Fandom thoughts, continued

On the evolution of fandom in general, Livejournal, and a bit on Naruto in particular (somewhat a continuation of the previous post, and a response to Loren's comment- which I do mostly agree with). Beware of enormous lurking parentheticals; they have teeth, and very little to do with anything.

I should clarify what I meant by my comments on the general move to Livejournal and other blogging mediums. Eight years ago, you'd have to go searching through fic archives to find a pairing or a genre you wanted to read; if you were lucky, your favorite author would have her own website or archive, and you could rely on link exchanges to lead you to other things within your scope of interest. But that was tedius and often frustrating; broken links and un-navigable or ugly layouts were a definite problem. If you wanted discussion or interaction, you joined a mailing list or a message board that may or may not have had an archive or personal site as a counterpart.

Now, you can find dozens of livejournal communities that serve the same purpose those message boards and mailinglists did- and most things are public for anyone to see, whether they belong to the community or not. This is what I meant by encouraging mob mentality; everyone can join in. There's a transparency of information that wasn't there years ago, when fandom was spread out and difficult to navigate.

It's not about your link exchange and your personal website with its mini-library of fics and your personal bio and your guestbook, floating out in the middle of nowhere. It's about the community of your friends' list. Suddenly your favorite authors are more than a few sentences in their message board profiles; they have lives and can be present in more than just a few scattered fic archives. There is more people to people interaction in fandom now, because it's easier to find a person behind a fic or an essay. It's easier to give and receive feedback, and much easier to start up spontaneous conversations. Things are as much about the people as they are about the source material- and that's not a bad thing, at all- in many ways it's better, and in many ways it's just different. It certainly makes life easier for those of us who are socially retarded, lazy, or bad at html.

Livejournal does segregate fandom; if you don't feel like reading het or slash or gen or what-have-you, you can just avoid the communities or authors that write that sort of thing. You don't have to sift through large archives anymore (though I suppose fanfiction.net has become such an institution that there will always be a large, poorly organized archive to search through; that's kind of comforting, really). It simultaneously brings people in from the fringes and decentralizes areas of interest. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, since it's still fairly easy to expand your interests into other genres and whathaveyou. There are still issues with organization and archiving on LJ, of course- the memories feature is notoriously faulty. But that's just a design flaw, and the LJ people are working on it, albeit slowly.

Me? I'm socially retarded and lazy, though I like to think I'm halfway competent when it comes to html. I'm also resistant to change, which is why I still lurk at the fringes of things and keep my fandom journal off LJ. I do appreciate the decentralization of my fandoms and the ease with which I can stalk my favorite authors; I just find the movement towards decentralization a curious thing.

Heh. To use a horrible but fairly apt simile, the move to livejournal is a lot like a fandom equivalent of a migration to the suburbs. And BNFs are the SUV-driving soccer moms instead of the town politicians. *facepalm*

My previous rant was meant to be less on the changing nature of fandom as a concept over time, and more on the change within fandom over time- mostly because I felt like complaining about how difficult it's become to find decent speculative fic in my favorite fandoms. Both aspects of fandom pose interesting questions, though.

(Other things I like to examine- fandom explosions. A year ago- just one year- there were less than seven thousand fics in the Naruto category at ff.net, and less than 300 at aff.net. (A year ago, at the beginning of my obsession with the series, I did actually search through the entirety of the ff.net archives. Several times. It was still possible to do that back then; now, not so much.) Now there are nearly 20,000 and over 1000 respectively. Explosion. And yeah, ninety percent of everything is crud- I believe that's part of the definition- so it's certainly plausible that the fandom explosion has a lot to do with the declining quality of the fandom output, but I do like to think there's more to it than that. The popularity explosion is fascinating in and of itself. Naruto isn't unique in this, though. Yuugioh actually expanded at a similar rate between '03 and '04, and has since doubled in fic count. But there are fundamental differences in not only the series themselves, but in the release of the series to the non-Japanese market. (Both are distinctly shounen series, but both represent different kinds of shounen-ness, which is an interesting thing in and of itself.) Of course, I neither know nor care about the inner workings of the Yuugioh fandom; I might have, had fate not conspired against me in regards to the series. (I ended up missing the show constantly in highschool because of marching band, I didn't have access to the manga, shows that are blatantly built around merchandising irritate me, and the shippers all seemed to suffer from the Chickenwuss syndrome- something that has absolutely nothing to do with the people themselves or with the series, and everything to do with the depth of my hatred for the Seifer/Zell pairing in FFVIII. And god, don't even get me started on FFVIII, or I really will write that Sorceress!Selphie fic where Rinoa turns into Ultimecia a few generations early and all of the orphanage brats are mako junkies.))

It's true that Naruto, as a fandom, doesn't really have any BNFs according to the generally accepted definition of the term- it's outgrown them. This seems happens whenever a fandom gets too large, particularly now that fandoms generally center around livejournal, which contributes to the phasing out of Big Names by segregating people according to their ships, genre preferences, or RP groups. I would say that there were BNFs according to the accepted definition of the term, but all of them have since left the fandom. Kind of like Elvis, and the building. If they hadn't left, the size explosion probably would've rendered them obsolete, anyway.

(I'd go on an aside rant about how well-known authors and BNFs are not automatically good writers, but that's so been done before. I'd probably just end up being mean, anyway, and there's no point in flaming people if they aren't going to hear about it. Sometimes quasi-anonymity does have its drawbacks.)

Someday, perhaps, I'll dig up all my disjunct thoughts on fandom and compile them into something coherent. Perhaps. Until then, you get my meandering, procrastinatory discussions of things that have very little to do with what I ought to be writing right now. I'm sure my roommate is convinced that I'm working hard on my paper, though. And keeping up appearances is so very important. :)

December's Impossible Project (DIP) current score: one for one, Naruto. (Good to know I haven't completely lost interest in the actual series, eh?) Let's see how long I can keep this up.