Fannish identity & communication style

[extrapenguin]

I haven't actually been doing 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!)

Comments

[extrapenguin]

Very nice people, probably, but talking to them about Adult Subjects In Our Shared Fandom was definitely "this was not okay at all!" territory.
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.

[krait]

also a shocking example of how, well, one-dimensional teenagers' thought patterns tend to be.

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. :/

[extrapenguin]

Urgh, that sucks. Modao Zushi didn't have any nonhumans, but it did have a canon explicit sex scene(!), and kids having lots of opinions about the canon couple and their sex scene that belied a deep lack of understanding how sex and humans work. The fic is mostly unreadable, too; the protagonist's personality gets interpreted as being The Uke and all his actual personality traits are forgotten. But mostly I'm just ... Kids, this thing has an E-rated sex scene, whyyyy are you telling us you're 16?