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silveradeptThe final challenge for this year asks us to gather our prognostication devices and describe the future.
The virtue of fandom is that it can create communities on just about any platform, regardless of whether the platform was designed for fannish interaction or not. The problem is that because most platforms weren't designed for fannish interaction, it's always a little bit like fitting an ovoid peg into a circular hole. Fans have to decide whether the incongruities are small enough or have robust enough workarounds that they're willing to work with them. The bigger the gathering of fans is, the more likely it is someone's going to run into an unpleasant person (if they're lucky) or someone who believes they shouldn't be in the fandom at all, almost always for spurious or -ist reasons. The more visibly minority a fan is, the more likely they're going to be gatekept and sneered at as a regular part of their fandom experience. Places that have robust tools for curating your experience and/or active moderators bent on improving the experience of everyone often last longer, even if they eventually lose to the advertisers and the people demanding they make money instead of build a community. The world we live in offers us a Faustian pact, where growth, exposure, and monetization are pitted against community and enjoyment as a zero-sum game. The closer to the firehose you get, the more great things there are to discover, and the more terrible things there are that will be thrown at you for "engagement."
There's clearly a line somewhere, and maybe it's different for every medium or how interactive the fans can be with each other, but at some point, any platform or service that goes over that many people present eventually gets caught in the problem of competing interests, or in having enough users on the platform engaging in bad behavior toward other users, intentional or otherwise, that the tools and the moderators aren't enough to keep it contained. Darius Kazemi, on his site extolling the virtues of running your own instance of the Fediverse, suggests that 50 is a soft line of too many and 100 is a hard line. And freely admits that his lines might be too high, rather than too low. The line might be a lot lower on platforms designed to facilitate discovery, or that have algorithms making suggestions about which users might want to interact with each other. (Algorithms that suggest interaction based on "engagement" and are tuned to get people who hate each other to see each other's content should be banned, but they will thrive because ads demand "engagement" and don't care about the quality of the interaction, only that it keeps someone in a place and lets them see more ads.) Dreamwidth may be well over the line, but because Dreamwidth doesn't algorithmically suggest other users, and lacks features that allow for ready content sharing (and the attendant context escape), and offers a very robust set of tools for people to curate their own experience, it's entirely possible that each Dreamwidth account is much more like a Fediverse node than a Tumblr or Twitter account, and therefore we should use individual connections rather than the total number of users.
The Archive of Our Own (AO3) is absolutely over the line, and isn't helped by their social features being an afterthought and bolted-on, rather than designed in from the beginning. (As an Archive, with no social features at all, the limiting factor would be storage space and database efficiency, but with social features, people being jerks to each other inevitably comes with it.) The most wonderful thing about AO3 is also its biggest drawback: there's only one of it. It gets all the benefits of centralization and being the first, and the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) should be lauded for stepping up to the plate and saying that it's an Archive for fans, by fans, and therefore it will never be beholden to advertiser pressure or the corporate requirement to stop talking to each other and buy things, and for fielding a legal team to protect fanworks and their creators and try to carve out sensible exceptions and defenses to infringement claims and copyright laws so that fans can be fans and create fanworks without the worry of legal liability for doing so, within specific parameters. It also deserves criticism for adopting the same kind of "neutrality" about what works it accepts that U.S. public libraries use to defend their choices to purchase and display conspiracy theories and other materials deliberately offensive to communities of their users. And because it is the only thing, and many of the OTW's goals are good and noble things to do, OTW volunteers sometimes also benefits from the halo of vocational awe, where the OTW and its supporters are sometimes held yup on a pedestal and above criticism because of the work the volunteers do. ("Neutrality" and vocational awe are both ably critiqued in Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy by Anastasia Chiu, Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti.) And while otwarchive as a software is available for other people to download and set up on their own servers, it runs into the same problem as the Fediverse (and plenty of other open source software projects) do, where doing it yourself requires money, technical experience, and people expertise in some combination that adds up to a running and functioning website/service that can also moderate the content of the users without burning out the moderators, running out of money to pay the hosting (and the legal people), and keeping the whole thing going as new versions resolve security issues, patch bugs, and introduce new issues and bugs to the system. The influx of people from Twitter to various Fediverse instances has collapsed quite a few of them that could have survived as hobbyist projects with low cost and small traffic, and other ones are struggling with new demands for moderation, blocking, defederation, and having a community grow exponentially in size. As well as some of the legal concerns that might pop up from other users posting content and the various demands that might be made to take it down, from copyright owners to state actors. There's a lot involved in running your own, and many people who want to participate (and who should be able to participate) won't be able to if they have to do it all themselves, or if the only environments available to them are toxic and destructive.
