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silveradeptalisx posited three major branches of fandom - the consumptive, the curative, and the transformative. Reading the comments on the original post is worthwhile, in that there's further explanations and some differences and teasing out that sometimes we work with a language where the right word sometimes also has unintended meanings along with the one we wanted.What I got out of the post, hough, was that it was a succinct way of describing the corrupting influences on those branches. Not that there's a Platonic form of these activities, free from things that can be corrupting, because humans participate in fandom, and humans have chemical feedback mechanisms that have us chasing things that feel good but might not actually be good.
In any case, the three branches are consumptive fandom, curative fandom, and creative (or transformative) fandom.
Consumptive fandom is the kind of fandom that consumes the material created by others, whether that's canon, figurines, fanworks, posters, art, and so forth. As is noted, you generally have to consume something to participate in the fandom, and what you consume (and what you think about it) is going to shape how you see the material and its fans. Canon is usually the jumping-off point for most fans, but sometimes it's fanworks that get someone into a fandom. Possibly even to the exclusion of the canon itself.
Where consumptive fandom gets corrupted is when it starts becomed obsessed with "the most." The kind of people who you want to hire on as a continuity wrangler, because they've seen everything that's been put out, including, yes, that thing that only aired once halfway across the world. They have all the trivia down, they have seen everything there is to see in the fandom. (Except, perhaps, all the fic. But they might be really well-versed in the fic that follows their ship or their idea.) The person that wants everything, not because they want a full set to play with, but because a full set means they have the most (and can sell it off for a good chunk of money later, for some of them). It's pretty hard to be a successful "most"er these days, because any property with even a small whiff of studio support behind it can generate a fiendish amount of content, tie-ins, toys, games, and the like, which would cost a lot of money to get all of it, whether new or through the used markets, amassing the collection anf hoping for the most (and possibly certifiably the most by some authoritative entity that records such.)
If I were going to inject a metaphor of the Seven Dedly Sins, the consumptive fandom gets corrupted by Avarice most easily.
Curative fandom, on the other hand, is about ordering, indexing, making sense of, and providing finding aids to others in the fandom. Creaters of wikis, archives, link-lists, newsletters, recommendations, bookmarks, tags and tagging systems, all of those things are curative, with the idea in mind that dumping a fan into an unorganized heap of everything and then telling them to find their own way is not a productive way of getting and retaining fans. Signposts, walkways, clear labels, and the like are necessary for navigation and for eventually finding the enclave of people who you groove with.
Curative fandom gets corrupted by an obsession with "the best." As noted by
alisx in the comments to the original post, "the best" has at least two meanings to the curative fandom, depending on the orientation of the curator. Some curators believe "the best" is "the most" in the sense of "most comprehensive," for example. Whomever has the greatest amount of knowledge packed into one place is the best, and rather than hiving off and doing something different, everyone should put all their knowledge in the best place, so that it can get even better until it is complete. TVTropes and Memory Alpha and/or Memory Beta are two examples where comprehensivity is prized, even if completeness will be impossible for any trope, because there will always be new works that invoke those tropes or find different ways of interacting with them. If "the best" means "the most", then curative fandom is just a subset of consumptive fandom, and their corruptions stem from the same root.Curation can also mean best in the sense of "the highest quality". Where comprehensivity seeks to include, quality seeks to exclude. Curation of this form has a ready example in the "top [z] list," where, out of all the things that have been consumed, there's a finite number that are of the highest quality, the most exemplary, or otherwise are set apart from the rest. (It could be argued that this, too, is also a "most" obsession, although one that's generally opposed to what we think of as trying to acquire the most.) Of course, one top [z] list is not another, and there can be a fair amount of specialization and combativeness across lists and large amounts of commentary and hurly-burly about the inclusion or exclusion of certain works, ships, pairings, and the like. Some of it is good-natured, some of it is less so, but it's all in pursuit of finding the best for someone so they can have their needs fulfilled.
The corrupting sin of the curative fandom is Pride. Because having and deciding on what constitutes "the best" means having to have at least some confidence in your abilities and judgement as a taste-maker, or in deciding what qualifies as good and what doesn't. And in being willing to share that opinion with others, even if it's just amongst your peer group, rather than, say, the Internet at large. And if people agree with you, then why not go looking for the self-image boosts that come along with people telling you you're right? (And then that can become the echo chamber and/or the anti, if your mission sours from "my list of best" to "my best is the only thing that should be."
Creative fandom are the people who take what's shown in the canon and create new things. Transformative works, transformative fandom. Sometimes what they create is a taking some of the smallest bits, adding a lot of extrapolation, and going from there to create something very knew, but still familiar to people who are versed in the source material. More often than not, if "fandom" is being discussed as a general noun, it's the creative (and maybe curative) division that's being talked about, because the creative division tends to be loud and prolific, both in what they think about whatever just happened and in building responses or stories to go along with or in defiance of what just happened.
The money-in-fandom debate exposes one of the more common sorruption points of the creative fandom. Not the money itself, which is pretty neutral at this point, now that we've figured out that the C&D tends to be pointed at the person who is making large amounts of money off their infingements, but on discussions of privilege, who gets to be in the creative space, who is being shut out, and whether or not that's ultimately beneficial fo the creative division and what should be done to add more people or remove barriers to participation.
