Current mood:	cynical
Current music:	Maurissa Tancharoen - Nobody's Asian in the Movies
Entry tags:	fandom, metameta, rage

Sorry, I keep forgetting to finish that meme
I glanced at Luminosity (sockkpuppett)'s post from the other day (screencap here).

Now, ms_treesap has a great post about it, and the_wanlorn similarly is awesome about pointing out the ridiculous assumptions contained within the post.

I'd like to make one more, rather less ragey note about the ridiculousness of Luminosity's failure to understand fandom:

I'm going to say that I don't really understand it.

I mean, that's not to say I haven't done my fair share of bitching about fandom and how I hate the direction it's going, but I usually also turn around and find something else to do in fandom. I got to the point where I hated Wincest? amchara founded spn_summerlove, and I had a source for fic about the women on SPN. When I get tired of the racism and sexism meta I go looking for porn. And honestly, regardless of how much racism and sexism meta there is, it's not hard to find. When I do my relatively rare meta-ing, I write about what interests me. Maybe I'm not as pressured because my many fandom friends are scattered over multiple fandoms, so I don't worry about the crushing weight of fandom dislike (and also, I enjoy meta-ing about race and gender), but if I feel like meta-ing about Hardison's awful accent in The Ice Man Job, I don't think anyone's going to yell at me for disrespecting him for being Black. And if I meta about the fact it does seem like Leverage sidelines the character and that might be because he's Black-- that also is okay. People might disagree, people might agree, people might very well fucking ignore it, but I do it because the topic is there and it's something I want to talk about, not because this is work for me. And you know what? If people ignore it, they're free to.

And therein lies the reason the post rubbed me wrong-- Wanlorn and Tree are totally correct in pointing out how utterly privileged Luminosity was being, but even those of who do try and keep up with the *fails get tired after a while. Shocking, I know, but it burns a person out. But this is fucking fandom. When you get tired, there are other places for you to go and recharge-- I can think of several communities created by FoC for FoC so they could be fannish and recharge and just have fun. I can think of plenty of non-political fic and meta communities that anyone can join and recharge.

Not only was she being privileged in that she refused to understand why so many people have gotten politicized (and, yes, Luminosity, fandom used to be political just by being-- we've grown out of that and now we have to work at keeping our subversive cred, sorry), but she was being privileged by dismissing out of hand the idea that this stuff tires EVERYONE out. And that's why only part of fandom is extremely vocal about it. No one's going to begrudge you ignoring some of it and recharging your batteries. We will begrudge you acting like we're trying to make life hard for you.

Go find a fucking fic community and don't act like a goddamn martyr.