I try not to talk about this stuff on main v much anymore besides occasional clowning on weirdos but like. people who spend all their time crying about evil "fandom police" are interesting bc theyre also v much policing fandom and gatekeeping what kind of Discourse is acceptable

bro you're still constructing and enforcing norms and punishing people who don't conform to those norms bro. it's all policing, babey

by policing what kinds of criticisms fans are allowed to make you're ultimately policing how people are allowed to engage with fandom, transformative works, and the source content. You're creating rules for who is or isn't allowed to be fannish and then enforcing those rules

I'm sorry but fandom isn't just your little circle jerk bubble of friends mourning the good old livejournal days. We're all members of transformative Fandom and you're going to have to accept that. Never mind that the kind of discourse y'all shut out isn't a recent invention

The "problematic" fandom content debate we've been hashing out on social media for the last two years has been a point of contention and debate since at least the 90s. Here's some commentary from lesbians fed up with straight women fic writers who fetishize gay men (1/3)

(2/3)

(3/3)

Source is "Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity", one of the seminal collections of articles in fandom studies

LGBT people/poc/etc finding your work problematic or choosing to analyze transformative works through a wider political lens isnt some grand, recent terf/Puritan/Republican/kids-these-days conspiracy. Sometimes other fans just disagree with you, man. As they have done for decades