lolaraincoat | Because I'm your fan

I set myself up at Greatestjournal a few years ago when LJ was down for a few days. Now at least the fannish half of my f'list here seems to be migrating in that direction, or in many directions really, because LJ has been banning users whose content they don't like (depictions of fictional characters who appear to be under 18 having sex.)

I'm undecided about what to do - stay here but read journals on three or four other sites? move most of my posting over there but keep reading journals here? something else entirely? There's a fan-run not-for-profit journaling site currently in beta-testing, so that will be a good option soon but not yet. But I don't want to lose track of you while I dither. So! If I have you friended here, and you have set yourself up at Greatestjournal, and I haven't yet friended you there, it's because I haven't found you. Please ping me and let me know your username there. And if you're migrating to some other journal but not Greatestjournal, please let me know that as well. I don't want to lose track of you all!

cubby66,

dailyplanet,

mulberryfields,

stillwell,

slit,

t_ktl,

telurian: THIS MEANS YOU.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh yeah, I bet music sites do have very similar problems (though with Stealing From Artists OMG!!! substituted for Endangering Children OMG!!! in the related inflamatory rhetoric.)

The problem with invite-only groups is that they don't work nearly as well for the kinds of fandom where fans aren't there primarily to share copies of existing artworks. People in the kinds of fandom that I hang out in are mostly engaged in legal activities - legal, that is, in most jurisdictions that I know of - in the kinds of communities that thrive with low or no barriers to entry.

But I agree that there will be solutions that work for us; I just wish very much that those solutions included everyone staying on lj, and expect that this won't be the case.

I find that invite-only doesn't work extraordinarily well for music-sharing, either, but it seems to be the way some of the best ones have gone.

I find, personally, that I kind of like the Victorian method of dealing with censorship: adding a subtext that only those in the know will understand. So one can write about the most explicit taboo subjects using keywords that pass completely under the radar of anyone trying to censor it. Probably that already happens to some extent in fandom, and I'm not really suggesting that it should be adopted en masse, but I do think that done skillfully, it can often enhance the erotic charge of a text rather dramatically.

f.y.i.: downloading music for personal use is perfectly legal in Canada; uploading could potentially get one in trouble (contorted legal reasoning, I suppose).

Will you join my "hotmail is evil and sucks ass" club? As the second member, you can be honorary vice-president.

But then, one definition of fanfic is that it is the fiction that makes the subtextual textual - not always or primarily sexual subtexts, either. So that kind of fanfic both depends upon coded sexuality in lit/film/tv/whatever, and can't itself use coding as a strategy.

Totally happy to join in any anti-hotmail activism. I promise to wield my newfound powers responsibly.

*deleted rambling that probably made no sense anyway*

Oh, wait...flash of insight. Whenever Snape and Harry appear together in the books, we know they're actually about to hop in bed with each other...that's what you mean by the coded sexuality in the text, right? To recode it does seem a bit pointless, then. Fanfic makes explicit what J.K. Rowling was, of course, hinting to us all the time. She's the one who had to avoid the censors, otherwise all her smut would never make it into our grubby little hands!

I think I get it now. Ignore some of what I wrote in my other comments.

Hmmm. I guess I should have said that making the subtext into text is ONE of the things that fanfiction does.

In the case of sexually explicit Potterverse fic, well, sometimes (I would say Remus-and-Sirius stories until they were degayed in the last two books) fanfic does exactly that, but sometimes it just comments on the general situation -- there's a whole lot of wand-polishing going on in Rowling's text, if you see what I mean -- or builds on fans' responses to the way that actors like Alan Rickman play the characters.

But also there's just the universal human urge for porn at work here.

*nods*

Yeah, I understand how all this works to a greater extent than I can verbalize here (I'm way out of practice discussing any of this stuff); I have a pretty extensive background in literary theory and, more generally, in thinking about texts and authors and readers, etc.

Still, I was missing a basic point there, and somehow reading your comments and thinking about them finally bonked me over the head about some of the issues here. It's always a good thing when someone, like you for instance, challenges me on what I'm saying so that I'm forced to think more broadly about whatever it is I think I know what I'm talking about, which is sometimes dismayingly next to nothing.

One of the things I love best about fandom as a community of readers, writers, artists, archivists, critics, vidders and so on is that we spend a lot of time, collectively, asking ourselves and each other about what we do when we read/write/etc. as fans. And wow there are some smart and sophisticated thinkers out there working on these questions - you know

cathexys, right? Me, I operate at a much more basic level, but yeah, thinking about these questions is just so much fun.

That's why we're all so nervous about either leaving lj or staying here: we have this community (or set of communities) which we all treasure, and uprooting it would mean losing so much of it ...

I could be wrong about this, so take it with a grain of salt, but my instinct tells me that the censorship issue is being overblown. Fandom is an echo chamber, and those who are immature and/or frustrated and/or drama-seeking are fanning the winds of controversy to the point where any action by lj to censor something which is, after all, obviously controversial is immediately seen as a full-blown attack and the end of the world as we know it. I've seen this happen time and time again in lj, going back over six years, on many different kinds of issues.

I think, too, that there's no real solution. Fandom is an echo chamber; drama happens; people with more perspective still get caught up in it all because, as you've mentioned several times, the danger is a fracturing of the community, and maybe it's better to get caught up in it and move with the rest of the community than to keep one's head and be alone.

From my perspective, as an outsider to fandom, it's easy to come up with simple solutions, all of which simply require: keeping one's head and making small efforts to stay under the radar. In a word: compromise. But of course, it's not really that easy. Fandom isn't filled with outsiders; it's full of insiders who deeply care about what they're trying to do and for whom there are real things at stake.

But maybe people like you and cathexys and others who are, for want of a better way to put it, more grounded in life than some of those shouting "fuck you lj, I'm leaving" can find a way to damper the resonance. Or maybe I'm just thinking that while everyone is exploding, no one is writing or drawing. My guess is that for you (and maybe for many others), sacrificing a bit of the controversial matter would be okay if it meant keeping what's truly important: the community itself. Sex is a lightning rod, but controversial sex is a house without a lightning rod. *scratches head* (That's either clever or an utterly meaningless non sequitur.)

blah blah it's midnight and I'm losing my train of thought. I'm probably not telling you anything you already know; I just find it all frustrating to watch. And time-sucking in an endless-time-suck sort of way. Drama is addictive.

Because I'm your fan

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