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Encountering What They Think of Us
Apr. 5th, 2020 04:18 pmI was linked to this podcast called Rite Gud, which is done by a science fiction writer, and specifically this episode they did about Isabel Fall and the "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" story and the fan overreactions to it. And that was a good and interesting episode that discussed and condemned the harassment of Isabel Fall that followed the story, so I went and looked at their other episodes. They have a two-parter from February about "The Dark Side of Fandom", and I thought it was going to be good and interesting and interrogate the toxic behaviors some parts of fandom have developed lately. (Like the "woker than thou" stuff.)
It does not do that thing.
The entire episode is just so *disdainful* of fandom, honestly-- the host is a speculative fiction writer, and she says at one point in it that she's afraid of having *fandom* for her work, as opposed to people who like it, because if you have a fandom you get people like Annie Wilkes. And she complains about most of the networking for the field taking place at cons because she doesn't want to spend time around the kind of people who go to cons while she's trying to network. She and her guest also both outright state several times that engaging in fandom is a substitute for having a personality.
For the record, anyone who says that the giant franchises that are never allowed to die are basically the world from 1984 because it's writing by committee that is never allowed to change has no business accusing *other* people of taking things too seriously.
All this is quite aside from some *factually* wrong stuff-- like, it might suit your point to talk about TV shows like Friends and The Simpsons not having character development being evidence fans of things can't handle their media being different because it's always status quo, but both of those shows originate from a time when you couldn't ever catch up on what happened in an episode you missed, so having a lot of serialization meant you eventually had no viewers because they couldn't keep up with what happened if they happened to miss an episode. There's *very little* modern TV that's like that except for Law and Order and its imitators. (Even NCIS has *some* serialization in the later seasons, if only because being on the air for 15 years means they have to have satisfying ways to have cast turnover.)
They suggest that these shows which promote status quo stunt the personal growth of the viewer because it returns to status quo at the end of every episode... but if your argument is that people shouldn't be using media as any sort of aid for their personal growth, surely that shouldn't *matter* because healthy people aren't relying on it in the first place? Like, even if I accept their argument at face value (which I don't), they're wrong. Similarly, they talk about fandom being not about really understanding works but about collecting detailed knowledge of them, ignoring that there's a huge pushback against the "memorize facts to prove your fanness" aspects of fandom coming from *within* fandom. And then at the same time they say things like "I just respect movies, especially if it's a kids' movie or a family movie, for killing major characters, because fans just hate it so much," (that bit's an actual quote) which isn't about good storytelling at all.
There's an entire attitude on display here, one of "I like grimdark and like to interact with my media in these ways, therefore I am morally superior and anyone who interacts with media in a way I don't like has something wrong with them." It's the attitude they're saying fandom has, that they're decrying. Except that's *not* a predominant attitude within fandom-- *except* among the purity culture people who live on Tumblr, and the people who think liking grimdark makes them morally superior. (Purity culture people are often kinda scary, grimdark-is-all people are annoying and sometimes exhausting-- but I'd never make the mistake of saying that either of those groups constitutes all of fandom.)
Let people enjoy things, y'all. Let people enjoy things.
It does not do that thing.
The entire episode is just so *disdainful* of fandom, honestly-- the host is a speculative fiction writer, and she says at one point in it that she's afraid of having *fandom* for her work, as opposed to people who like it, because if you have a fandom you get people like Annie Wilkes. And she complains about most of the networking for the field taking place at cons because she doesn't want to spend time around the kind of people who go to cons while she's trying to network. She and her guest also both outright state several times that engaging in fandom is a substitute for having a personality.
For the record, anyone who says that the giant franchises that are never allowed to die are basically the world from 1984 because it's writing by committee that is never allowed to change has no business accusing *other* people of taking things too seriously.
All this is quite aside from some *factually* wrong stuff-- like, it might suit your point to talk about TV shows like Friends and The Simpsons not having character development being evidence fans of things can't handle their media being different because it's always status quo, but both of those shows originate from a time when you couldn't ever catch up on what happened in an episode you missed, so having a lot of serialization meant you eventually had no viewers because they couldn't keep up with what happened if they happened to miss an episode. There's *very little* modern TV that's like that except for Law and Order and its imitators. (Even NCIS has *some* serialization in the later seasons, if only because being on the air for 15 years means they have to have satisfying ways to have cast turnover.)
They suggest that these shows which promote status quo stunt the personal growth of the viewer because it returns to status quo at the end of every episode... but if your argument is that people shouldn't be using media as any sort of aid for their personal growth, surely that shouldn't *matter* because healthy people aren't relying on it in the first place? Like, even if I accept their argument at face value (which I don't), they're wrong. Similarly, they talk about fandom being not about really understanding works but about collecting detailed knowledge of them, ignoring that there's a huge pushback against the "memorize facts to prove your fanness" aspects of fandom coming from *within* fandom. And then at the same time they say things like "I just respect movies, especially if it's a kids' movie or a family movie, for killing major characters, because fans just hate it so much," (that bit's an actual quote) which isn't about good storytelling at all.
There's an entire attitude on display here, one of "I like grimdark and like to interact with my media in these ways, therefore I am morally superior and anyone who interacts with media in a way I don't like has something wrong with them." It's the attitude they're saying fandom has, that they're decrying. Except that's *not* a predominant attitude within fandom-- *except* among the purity culture people who live on Tumblr, and the people who think liking grimdark makes them morally superior. (Purity culture people are often kinda scary, grimdark-is-all people are annoying and sometimes exhausting-- but I'd never make the mistake of saying that either of those groups constitutes all of fandom.)
Let people enjoy things, y'all. Let people enjoy things.
