because this is true for... most industries but fandom drives press and fandom drives trend-chasing content
reality is the battlefield
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https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut
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in reply to @NireBryce's post:
i'd get pilloried but I've been thinking a lot about how, as it stands, the gestalt of "fandom" mostly exists in practice rn to continue to alienate people from the labor that goes into making what they love.
While simultaneously driving things like crunch and total pivots six months before release, and helping divide workers and create narratives that help enforce those divides and rivalries, partially so people feel trapped in their current employer because the other ones hate them or whatever.
you saw this in comics, you saw this in TV, you see it in politics, you see it in computers, you see it in news, you see it in every industry
its really weird how this gets perpetuated in stuff like open source, maybe because people are just so used to that mindset that they bring it with them? I remember being very fandomy about linux before i got as involved with it as I am now. and now i cannot imagine having like. allegiances to specific softwares, the way I did then.
i have seen people fight about python 2 vs python 3 the way they fight about different generations of a TV show / movie IP. like what????????
people who do not know how much work goes into the sub-things they take for granted as whole pieces often push people very hard, being unable to know what they're asking.
and then in a decade or two, they do, and realize. from what I've seen
and yeah python 2 vs 3 is sorta... communities misunderstanding what the fight was, which was mostly that it would take a lot of work to transition to 3 that few companies were willing to pay for until it was absolutely required (or their opponents would have an edge) but it became a fandom fight that ended up making the transition way worse anyway
i feel like fandom as a word has this weird connotation now that i wish for a better way to differentiate between stuff like this vs like, participating in the creative sides of fandom. fan art, fanfic, fan music, that collective engagement in a shared setting, regardless of whether the legal system says some corpo entity owns it or not. like this is also what the furry fandom has basically always been. just wondering if theres other ways to describe that
touhou kinda epitomizes this where huge parts of people interested in touhou, doing touhou art, music, etc. have never actually played the games and never plan to. and ive never really seen a touhou fan go to touhou war over their touhou opinions. (though im sure someone somewhere is lol).
i've seen tohou people act just as badly so I'm not really sure it's an exception, but it does seem like there's better norms there -- or perhaps most of the fights stay in their various pockets, i guess.
but what's most in it's favor is there's no company or projects to really steer, because they're too consumed by the meta. But eventually the meta runs out and people who aren't as creative (not an insult) start pushing for new source material, if similar patterns from elsewhere hold.
the context has been collapsed by people who want to enjoy the aspects of a movement without having to be involved with the other parts, for better and for worse.
but the fandom -- that is, the gestalt of fans of a thing -- has a long tradition that used to self police and has sort of been obliterated with the scaling issues of the internet. I don't know if it can work that way anymore, but I do wish there was more collective responsibility than there has been, a lot of places, but it's hard when opponents can just accuse and disappear and force people to write long pages that won't be listened to. Getting people to build things is very hard when you get shouted down without a critical mass.
which i guess is why it's so critical to be talking about and thinking about this. I certainly don't have much developed thoughts here either, but it doesn't seem worth sitting on those when I see the things crystallize (elaborating; not worried)