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Um. This is a direct result of my basically failing to successfully post meta earlier. So, as the natural solution, I post a meta about posting meta (and making safe spaces and commenting on other people's fic and being baffled by the social end of fandom and this whole 'fandom, how do you do it' thing). Because that'll work, obviously. Extremely personally biased/based, to warn you.
Ah. For reasons that will be perfectly obvious from the post itself, I may have trouble keeping this up/responding to comments on it -_-;
Ah. For reasons that will be perfectly obvious from the post itself, I may have trouble keeping this up/responding to comments on it -_-;
Engaging With Fandom: Me-Edition
I felt I ought to specify that. The 'me-edition' thing. With the month_of_meta around, I tend to get introspective and engage in lots of meta (you may have noticed), but because they're mostly introspective, they probably don't have a lot to do with how other people see and do things. So, you know, possibly of very little interest to people who aren't me.
I've been reading a lot of fandom discussions lately (via the pinboard 'meta' tag, mostly). Not actually engaging in them, you understand (which is partially the point of this little musing, you'll see in a while), just reading them. I keep bouncing off things that ping my interest intellectually but bounce me away personally, because I'm bad at interacting. That isn't whining, that's just fact. I have several personal tendencies in discussions that alarm me, so I try to avoid bringing them to bear.
Lately, this has been adding up with some comments I've gotten, and things I've noticed in memes, and it all just sort of bundled together into this little bit of speculation here. The overall gist being: Fandom is my primary social engagement. However, I don't do a lot of engaging with fandom socially.
I'm guessing those of you who know me have probably noticed this already -_-; Things like not following friends who move away fandom-wise, not necessarily friending people back when they friend me, not commenting very often outside my own space, focusing mainly on topics directly relating to fandom and/or personal musings rather than engaging with the musings of other people. Possibly a lack of fandom knowledge that might be presumed baseline, I can't judge that one, I only run into it on things like memes when people ask me "What do you think of other portrayals of this character?" or "Do you think this fandom is welcoming?" and I have to go "Um ...". Things like that.
The primary means by which I engage with fandom is basically: write a lot of fic. And that might seem obvious, that seems like the way quite a lot of people engage with fandom, but I'm just looking at specifically in relation to me.
I write fic. I write a lot of fic. And possibly the reason I write a lot of fic is because it's the single most prominent way I talk to people. I write fic as a means of communication because, basically, I'm pants at most other forms of it.
Fandom provides me with people to engage with in ways I'm half-way good at. I've met so many of you through this space that I would never, ever have met otherwise. So many of you tolerate me engaging with you in ways that I've never had anyone tolerate outside of this kind of space. And sometimes I'm not sure that's a good thing, because sometimes I think the ways I engage with people are fundamentally selfish and mostly a one-way street.
Okay. To give you an idea, this is how I usually go about entering a fandom:
- I watch/read the source. I've never entered a fandom without the source behind me. Part of that is because I usually enter fandoms for sources I enjoy, part of it is because I have a need for a concrete, solid platform of understanding from which to base things. In fandom, the more solid your engagement with the source, the more solid your engagement with the fandom. (Um. In my head, anyway. I know other people might do it differently, but I ... don't get that, and don't know how it works).
- I write a fic. What fic and about what characters depends on the fandom, I've mused about my love of single characters and using them as gateways into fandoms before. But. I don't enter fandoms by discussing them with people, I don't enter them by commenting on other people's fic, I almost uniformly enter fandoms by writing my own. (I have babbled about various sources without writing fic for them, and discussed them cheerfully if people on my f-list or whatever happened to have seen them, but I'm not sure that's quite the same thing).
- I pick a comm and post the fic. Usually the most general comm I can find for the fandom, at least those that have centralised comms. If the fandom is too small for comms, I mostly just post the fic on my own journal and never really engage as such with the fandom itself. Since AO3, that might be shifting a bit, but it still depends on people from that fandom finding my fic the same way LJ does, so not really.
- If the fic goes down well and I haven't committed a gross error in character interpretation or whatever (as far as I can remember, it only happened the once, but it sort of stuck), I write more fic for that fandom. I reply to comments on my fic, I discuss things about the canon in the comments to fic. Sometimes as a result of this, people will friend me (at least, I'm presuming it's a result of this). Sometimes I will friend them back. I post discussions and memes and burble posts back on my own journal, and sometimes people read them, and I get talking to them.
The thing that's important about this? I never, ever friend first. I presume people have noticed this. I don't friend people until after they've friended me. I'm pretty sure my entire flist is made up of people who are braver than me and friended me first, presumably because something I said or wrote interested them.
