Rant: The Absence of Squee

[argentum_ls]

Sometimes this fandom makes me really sad.

I’ve been in a lot of fandoms over the years of every size. I’ve started fandoms, I’ve kept them limping along when few others were interested, I’ve helped end them. I’ve been a nobody and I’ve been a BNF. What I’ve never been is so excluded.

Fandom is an incredible social construct and there’s so much to marvel at within its workings: mailing lists, kink memes, fests, archives, twitter, bingos, tumblr, facebook, conventions. And the squee. Ultimately, it’s all about the squee. Fandom is the mechanism for individual fans to share their love of a media with other fans as loudly and in as many ways as possible. When one is the only person in one’s family, real-life-friend circle, or neighborhood who loves a particular media, the internet may be the only way to get one’s squee on.

The friendships that fandom can create are amazing. The hostilities are also amazing. Emotions run at their highest, exclamation marks abound, and whole vocabularies have been developed just to better express the squee.

It’s well documented that when people with a common viewpoint spend time together, they feed off each other. Their opinions intensify. They develop memes and short-hands to talk about the things they feel are important. They share backstories and explanations to help smooth over the holes in their arguments. In fandom, this manifests as fanon.

Right around the time first season was ending, a juggernaut ship developed in the TW fandom. This happens. Normally it would be no big deal, though I did personally find it concerning because the fandom was so new that it didn’t really have the traction to support itself with such a ship. It was acting like a fandom that was dying, not one that was being born.

In a larger fandom, developments and fanon in one ship would be mitigated by the activity in the other ships and there’d still be plenty of room for everyone in the middle. Or, the various factions could crawl off into their own fan-corners and play happily with like-minded friends. In the TW fandom, the memes and fanon from the main ship took over and became the assumed norm for how the show was viewed and how the fandom could be participated in.

Over the hiatus, this resulted in the non-like-minded fans dropping away. It’s hard to squee when what one wants to squee about isn't in line with what the majority is squeeing about. By the end of April, most of the former TW fans who weren’t into the main ship had left. They’d either been driven out or they’d quit. I heard from a few as they were leaving, and very nearly was one myself.

Here we are at the start of the second season, though. Squee is at its highest. The fandom is welcoming new members constantly (or should be), which means new voices and new perspectives. The stats on my stories are through the roof. I’ve never seen reading numbers so high. (The comments are good, too).

The problem now is that the Derek/Stiles fans have become so accustomed to everyone agreeing with their viewpoints that they’ve forgotten that they are viewpoints and not givens.

I’ve grown used to my kink meme prompts being ignored, my comment meme prompts being ignored, and my entries in other fests and challenges being ignored. I don’t like any of that one bit. It’s not the way fandom should be or behave. But that’s how it is. I don’t ship Derek/Stiles, and being ignored is apparently the cost. The rare, random fill has come through that lets me live in hope that more will happen, and it reminds me that I’m not completely alone out there.

But, overall in the fandom, there’s still no room for me.

I was going to participate in one of the live chats on LJ. I logged on to find that the majority of the comments already there were people decrying the BORINGNESS of one of the elements I most enjoy on the show. That alone wouldn’t be the problem, if it weren’t for the implication from the way the comments were being made that they expected everyone to agree with how BORING that element is. I left. I wanted to squee, not defend myself.

Tumblr. I can’t get started on tumblr. Everywhere I look, even when I follow tags for the things I’m interested in, I see hate and put downs casually being flung about as if they are the mere facts of the show.

Today I saw the post for the twitter friending meme. It was on a general fan site, not one dedicated to the main ship. Three items were listed in the invitation. One was a point I don’t agree with and one was, once again, a negative against something I particularly like. So much for finding friends that way.

Hardly before it got started, the fandom closed itself off. There’s no room for the new, the innovative, or the different. For me, for the other non-Derek/Stiles shippers, for the new fans who don’t yet have solid opinions, there’s no place to squee and no one to squee with. This all makes me sad.

Comments

[sablize.livejournal.com]

Hi again! I saw your post on tumblr (which I'm now following, because I need more rational teen wolf fans on my dash) so I went to your livejournal to read this, and omg I totally agree with you.

The Teen Wolf fandom is a lot like the Vampire Diaries fandom; like, I don't ship Damon/Elena or Stefan/Elena and my otp is Damon/Rose, so with all the crazy Delena/Stelena shippers I often feel left out. But I mean the TVD fandom is pretty large and it's stopped bothering me, as long as I stay in my little bubble I'm fine; there's plenty of fic and things for the shi

[sablize.livejournal.com]

Oops I didn't mean to post that already. Crap.

Anyways, so yeah. With the TW fandom it's different because Sterek is SO HUGE that it just obliterates everything else. I mean, I feel like I complain daily about the lack of Scott/Stiles or any other ship for that matter. And then there's all the Scott bashing and the ridiculous 'Stiles is pack mom' thing, and at the end of the day I just sit there and think, "Am I watching the same show as everyone else?"

I dunno, I just feel like I'm watching a whole different show, or that I'm just in a fandom all by myself. I feel like I do with Suits or Political Animals, sort of alone in my love for them, but that's because almost no one watches those shows. And yet nearly everyone I know watches Teen Wolf.

Basically what I'm saying is that I agree with you, and it makes me sad, too :/

[argentum-ls.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

You've labeled all the problems as I see them, too. In a much bigger fandom, a monolith ship wouldn't be such a problem. In a fandom that's small and trying to find its footing, it's a severe problem.

At least those of us outside the norm are starting to find each other. That helps make things a lot more tolerable, and helps remind us that there are other people out there watching the show the way we do.

[sablize.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

And yeah, exactly. There are lots of fandoms with large ships but in a fandom this small is when it becomes a problem. I mean, the fandom is growing, but then you have all those people who say 'you'll love Sterek, it's totally canon' and 'Stiles is the best character' and 'you won't like Scott or Scott/Allison until season two. It's like they don't let newbies draw their own conclusions or have their own opinions, and that bugs me. It shuts the rest of us out and just contributes to the problem. There's no diversity.

And true, true. It's always nice to find people who think the same way(:

[argentum-ls.livejournal.com]

This is one of the behaviors that really bothers me. Shaping newbies and potential fans' attitudes and expectations is bad enough. It doesn't seem to stop there, tho. Too many Sterek fans make it so that any attitude that doesn't match the "correct" one is shouted down or shamed, and that's not good behavior in any context.

[sablize.livejournal.com]

Yes and I hate it. Like, let people form their own opinions :/