Response to Fannish Kerfluffle Du Jour

[kiya]

You see, the internet makes it so easy to produce trivial content like stuff on the internet, so I've only been agonizing over this for days and then when I actually have it drafted stared at it for ages before hitting "post". It's just too easy for people to contribute, I GOT MIMEOGRAPH INKSTAINS ON ME FINGERS.

http://kiyanicoll.com/2019/06/30/i-was-born-to-be-a-fake-fan/

Bonus ha ha the correct icon for this post is the one with the Heinlein quote.

Comments

[sovay]

Response to Fannish Kerfluffle Du Jour

Your first "no shit there I was" fan story is adorable.

[kiya]

A thing Brent Spiner said to me once: "... you really want to give me a cookie, don't you?"

He was so confused, poor dear man.

[keshwyn]

Do I even want to know what this one is? Home improvement plus work ate my week, so I've been pretty out of it.

[kiya]

If you want to check it out, File770 has it: http://file770.com/broken-hearts-and-hugos/

[jenett]

This has me thinking that, intriguingly, the fanzine part of fandom is the part that not only have I never been a part of, but that has been amazingly opaque to me.

I know I know people who do that thing, but where I've had multiple people over the - um, decades - mention specific cons to me, or online spaces for discussion, or podcasts, or websites, and of course many many actual works - no one has *ever* done that to me with fanzines.

And in fact the impression I've gotten is people have their fanzine people and are not actually that interested in including new people in those particular circles. (Which is fine! Adding new people to an ongoing conversation is tricky.)

But it means that centering it as the one true fannish communication feels utterly bizarre to me.

(I mean, I've had substantially more direct conversation about fanzine culture in library school classes and some related professional discussions (in terms of how to deal with collecting them or archival processes) than how to actually participate if I wanted to.)

[kiya]

Well, Ansible. I know Ansible.

Which is part of the point, given that the precipitating incident for this thing is someone going off on Scalzi for breaking Ansible's streak.

[graydon]

Fandom membership is modelled as different things.

Many fandoms are modelled around enthusiasm, but not all; consider the variants where baseball can be "root for the team" or baseball can be "esoteric knowledge".

Fanzine fandom is a social inclusion through esoteric knowledge thing, it's a feature (to its participants) that it's closed because belonging is being defined in the American by-exclusion (we know who we are not!) way, and they're mostly sorta actively anti-enthusiasm because most enthusiasms are outwith the defining esoteric knowledge.

The overlap between fanzine fandoms and con-running fandoms has done a lot of harm.