I also don't tend to comment outside my own space. I presume people have noticed that too. I do sometimes, and I like to think I'm getting better about it, but I tend to limit my comments to my own posts and those of friends. I'm trying to comment more on other people's fic, but it's still pretty rare. (AO3 kudos helped a bunch. I think I've commented more in the past year or so than I did in the two years before it). I just ... do not like advancing opinions or contacting people outside my own space.
Once inside a fandom, if there's something I want to discuss, 9 times out of 10, I write a fic about it, and discuss stuff in the comments. Sometimes I write a meta, but that happens much less often. A fic, you see, is a narrative based on a narrative, and people presume it has the biases of a narrative. A fic is a subjective piece of work: this is what I see in the canon, or this is what I see a bit of and am magnifying for the sake of this story, or this is what I would like to see and isn't directly contradicted by canon, or this is what I would like to see and screw the canon anyway, what are AUs for? Whereas a meta is much less subjective. A fic carries the burden of authorial intent and audience interpretation and allows for divergence between the two. Meta is just stating your opinion, saying "This is what is in the text as I understand it, and I dare you all to tell me different". And, um. That is not a dare I'm usually comfortable making.
And see, that's for much the same reason as I don't usually comment on other people's stuff or friend people first. The reason basically being that socially, I am an idiot, and I'm coming to the party with the presumption that in a social situation I will most likely be the one in the wrong.
To pause here: this isn't whining, and it isn't accusing anybody. I mean that statistically speaking, in pretty much most of my RL interactions, I have been in the wrong. At least as far as impinging outwards on other people goes. When they're impinging in on me, I'm much more confident and capable of laying boundaries. When socially dealing with stuff that is about me, I can make decisions better, because I'm the one with the facts of my personal state. I have a concrete platform to move from. But when it comes to social situations that are about others, I can't do that very well at all. I have trouble judging what's too far, what's not far enough, what's even in the right emotional ballpark for what we're dealing with. I don't know when I'm being forward, I don't know when I'm being an ice-cold bitch, I don't know how to find the line between. The boundaries are invisible, so I keep essentially tripping over them in one direction or the other, and then people tend to get mad at me, or I end up hurting someone.
And this basically transfers over to my interaction with fandom. I prefer, if at all possible, to create a space that is about me, something that I have made or done that can form the platform for the interaction. If I want to have a discussion, I write a fic and see what people take out of it. If I want to persuade people towards a point of view, I write a story espousing it, and see if they take it as intended, or if there was something I overlooked or misinterpreted. There's a cushion with fic, because it posits slightly different circumstances from canon, so you can cushion questions in hypotheticals like 'maybe he didn't do that in canon, but if the circumstances had been these, do you think he might have?'. I've had some fascinating discussions with people coming out of fic. (For example, my JARVIS series was basically one long dialogue with fandom on AI in fiction, and a whole bunch of people responded in a variety of ways - I could have done that with meta, and did the once, but I don't think it would have worked out near so well).
However, it does mean that my awareness of wider social movements within fandom comes almost purely from how they've directly impinged on me and my work. Some of it comes from the fact that I lurk around fandom discussions too, that I read a lot of meta even if I don't engage with it, and some of it does come from reading other people's fic, but a lot of the time my awareness of, oh, Fury being viewed as the bad guy in some places, and Loki being the woobie in others, and Natasha often being written as a robot ... these things come to me via comments on my stories, most often.
It just ... there are a range of consequences for how I engage with people in fandom. Things like how if I get writers block I suddenly feel like my social interaction has been cut in half, because to me most of my interaction, my conversation, comes from what I'm writing. Things like how I don't know how to answer a lot of questions relating to my opinions on wider fandom trends, mostly because I haven't seen them enough in person to comment with assurance on them. Things like how I don't like moving around platforms, because the one I have is the one that's kept me safe and functional for years now (I've partially moved to AO3, and have had a lot of conversations there, but I'm also still pretty firmly planted in LJ at the same time). Things like how I can't really follow friends outside of fandom platforms, so if we part fandoms we often part personally as well, though some of you have heroically stuck around. Things like how I'm sort of all take and no give, unless you're willing to accept fic as the 'give'. Things like how I prefer to bring people back to mine rather than go to theirs, with the exception of official spaces like fic comms (and even then, mostly linking back to mine).
