decepticonsensual:

lazaefair:

decepticonsensual:

I might have mentioned this before, but developments I am genuinely glad of in fandom over the last couple of decades:

• Way less bashing of canon female love interests in order to hook up two male characters – some of that is the advent of the OT3 as a solution to love triangles, but it’s just as common to have the canon couple break up amicably and realistically, or simply tweak things so that they were never a couple, but still like and respect one another as friends
• The rise of the reader insert fic, which I’m convinced has taken the pressure off to create an OC for people who really just want to write self-insert fantasy, thereby letting them do what they actually want and (hopefully) helping to lessen the stigma around OCs for those who really want to create OCs
• Linked to that, a decrease in the amount that the accusation “Mary Sue!” gets flung around, and intelligent criticism of how gendered the whole “Mary Sue” concept has ended up
• Less pressure to “explain” how a character could end up with a character of the same gender in fic, when they’ve always been paired with other-gender characters in canon
• A decline in the popularity of extensively mocking/dragging individual fics for bad or inexpert writing (such as through writing MSTs in response where the canon characters read and reacted to the fic), which, looking back, was a pretty shitty thing to do to writers just starting out
• Much less likelihood of getting virulently homophobic comments on any given slashfic (”My poor [favourite character] isn’t GAY, how dare you!”)
• And, of course, the shining glory that is AO3, an all-inclusive single archive that’s actually run and controlled by fans, meaning no hours spent paging through webrings to find one author who has four fics of that pairing you love and then reading them over and over for months, and no chance of waking up tomorrow to find all your fic purged because some internet company got a pissy letter

I mean, don’t get me wrong, fandom today is no picnic; it’s not like homophobia or sexism have gone away entirely (and to an extent they’ve gone underground, which complicates things), and of course we have the new puritanical backlash, which can sometimes be even more complex to challenge.  But fandom back in the day was far from perfect, as well, and some of the ways things have changed are a real breath of fresh air.

God, when I think of the sheer number of hours I spent scrolling through Mediaminer and FF.net, to say nothing of the private archives and their eye-wateringly primitive HTML. Enormous piles of unsorted, untagged, barely titled or summarized fic, all just in one long horror show of a list with that dreaded page count at the bottom. You’re on page 9 and you still haven’t found anything half-decent to read – and there are 73 more pages to go. You were lucky if the fic was categorized by fandom, and you only got pairings if the author felt like putting it in the summary. If there was a summary. I’m surprised that my mouse hand didn’t develop carpal tunnel from the scrolling alone.

Oh, God, just reading this description, I vividly felt like I was back there.  *shudders*