He spends all afternoon hunting the moon
I don't feel it should be a controversial opinion that not all favorite characters are figures of identification or representation nor should they be treated as such, but I finally managed to articulate to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch why the expectation to the contrary bothers me so much, aside from the normal number of times since childhood that I have had to fend off people taking statements of narrative interest as a kind of personality quiz: especially these days, it feels like an extension of personal branding, this idea that your clothes and your reading material and your writing music are all advertisements of your ethics or politics or allegiances—assertions, not even reflections, of your identity—and everything you like must be recognizable as a you sort of thing as opposed to sometimes just the most interesting writing in the book or acting on the screen. Yes, everything tells you something about a person. No, it's not the TAT, and it's especially not the weighing of the heart. I hadn't had any dust-ups with purity culture in fandom lately, so I wasn't sure why the subject was on my mind, but it turns out that today was the twenty-year anniversary of my beginning to keep a list of favorite characters in literature and media whenever I ran across them. I did it to find out if there were patterns. I wondered at the time if my tastes would have changed entirely in twenty years. The answer turns out to be a relatively solid "no," although it interests me that in some cases I could still produce a short essay on the character in question and in others I barely remember their source material or why they appealed to me. More aggravatingly, it reminded me how much I miss live theater. Some of these people I can revisit, but that opera from the Yale School of Music in 2005 or that play from the Trinity Rep in 2009 are memory alone. I can tell from the dates when I started really watching movies.
spatch why the expectation to the contrary bothers me so much, aside from the normal number of times since childhood that I have had to fend off people taking statements of narrative interest as a kind of personality quiz: especially these days, it feels like an extension of personal branding, this idea that your clothes and your reading material and your writing music are all advertisements of your ethics or politics or allegiances—assertions, not even reflections, of your identity—and everything you like must be recognizable as a you sort of thing as opposed to sometimes just the most interesting writing in the book or acting on the screen. Yes, everything tells you something about a person. No, it's not the TAT, and it's especially not the weighing of the heart. I hadn't had any dust-ups with purity culture in fandom lately, so I wasn't sure why the subject was on my mind, but it turns out that today was the twenty-year anniversary of my beginning to keep a list of favorite characters in literature and media whenever I ran across them. I did it to find out if there were patterns. I wondered at the time if my tastes would have changed entirely in twenty years. The answer turns out to be a relatively solid "no," although it interests me that in some cases I could still produce a short essay on the character in question and in others I barely remember their source material or why they appealed to me. More aggravatingly, it reminded me how much I miss live theater. Some of these people I can revisit, but that opera from the Yale School of Music in 2005 or that play from the Trinity Rep in 2009 are memory alone. I can tell from the dates when I started really watching movies.
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It is such a frustrating trend!
And that list sounds fascinating - what a good idea to have had & kept. ♥
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I feel it's worsened since I started keeping the list, too. Or maybe I just wasn't in the relevant fandom spaces in 2001 to see how bad it had already gotten.
And that list sounds fascinating - what a good idea to have had & kept.
Thank you! I'm glad I did. I still add to it.
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No, it really wasn't then, not that I could see, either. There was plenty of w*nk as ever, but not that specific kind as a big thing. It seems to be partly to do with sites that work by global tagging - much harder to stay in your own fandom lanes; much easier for people to get annoyed and then to justify that annoyance & acting on it with morality. (But only bad people would ship that/like a villain etc.) I suppose when the next type of site comes along, we'll have a different type of screaming at each other again, but I suspect as long as we have the internet and fandom, we'll have the screaming). Yay?
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Sigh.
I suppose when the next type of site comes along, we'll have a different type of screaming at each other again, but I suspect as long as we have the internet and fandom, we'll have the screaming). Yay?
"We'll always have screaming" is truly not the community motto I strive for!
(I did not in fact make this post thinking particularly about problematic faves, but the overlay of moral panic onto fandom should just catch on fire and disappear, as moral panics in general should.)
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Well, fandom is far too large and disparate to truly be a community; we just make lovely friendships and really great communities within it. Outside, is the rest of fandom & the internet screaming, but I don't really know what anyone can really do about that, other than manage our particular spaces within fandom and platforms as best as we can. (Unless they make us all do video under our real names so that we can see the people we're talking to and be fully accountable and see the consequences of trolling and screaming and spamming and hate, but that would be pretty dreadful too, I think!) But, I mean, fandom was toxic and divided when I found it and it's stayed that way - but platforms like LJ were so much better at being able to avoid it if you wanted (unless you were unlucky) than global tagging sites where everyone's shouting in the same space. The screaming was always there, and you could still here the echoes from afar. :-/
I did not in fact make this post thinking particularly about problematic faves, but the overlay of moral panic onto fandom should just catch on fire and disappear, as moral panics in general should.
Moral panics really really shoul; absolutely.
I'm just watching Game of Thrones finally and everyone's problematic, but in really interesting and compelling ways. And at the same time I'm thinking, well, reblogging stuff is going to be fun, isn't it? (Do I stan for incest, manslaughter, murder, underage, torture etc etc by my choices? :lol)
On the positive side, you reminded me of my tumblr list of faves I'm working on, so I went and made some Seventh Doctor gifs, including this one, which is probably some sort of metaphor for how to deal with this kind of thing in fandom:
And that was a good thing. ♥
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I totally want to hear about the difference!
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I am delighted to have contributed to the creation of this highly relatable gif.
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I also have one for What To Do When You Find Yourself In The Middle of a Ship War:
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Beautiful.
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