This isn't universal, of course. I write a lot of personal stuff that isn't directly fandom related, and I've had a lot of conversations with friends and sometimes random strangers on all sorts of topics. Sometimes I put things out there in the form of meta rather than fic, sometimes if I feel strongly enough I'll go argue my case in someone else's field of play. But the core of my circle, I think, comes from fandoms, and they usually come from interactions started by fic. And the bulk of my interactions happen in my own space.
Usually I don't notice this. Unless, as I said, I'm getting writers block and suddenly feel lonely, because I'm suddenly realising how much of my interaction with people is dependant on having written a fic. Or unless I'm reading wider fandom debates, and realising ... how much I'm actually not getting about them?
Things like BNFs and fic drives and fic exchanges and SJW (huh?) and big screaming rows on issues I hadn't realised fandom even involved in the first place. I've dipped my toe into wider debates before, and frankly practically jumped back to the relative safety of my own space in fairly short order. In part because way too many other people being way too invested, in part because my own behaviour when panicky tends to be less than sterling (I have a tendency to lock solid and simply hammer my opinion until the other person goes away, which is not good behaviour and causes way too much pain).
There are whole areas of fandom that, while I'm aware they exist, I don't understand how they function. The meta axis of fandom, the social justice axis of fandom, those tend to mean 'big ongoing rows to be avoided at all costs' to me. Which might seem strange, since I tend to write a fair bit of meta myself, and some of it, like this, tends to be about exactly those things. But ... I think I've written exactly one other post that was directly about engaging with that sort of fandom, and to be honest I locked it down almost immediately and didn't go back. (*crossing fingers this one doesn't end the same*) I just ... am not capable of dealing with interpersonal boundaries in an environment of elevated emotions. Um. At all. So I usually don't.
I also don't get the whole social exchange, clique-y, BNF type of fandom interaction that some people describe? And this one isn't like the other one, where I'm aware and just not good at it, this one I actually just don't see. I mean, as far as I know it could be happening right in front of me, I just genuinely don't notice it. Someone had to explain the concept of a BNF to me, and ... uh. How do you know? If the person you're talking to is one, I mean. How do you identify a fandom clique? (I have this problem in RL, too. I could identify broad groups and alliances around me, but heck if I knew how they worked or how they interacted on the edges, or why one group was different from another beyond the fact that it had -mostly- different people in it). I mean ... does Avengers fandom have BNFs? Does it have cliques? Am I in one? (Legit question, clusters of friends or friendly people who gather around certain characters or pairs, are they cliques? Is that the same thing?)
And I think most of this, this lack of understanding on my part, is directly related to how I engage with fandom. Because I'm sticking mostly to my own space and using relatively neutral tools (fic) to engage with people around me, I think I'm just actually not seeing the other modes of interaction that people use. For me, unless it happens in my space, I don't see it. Unless someone comes and tells me what's going on, I won't know it exists.
As far as I know, no fic of mine has really ended up bumping into any of the larger debates. Well, some of them get comments like "Yay, a Fury who isn't a raging bastard, thanks for the change" or "I never thought about JARVIS like that" or "I don't see Natasha that way, but the fic wasn't bad", but the big mad scary things where everyone dogpiles in and the fic gets linked everywhere and people scream at it and other people defend it, that's never happened (I've only seen that happen once, back in SPN fandom, and I was well away from it personally). Meta is more likely to attract it, which is why ... Um, why I'm more likely to write but not post meta, more likely to take down meta I do post, more likely to be slow to respond or not respond at all. Basically, anything that runs the risk of attracting that kind of attention, I take back down and go back to the source. Shut up and listen until I've a better idea what's going on.
But even aside from that. Smaller things, like questions asked in memes like "Do you think such-a-fandom is welcoming?" or "What do you think of the portrayal of this character in fandom?". Um. I don't know? And it's not that I'm not reading other fic (though sometimes my main writing fandom isn't the same as my main reading fandom at a given point in time), it's that I've no idea how you make that kind of judgement. I mean, I could say a thing based on my experience, but how do I know that my experience would match that person's if they went and engaged with that fandom? My experience has several distinct artificial boundaries constructed by the way I do things, I've no idea what someone else would encounter if they engaged based on their way of doing things, with their opinions and their methods. So how to I make that judgement? And the character, the portrayal thing ... again, while I might read an individual fic that takes someone a certain way, and while I get comments that indicate to me that there are wider trends of portrayal, usually I don't read nearly enough fic to make what I would consider an informed judgement, and I can't judge fandom numbers well enough to tell if something's actually popular or just particularly vocal.
*shakes head* Okay. Anyway. Moving back off that and onto the main point once again.
