I found out a bunch of fandom "friends" hated me once While a lot of not nice things were said by people, one of the things that stung the most was a friend saying that he dreaded talking to me on MSN. I never made him message me. He could have taken me off his contacts, could have said he was busy, could have done... anything but have long conversations with me that he apparently hated.
That's really awful! There's a lot of things I prefer about earlier versions of internet fandom, but one thing I don't miss is the cruelty and drama. I think a lot of it was down to people being a lot younger, and people still not really sure how to be a community/friends in online spaces, and the combination of those two things led to a lot of confusion and nastiness. But really, that's an explanation rather than an excuse, and I'm sorry you experienced that.
I agree with you about Twilight, and I think in some ways the level of hate it attracted (and the way some people's entire online life seemed to be hate-reading Twilight and posting about what was wrong with it in exhaustive detail) was the precursor to a lot of the toxicity we see in fandom today, especially the idea that 'problematic' fictional content causes real-world harm, and that fans of said 'problematic' content are bad people who themselves contribute to this real-world harm. At this point, I understand disliking a work of fiction, a character, a ship, a trope or whatever — and not wanting to read/watch such things, or writing a negative review of works in which they appear is entirely justifiable, but I think attacking other fans who do enjoy those things is completely unacceptable. Or devoting the bulk of one's fannish output to complaining about the existence of such things (or complaining that the 'harmful' ships, 'problematic' tropes etc are more popular than the tropes and ships you like), which I also see a lot — why not devote energy instead to engaging with things you enjoy and reccing them to other people?
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That's really awful! There's a lot of things I prefer about earlier versions of internet fandom, but one thing I don't miss is the cruelty and drama. I think a lot of it was down to people being a lot younger, and people still not really sure how to be a community/friends in online spaces, and the combination of those two things led to a lot of confusion and nastiness. But really, that's an explanation rather than an excuse, and I'm sorry you experienced that.
I agree with you about Twilight, and I think in some ways the level of hate it attracted (and the way some people's entire online life seemed to be hate-reading Twilight and posting about what was wrong with it in exhaustive detail) was the precursor to a lot of the toxicity we see in fandom today, especially the idea that 'problematic' fictional content causes real-world harm, and that fans of said 'problematic' content are bad people who themselves contribute to this real-world harm. At this point, I understand disliking a work of fiction, a character, a ship, a trope or whatever — and not wanting to read/watch such things, or writing a negative review of works in which they appear is entirely justifiable, but I think attacking other fans who do enjoy those things is completely unacceptable. Or devoting the bulk of one's fannish output to complaining about the existence of such things (or complaining that the 'harmful' ships, 'problematic' tropes etc are more popular than the tropes and ships you like), which I also see a lot — why not devote energy instead to engaging with things you enjoy and reccing them to other people?