No, it isn't just your fandom...

[rj_anderson]

...people in every fandom, of every kind, everywhere, are insane.

Whenever you get a large group of people together to discuss a common interest, and people are passionately interested and emotionally invested in the thing being discussed, it is absolutely inevitable that irrational behaviour will go on, flamewars will erupt, trolls will emerge, and before long the entire fandom will be dismissed as a bunch of wacked-out morons who seriously need to Get a Life.

The key to surviving in any fandom is to find a group of people who, even if they don't necessarily agree, are at least mature enough to handle disagreement sensibly. This can be difficult if a large percentage of your fandom is hormonally crazed and/or ON CRACK, but with a little searching and effort, it can be done. Then you stick with the sane people and ignore all the other stuff.

See? Much better.

No, this rant was not inspired by HP fandom. Though you can apply it there too if you like.

Comments

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the Sherlock Holmes fandom is also insane. Sure, they might come across all clever and mature and sensible, but you just have to get them going on certain issues, and BOOM.

On the other hand, Holmes/Russell fandom is, I am happy to say, pretty darn cool. :)

[kerravonsen]

On the other hand, Holmes/Russell fandom is, I am happy to say, pretty darn cool.

Maybe theres some sort of critical mass, below which a fandom still stays sane...
Certainly the Tomorrow People fandom is quite small.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Now that is entirely possible -- that size does matter.

[(Anonymous)]

Not signing in by my screen name here, as in my fandom days I was a known partisan on certain issues (though not a big-time debater), and identifying myself would make this seem more "targeted" than I mean it to be. (Maybe some people will guess who I am anyway, but hopefully this will at least blunt the edge of it a bit.)

I agree strongly that fandom size matters. I encountered the online HP fandom in the fall of 1999, a few months after the release of Prisoner of Azkaban, which was the point at which Rowling said that "it just exploded." I was then a participant at a fairly small and tightly-regulated board, and things were quite civil. The same seems to have been true in general of other sites at that time. There was some early-teen immaturity going on, but a well-run site could hold it in check. Also, I recall that it took me (and at least a few other adult HP fans) some careful thought before deciding which side of the R/H vs. H/H question we preferred-- it wasn't the volatile political issue that it later became.

Over the following years-- starting perhaps at the run-up to the GoF release in July 2000, and steadily increasing from there-- things became increasingly unmanageable. With the increase of ship debating, some people enjoyed all-comers, no-holds-barred debates, while others preferred smaller discussions that allowed the assumption of a shared view on the matter. (The ship preferences and debate attitudes also seem to have served as proxies for a host of other issues, including postmodernism and multiculturalism-- which, I think, took the debates to a level beyond the merely literary, and made the discussions all the more sensitive.) Also, as sites became larger, it became more and more difficult to find havens for rational and intelligent discourse.

The group-size issue is discussed quite a bit in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. He uses 150 as the standard group size beyond which the community's character changes, and things have to be organized much differently. (Apparently some companies-- I believe GoreTex is one-- have even set a policy of spinning off a new division any time one reaches 150 employees.) What I think is going on there is that beyond that point, the group can't function on an everybody-knows-everybody basis anymore, and the leaders have to organize things more strictly or else watch it all collapse into chaos. The group becomes "public" in a sense in which it had been "private" before.

(I have spent most of my life in a church of 50-100 people, but in college attended a church of almost 500. The difference was immense. In my small church, we can make decisions on an ad-hoc basis, based on what seems to be best for the people we have; but in the larger church, more things have to be standardized, and the elders end up saying, "we'd like all our ministry leaders to do things this way." Again, the leaders of the larger group have become "public figures," and are forced to conduct themselves as such.)

In the fall of 1999, no one would have spoken of being a "big name" in the HP fandom. By the middle of 2000, a few uberfics had begun to earn that status for their authors, and in the course of time people even started to organize "BNF Deathmatches." Again, people were becoming public figures, with people that they didn't know reading what they wrote and paying attention to it, and sometimes arguing against it.

Some of the best fandom friends I had were "successful" beyond their expectations, and became BNF's somewhat against their will. I know some who struggled between enjoying the fame and regretting its consequences for them; I also know some who attempted to reject it outright, with varying degrees of consistency (the only way to really do it, of course, is to abandon one's online life entirely). There do seem to be some people who relish the feelings of fame and importance; although those for whom I suspect that to be the case, I don't really know personally, and so I can't comment on their motivations with great certainty.

(to be continued, due to post length limit)

[(Anonymous)]

(continued from previous post...)


I don't think, by the way, that Gladwell's 150 figure applies directly to fandoms; I think it's more like 500 to 1000. With a corporation, either you're an employee or you're not, and if you're in, you're in all the way. It's similar with churches; there can be some part-time attenders on the fringes, but usually only a few (except at churches which are well beyond the 150 mark anyway). But in an online community, if you've got 500 members, maybe only 100 will be consistent, "full-time" participants, and so most of the discussions going on will be among people who know each other fairly well. But at some point beyond that (maybe 800?), you start getting more and more people who are active members but not really in touch with the original community's philosophy, and the leadership has to either crack down or allow for a philosophical dilution of the community (neither of which they'll generally find desirable).

But ultimately the same "tipping point" principle is true. When you're having a discussion among people who value their relationship with each other, the discussion will usually be civil and mature (and even the younger members will often learn maturity in that environment). But in a larger community, relationships are valued less (or, more to the point, discussions are conducted more between people who don't mutually value their relationship), and fandom sanity becomes more and more difficult to find.

(Apologies for dumping a two-comment essay on you here; but thanks for triggering some interesting ideas in my mind.)

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting theory and I think there's some validity to it, but I've seen fandoms (or at least, mailing lists/Usenet groups) of 500 members or fewer where all kinds of wacky and immature behaviour occurred on a regular basis, and in many cases it was because the posters knew each other that grudges went so deep and bitterness festered. Whereas my Laurie King mailing list has over 700 members now, people on the list are chatty but fairly independent, and we haven't had anything close to a serious dispute, let alone a flamewar, in literally years.

Maybe it depends on the type of fans who are drawn to certain fandoms. And maybe it also depends on the potential of the fandom in question for disputatiousness. Nobody in Russell fandom argues about shipping, for instance. There is only one ship and there's no question that it's canon. That cuts back on a lot of potential animosity right there...

[verlindahenning.livejournal.com]

Part of the joy of Usenet groups (at least the one that I spent the most time with) was the wacky stuff that went on. I was a regular over at atxf (alt.tv.x-files) since the end of 1998, and made friends for life from that group. We had a reputation for being snarky and cliquish--while there was a lot of snark going on, a lot of it was tongue-in-cheek. We did have a very low tolerance for stupidity--e.g., asking questions covered in our F.A.Q., which was posted regularly in our heyday.

The biggest thing that caused dissension in our group was another explosion of sorts--after the movie "Fight the Future" was released in the summer of 1998. People saw the movie that had not been long-term fans of the show, and the ship/no-ship wars really heated up after the movie came out. It seemed that the level of posting degenerated after the movie--we got more fangirl/fanboy type postings, which greatly annoyed some long-time posters. Then there were the polar opposites of these posters--the ones that treated with the gravitas of a United Nations Security Council meeting, having world-changing implications. Somewhere in between is a fine line--to enjoy a fandom, and not lose your sanity, you have to find the people in that fandom with some balance and perspective.