I engage with fandom in a particular way, a way that is basically designed to maximise my sense of safety among the people I meet here. Because I have such problems with social situations both in fandom and other areas of life, my fandom interaction is designed to control the social elements as much as possible in my favour. Which is ... a horribly cold thing to say, now that I see it typed out, but ... there you go. I prefer to create a controlled space that is about me, and then engage outwards from that along relatively neutral, safe lines of communication, such as fic. Because I can write a fair amount of reasonably decent fic fairly quickly, I can engage with reasonable quality and quantity across a few areas of fandom, creating spaces for discussion of characters and themes and issues that interest or are important to me. Moving out from that again (or in, depending on how you interpret it), I can discuss things more personally with people in meta or personal posts once they're willing to come to my space. Usually, after a certain amount of time, I get braver with individual people and start moving into their spaces, talking about their issues and their posts, their stories. (I'm still bad at this, I'm guessing people have noticed that). Since moving to AO3 and the kudos system, I'm getting slightly braver about talking to people I don't know about their stories, though possibly not by much.
Overall, it's probably an incredibly selfish way to go about things. All take and no give, as I said, unless fic is enough of a 'give' for you. I'm essentially trying to keep myself safe while at the same time engaging with a lot of issues and topics and people that otherwise I just wouldn't meet or dare interact with, and consequently I tend to keep my means of interaction fairly limited. As much because I don't know how to do anything else as because I'm scared to do anything else.
And, um. Sometimes I get comments, that people were nervous about talking to me at first, or that they thought I was good writer and didn't know if they should talk to me, and I just ... I know I should get that, but seriously, the first thing that comes into my head is always: "You're nervous of me? But ... But I'm pretty much always wrong, and seriously, everybody terrifies me, and I'm not an authority on anything, and if you argue with me I'm liable to crumple. Seriously? You're nervous of me?"
It's just ... every time I post a fic, until I get the first comment or kudo or reaction, I'm basically paralysed with terror that I've done something wrong or said something stupid or why did I think Tony would do that or shit, did I make Clint out to be a bastard or ... Or worse, did I tread on something actually important, did I say something that hurt someone, did I say something that makes someone out to be less than what they are, did I say something that disses real issues, or ...
I mean, fic is my primary means of communication. I say stuff in fic that is way too personal or way too loaded to ever say without the cushion of a narrative and familiar characters to ease people into it, and even then I'm shit-scared that what I've written will reveal exactly how horrible a person I am behind it. And that's fic. That's the stuff I actually feel relatively safe writing. Meta? Personal posts, unless they're directly about me? Those are liable to give me a genuine panic attack (as, um, people may have noticed recently).
I, uh. I don't like people. Or, no. I love them, I love the idea of them, they're the most beautiful things I've ever seen, but gods do I hate interacting with them. I hate trying to judge things I can't see, I hate trying to understand the inner lives of people with next to no interpretable data, I hate the sensation of being wrong and having hurt someone. There are times I feel like the goddamn Hulk, clumsily reaching outwards and smashing everything in range just because subtlety is basically beyond me.
Fandom gives me a way to operate, a way to work around that, that, while extremely limited in some ways, lets me actually engage with a lot of things that I otherwise wouldn't engage with. But I need to keep it within certain parametres. I need to keep it working a certain way. I ... I think I'm getting braver about things, or some things anyway, if very, very slowly, but I also tend to genuinely flip out and panic at things I don't know how to deal with and then retreat from them, so mostly I tend to stick to certain limits and push them only rarely.
(I've also noticed that I tend to push them when I'm feeling down generally, which makes me wonder if ... if it's my version of going out to start a fight because I feel bad, or if it's my version of self-harm in some ways, deliberately seeking out situations in which I know I'm liable to panic because I'm already in a slump. I really really hope that's not the case, but I've wondered sometimes. I tend to write argumentative meta when I'm down, possibly just to have something concrete to panic about. Or possible to have an excuse to fight something in a way I can just turn off later, though even if I turn off the computer I've never successfully managed to turn off the panic internally. Which is a bad reason to do anything, and another reason I'm reluctant to post things like that, in case I'm doing it for the wrong reasons.)
I've been thinking about this lately, because I've been reading around fandom discussions in ways I haven't in a long time, and I've been noticing bits of my behaviour because of the difference between AO3 and LJ, and because ... well, because I've been in a slump writing-wise -_-; So, yes, possibly I'm writing this for the wrong reasons as per above, but I think my basic philosophy is: "Do what you have to, but at least explain yourself. The more people know about what you're doing and why, the better they can judge how best to react to it." Um. This is the hope, anyway?