The recent increase in visibility, prominence, and effectiveness of censorious interests in fandom is also contributing mightily to the toxification of spaces. It's not genuine to say that it's a new phenomenon, because the ship wars are and were a thing, and so was Strikethrough, and the ban on female-presenting nipples, and the fact that Kirk/Spock slash was referred to as The Premise, rather than being able to state aloud a headcanon, or at least a reading of the show, that the captain and the First Officer had a romantic relationship with each other. There have always been fans who have visceral reactions to other fans' behaviors, who write meta about how they can't, in good conscience, endorse or support a relationship as it appears in the canon or in popular fanon, and who want to let other fans know about incidents of bias, -ism, abuse of power, or other problematic behaviors by other fans or by creators, actors, and other entities involved in the fandom and the creation of the canon. This is fine (and not in a Fine Dog sort of way.) Where we seem to be having trouble in the current era is distinguishing between those things that are being called out because they represent problems, often systemic problems, in the way we make and consume canon and fanworks that are both unexamined and present barriers to the participation of more fans in fandom, and things that are largely a matter of personal taste and preference adopting and cloaking themselves in the language of calling out systemic unexamined problems with canon, fanon, and fandom.
While it would be a mistake to say that all of fandom is inherently transgressive, the transformative side of fandom certainly has its roots in transgression. Every fanwork is a creator saying "I also have stories to tell of these characters, in addition to / in opposition to the ones that you have told me about them." And the stories that fanworks tell are almost always ones outside what the canon tells, changing the situations, exploring consequences, or imagining meetings that could never happen between entities. Publishing a fanwork is, in some small way, saying "My stories are equally as important as theirs." Because of that transgressive nature, while transformative fandom was smaller and more scattered, there seemed to be a shared understanding of anyone who entered the space that they might see things they were not expecting, or that they wouldn't like, and the thing they should do at that point, unless it was something that was against the rules of the space, was to use the back button and/or stop interacting with the work. From what I've read, this kind of "you are consenting to enter a space where you may see things that are shocking, disturbing, or otherwise uncomfortable to you, and unless what you see is a direct risk to the health and safety of the participants, you agree that what you will do if you see such things is look away" is basically the idea of what consenting adults do when they enter community kink spaces (and they may sign explicit agreements to such as a condition of entry.) As transformative fandom has gotten more popular and allowed to exist more openly (and at least some sections of being not-straight also gained acceptance, visibility, and destigmatization, like being gay), doing fanworks seemed less strongly transgressive and secretive, and then we get more kinds of people participating in fandom (or wanting to be in exclusively gay spaces because of wanting to escape certain segments of society or because they want to engage in objectification without worry). More people! Yay! They brought their own ideas about things! Oh no. And, as we mentioned above, once people realized there was money to be had from fans or from their "engagement," they wanted to make their environments friendly to the people with the money.
So now we have people who want to enjoy fandom and transformative works like other aspects of culture where they're the mainstream. They want stuff they'll enjoy and they don't want to see anything that might suggest they're not the sole arbiters of taste and culture, or that other people are still using transformative fandom as transgressive and to explore situations that haven't yet made it to mainstream acceptance or to make commentary on things that are mainstream and shouldn't be. And they certainly don't want anything happening where children might see it, because Everyone Knows children are completely impressionable and have never had a thought in their head that wasn't planted there by someone. Between the people who never want to be disturbed by anything and the people who want to make sure the money never dries up, were have a whole lot of people who really want fandom to stop being so transgressive. I suspect that for as long as transformative fandom stays mainstreamed and profitable, there will always be those twin forces of monetization and sanitization trying to take away the parts of fandom that are monstrous. (And if fandom falls out of the mainstream, then efforts step up to get rid of it because it's "deviant" and not part of the mainstream, so obscurity doesn't really save fandom in this situation.) It's probably been coined as someone's law (or the Icarus Principle), but I think the closer you situate your fandom space to where others can see you be fannish, the more visibility you get for your activities. Which means positive visibility (more people see your stuff and compliment it) and more negative visibility (more people see your stuff and complain about it.) So the best thing for any fan to find is the spot where they have the amount of negative visibility they can handle, since the positive visibility is almost always a lovely thing to get.
