comment crossposting: aimless rambling on identity & fandom

[a_flyleaf]

See, I know myself better than to make any promises about Getting Active™, but I’ve been lurking around some more active corners of DW today and decided to cosplay an extrovert talk to some strangers. Wanted to crosspost this thought so I wouldn’t lose it, starting with a quote:

Or even name-splitting, which I also see all the time: people who will admit that they have one account for porn, one for gen, and one for exchanges, or some other set of divisions.

[…]

It's such a marketing thing that I always have a bit of a flinch reaction. The impression I get is that their fic is a product, and their name is a brand, and the brand must deliver a promised product and only the promised product with no surprises - on pain of being sued for breach of contract.

[…]

How can you make friends and enjoy your hobby if you're carefully slicing yourself into market segments and pretending to be three different people with singular interests? How can you keep friendships if every time you find a new interest you vanish from the old one?

—krait

Oh man, as someone who’s only been alive for about two decades, this hurts (in a good way, the way it does when someone finally puts a Thing into words, and the Thing is upsetting but now there are words for it) :,D Because I definitely do sense (and felt, very actively, when I used tumblr) this unspoken pressure to Perform Fandom in disjointed segments, which gets very tricky to navigate when those interests overlap.

This is sorta tangential but I think it started innocuously enough; I remember first getting into tumblr c. 2013–14, following a few people who posted stuff I liked, and being bombarded by not only reblogs of $fandom but also fifty other fandoms that I didn’t really care about. So I started seeking out fandom-specific blogs, and fandom blogs so often got way more followers/likes/general engagement than main/catch-all blogs, so it seemed both convenient and beneficial to split interests like that.

But the marketing. The marketinnnng. I wonder if this has something to do with the proliferation of Patreon and other donation platforms, and the trend of budding storyboarders and animators being found by the big studios through their fanwork? Both of these trends (the latter moreso than the former, afaik) basically smash the divide between personal and fannish, right down to legal names and portfolio sites. You don’t want the employers to find your smut, or maybe you’d lose patrons for drawing The Wrong Pairing, so you fragment. Sometimes the accounts are linked—and sometimes they’re not, with any connections deliberately and fastidiously scrubbed.

I dunno, man. There’s probably something else here wrt fandom longevity (people hopping from one trendy thing to the next; getting fannish about older stuff being unheard of in a self-feeding cycle of “there’s no community → so even if new fanwork is made it won’t have that positive feedback loop of a big/active fandom → people tend to make one or two things and leave → no community”) and bigger trends towards small attention spans and instant gratification, but I’ll stop here xD But yeah! Thanks for this comment, it articulated some things I’ve been mulling over really well.