I was reading Star Trek zines as a preteen being written by people old enough to be my grandparents. I read Harry Potter fan fic in my 20s written by 12 year olds. Fandom has NEVER been singular experience. Many fandoms straddle multiple generations.

Here’s the thing. There are A LOT of white folks in fandom who assume their experience of fandom is universal and thus anything they’ve never seen before or don’t understand MUST BE NEW! Because obviously they know about every corner of fandom, right?

The “new” shit in fandom that lot of these folks are seeing is the result of the Internet giving platforms and visibility to aspects of fandom, and new media to develop fandoms, that white people who are used to dominating fandom have never noticed or cared about.

Some of the more negative aspects of what happens when people gather together and can feed off each other that we see on a large scale on social media. But this shit ALWAYS EXISTED! You just didn’t have the platform to collect all the people who hated a ship or character before.

But those message boards existed. Those aol groups existed. We sat in our bedrooms with friends and had these same conversations.

All the Internet did was give us more access to a wider pool of people who felt the same or liked to stir the pot to a boiling point.

The fandom utopia that a lot of folks like to peddle is either wholesale horse shit or a very rare (likely isolated) exception. Not the rule.

Toxic fandoms is fandom. Racism and sexism. Petty in fighting and bad mouthing, cliches and hierarchies have always existed in fandoms.

If you didn’t ever experience “ship wars” or “kurffles” or other “drama” in your fandoms, it’s likely not because it didn’t exist. But you were part of a privilege group, or followed them, that dominated the discourse in your fandom. Decenters existed. They were just shut out.

One of my favorite fandom anthropology notes is the use of “lemons” in the Twilight fandom.

It’s a Japanese slang popularized in anime fandom. Several of the women I spoke with in the fandom didn’t know the anime roots. They learned it from others in the Twilight fandom.

Fandom wank archive shows that conflict in fandom is far from a new phenomena.

http://www.journalfen.com/users/fandom_wank/

As is Fandom!Secrets, which is still going.

https://fandomsecrets.livejournal.com