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Strikethrough Revisited
Mar. 11th, 2013 10:21 amDid fandom's actions during and after Strikethrough actually work?
I think that...no...not as much as we hoped.
I think we put a *dent* in Livejournal's reputation. They kind of ended up looking like unscrupulous, underhanded, misguided bullies who run their organization poorly. And it's clearly not the place it once was- but that could also be attributed to the rise of Facebook and Pinterest and Tumblr. Those sites are better for what most people really use internet social networking for- and it's not to post long stories about other people's characters semi anonymously. They want to post pictures and memes without having to do too much HTML, and they want to keep in contact with relatives, high school/college classmates and new friends without necessarily having to let those people into their private spaces. Or they want to look professional and reach an audience that isn't inclined to go on LJ (like a professional writer acquaintance of mine who left LJ because it was a "ghetto"). The audience they (LJ) thought they wanted was an audience that ultimately turned out to have little use for the LJ platform.
But all the protests also called attention to fandom's erotica writers in a way that was not beneficial at all. I think people thought that if the world just understood our position, they'd be on our side. And, a lot of the world wasn't.
1) What felt like a complete apocalypse to fandom's erotica writers was barely a blip on the radar in the non fannish parts of Livejournal. Additionally, many fen who did not write Harry Potter slash (or any slash) studiously pretended the whole thing wasn't happening.
2) What we do is very weird and it didn't do us any favors to try and get sympathy. Most of the world sees something bizarre and pathetic about adults who like to consume fantasy/sci fi in the first place, judges even harder those who actually care. They judge even harder those who incorporate costumes, research, or intense discussion of it, and even *harder* those who write fan fiction. Erotic fan fiction is twice the butt of the jokes regular fanfic is- erotic fan fiction about a story a lot of people erroneously think is only for children and therefore its main characters must be, perpetually, underage, well...
If you have to argue "But I'm not a pedophile!" you're already in an argument you can't win. Trying to fight it with logic and facts is pretty pointless. Yeah, it turned out that Warriors for Innocence were not at all innocent, and most people did think LJ was handling the whole thing incredibly badly, but there was sizeable mocking of Harry Potter slash writers at the same time.
People forgot that what we do is extremely weird and controversial. And it's like, "No, you forgot what people out there are really like".
3) A lot of the people who loudly claimed that they were going to leave, didn't. Nobody in fandom is as brave or principled as they claim to be (which isn't much different from everywhere else in the world). Remember those nasty badfic mocking lists that were strongly denounced by so many BNFs? Do you know how many of those same people were members of those lists? Now I know better. Or maybe I don't, because I fell for the whole "we're all leaving LJ FOREVER" thing.
In the end, fandom was not able to make as clean a break with LJ as it claimed it wanted to- too many people didn't move, thus forcing Insanejournal and Dreamwidth users to keep returning to LJ to maintain friendships. No one could just delete their journal and go and staunch LJ users rarely made the effort to read stuff posted on other journal sites. Many of the most popular fandom communities on LJ (like fandom secrets, and fanficrants) are still the most active versions out there, despite their mirrors on IJ and DW and Journalfen and Tumblr. I still use mine! I don't post things there first, I mostly use it as a feed for The Cosmicdance, but I log in just enough to keep the page active and therefore access entries posted by myself or others that are locked and don't exist anywhere else. But nobody really moved to Insanejournal, and while Dreamwidth is certainly going strong, it's definitely much quieter than LJ.
I think that...no...not as much as we hoped.
I think we put a *dent* in Livejournal's reputation. They kind of ended up looking like unscrupulous, underhanded, misguided bullies who run their organization poorly. And it's clearly not the place it once was- but that could also be attributed to the rise of Facebook and Pinterest and Tumblr. Those sites are better for what most people really use internet social networking for- and it's not to post long stories about other people's characters semi anonymously. They want to post pictures and memes without having to do too much HTML, and they want to keep in contact with relatives, high school/college classmates and new friends without necessarily having to let those people into their private spaces. Or they want to look professional and reach an audience that isn't inclined to go on LJ (like a professional writer acquaintance of mine who left LJ because it was a "ghetto"). The audience they (LJ) thought they wanted was an audience that ultimately turned out to have little use for the LJ platform.
But all the protests also called attention to fandom's erotica writers in a way that was not beneficial at all. I think people thought that if the world just understood our position, they'd be on our side. And, a lot of the world wasn't.
1) What felt like a complete apocalypse to fandom's erotica writers was barely a blip on the radar in the non fannish parts of Livejournal. Additionally, many fen who did not write Harry Potter slash (or any slash) studiously pretended the whole thing wasn't happening.
2) What we do is very weird and it didn't do us any favors to try and get sympathy. Most of the world sees something bizarre and pathetic about adults who like to consume fantasy/sci fi in the first place, judges even harder those who actually care. They judge even harder those who incorporate costumes, research, or intense discussion of it, and even *harder* those who write fan fiction. Erotic fan fiction is twice the butt of the jokes regular fanfic is- erotic fan fiction about a story a lot of people erroneously think is only for children and therefore its main characters must be, perpetually, underage, well...
If you have to argue "But I'm not a pedophile!" you're already in an argument you can't win. Trying to fight it with logic and facts is pretty pointless. Yeah, it turned out that Warriors for Innocence were not at all innocent, and most people did think LJ was handling the whole thing incredibly badly, but there was sizeable mocking of Harry Potter slash writers at the same time.
People forgot that what we do is extremely weird and controversial. And it's like, "No, you forgot what people out there are really like".
3) A lot of the people who loudly claimed that they were going to leave, didn't. Nobody in fandom is as brave or principled as they claim to be (which isn't much different from everywhere else in the world). Remember those nasty badfic mocking lists that were strongly denounced by so many BNFs? Do you know how many of those same people were members of those lists? Now I know better. Or maybe I don't, because I fell for the whole "we're all leaving LJ FOREVER" thing.
In the end, fandom was not able to make as clean a break with LJ as it claimed it wanted to- too many people didn't move, thus forcing Insanejournal and Dreamwidth users to keep returning to LJ to maintain friendships. No one could just delete their journal and go and staunch LJ users rarely made the effort to read stuff posted on other journal sites. Many of the most popular fandom communities on LJ (like fandom secrets, and fanficrants) are still the most active versions out there, despite their mirrors on IJ and DW and Journalfen and Tumblr. I still use mine! I don't post things there first, I mostly use it as a feed for The Cosmicdance, but I log in just enough to keep the page active and therefore access entries posted by myself or others that are locked and don't exist anywhere else. But nobody really moved to Insanejournal, and while Dreamwidth is certainly going strong, it's definitely much quieter than LJ.
