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This will be a rant. I suspect that people who consider themselves part of "fandom" should probably read it only under advisement that I'm fed up with fandom and shouting mad.
I should know better by now. I should know better than to ever admit that I find fandom frequently a strange, alienating culture full of shit that I don't want to take.
So someone posted a, "I don't understand why anyone on rasseff would be going to DragonCon rather than WorldCon," with undertones of "because, after all, WorldCon is where all the Real Fans go". And I made the stupid mistake of saying, essentially, "The attitude about where the Real Fans go is one of the reasons I don't want to be a fan, or pass for a fan, or what have you."
Got the usual response: That's just one person with one shibboleth, you're overreacting, the whole community isn't like that.
Isn't it?
The word "sci-fi" is in my dialect as a generic, catch-all term for fantasy, science fiction, horror, surrealistic weirdness like Photographing Fairies, all of that stuff. I write sci-fi. The thing I'm near seventy kilowords in on is sci-fi; it's a fantasy set in a nocturnal-functioning world with a couple of different humanoid races, yadda, yadda, yadda. That's what the word means in the culture I grew up with, and so it makes perfect sense to me that The Sci-Fi Channel shows what it shows, which is exactly that.
The first I heard about the objection to the term? A few months after the Sci-Fi Channel was established, I heard rumours that there were some people who were protesting it because they found it derogatory. I came to the conclusion that there are crazy people who'll take offense at the damnedest things, and ignored it. Until I encountered fandom, and discovered that in order to deal politely with people, I had to let them take my words away.
And I've yet to find another word that means "fantasy, science fiction, horror, surrealistic weirdness like Photographing Fairies, all of that stuff" that's comfortable and easy to say. And I've got a fucking complex as fandom perpetuates its memes by abusing the people who don't conform until they're spastic, twitching masses.
Congratulations. One, count me one, spastic, twitching mass.
Now then, the whole "DragonCon isn't real, WorldCon is" thing looks a lot to me like it's the usual "books are real, television and movies aren't really" bigotry under a thin veneer. Fuck that. My childhood is as much full of what's called "media sf" as it was full of books; of afternoons driving to Baltimore listening to WETA broadcasting the radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, sitting in the living room with a bowl of oversalted popcorn and a Dr. Pepper watching Dr. Who with my father and chanting "cheap special effects!" at the rubber monsters, going to West Virginia with my aunt, who had copied all of the original Star Wars movies onto audio tapes and played them in the car are all as much a part of my upbringing as climbing the bookcases to get at the rest of the Cherryh, of having The Lord of the Rings read to me at bedtime, one book at a time, in between Dr. Doolittle (when we needed a break), of my father's periodic sweeping my room for his books that had somehow migrated inwards.
It's all the real stuff, damnit.
A few weeks after I tried to call people on rasseff on this bigotry against "media" stuff, I went downtown; there was going to be an alt.poly get-together because a bunch of people were in town for Arisia. People got to talking, and someone (once she identified me) said, "You know, I was reading that argument you were in, and I've had the same argument about costuming . . . ."
I responded today to someone who mentioned that not liking the categorization of things into legitimate fanac and not-fanac, and who cited CostumeCon as an example. I think that's what it was called; it was a costumer thing, anyway.
And I remember seeing suggestions that the Masquerade be dropped from various conventions that have such a thing, because it's not real fandom. Or indeed the suggestion that the Masquerade at WorldCon could reasonably be held in the same timeslot as the Hugo Awards Ceremony, if there were space for two such large gatherings, because it was reasonable to presume there was no overlap between the costumers and the Real Fen.
I've seen similar stuff about gaming rooms on occasion, though not as virulent as the stuff about costuming.
I can take this pretty easily from the "mainstream". I can't take it from a subgroup that claims to be welcoming of anyone "fannish".
Me, I don't want to go to a WorldCon. A "family reunion" for a family that isn't mine and that doesn't like my kind isn't my idea of fun. DragonCon, hey, I go to DragonCon I get to hang out with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
erispope. Who is family.
I should know better by now. I should know better than to ever admit that I find fandom frequently a strange, alienating culture full of shit that I don't want to take.
So someone posted a, "I don't understand why anyone on rasseff would be going to DragonCon rather than WorldCon," with undertones of "because, after all, WorldCon is where all the Real Fans go". And I made the stupid mistake of saying, essentially, "The attitude about where the Real Fans go is one of the reasons I don't want to be a fan, or pass for a fan, or what have you."