So. Um. This is the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
icarus_chained model of fandom interaction. Ah. Take from it what you will? And I apologise to those I've treated badly because of it. *ducks* My apologies.
I felt I ought to specify that. The 'me-edition' thing. With the month_of_meta around, I tend to get introspective and engage in lots of meta (you may have noticed), but because they're mostly introspective, they probably don't have a lot to do with how other people see and do things. So, you know, possibly of very little interest to people who aren't me.
I've been reading a lot of fandom discussions lately (via the pinboard 'meta' tag, mostly). Not actually engaging in them, you understand (which is partially the point of this little musing, you'll see in a while), just reading them. I keep bouncing off things that ping my interest intellectually but bounce me away personally, because I'm bad at interacting. That isn't whining, that's just fact. I have several personal tendencies in discussions that alarm me, so I try to avoid bringing them to bear.
Lately, this has been adding up with some comments I've gotten, and things I've noticed in memes, and it all just sort of bundled together into this little bit of speculation here. The overall gist being: Fandom is my primary social engagement. However, I don't do a lot of engaging with fandom socially.
I'm guessing those of you who know me have probably noticed this already -_-; Things like not following friends who move away fandom-wise, not necessarily friending people back when they friend me, not commenting very often outside my own space, focusing mainly on topics directly relating to fandom and/or personal musings rather than engaging with the musings of other people. Possibly a lack of fandom knowledge that might be presumed baseline, I can't judge that one, I only run into it on things like memes when people ask me "What do you think of other portrayals of this character?" or "Do you think this fandom is welcoming?" and I have to go "Um ...". Things like that.
The primary means by which I engage with fandom is basically: write a lot of fic. And that might seem obvious, that seems like the way quite a lot of people engage with fandom, but I'm just looking at specifically in relation to me.
I write fic. I write a lot of fic. And possibly the reason I write a lot of fic is because it's the single most prominent way I talk to people. I write fic as a means of communication because, basically, I'm pants at most other forms of it.
Fandom provides me with people to engage with in ways I'm half-way good at. I've met so many of you through this space that I would never, ever have met otherwise. So many of you tolerate me engaging with you in ways that I've never had anyone tolerate outside of this kind of space. And sometimes I'm not sure that's a good thing, because sometimes I think the ways I engage with people are fundamentally selfish and mostly a one-way street.
Okay. To give you an idea, this is how I usually go about entering a fandom:
- I watch/read the source. I've never entered a fandom without the source behind me. Part of that is because I usually enter fandoms for sources I enjoy, part of it is because I have a need for a concrete, solid platform of understanding from which to base things. In fandom, the more solid your engagement with the source, the more solid your engagement with the fandom. (Um. In my head, anyway. I know other people might do it differently, but I ... don't get that, and don't know how it works).
- I write a fic. What fic and about what characters depends on the fandom, I've mused about my love of single characters and using them as gateways into fandoms before. But. I don't enter fandoms by discussing them with people, I don't enter them by commenting on other people's fic, I almost uniformly enter fandoms by writing my own. (I have babbled about various sources without writing fic for them, and discussed them cheerfully if people on my f-list or whatever happened to have seen them, but I'm not sure that's quite the same thing).
- I pick a comm and post the fic. Usually the most general comm I can find for the fandom, at least those that have centralised comms. If the fandom is too small for comms, I mostly just post the fic on my own journal and never really engage as such with the fandom itself. Since AO3, that might be shifting a bit, but it still depends on people from that fandom finding my fic the same way LJ does, so not really.
- If the fic goes down well and I haven't committed a gross error in character interpretation or whatever (as far as I can remember, it only happened the once, but it sort of stuck), I write more fic for that fandom. I reply to comments on my fic, I discuss things about the canon in the comments to fic. Sometimes as a result of this, people will friend me (at least, I'm presuming it's a result of this). Sometimes I will friend them back. I post discussions and memes and burble posts back on my own journal, and sometimes people read them, and I get talking to them.
The thing that's important about this? I never, ever friend first. I presume people have noticed this. I don't friend people until after they've friended me. I'm pretty sure my entire flist is made up of people who are braver than me and friended me first, presumably because something I said or wrote interested them.
I also don't tend to comment outside my own space. I presume people have noticed that too. I do sometimes, and I like to think I'm getting better about it, but I tend to limit my comments to my own posts and those of friends. I'm trying to comment more on other people's fic, but it's still pretty rare. (AO3 kudos helped a bunch. I think I've commented more in the past year or so than I did in the two years before it). I just ... do not like advancing opinions or contacting people outside my own space.