Away from the main burst of the firehose, (and getting back to the original prompt,) there are platforms that contentedly exist at exactly the level they want to be, and other platforms that were (more or less) designed for fannish interaction. Or, as in the case of AO3, designed as a place where someone can stash textual fanworks without worrying that an advertiser purge will destroy them. Because Twitter is the current trash fire, the Fediverse (the confederation of services connected to each other through common protocols like ActivityPub) and Mastodon specifically (a microblogging service visually and conceptually like Twitter using ActivityPub) are getting a lot of attention as possibly the next great place for Twitter fandom to de-camp to. Which is stressing the systems of federation with all the new sign-ups and activity, and also bringing to light and exacerbating several of the structural problems and social conventions of the Fediverse concept and its emphasis on finding the right space or creating your own as the way of solving the problem of toxic people in your spaces. As LiveJournal shifted from a fannish gathering place to an oligarch-owned platform intent on crushing the people using it to organize protests against the government of the Russian Federation, Dreamwidth got started and got popular enough to be sustainable at its current level. Each rumble of bans and threats of collapse from Tumblr and Twitter sent fans looking for an exit strategy, a backup account, or possibly to a new place entirely, deciding they were going to be the rat fleeing the sinking ship before it completely went down. Pillowfort got launched, as did Hive, Counter Social, Cohost, and an entire fleet of new instances at each time that a bigger, more mainstream platform looked like it was in trouble. As big platforms creak, lurch, and shudder, smaller ones grow, sometimes sustainably, sometimes not. And there's places like Neocities and tilde and entire projects dedicated to creating and maintaining webpages and even possibly webrings as the way of showing your fannish affinity, with or without any guestbook capabilities for people to interact with. Big things fracture and reform, and some of the slivers and splinters from the big thing join small things and stay contented there rather than going on to whatever the next big thing is going to be.
So what does this say about the future of fandom? I think that large swaths of fandom are going to continue to move back toward smaller enclaves with firewalls and insulation built into them so as to discourage context escape and to make themselves harder to discover by automated tools or entities looking for new sources of drama and places they can agitate. I think a lot of fandoms and fandom-friendly spaces aren't ever going to get as big as they want, or as small as they want, because there's so much more canon for everyone to experience these days, between broadcast, streaming, and stuff you only experience at convention or online. At the same time, I think fandom, and transformative fandom, isn't going to completely fade into obscurity again, because there are enough fans around who want to be popular, or to monetize their fandom selves, or otherwise need a large audience to see, appreciate, and possibly provide some money for them. And enough people who want to provide things you can buy for fans, or who really appreciate the things that creators make.
What that means, to me, is that fandom, like so many other facets of society, has to be able to confront head-on structural and social criticisms. No fandom is necessarily forbidden to anyone, but some fandoms, thanks to their creators, canons, and the way they use their tropes, are going to need people to be more intentional about their works and how they approach things. Other fandoms will have to set aside the things they've been taught by their society about who should be in front of a camera, behind it, or on the cover of a book, and what a hero or a protagonist looks and acts like. Or what a fanwork creator looks like and how they do their work. It's going to take time and a lot of patience from those of us who have been here before to guide others away from the paths that hurt them and others and to help them understand how to fight the people that want their fandom, all other fandoms, and most of their canons to go away and never return. It's going to be frustrating, because a lot of that it going to seem like shouting into the void and nobody is listening. But being loud and visible and backing things up with history and talking about our own experiences and why fandom is important to us and why we need fandom to keep its transgressive elements is important and part of our work as fans.
I can't predict whether fandom at large will take on these challenges and how well they will handle them, but I do know that they will be part of the future of fandom.
So Twitter is going great, but that's okay because you can buy two blue check marks on tumblr! Seems like every other day I hear about a new platform, either because it's starting up or because it has a data breach. Which is to say that fandom at this moment feels a little bit more in flux than usual, both in terms of online spaces and in terms of ways of doing fandom. Where are we all going? What does it all mean? What do you, personally, plan to do?The prompt's framing is about the churn of platforms and the cyclical motion of "platform starts up and things are great, if small, platform gets bigger and more popular, platform sells out to the advertisers because it's the only way to keep the server costs running, the advertisers demand changes that ruin what the platform was and can do, platform's users desert platform for other platforms, platform degrades, gracefully or otherwise, platform is shut down for being unprofitable." Which seems to be accelerating as the Web is more firmly consolidated and controlled by the people who want it to make money rather than provide a space for a community. BBSes and forums, MySpace, Geocities, LiveJournal, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and so forth, all places where people gathered and then were driven away because, as Catherynne Valente titled a post, the platform owners told the fans, "Stop talking to each other and start buying things." Only some of them have been shut down completely, whole others continue on, either as platforms for the non-fannish or as places where you have to put on your armor against trolls and toxic people before you wade in. It has always been thus, because people. It will always be thus, because people. It's a matter of degree that's the determination between staying and trying to get change and leaving for some place less toxic. I suspect this is also true of pre-networked computers fandom, where the letters page and the convention attendance were exhilarating and wonderful to connect with other fans at, but also the place where you had to endure someone being loud, belligerent, and wrong about your fandom if you wanted to enjoy the panel content or to get through the line or to get the next issue of the canon.