Got the usual response: That's just one person with one shibboleth, you're overreacting, the whole community isn't like that.
Isn't it?
The word "sci-fi" is in my dialect as a generic, catch-all term for fantasy, science fiction, horror, surrealistic weirdness like Photographing Fairies, all of that stuff. I write sci-fi. The thing I'm near seventy kilowords in on is sci-fi; it's a fantasy set in a nocturnal-functioning world with a couple of different humanoid races, yadda, yadda, yadda. That's what the word means in the culture I grew up with, and so it makes perfect sense to me that The Sci-Fi Channel shows what it shows, which is exactly that.
The first I heard about the objection to the term? A few months after the Sci-Fi Channel was established, I heard rumours that there were some people who were protesting it because they found it derogatory. I came to the conclusion that there are crazy people who'll take offense at the damnedest things, and ignored it. Until I encountered fandom, and discovered that in order to deal politely with people, I had to let them take my words away.
And I've yet to find another word that means "fantasy, science fiction, horror, surrealistic weirdness like Photographing Fairies, all of that stuff" that's comfortable and easy to say. And I've got a fucking complex as fandom perpetuates its memes by abusing the people who don't conform until they're spastic, twitching masses.
Congratulations. One, count me one, spastic, twitching mass.
Now then, the whole "DragonCon isn't real, WorldCon is" thing looks a lot to me like it's the usual "books are real, television and movies aren't really" bigotry under a thin veneer. Fuck that. My childhood is as much full of what's called "media sf" as it was full of books; of afternoons driving to Baltimore listening to WETA broadcasting the radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, sitting in the living room with a bowl of oversalted popcorn and a Dr. Pepper watching Dr. Who with my father and chanting "cheap special effects!" at the rubber monsters, going to West Virginia with my aunt, who had copied all of the original Star Wars movies onto audio tapes and played them in the car are all as much a part of my upbringing as climbing the bookcases to get at the rest of the Cherryh, of having The Lord of the Rings read to me at bedtime, one book at a time, in between Dr. Doolittle (when we needed a break), of my father's periodic sweeping my room for his books that had somehow migrated inwards.
It's all the real stuff, damnit.
A few weeks after I tried to call people on rasseff on this bigotry against "media" stuff, I went downtown; there was going to be an alt.poly get-together because a bunch of people were in town for Arisia. People got to talking, and someone (once she identified me) said, "You know, I was reading that argument you were in, and I've had the same argument about costuming . . . ."
I responded today to someone who mentioned that not liking the categorization of things into legitimate fanac and not-fanac, and who cited CostumeCon as an example. I think that's what it was called; it was a costumer thing, anyway.
And I remember seeing suggestions that the Masquerade be dropped from various conventions that have such a thing, because it's not real fandom. Or indeed the suggestion that the Masquerade at WorldCon could reasonably be held in the same timeslot as the Hugo Awards Ceremony, if there were space for two such large gatherings, because it was reasonable to presume there was no overlap between the costumers and the Real Fen.
I've seen similar stuff about gaming rooms on occasion, though not as virulent as the stuff about costuming.
I can take this pretty easily from the "mainstream". I can't take it from a subgroup that claims to be welcoming of anyone "fannish".
Me, I don't want to go to a WorldCon. A "family reunion" for a family that isn't mine and that doesn't like my kind isn't my idea of fun. DragonCon, hey, I go to DragonCon I get to hang out with
erispope. Who is family.Tags:
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I get so . . . frustrated . . . by shit like this. I mean, I like a lot of people in fandom, and there's a lot of interesting conversations there, but it's got no more claim on the "more enlightened" crap than polyamory does. It's full of shibboleths, and treacherous for the outsider, just like any group of human beings with an identification burr.
I've had people tell me that I'm obviously a fan because I posted to rasseff, because That's Fanac, and anyone who said they weren't a fan on rasseff was Lying Or Deluded. If it looks like a duck, y'know? No, I posted to rasseff because I found it interesting there. I don't have any self-identification with fandom, and any time I might find myself comfortable forming one, I get hit in the nose with a shibboleth.
I may go back to rasseff at some point. Right now, I just want to cry.
I'm really not doing so hot at this dealing with humans thing these days.
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People Are People, and sometimes People Are Jackasses. :P I need caffeine.