There's Nothing Wrong With Fandom That Getting Rid Of All The People Won't Fix

[icarus]

There's Nothing Wrong With Fandom That Getting Rid Of All The People Won't Fix

Every now and then I read about a major wank, or I hear a loud declaration that fandom is all screwed up. That once upon a time fandom was warm and welcoming, filled with love and roses... but no more. Newcomers have changed it.

Or else, once upon a time we entered into a fandom with open hearts and then had our souls crushed by the [fill in the pet peeve of choice]. Now that we know better the kinds of people we'll meet in fandom, we're going to [put on our magic ring and depart like Bilbo / choose only the people we deem worthy of ourselves and f-lock mightily / other more imaginative exit designed to make our point that fandom is fucked and we are right about this].

Honestly, the only problem with fandom is that we bring ourselves to it.

Fandom is like a Rorschach test. It's a map of our own personal issues whether we're aware of them or not. Have a hair-trigger temper? Oddly enough, something in fandom will set it off. Have a lingering issue with relationships? How dare all those people talk about marriage as if it's a good thing! As it happens, Yoda was right: What's in fandom? "Only what you bring with you."

It takes a lot of self-honesty to negotiate fandom. These are personal journals where many people (unless it's their tendency to be shy)... write journals. Let it all hang out. Personal stuff, tough questions, issues, opinions and politics. At the same time, there's a quasi-anonymity that allows us to project ourselves or our own issues onto these blank slates more easily than if we saw a person and a face. I had somebody come by and make a political comment and I was quick to make an assumption that turned out to be wrong. What was that? Well, it had nothing to do with the commenter, it was my own frustration with WG's Bush-supporting family..

Now we humor our BNFs and many people believe "oh, well this BNF is surrounded by fawning fans that let them get away with appalling behavior."

Well. Not really.

You see, there's a central office located about four blocks north of Queen Street in Toronto, Ontario,* that is dedicated to BNF-management. The moment a BNF has a meltdown they get a call, "Oh, hell. How many WIPs are at risk? And a Fic-A-Thon assignment -- plus an archive? Shit. We'll get right on it."

They then dispatch professional "soothers" whose job it is to ensure the steady flow of fiction. After all, we're not paying the BNF to write. They are producing massive amounts of work for us, for free. The work of the OBNFMT (Ontario BNF Management Team, Ltd.) is a pragmatic side of the gift economy. It's not a job I could do, but I'd like to thank the soothers of OBNFMT from the bottom of my heart.

It's up to the BNF, like any other star, to be honest with themselves and recognize when they're being handled. Not that being handled isn't very nice. The palanquin alone is worth the price of admission.



* What? You're suprised it's a Canadian firm?

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

You know how many times I've heard that one?

Especially in the Lord of the Rings fandom. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised -- nostalgia plays a prominent role in the LotR.

Icarus

[orca-girl.livejournal.com]

This is true... but it's especially ironic in LOTR fandom, given how far back the book fandom of that goes, and it's silly for anyone to pretend that there weren't fannish wars back then that were just as internicine, if perhaps more *contained*, as anything on the internet.

(Now I can well imagine the book-LOTR fans complaining constantly about how the movie-LOTR fans have RUINED EVERYTHING because it was all so PURE and HIGH-MINDED before the movies came along and people came into the fandom who had not had to pass the acid test of being able to hack reading Tolkien's prose style... yes, yes, I can imagine that all too well. But to pretend that pre-movie LOTR fandom was all sweetness and light? Oh, please.)

I wish there were some easily-findable histories-of-fandom/s not dissimilar to the recent Msscribe history that got put out, although obviously they'd be *longer*. But it would really be fascinating, and I have a feeling that if someone hasn't done it or doesn't do it, the folks who have the memories and the documentation and all will steadily be lost. A pity, because as entertaining as the Msscribe thing was in a "looking at a trainwreck" fashion, so would be some of the early fandom histories, and sometimes they'd just be wacky and fun.

The closest I can think of to it -- besides the work of people like Jenkins and so on -- is that when I was very young, I went through a phase of reading all of the collected volumes of the Hugo Winners, and in those, for each year, there would be an introductory essay by someone about what was going on in sf fandom that year that led up to the Hugos, and you'd get anecdotes about Fred Pohl and L. Sprague de Camp muttering in the back of an elevator about bumping off Harlan Ellison -- good times, good times. Fandom when it was teeny and small. But oh lord, that hardly means the politics were any less vicious than they are now.

[dossier.livejournal.com]

Asimov's two volume autobiography has *loads* of stories of First Fandom, and there were some really viscious feuds that make LJ kerfuffles look like kitten fights.