[personal] the collapse of fandoms
okay but this post is a rant and personal
which may not apply to some people's experiences.
fandom spaces on social media after COVID have gotten more inhospitable. fandoms used to be more easygoing and more fun (especially small fandoms) back before 2020. I'm going to explain a story about a fandom I liked.
when I was 16, Final Space came out back in 2018 (before covid) and I watched the show, it was a fun show. I was an OK KO fan and a Final Space fan but I was mostly into Final Space.
I started to join the fandom. I had a nice experience with this fandom and I made a lot of friends here, it was a fun fandom. I used to join a final space fan server on discord and they always ask the newcomers what their favorite final space character is to make sure they're not a bot. I answered that I like Avocato, they answered "you're good then" and some people were like "OMG I LOVE HIM TOO" and a lot of positive comments about people's favorite characters (none of them were making fun of the characters and ridiculing people for liking the characters). final space fandom still had drama (i'd say rarely or I just didn't usually engage with fandoms); some people may have a negative experience with any fandom but that's okay; no fandom is perfect.
I used tumblr all the time when I was a teenager, I used to have (mostly) positive experiences with this platform. if you post a fanart of a small IP on this platform, there will always be devoted fans of that IP going around liking and reblogging your stuff (people still do it and I feel bad abandoning tumblr like that).
[THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC JUST STARTED]
during the lockdown, I had no fandom to get into at the time, no new movies, no new shows and nothing is being produced or everything is being delayed because the animators were in quarantine
I was so bored in quarantine and I created a twitter account out of curiosity (worst mistake of my life), I saw really cool artists here from my fandoms but..... THERE'S WORSE FANDOM DRAMA on twitter than tumblr because twitter is such a grim place, so many bad takes and fandom spaces here act like cliques. (I won't go into detail because I might write a whole blog entry about how I dislike the twitter community later). 3 years ago after the pandemic, dreamworks dropped a cool new intro for their movies and there were so many people complaining about it because of "NoStAlGiA" and it's "uncreative" (it was actually very creative and the moon child was giving the characters from their films a high five, it's so funny). twitter is full of grumpy people and partypoopers, whenever someone expresses their happiness and talk about their favorite things, they will go on their qrts/comments, they will bash on them for liking "such a stupid thing".
this image is why you would not like to express your happiness and talk about the things you love on twitter, people here are too negative and find a reason to complain about everything even good stuff because this site will be pushing arguments so the company can gain money. twitter is a terrible place to engage in a fandom, a terrible place to post fanart, there's a lot of fandom elitism, circlejerks and gatekeeping. if you talk about a character you like, tweet something like "this is my comfort character 💕" and there will be some people agreeing with you but there will always be this one random miserable loser out of nowhere to disagree with you, they will either say something like "this character is actually overrated", "that character suckss", "that's nice but the other character from the same IP is better than them" or something with the intention to discourage you and make you look stupid for liking that character instead of ranting about it on their own post.. (there was no need for them to say it to people's faces)
DON'T GET ME STARTED with tiktok... hhoooo boy this damn image got people on tiktok so mad..
the my little pony characters and most anthropomorphic/non-human characters from cartoons have their races/ethnicity unconfirmed therefore people can make headcanons about them for fun but NOOOOOOO..... this is "FoRcEd DiVeRsItY"..
listen here, buddy. THERE'S NO SUCH THINGS AS "FORCED DIVERSITY", HUMANS JUST EXIST. i know tokenism is a thing but most fans don't do it with tokenistic intentions.. OK MOVING ONNNNNN
Tiktok will ruin everything it touches, every fandom it touches, every music it touches and even ruin a subculture like goth, emos, cosplayers, etc. (people have confused goths and cosplayers with "tiktok e-girls")
Tiktok and Twitter are just the worst places to join a fandom
(also including instagram because instagram used to be good before reels and removing the recent posts feature. reel comments are extremely toxic and EVEN RACIST/ABLEIST/MISOGYNISTIC/ETC.)
[ok this post is going to be a long explanation of my experiences with new fandoms but I don't want to make it too long sooooo I'm gonna make a part 2 of this entry later bye!!]
#fandom
#personal
#rant