Challenge #15
In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.
This can be positive, negative, ambivalent; about fandom as a whole, your own fandom(s), or your own plans. Alternately, what do you hope fandom will do? Imagine a best-cast scenario, and tell us what that would look like.
The virtue of fandom is that it can create communities on just about any platform, regardless of whether the platform was designed for fannish interaction or not. The problem is that because most platforms weren't designed for fannish interaction, it's always a little bit like fitting an ovoid peg into a circular hole. Fans have to decide whether the incongruities are small enough or have robust enough workarounds that they're willing to work with them. The bigger the gathering of fans is, the more likely it is someone's going to run into an unpleasant person (if they're lucky) or someone who believes they shouldn't be in the fandom at all, almost always for spurious or -ist reasons. The more visibly minority a fan is, the more likely they're going to be gatekept and sneered at as a regular part of their fandom experience. Places that have robust tools for curating your experience and/or active moderators bent on improving the experience of everyone often last longer, even if they eventually lose to the advertisers and the people demanding they make money instead of build a community. The world we live in offers us a Faustian pact, where growth, exposure, and monetization are pitted against community and enjoyment as a zero-sum game. The closer to the firehose you get, the more great things there are to discover, and the more terrible things there are that will be thrown at you for "engagement."
There's clearly a line somewhere, and maybe it's different for every medium or how interactive the fans can be with each other, but at some point, any platform or service that goes over that many people present eventually gets caught in the problem of competing interests, or in having enough users on the platform engaging in bad behavior toward other users, intentional or otherwise, that the tools and the moderators aren't enough to keep it contained. Darius Kazemi, on his site extolling the virtues of running your own instance of the Fediverse, suggests that 50 is a soft line of too many and 100 is a hard line. And freely admits that his lines might be too high, rather than too low. The line might be a lot lower on platforms designed to facilitate discovery, or that have algorithms making suggestions about which users might want to interact with each other. (Algorithms that suggest interaction based on "engagement" and are tuned to get people who hate each other to see each other's content should be banned, but they will thrive because ads demand "engagement" and don't care about the quality of the interaction, only that it keeps someone in a place and lets them see more ads.) Dreamwidth may be well over the line, but because Dreamwidth doesn't algorithmically suggest other users, and lacks features that allow for ready content sharing (and the attendant context escape), and offers a very robust set of tools for people to curate their own experience, it's entirely possible that each Dreamwidth account is much more like a Fediverse node than a Tumblr or Twitter account, and therefore we should use individual connections rather than the total number of users.
The Archive of Our Own (AO3) is absolutely over the line, and isn't helped by their social features being an afterthought and bolted-on, rather than designed in from the beginning. (As an Archive, with no social features at all, the limiting factor would be storage space and database efficiency, but with social features, people being jerks to each other inevitably comes with it.) The most wonderful thing about AO3 is also its biggest drawback: there's only one of it. It gets all the benefits of centralization and being the first, and the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) should be lauded for stepping up to the plate and saying that it's an Archive for fans, by fans, and therefore it will never be beholden to advertiser pressure or the corporate requirement to stop talking to each other and buy things, and for fielding a legal team to protect fanworks and their creators and try to carve out sensible exceptions and defenses to infringement claims and copyright laws so that fans can be fans and create fanworks without the worry of legal liability for doing so, within specific parameters. It also deserves criticism for adopting the same kind of "neutrality" about what works it accepts that U.S. public libraries use to defend their choices to purchase and display conspiracy theories and other materials deliberately offensive to communities of their users. And because it is the only thing, and many of the OTW's goals are good and noble things to do, OTW volunteers sometimes also benefits from the halo of vocational awe, where the OTW and its supporters are sometimes held yup on a pedestal and above criticism because of the work the volunteers do. ("Neutrality" and vocational awe are both ably critiqued in Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy by Anastasia Chiu, Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti.) And while otwarchive as a software is available for other people to download and set up on their own servers, it runs into the same problem as the Fediverse (and plenty of other open source software projects) do, where doing it yourself requires money, technical experience, and people expertise in some combination that adds up to a running and functioning website/service that can also moderate the content of the users without burning out the moderators, running out of money to pay the hosting (and the legal people), and keeping the whole thing going as new versions resolve security issues, patch bugs, and introduce new issues and bugs to the system. The influx of people from Twitter to various Fediverse instances has collapsed quite a few of them that could have survived as hobbyist projects with low cost and small traffic, and other ones are struggling with new demands for moderation, blocking, defederation, and having a community grow exponentially in size. As well as some of the legal concerns that might pop up from other users posting content and the various demands that might be made to take it down, from copyright owners to state actors. There's a lot involved in running your own, and many people who want to participate (and who should be able to participate) won't be able to if they have to do it all themselves, or if the only environments available to them are toxic and destructive.
