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toujours_nigel) wrote2019-01-15 10:24 am
toujours_nigel) wrote2019-01-15 10:24 am
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Snowflake Challenge: Day 14
Day 14: In your own space, talk about what you think the future holds for fandom.
I think fandom needs to be intersectional and federated.cesperanza's entry for today discusses the technical side of this far better than I could, so that, basically.
On the other side, I think fandom is deeply and historically Western, in ways that have led to incredible idiocies in the past (RaceFail, yo). In part this is because the Global South doesn't do fanfic etc in the same ways; in India at least the fannish impulse for films and books mostly discharges itself in the same way as it does for sports: fanclubs and events and cheering and legit temples I kid you not. Every Indian fanwriter/artist I've found online has been middle-class and upwards, and found their way into fandom through a love of Western sources.
(This is not to say that there aren't fanworks being produced in India, but they're not (by and large) locked into fandom in any recognisable fashion. One of the coolest remake-groups functions out of a tiny, ex-industrial town in Maharashtra, where they take Hollywood and Bollywood films and adapt them to their own circumstances: their best-known is a Superman adaptation.)
But I digress. I would love for fandom to be more accessible, and OTW's translation movement is a very good beginning to which I wish I'd contributed more. But also a space for fandom in other cultures and languages, which is one of those things that tumblr was really good for, because you could just go through the tags and not have to know the people involved, because a shared love for Bollywood or Indian history or (worse) mythology doesn't actually indicate that you'll like each other. Which... brings me back to the need for federated fandom, I guess.
I think fandom needs to be intersectional and federated.
cesperanza's entry for today discusses the technical side of this far better than I could, so that, basically.On the other side, I think fandom is deeply and historically Western, in ways that have led to incredible idiocies in the past (RaceFail, yo). In part this is because the Global South doesn't do fanfic etc in the same ways; in India at least the fannish impulse for films and books mostly discharges itself in the same way as it does for sports: fanclubs and events and cheering and legit temples I kid you not. Every Indian fanwriter/artist I've found online has been middle-class and upwards, and found their way into fandom through a love of Western sources.
(This is not to say that there aren't fanworks being produced in India, but they're not (by and large) locked into fandom in any recognisable fashion. One of the coolest remake-groups functions out of a tiny, ex-industrial town in Maharashtra, where they take Hollywood and Bollywood films and adapt them to their own circumstances: their best-known is a Superman adaptation.)
But I digress. I would love for fandom to be more accessible, and OTW's translation movement is a very good beginning to which I wish I'd contributed more. But also a space for fandom in other cultures and languages, which is one of those things that tumblr was really good for, because you could just go through the tags and not have to know the people involved, because a shared love for Bollywood or Indian history or (worse) mythology doesn't actually indicate that you'll like each other. Which... brings me back to the need for federated fandom, I guess.
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But then again, cosplay kind of messes with that divide and it seems like its own grouping. Which I have to admit I have struggled to understand in the past. So maybe we just need a bigger perspective of fandom as a whole, like, a Venn diagram.
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