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I was reading a bunch of different things today, including ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaiz's post on taking fanfic out of context and it got me thinking about just the general self-conscious nature of fandom, and the way that people can, in ways I don't think people always do in other groups, refer to some sort of way we're supposed to be interacting but aren't. That sounds confusing, but what I mean is, for instance, in "real life" if you're having a conversation about something, there's only limited situations where you can try to redirect the conversation on the grounds that it would be better to talk about something else. It always surprises me a bit when I see it in fandom--and I see it in every fandom--because the nature of fandom seems to be that it's a group of people who just need to talk about something for no other reason than they need to talk about it. The only goal of fandom discussion is the discussion itself, so you can't really go off-track. Yet the word “fan” has become something associated with positive appreciation and that’s it.
The kind of redirecting I'm talking about, in my experience, maybe because my own way of being a fan is to take a canon in my teeth and worry it like a terrier, is the requests to ( talk about happy thoughts. )
kaiz's post on taking fanfic out of context and it got me thinking about just the general self-conscious nature of fandom, and the way that people can, in ways I don't think people always do in other groups, refer to some sort of way we're supposed to be interacting but aren't. That sounds confusing, but what I mean is, for instance, in "real life" if you're having a conversation about something, there's only limited situations where you can try to redirect the conversation on the grounds that it would be better to talk about something else. It always surprises me a bit when I see it in fandom--and I see it in every fandom--because the nature of fandom seems to be that it's a group of people who just need to talk about something for no other reason than they need to talk about it. The only goal of fandom discussion is the discussion itself, so you can't really go off-track. Yet the word “fan” has become something associated with positive appreciation and that’s it.The kind of redirecting I'm talking about, in my experience, maybe because my own way of being a fan is to take a canon in my teeth and worry it like a terrier, is the requests to ( talk about happy thoughts. )
