a veil of caveats and insecurity. And I'm much happier amongst oldskool types than the modern fandom youth of today, communication style -wise. (And I am very grateful that Guardian fandom is mostly people for whom 15 is a distant memory rather than present reality!)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-17 19:22 (UTC)Oh yes, me too. To both those things. When I started 20 years ago in Vampire Chronicles fandom I was 28 and my impression was that most of the people were at least over 20 and many were older than me. I mean I’m sure there were some teenagers, but they never talked about their age. From the message board I frequented I remember one person who admitted that she was under 18. Just one person. I'm so grateful for Guardian fandom here, I couldn't and wouldn't do it on tumblr or twitter.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-17 19:51 (UTC)I started at a younger age, but yeah, I definitely felt like a kid in the cool adults's club!
My previous fandom was Modao Zushi, which has an animated adaption and thus became super popular and infested with minors. People openly admit to being 16! Suddenly I was one of the oldest people present*! This was not okay at all! I'm very glad I could escape to Guardian fandom over here.
* I'm a taxpaying adult, but not that old. If I'm the oldest person in the fandom, there is a serious problem and I want to find the emergency escape ASAP.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-18 13:36 (UTC)It was a canon with such great material for the adult side of fandom (as in, rated Adult), but there were SO MANY KIDS. I think the average fan age was less than half of my own. Very nice people, probably, but talking to them about Adult Subjects In Our Shared Fandom was definitely "this was not okay at all!" territory.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-18 17:10 (UTC)YUP. It was also a shocking example of how, well, one-dimensional teenagers' thought patterns tend to be. Everything was flattened into good-or-bad, and everyone hated nuance. Even the people who claimed to be 26 (but had the maturity of a 16-year-old at most). It was just so frustrating on many counts.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 02:02 (UTC)Yep, this was also a feature of my time in a young-leaning fandom. A lot of the younger side of Homestuck fandom only cared about the sexual ships, had long heated arguments over liking villains (to be fair I think a number of older fans also partook of these) or whether a particular character was a villain at all, wrote alien characters as identical to humans, and/or just shipped the humans.
On the porn side, 99% of the smut was either human junk, human junk but paletteswapped to 'alien' colours, or tentacock futanari. It was like someone had had a neat idea early on, and the entire rest of the fandom just said, "yeah, that's good enough" and didn't explore any further!
The situation was not helped by the fact that a third of the fandom was too young to be writing porny fic, and the quarter of fandom old enough to have new ideas for porny fic setups were leery of talking about them to anybody for fear of discovering midway through that our conversational partner was in 9th grade. :/
no subject
Date: 2019-07-19 06:07 (UTC)