Once inside a fandom, if there's something I want to discuss, 9 times out of 10, I write a fic about it, and discuss stuff in the comments. Sometimes I write a meta, but that happens much less often. A fic, you see, is a narrative based on a narrative, and people presume it has the biases of a narrative. A fic is a subjective piece of work: this is what I see in the canon, or this is what I see a bit of and am magnifying for the sake of this story, or this is what I would like to see and isn't directly contradicted by canon, or this is what I would like to see and screw the canon anyway, what are AUs for? Whereas a meta is much less subjective. A fic carries the burden of authorial intent and audience interpretation and allows for divergence between the two. Meta is just stating your opinion, saying "This is what is in the text as I understand it, and I dare you all to tell me different". And, um. That is not a dare I'm usually comfortable making.
And see, that's for much the same reason as I don't usually comment on other people's stuff or friend people first. The reason basically being that socially, I am an idiot, and I'm coming to the party with the presumption that in a social situation I will most likely be the one in the wrong.
To pause here: this isn't whining, and it isn't accusing anybody. I mean that statistically speaking, in pretty much most of my RL interactions, I have been in the wrong. At least as far as impinging outwards on other people goes. When they're impinging in on me, I'm much more confident and capable of laying boundaries. When socially dealing with stuff that is about me, I can make decisions better, because I'm the one with the facts of my personal state. I have a concrete platform to move from. But when it comes to social situations that are about others, I can't do that very well at all. I have trouble judging what's too far, what's not far enough, what's even in the right emotional ballpark for what we're dealing with. I don't know when I'm being forward, I don't know when I'm being an ice-cold bitch, I don't know how to find the line between. The boundaries are invisible, so I keep essentially tripping over them in one direction or the other, and then people tend to get mad at me, or I end up hurting someone.
And this basically transfers over to my interaction with fandom. I prefer, if at all possible, to create a space that is about me, something that I have made or done that can form the platform for the interaction. If I want to have a discussion, I write a fic and see what people take out of it. If I want to persuade people towards a point of view, I write a story espousing it, and see if they take it as intended, or if there was something I overlooked or misinterpreted. There's a cushion with fic, because it posits slightly different circumstances from canon, so you can cushion questions in hypotheticals like 'maybe he didn't do that in canon, but if the circumstances had been these, do you think he might have?'. I've had some fascinating discussions with people coming out of fic. (For example, my JARVIS series was basically one long dialogue with fandom on AI in fiction, and a whole bunch of people responded in a variety of ways - I could have done that with meta, and did the once, but I don't think it would have worked out near so well).
However, it does mean that my awareness of wider social movements within fandom comes almost purely from how they've directly impinged on me and my work. Some of it comes from the fact that I lurk around fandom discussions too, that I read a lot of meta even if I don't engage with it, and some of it does come from reading other people's fic, but a lot of the time my awareness of, oh, Fury being viewed as the bad guy in some places, and Loki being the woobie in others, and Natasha often being written as a robot ... these things come to me via comments on my stories, most often.
It just ... there are a range of consequences for how I engage with people in fandom. Things like how if I get writers block I suddenly feel like my social interaction has been cut in half, because to me most of my interaction, my conversation, comes from what I'm writing. Things like how I don't know how to answer a lot of questions relating to my opinions on wider fandom trends, mostly because I haven't seen them enough in person to comment with assurance on them. Things like how I don't like moving around platforms, because the one I have is the one that's kept me safe and functional for years now (I've partially moved to AO3, and have had a lot of conversations there, but I'm also still pretty firmly planted in LJ at the same time). Things like how I can't really follow friends outside of fandom platforms, so if we part fandoms we often part personally as well, though some of you have heroically stuck around. Things like how I'm sort of all take and no give, unless you're willing to accept fic as the 'give'. Things like how I prefer to bring people back to mine rather than go to theirs, with the exception of official spaces like fic comms (and even then, mostly linking back to mine).
This isn't universal, of course. I write a lot of personal stuff that isn't directly fandom related, and I've had a lot of conversations with friends and sometimes random strangers on all sorts of topics. Sometimes I put things out there in the form of meta rather than fic, sometimes if I feel strongly enough I'll go argue my case in someone else's field of play. But the core of my circle, I think, comes from fandoms, and they usually come from interactions started by fic. And the bulk of my interactions happen in my own space.