The recent increase in visibility, prominence, and effectiveness of censorious interests in fandom is also contributing mightily to the toxification of spaces. It's not genuine to say that it's a new phenomenon, because the ship wars are and were a thing, and so was Strikethrough, and the ban on female-presenting nipples, and the fact that Kirk/Spock slash was referred to as The Premise, rather than being able to state aloud a headcanon, or at least a reading of the show, that the captain and the First Officer had a romantic relationship with each other. There have always been fans who have visceral reactions to other fans' behaviors, who write meta about how they can't, in good conscience, endorse or support a relationship as it appears in the canon or in popular fanon, and who want to let other fans know about incidents of bias, -ism, abuse of power, or other problematic behaviors by other fans or by creators, actors, and other entities involved in the fandom and the creation of the canon. This is fine (and not in a Fine Dog sort of way.) Where we seem to be having trouble in the current era is distinguishing between those things that are being called out because they represent problems, often systemic problems, in the way we make and consume canon and fanworks that are both unexamined and present barriers to the participation of more fans in fandom, and things that are largely a matter of personal taste and preference adopting and cloaking themselves in the language of calling out systemic unexamined problems with canon, fanon, and fandom.
While it would be a mistake to say that all of fandom is inherently transgressive, the transformative side of fandom certainly has its roots in transgression. Every fanwork is a creator saying "I also have stories to tell of these characters, in addition to / in opposition to the ones that you have told me about them." And the stories that fanworks tell are almost always ones outside what the canon tells, changing the situations, exploring consequences, or imagining meetings that could never happen between entities. Publishing a fanwork is, in some small way, saying "My stories are equally as important as theirs." Because of that transgressive nature, while transformative fandom was smaller and more scattered, there seemed to be a shared understanding of anyone who entered the space that they might see things they were not expecting, or that they wouldn't like, and the thing they should do at that point, unless it was something that was against the rules of the space, was to use the back button and/or stop interacting with the work. From what I've read, this kind of "you are consenting to enter a space where you may see things that are shocking, disturbing, or otherwise uncomfortable to you, and unless what you see is a direct risk to the health and safety of the participants, you agree that what you will do if you see such things is look away" is basically the idea of what consenting adults do when they enter community kink spaces (and they may sign explicit agreements to such as a condition of entry.) As transformative fandom has gotten more popular and allowed to exist more openly (and at least some sections of being not-straight also gained acceptance, visibility, and destigmatization, like being gay), doing fanworks seemed less strongly transgressive and secretive, and then we get more kinds of people participating in fandom (or wanting to be in exclusively gay spaces because of wanting to escape certain segments of society or because they want to engage in objectification without worry). More people! Yay! They brought their own ideas about things! Oh no. And, as we mentioned above, once people realized there was money to be had from fans or from their "engagement," they wanted to make their environments friendly to the people with the money.
