Contrapositives

[primeideal]

Almost a year ago I wrote this

This also goes for "I love fandom A, but if you hold position Z [on an RL issue that doesn't really come up in the work], then you're not allowed to like it." Sometimes a diffuse work of fiction is going to appeal to people with different beliefs and behaviors, and you can't really prevent that! It's fine to say "I think this position is reprehensible," period, unrelated to your opinions on anything else. But trying to police who is allowed to enjoy the same things as you is sort of a backwards no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
 

The contrapositive of that is "If you don't hold bad-and-wrong position Z, then you totally should get into fandom A." Usually in the context of "because the creator of fandom A is a super progressive and good person!" And that's, like, also a problem, because just because someone has some similar opinions to you doesn't mean they're going to find the same fictional tropes enjoyable. (Again, especially when the issue in question isn't really related to the work of fiction.) I will repeat that it's not my place to gatekeep, so anyone should feel free to get into or out of any fandom for any reason. But if I see a bunch of people flock to my fandom because "I heard it was produced by a morally righteous person," I'm not going to be super enthused. Partly because that's often in the context of "everyone is either the best or the worst," so the goalposts may shift against that creator soon. And partly because it has all the enthusiasm of an "eat your vegetables" kind of fandom, except that these vegetables aren't even in the fandom in question. (Though it can sometimes occur in a similar context of "this pseudo-'representation' counts and is valid, this other pseudo-representation is unacceptable, I have said so because I am the ultimate decider.")

Ah well.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Hmm... is "You're not allowed to like it" really a way of shorthanded way of saying that fandom is a community and we want to police our community to only let people we want in the community? Obviously anyone can like a piece of media, but that doesn't mean I need to let hateful people hang out in fandom space with me.

[primeideal]

I feel like a lot of fandom (especially now as opposed to 15 years ago?) is fairly decentralized even if it is a community. Like, you can block someone from commenting on your dreamwidth and reading your Tumblr if they're being offensive, but you can't prevent them from reading your fic on Ao3 if they still want to, or from posting their own.

There's also the question of behavior versus mindset: if someone does something offensive, there are going to be negative consequences. But what if they're behaving politely but have "the wrong" beliefs? Maybe I'm being cynical but some of the rhetoric I've seen feels like it's also directed at those people.

[seekingferret]

I feel like a lot of fandom (especially now as opposed to 15 years ago?) is fairly decentralized even if it is a community.

I don't do tumblr and twitter, precisely because of this problem, but I think the issue is that on those platforms, fandom community is the opposite of decentralized. It's almost impossible in the infrastructure of the platform to have a conversation about a fandom topic without anyone who sees it being able to participate, including people you don't want to talk to.

But what if they're behaving politely but have "the wrong" beliefs?

What about them? I'm not required to hang out with people just because they're being polite, right?

[primeideal]

I haven't done fandom on Twitter either. My experience on Tumblr has been pretty quiet in the sense that I don't get drawn into a lot of conversations via tag-browsing or vice versa. I'm not sure if it's different in larger fandoms? (Even though some of mine are large, it's possible my posts are getting "lost" in the firehose, and that's fine with me!)

Re: the second point, agreed that you shouldn't have to socialize with anyone you don't want to. But they still have the "right" to post/view fanworks? I guess it gets down to fandom as social interactions versus fandom as individuals separately engaging with canon; I have a hard time seeing the first way because it's hard for me to think about a particular form of social engagement as an end in itself.