Usually I don't notice this. Unless, as I said, I'm getting writers block and suddenly feel lonely, because I'm suddenly realising how much of my interaction with people is dependant on having written a fic. Or unless I'm reading wider fandom debates, and realising ... how much I'm actually not getting about them?
Things like BNFs and fic drives and fic exchanges and SJW (huh?) and big screaming rows on issues I hadn't realised fandom even involved in the first place. I've dipped my toe into wider debates before, and frankly practically jumped back to the relative safety of my own space in fairly short order. In part because way too many other people being way too invested, in part because my own behaviour when panicky tends to be less than sterling (I have a tendency to lock solid and simply hammer my opinion until the other person goes away, which is not good behaviour and causes way too much pain).
There are whole areas of fandom that, while I'm aware they exist, I don't understand how they function. The meta axis of fandom, the social justice axis of fandom, those tend to mean 'big ongoing rows to be avoided at all costs' to me. Which might seem strange, since I tend to write a fair bit of meta myself, and some of it, like this, tends to be about exactly those things. But ... I think I've written exactly one other post that was directly about engaging with that sort of fandom, and to be honest I locked it down almost immediately and didn't go back. (*crossing fingers this one doesn't end the same*) I just ... am not capable of dealing with interpersonal boundaries in an environment of elevated emotions. Um. At all. So I usually don't.
I also don't get the whole social exchange, clique-y, BNF type of fandom interaction that some people describe? And this one isn't like the other one, where I'm aware and just not good at it, this one I actually just don't see. I mean, as far as I know it could be happening right in front of me, I just genuinely don't notice it. Someone had to explain the concept of a BNF to me, and ... uh. How do you know? If the person you're talking to is one, I mean. How do you identify a fandom clique? (I have this problem in RL, too. I could identify broad groups and alliances around me, but heck if I knew how they worked or how they interacted on the edges, or why one group was different from another beyond the fact that it had -mostly- different people in it). I mean ... does Avengers fandom have BNFs? Does it have cliques? Am I in one? (Legit question, clusters of friends or friendly people who gather around certain characters or pairs, are they cliques? Is that the same thing?)
And I think most of this, this lack of understanding on my part, is directly related to how I engage with fandom. Because I'm sticking mostly to my own space and using relatively neutral tools (fic) to engage with people around me, I think I'm just actually not seeing the other modes of interaction that people use. For me, unless it happens in my space, I don't see it. Unless someone comes and tells me what's going on, I won't know it exists.
As far as I know, no fic of mine has really ended up bumping into any of the larger debates. Well, some of them get comments like "Yay, a Fury who isn't a raging bastard, thanks for the change" or "I never thought about JARVIS like that" or "I don't see Natasha that way, but the fic wasn't bad", but the big mad scary things where everyone dogpiles in and the fic gets linked everywhere and people scream at it and other people defend it, that's never happened (I've only seen that happen once, back in SPN fandom, and I was well away from it personally). Meta is more likely to attract it, which is why ... Um, why I'm more likely to write but not post meta, more likely to take down meta I do post, more likely to be slow to respond or not respond at all. Basically, anything that runs the risk of attracting that kind of attention, I take back down and go back to the source. Shut up and listen until I've a better idea what's going on.
But even aside from that. Smaller things, like questions asked in memes like "Do you think such-a-fandom is welcoming?" or "What do you think of the portrayal of this character in fandom?". Um. I don't know? And it's not that I'm not reading other fic (though sometimes my main writing fandom isn't the same as my main reading fandom at a given point in time), it's that I've no idea how you make that kind of judgement. I mean, I could say a thing based on my experience, but how do I know that my experience would match that person's if they went and engaged with that fandom? My experience has several distinct artificial boundaries constructed by the way I do things, I've no idea what someone else would encounter if they engaged based on their way of doing things, with their opinions and their methods. So how to I make that judgement? And the character, the portrayal thing ... again, while I might read an individual fic that takes someone a certain way, and while I get comments that indicate to me that there are wider trends of portrayal, usually I don't read nearly enough fic to make what I would consider an informed judgement, and I can't judge fandom numbers well enough to tell if something's actually popular or just particularly vocal.
*shakes head* Okay. Anyway. Moving back off that and onto the main point once again.
