it fucking breaks my heart hearing käärijä go “…but i wasn’t the best :(” when he literally scored the second most points EVER in eurovision public vote, second only to ukraine in 2022, like sweetie NO LISTEN, you WERE the best actually
It’s easier to find fandom now. You used to have to–and children, I am going to repeat some advice that was given often in the 90s–
lurk more
This didn’t mean “you can’t speak”. It meant “learn the norms of the community you’re trying to join before you try to actively participate”. But now that geeky things are mainstream and fanfic is easy to stumble over, there aren’t such widespread norms, and people don’t have to spend even two seconds thinking before they open their mouth and shove their whole foot in.
I recently observed the following situation:
1. A fest was started for fans of a certain ship.
2. Fans inquired of the mods what type of content would be permitted in the event - e.g. was underage content allowed? was dark/‘dead dove’ content allowed? (These are highly relevant questions given that one character of the particular pairing is a high school student and the other is a literal thousand-year-old demon. A lot of the fanworks for this ship already tends to include some content that would require a warning on AO3, unless it’s hugely AU, involves a time skip of at least a few years, or is extremely out of character.)
3. The mods said no 'dead dove’, no underage, no rape/non-con.
4. Some fans responded poorly to this - basically pointing out that most canon-compatible works would be banned by these terms.
5. Angry messages go back and forth and in the end the event is cancelled. The mods’ parting message is essentially that they were new to the fandom and thought running this event would be a nice way of joining in, but since people were so mean to them they’re now going to flounce.
Anyway it could all have been avoided if they had lurked more before deciding to jump in and mod an event. They could have taken the temperature of the fandom, realized that it was generally very favourable to darker themes (and perhaps that if they want to avoid underage content they should pick a different pairing entirely). I was absolutely boggled that anyone would think the best way to join a fandom is to immediately mod an event. I mean, I’m very in favour of “do the thing you want to see in the world,” but maybe observe things for at least a couple weeks first, read some fics, talk to some people already in the fandom and see what they think about your idea before you jump in with both feet. Sheesh.
