The fannish conundrum:
Not enough people are fans of this, I have no-one to talk to
vs
So many people love this, and I have so many people to talk to, and all of them are wrong
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Categories of people who actually give an accurate chapter count from the start for how long a story is going to be:
people who have already written the whole thing, they're just posting it a bit at a time
people writing in a style where the chapter count is integral to the structure, such as 5+1
wizards
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This is a shout out to small fandoms.
Yes, there is five of us. No, no one is getting hundreds of kudos or comments.
But we all have immaculate taste and we are vibing. We are sitting in a cosy living room, taking turns reading stories. There is a fireplace and tea and rocking chairs. This is our house and these are our stories, inspired by and created for one another, with utmost love and care. And that's more than enough.
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I opened tumblr today to see an absolutely heartbreaking post, about a person in their 40s feeling ostracized from the community due to their age. This isn't right! People fandoming in their 30s/40s/50s...Those epic sorts still fandoming in their 60s and above... Wise men, women and other who led the way. You shouldn't feel ostracized you should be respected! Sort after for your fandom know how. But either way, I'm sure most of the problem is us 30s + members of community feel a drift in a sea of 20 somethings. 😅 I don't know if this will help, but it may prove there are more fandom elders out there then you think. Hopefully it might help some people to connect. ❤️ So...
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Please don’t use collections to track your reading on AO3!
Someone is going through all my zimbits fics and adding them to a collection called “completed stories I’ve read.” Well, they’re trying to, but I’m denying all their requests.
Yes, ao3 has fixed the thing that made it possible for collection owners to anonymize your fics without your permission, so why do I not want all my fics in these random collections?
Well, imagine if 10% of the people who read my fics tracked their reading via a collection like this. Unlike bookmarks, all the collections a fic is in are listed directly on the fic! The fic I just got a request for has 12000 hits and 1300 kudos. If even 10% of the people who left kudos added it to a collection, every person who reads it would have to scroll through a list of 130 collections to get to the fic!
Please track your reading using bookmarks, not collections!
Bookmarks just add to a number on the fic itself, but if you click that number you’ll see the many ways people use them to track their reading. Some people use tags like “to read,” “read,” “complete,” etc. Other people use bookmark collections, which unlike regular collections don’t get listed on the fic - plus, they don’t require the author’s permission, so you can actually have an accurate list instead of just a list of the fics that got approved!
Whoever you are (I know their ao3 name but since they have no works of their own I have no way to contact them), I am very flattered that you like my stuff enough to go through and read all of it, and I very much appreciate it. But please stop using collections just to track your reading.
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Hi, i'm a newish bl drama watcher from thailand that just started watching thai bls. i'm a bit ashamed to say that for a long time as a gay man living here i've been avoiding bl shows like the plague cuz of both the fandom reputation and of misconception from my yaoi era which i leave far behind. i'm just want to ask how did you got into watching thai bls and what were you preconception before you got into it.
Welcome to the Tumblr side of BL fandom. I'd actually like to also hear more of your experience with yaoi and BL as a gay person growing up in Thailand if you're willing to share.
For me, I'm a Black American from the Gulf Coast (the South). I grew up in a Catholic city and spent my entire adolescence in the closet. Despite having a sense of who I was as early as 8 years old, I kept most of that to myself. Because I didn't talk about it much with people, I found out most information about queer media and queerness from the internet.
I entered BL via queer cinema. I think the first explicitly gay character that I remember from TV was Marco from Degrassi: The Next Generation. There were probably others, and definitely more subtle expressions, but when I think about the oldest gay character I remember and connect to, it's Marco. I don't like counting things like shipping Shawn and Corey on Boy Meets World or Tai and Matt on Digimon for oldest gay characters. Sailor Moon can't even count because we got a censored version of it in America.
I got access to satellite television away from observing eyes around age 16 and started watching content on Logo back when they aired gay content regularly. I watched basically whatever I could late at night. It's how I saw movies like Get Real (1998), Beautiful Thing (1996), and Bent (1997). It's also how I saw Queer as Folk (2000-2005) Noah's Arc (2005-06).
After hitting adulthood I mostly got lost in video games and standard American TV for a while, but I did basically show up to any Gay Event in TV. I appreciate that Stef and Lena from The Fosters (2013-2018) were some of the only TV lesbians to survive the horror of 2016.
I watched a bunch of movies in this time, many of which appear on the Queer Cinema Syllabus I made for a hypothetical Westerner new to BL and queer cinema, which @wen-kexing-apologist has decided to try to complete.
I got into Thai BL in 2018 accidentally. I started seeing gifsets of Kongpob telling Arthit he'll make him his wife passing around Tumblr and was basically like, "Right, what's all this then?"
I had watched a few Thai gay films, mostly notably Love of Siam (2007), Bangkok Love Story (2007), How to Win at Checkers Every Time (2015), and The Blue Hour (2015), but this was the first time I was seeing a long series made available so easily from any Asian country.
From there I got into Make It Right (2016-17) and Love Sick the series (2014). Once I realized that yaoi had moved beyond manga and a few anime adaptations, I went looking for a lot more. I basically haven't left since I started in about 2016 with SOTUS.
There's my basic entry into the genre. I don't think I was as worried about fandom and worries at the time because so much of being a fan of queer cinema was a mostly-private experience for me for so long. I didn't realize that BL fans active in the space would predominantly be women or queers figuring themselves out. It took a while to adjust to that, and also to adjust my expectations of the kinds of queer stories BL distributors were willing to fund.
That being said, I tend to agree with @absolutebl that BL has a useful role in normalization for non-queer audiences who encounter it. I like cheering BL when it does things I think work really well, and also deriding it when I think it does things that are offensive to help nudge the genre and offer my perspective as a gay man.
I like the place we're at right now where there's way too much to watch for any person with other hobbies and responsibilities because it means that people can pick and choose what's to their tastes.
More often than not, I'm probably most-invested in something airing from Japan because of my melancholy nature, but there's so much variety these days that it's okay if you don't like everything. I certainly don't!
I'm glad you joined us on Tumblr and look forward to your thoughts!
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You know what we need to have for fandom events? Fanfic READING exchanges. Like, committing to reading a fic that someone really loves, while they read a fic that YOU really love.
I think this would be a good idea because first of all, it's a LOT easier to do than exchanging WRITING fic (or drawing art) and open to pretty much EVERYONE in fandom as opposed to just people who feel confident sharing their work. Also, it's easy to check the word count for a thing, so it can get matched up to people who have the time and energy available to read things of a particular length.
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