#don't take this as a deification of FW

[callmearcturus]

it’s sort of wild to me that people don’t know things like Racefail or the J2 Haiti thing or other.... wanks.

THAT’S THE THING, i still mentally call them wanks.

I have a lot of reasons I hate tumblr, but one of the big ones is that it’s utterly ahistorical and seems custom built to demolish any ability to learn about the community. You just have to jump in and follow the stream forward with no way to learn context around you.

But back before tumblr, we had.... shit like FW. And I’m certain FW was a busted imperfect system, given how much of it was based on the mockery and voyeurism of drama going on in other fandoms. (I fully admit i was too young and immature to recognize this at the time.) But the one thing it did provide was a wider view of wtf was going on in capital-F Fandom.

Like, I believe if you are in a specific fandom, you tend to know all of the drama within that fandom........... but essentially fucking nothing beyond the garden walls. Like, you have no context, its not coming to you, and Tumblr makes it very hard to get any sense of the wider space. The number of times I’ve explained intricate, minute details of some drama in one of my fandoms to people who had no fucking idea shit was happening! is a lot!

like, for ppl out there who know that.... for example, that Voltron fandom was super wanky..... can you detail any of it? how much do you know about what was happening? because I know nothing! and given the nature of tumblr it’s hard to lend too much weight to someone’s explanations bc how the culture of this site has evolved into this power game.

point being, I know about aja being garbage and about the j2 haiti thing and about the post-katrina racism and about fucking cultish charlatans in LotR fandom who embezzled a fucking convention not because i was in any of those fandoms..... but because of FW. and to my knowledge there is no modern replacement. we’ve become much more stratified and sectioned off from anything but the biggest and most dramatic troubles because, imo, the structure of this fucking terrible blue hellsite. 

hm “the structures and systems we are locked into are antithetical to maintaining a sense of community history” sure is a microcosm of the societal rot, isn’t it. i bet someone who has studied social media could explain “oh well that’s intentional because these metrics” or something.

fucking sigh. my shoulder hurts.

#don't take this as a deification of FW #i literally don't have clear enough recollections of it to say good or ill of it #only that it provided context and made the events in one fandom actually matter to the whole