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Man I'm still never entirely sure what I think about ffa (![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fail_fandomanon) I've been thinking about it recently after a friend of mine had to leave because the incredibly nasty things people say there about a group she's in were bringing her down. I wish there was somewhere I could go for active fannish conversations that was less likely to randomly dissolve into intense ableism/transphobia/whatever and that didn't assume anyone there was, by definition, "anti-sj". (I mean I am against "sjw"s by the definition of "bully or abuser who uses social justice terminology". Because I'm against all bullies and abusers! But there are plenty of people there who are against any serious attempt at social change, and/or whose definition of sjw includes me and many of my friends)
It took me a long time to learn to recognise the difference between trolls who don't represent the average views at all and more mainstream opinions. It's not fair to hold up the worst of the group as representative of the whole, and there's a pretty wide range of opinions even once you exclude the outliers. But (a)Knowing someone's a troll doesn't always remove the sting of what they've said and (b)The mainstream opinions can still be pretty awful. And that's just on abstract topics, once they start talking about individual fans it can get nasty, hypocritical and just WRONG (the reactions to my own meta haven't been too meansprited, but they tended to miss the point or focus on trivialities. Which admitedly can in part be blamed on my own lack of clarity)
Urg, I'm tired, I'm not expressing this very well. Guess I'm not up to much beyond reading ffa and feeling weird about it :/
fail_fandomanon) I've been thinking about it recently after a friend of mine had to leave because the incredibly nasty things people say there about a group she's in were bringing her down. I wish there was somewhere I could go for active fannish conversations that was less likely to randomly dissolve into intense ableism/transphobia/whatever and that didn't assume anyone there was, by definition, "anti-sj". (I mean I am against "sjw"s by the definition of "bully or abuser who uses social justice terminology". Because I'm against all bullies and abusers! But there are plenty of people there who are against any serious attempt at social change, and/or whose definition of sjw includes me and many of my friends)It took me a long time to learn to recognise the difference between trolls who don't represent the average views at all and more mainstream opinions. It's not fair to hold up the worst of the group as representative of the whole, and there's a pretty wide range of opinions even once you exclude the outliers. But (a)Knowing someone's a troll doesn't always remove the sting of what they've said and (b)The mainstream opinions can still be pretty awful. And that's just on abstract topics, once they start talking about individual fans it can get nasty, hypocritical and just WRONG (the reactions to my own meta haven't been too meansprited, but they tended to miss the point or focus on trivialities. Which admitedly can in part be blamed on my own lack of clarity)
Urg, I'm tired, I'm not expressing this very well. Guess I'm not up to much beyond reading ffa and feeling weird about it :/
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I never read FFA unless someone directed me to a particular thread, because I hate all that endless scrolling through hundreds of comments.
We used to have fannish discussions in our own journals. I want that practice to continue. Do you have a theory about why, in your neck of the fannish woods, it all went to anon comms?
When I post about fannish topics, often people will come by and discuss. Does that not happen in your own journal any more?
In any case, hang in there.
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In my neck of the wood discussion seems to have moved more to tumblr, which I can see the advantages of while still tending to prefer dreamwidth myself.
People definitely still reply when I post discussion topics, if not always as much as they used to. But what I like from ffa is the passive act of reading. I very rarely comment myself, in fact I'm usually a post or two behind. So places like metafandom and fandom_wank (which I also have very mixed feelings about!) are what used to fulfill a similar function for me. And to be honest ffa does a better job in most ways. Just not all :(
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Fandom. Something for everyone….
Yeah, I'm glad so much of my fandom is on DW. If everything I'm interested in moved to Tumblr, I would have to grit my teeth and get one, and I so don't want to. This must be how the list/private archive people felt when LJ came along about 15 years ago….
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Haha yeah. And some of them still determinedly hang out on their mailing lists, the way we do here :)
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My observation is that in mega-fandoms, at seemingly random intervals, someone would write an unpopular opinion in their own space, someone who disagreed would comment on it elsewhere with side orders of how wrong this person was and what any right minded person would think, etc. there would be signal boosting, someone would go back to the original journal and be unkind and/or unpleasant, sometimes there was pushback, and frequently there was dog-piling.
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Yeah, that definitely happened. Still happens, except more on tumblr since that's where more people are now.
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>>It's not fair to hold up the worst of the group as representative of the whole
I suppose not, but nor is it fair to expect people to ignore the worst and only judge the good parts.
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I suppose not, but nor is it fair to expect people to ignore the worst and only judge the good parts.
Absolutely. And there's a conversation to be had about the ways the setup there (where comments are only deleted under VERY specific circumstances, and only certain kinds of "wank" get frozen/modded) affects the discourse. And what it means to engage in the conversation that results. (though my response to such a conversation would probably be to flail incoherently as in this post)
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That makes sense. I rarely read them either.
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ETA: Although I'll give you this, there is one kind of opinion I share there and not in my journal and that is that I am fed the hell up with the MCU and Captain America and I would rejoice if that whole thing went away tomorrow and was never heard from again. But that would mean upsetting my friends who love this stuff and I don't want to grump on the things that make them happy. In such cases it's easier to commiserate with fellow MCU haters elsewhere.
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Wow. Thank you. I thought I was the only one in fandom who felt this way. I walked out of Iron Man 2 and haven't been back to see a comic-book movie since. While I wouldn't diss the movies in someone else's journal, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who knows me that I am not on the MCU bandwagon. Is there a weekly commenting place for MCU at FFA? At least reading it would make me feel less weird and alone, I guess. Sherlock is the other popular show that I'm not comfortable criticizing in my journal. And those Lord of the Rings books, I guess.
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OTOH, when the "honest opinion" is "Fan X is terrible and a blight upon fandom and also I don't like their face or their cat photos or the sappy way they talk to their girlfriend*" and they are afraid to express it in their own journal because Fan X and Fan X's friends might not like them and they want to be vicious without social consquence...yeah, it's "safer" to say it on an anonmeme where there will be zero social consequences beyond other anons disagreeing.
*actual anonmeme bitching about a couple friends of mine, only it was nastier
(You can probably guess that I and most of my friends have at one point been Fan X, and I'm not much of a fan of any form of discourse that involves 'hate' threads devoted to specific people. But one of my recent fandoms has an exceptionally vicious anonmeme all its own; I ended up leaving the fandom entirely because just knowing they existed and people would keep grudgewanking about everyone I liked sapped all the fun from the fandom for me. I hope it made them happy, anyway; happily my current fandoms are so tiny that everyone seems to have the common sense to keep any crankiness private lest the entire fandom collapse.)
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The Homestuck anonmeme didn't sour me on Homestuck fandom, but it was certainly a remarkable level of awful.
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I used to go on there to read threads I was linked to. But then I decided to search for femslash in case I missed interesting conversations and saw someone trolling about me personally, and rethought f_fa entirely. Nope, not for me. (It kind of made me realize that I should've had more empathy for other people called out by name on there, some of whom may have done bad things, others of whom probably didn't and just got trolled.)
I think I know what you're saying, though, honestly. And if you choose to keep reading, though I did not, I understand. There have been some good threads on there.
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