So now we have people who want to enjoy fandom and transformative works like other aspects of culture where they're the mainstream. They want stuff they'll enjoy and they don't want to see anything that might suggest they're not the sole arbiters of taste and culture, or that other people are still using transformative fandom as transgressive and to explore situations that haven't yet made it to mainstream acceptance or to make commentary on things that are mainstream and shouldn't be. And they certainly don't want anything happening where children might see it, because Everyone Knows children are completely impressionable and have never had a thought in their head that wasn't planted there by someone. Between the people who never want to be disturbed by anything and the people who want to make sure the money never dries up, were have a whole lot of people who really want fandom to stop being so transgressive. I suspect that for as long as transformative fandom stays mainstreamed and profitable, there will always be those twin forces of monetization and sanitization trying to take away the parts of fandom that are monstrous. (And if fandom falls out of the mainstream, then efforts step up to get rid of it because it's "deviant" and not part of the mainstream, so obscurity doesn't really save fandom in this situation.) It's probably been coined as someone's law (or the Icarus Principle), but I think the closer you situate your fandom space to where others can see you be fannish, the more visibility you get for your activities. Which means positive visibility (more people see your stuff and compliment it) and more negative visibility (more people see your stuff and complain about it.) So the best thing for any fan to find is the spot where they have the amount of negative visibility they can handle, since the positive visibility is almost always a lovely thing to get.
Away from the main burst of the firehose, (and getting back to the original prompt,) there are platforms that contentedly exist at exactly the level they want to be, and other platforms that were (more or less) designed for fannish interaction. Or, as in the case of AO3, designed as a place where someone can stash textual fanworks without worrying that an advertiser purge will destroy them. Because Twitter is the current trash fire, the Fediverse (the confederation of services connected to each other through common protocols like ActivityPub) and Mastodon specifically (a microblogging service visually and conceptually like Twitter using ActivityPub) are getting a lot of attention as possibly the next great place for Twitter fandom to de-camp to. Which is stressing the systems of federation with all the new sign-ups and activity, and also bringing to light and exacerbating several of the structural problems and social conventions of the Fediverse concept and its emphasis on finding the right space or creating your own as the way of solving the problem of toxic people in your spaces. As LiveJournal shifted from a fannish gathering place to an oligarch-owned platform intent on crushing the people using it to organize protests against the government of the Russian Federation, Dreamwidth got started and got popular enough to be sustainable at its current level. Each rumble of bans and threats of collapse from Tumblr and Twitter sent fans looking for an exit strategy, a backup account, or possibly to a new place entirely, deciding they were going to be the rat fleeing the sinking ship before it completely went down. Pillowfort got launched, as did Hive, Counter Social, Cohost, and an entire fleet of new instances at each time that a bigger, more mainstream platform looked like it was in trouble. As big platforms creak, lurch, and shudder, smaller ones grow, sometimes sustainably, sometimes not. And there's places like Neocities and tilde and entire projects dedicated to creating and maintaining webpages and even possibly webrings as the way of showing your fannish affinity, with or without any guestbook capabilities for people to interact with. Big things fracture and reform, and some of the slivers and splinters from the big thing join small things and stay contented there rather than going on to whatever the next big thing is going to be.
So what does this say about the future of fandom? I think that large swaths of fandom are going to continue to move back toward smaller enclaves with firewalls and insulation built into them so as to discourage context escape and to make themselves harder to discover by automated tools or entities looking for new sources of drama and places they can agitate. I think a lot of fandoms and fandom-friendly spaces aren't ever going to get as big as they want, or as small as they want, because there's so much more canon for everyone to experience these days, between broadcast, streaming, and stuff you only experience at convention or online. At the same time, I think fandom, and transformative fandom, isn't going to completely fade into obscurity again, because there are enough fans around who want to be popular, or to monetize their fandom selves, or otherwise need a large audience to see, appreciate, and possibly provide some money for them. And enough people who want to provide things you can buy for fans, or who really appreciate the things that creators make.
What that means, to me, is that fandom, like so many other facets of society, has to be able to confront head-on structural and social criticisms. No fandom is necessarily forbidden to anyone, but some fandoms, thanks to their creators, canons, and the way they use their tropes, are going to need people to be more intentional about their works and how they approach things. Other fandoms will have to set aside the things they've been taught by their society about who should be in front of a camera, behind it, or on the cover of a book, and what a hero or a protagonist looks and acts like. Or what a fanwork creator looks like and how they do their work. It's going to take time and a lot of patience from those of us who have been here before to guide others away from the paths that hurt them and others and to help them understand how to fight the people that want their fandom, all other fandoms, and most of their canons to go away and never return. It's going to be frustrating, because a lot of that it going to seem like shouting into the void and nobody is listening. But being loud and visible and backing things up with history and talking about our own experiences and why fandom is important to us and why we need fandom to keep its transgressive elements is important and part of our work as fans.
I can't predict whether fandom at large will take on these challenges and how well they will handle them, but I do know that they will be part of the future of fandom.