I talked a lot about that elsewhere, so I'm not going to rehash it, but in addition to concerns about purity and nonmonetization, creative fandom kind of gets it the worst, in that they often end up with a corrupting obsession that's about being "the best" by measures of "the most". Value can be attached to the work by the amount of hits it has, the number of kudos/likes/comments/bookmarks/recommendations/recommendation lists/"top tens"/book contracts/Patreon supporters it has. (Or any other potential, measurable quantity that can be used to ascribe value.) There's usually differing amounts of value attributed to each of these measures, based on the opinion of the person/people involved about how accurate a valuation that particular measure is, but eventually, the corruption is about chasing the numbers of the highest value. To get the most of the best, whether or a particular thing, or in aggregate, as if each thing contributed a certain amount of points to the overall score.
If I were going to apply a sin to this corruption, it's Envy. Because a lot of the time, that chase for numbers is because of someone else. Some other author has more of the coveted thing, and often, in the opinion of the one whose eyes are turning green, doesn't have the quality that warrants their numbers, and so must be trading on some other thing than good work. (Despite many a time, the reality being something more like random selection of a work or a person onve some arbitrary threshhold of quality has been achieved. Once you're "good enough", at that point it's often a matter of having struck the right chord with an audience.) If it's "just" that they have a bigger audience, then it's very easy to discount their numbers as inauthentic compared to yours. Or to aggressively pursue an audience of your own (or their audience) to prove that when faced with superior material, the reader will very clearly prefer it to whatever trash is being put out Somewhere Over There by Some Other Creator.
I worked with an all-state band in my earlier years. The section director for many years in that band would chastise the improper playing of note or rhythm or other matters on the page either by saying it was the prvince of S.O.B.s (Some Other Bands) or by proclaiming that it was "elementary" to make that mistake (as in, "you're seasoned musicians at this point and shouldn't be making mistakes more suited to elementary students starting to learn their instrument and the notation").
Ship wars, antis, sporkings, the MST3K and so forth all kind of come out of this impulse, that someone else has something more or better than what we have, and we want it for ourselves. And yet, if you asked people about fandom and whether or not the idea of interneicine warfare was a good think, they'd tell you no, for the most part, because fandom is supposed to be a big enough space for everyone to coexist and have norms that say if you don't like what someone is doing in their corner of fandom, you don't read them and you don't direct traffic to them. YKINMK(ATO). And yet...
This is why I talk about them as corruptions, because each of those impulese are fine and often necessary to be a part of fandom. You watch/read/listen/consume, you form opinions, you talk about those opinions with others. Sometimes you even post those opinions to a wider audience and see what they think, too. You tell other stories, the ones that you think are missing or that could have been done better (or with more conscious thought about what went on). Fandom happens, but like a lot of the things we do, it can be hijacked in service of less noble impulses and ideas, and, as we have seen, when ideas that look a lot like how late-stage capitalism try to intrude on fandom and get themselves adopted as the authoritative measures of worth and value, things go badly and resistance happens, because ultimately, it looks like what people think of as fandom is the space where they can set aside those considerations or try to establish a space outside the norms of the world they live in (or even of the worlds they enjoy being in that are outside the worlds they live in). At least for as long as they can, until those forces get too strong and start shutting down the places the fans congregate in or splintering their fan groups into the people who have the means to be able to consume and curate and create and those that don't, proclaiming the former the only true fans and the others worthless.
We all get caught up in the chase here and there, because we want to get something out of our fandom. If there were such a thing as the Platonic Form of fandom, it would be that space where everybody gets the things they're looking for, has a space of their own to participate with, and none of those things have to be mediated or ranked in importance by outside corrupting factors. It would be a nice place to be, I think, where everyone could get what they liked, create what they liked, and not get bit by any of the bugs that demand "more" or "better" as a way of valuing yourself.
But that's just me. One data point in a vast place. I'm pretty sure all of you have different opinions on the matter, so let's have a conversation.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 05:41 am (UTC)I don't know that this is the only problem this end of things has. I once had "enough" for a brief period, when I had a particularly successful story that provided a large number of happy and positive comments to me, and comparison never entered into it. I wasn't happy because the story was better than anybody else's story (quite a few stories were higher rated at the time) it was just...enough.
I mean, I have felt envy, and it is also a problem, but sometimes it doesn't take comparison to bring about deep bitterness about fandom and those around you, it just takes the feeling that you're being ignored, put aside, not seen, not cared for, not read/listened to/watched/followed/whatever. It doesn't even matter if other people are or aren't, exactly. In pony fandom right now mostly people aren't, because it's slowly dying. There's nobody else to envy, they're all suffering it too, but it doesn't make it any less bitter.
(Today may be a bad day for me to opine on the state of things tangential in any way to my writing, though, I am very pessimistic at the moment.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 07:01 am (UTC)Well ...
Date: 2019-02-19 10:32 am (UTC)Re: Well ...
Date: 2019-02-19 05:26 pm (UTC)