I engage with fandom in a particular way, a way that is basically designed to maximise my sense of safety among the people I meet here. Because I have such problems with social situations both in fandom and other areas of life, my fandom interaction is designed to control the social elements as much as possible in my favour. Which is ... a horribly cold thing to say, now that I see it typed out, but ... there you go. I prefer to create a controlled space that is about me, and then engage outwards from that along relatively neutral, safe lines of communication, such as fic. Because I can write a fair amount of reasonably decent fic fairly quickly, I can engage with reasonable quality and quantity across a few areas of fandom, creating spaces for discussion of characters and themes and issues that interest or are important to me. Moving out from that again (or in, depending on how you interpret it), I can discuss things more personally with people in meta or personal posts once they're willing to come to my space. Usually, after a certain amount of time, I get braver with individual people and start moving into their spaces, talking about their issues and their posts, their stories. (I'm still bad at this, I'm guessing people have noticed that). Since moving to AO3 and the kudos system, I'm getting slightly braver about talking to people I don't know about their stories, though possibly not by much.
Overall, it's probably an incredibly selfish way to go about things. All take and no give, as I said, unless fic is enough of a 'give' for you. I'm essentially trying to keep myself safe while at the same time engaging with a lot of issues and topics and people that otherwise I just wouldn't meet or dare interact with, and consequently I tend to keep my means of interaction fairly limited. As much because I don't know how to do anything else as because I'm scared to do anything else.
And, um. Sometimes I get comments, that people were nervous about talking to me at first, or that they thought I was good writer and didn't know if they should talk to me, and I just ... I know I should get that, but seriously, the first thing that comes into my head is always: "You're nervous of me? But ... But I'm pretty much always wrong, and seriously, everybody terrifies me, and I'm not an authority on anything, and if you argue with me I'm liable to crumple. Seriously? You're nervous of me?"
It's just ... every time I post a fic, until I get the first comment or kudo or reaction, I'm basically paralysed with terror that I've done something wrong or said something stupid or why did I think Tony would do that or shit, did I make Clint out to be a bastard or ... Or worse, did I tread on something actually important, did I say something that hurt someone, did I say something that makes someone out to be less than what they are, did I say something that disses real issues, or ...
I mean, fic is my primary means of communication. I say stuff in fic that is way too personal or way too loaded to ever say without the cushion of a narrative and familiar characters to ease people into it, and even then I'm shit-scared that what I've written will reveal exactly how horrible a person I am behind it. And that's fic. That's the stuff I actually feel relatively safe writing. Meta? Personal posts, unless they're directly about me? Those are liable to give me a genuine panic attack (as, um, people may have noticed recently).
I, uh. I don't like people. Or, no. I love them, I love the idea of them, they're the most beautiful things I've ever seen, but gods do I hate interacting with them. I hate trying to judge things I can't see, I hate trying to understand the inner lives of people with next to no interpretable data, I hate the sensation of being wrong and having hurt someone. There are times I feel like the goddamn Hulk, clumsily reaching outwards and smashing everything in range just because subtlety is basically beyond me.
Fandom gives me a way to operate, a way to work around that, that, while extremely limited in some ways, lets me actually engage with a lot of things that I otherwise wouldn't engage with. But I need to keep it within certain parametres. I need to keep it working a certain way. I ... I think I'm getting braver about things, or some things anyway, if very, very slowly, but I also tend to genuinely flip out and panic at things I don't know how to deal with and then retreat from them, so mostly I tend to stick to certain limits and push them only rarely.
(I've also noticed that I tend to push them when I'm feeling down generally, which makes me wonder if ... if it's my version of going out to start a fight because I feel bad, or if it's my version of self-harm in some ways, deliberately seeking out situations in which I know I'm liable to panic because I'm already in a slump. I really really hope that's not the case, but I've wondered sometimes. I tend to write argumentative meta when I'm down, possibly just to have something concrete to panic about. Or possible to have an excuse to fight something in a way I can just turn off later, though even if I turn off the computer I've never successfully managed to turn off the panic internally. Which is a bad reason to do anything, and another reason I'm reluctant to post things like that, in case I'm doing it for the wrong reasons.)
I've been thinking about this lately, because I've been reading around fandom discussions in ways I haven't in a long time, and I've been noticing bits of my behaviour because of the difference between AO3 and LJ, and because ... well, because I've been in a slump writing-wise -_-; So, yes, possibly I'm writing this for the wrong reasons as per above, but I think my basic philosophy is: "Do what you have to, but at least explain yourself. The more people know about what you're doing and why, the better they can judge how best to react to it." Um. This is the hope, anyway?
So. Um. This is the
icarus_chained model of fandom interaction. Ah. Take from it what you will? And I apologise to those I've treated badly because of it. *ducks* My apologies.