Dan's Tumbled Up Blog

Godzilla:

they are performing an experiment

Valuable science is being done

Unmute, ffs

Navy seal in action

Teenagers 3 days after downloading Tiktok.

can we reintroduce “disturbing” back into the popular lexicon in place of most uses of “traumatizing”

Not a single thought between those blue eyes...

Bonus:

Puffs!! I love drawing these girls as teens but cute kids are fun too! I like drawing their eyeballs (EYELASHES) and chubby arms/legs.

Don't worry girls, the reboot doesn’t exist in my heart.

Goodluck Pikachu

I didn't even scroll. Just sitting right there.

....but.... why?

To quote Cave Johnson: "Science isn't about why, it's about WHY NOT!"

I want a knife gun.

For an updated Ides of March

The Ides of March: Reloaded

brutus is back and this time….. he doesn’t need the whole senate

Street Fighter (1994)

I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality,  that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

Quote

“Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around”

Social media has basically increased parasocial relationships and it has lead to the overall decay of fandom because it gets combined with the over-exposure and overconsumption of everything else.

It’s given people who wouldn’t generally care about fandom discourse and drama, a means to tie it to racism, oppression, etc. and not in a way that is “Let’s talk about how fandoms can treat minorities.” but rather a “If you like xyz it means your a racist.”

and vitriol hated is very popular on social media. It’s why some of the most condescending, angry, “clap back” posts get traction over posts that are actually thought out and nuanced because everyone wants the quick validation, the quick anger, the quick RT/RB and head on to the next thing. Combined that with things like YT, sponsorships, etc. and it’s easy to make a profit off of half baked ideas and misinformation about fandoms like harassment being just “people fighting over ships” rather than what it actually is which is normally suicide baiting, rape, and death threats, etc.

It becomes profitable (emotionally and monetarily) to be hateful and fandoms have suffered for it.

In fandoms before, in order to find certain content, you specifically had to go look for it. If you wanted to see fan art, you’d have to dig through art websites with that specific tag. It would rarely just happen across your TL and give you a reason to be angry about something.

And you see it becoming more and more prevalent across fandoms where BFNs create some of the most toxic and vitriolic hatred towards other fans for not existing in the same way they do. Rather than having walls and boundaries that were innately put up, everything is just on a vast plane where you can see anything and everything at all times and because you can, there’s no innate boundary between you and someone who you just don’t vibe with.

With how things spread so quickly on social media and the fact that people will not look into things because they trust the person they’re sharing from has good, honest information and so on and so on and all it takes is one person with bad or ill intentions to basically poison the well. Everything has to be accessible, which is why so many toxic people in fandoms just don’t block or mute the content they don’t like. Because it would still exist but it wouldn’t be accessible to them… and they can’t have that. They can’t have something be inaccessible to them it has to not exist or even be present at all. The onus of responsibility has been put onto other people rather than onto oneself.

Then you can combine that with the fact that it is an expectation that you will put up private and personal information about yourself that can range from your birthday to your age, to where you live, and even a list of triggers, disabilities, race, gender, etc. and it only increases those parasocial relationships, it only increases the responsibility being onto someone else, etc.

Before, when it came to creators, all you really knew was their alias and maybe age. You never really got into their gender or sexuality unless they specifically told you. Now, you’re expected to have all of that information out there “or else” you’re a bad, awful, and predatory person. Even though predatory people often refuse to respect the boundary of what someone is willing to share… and because of the rapid consumption, it has lessened what terms like “predatory” actually means or even how to spot a predatory person because, ironically enough, predatory people are redefining what predatory means… The same thing goes for racism, sexism, etc… They’re all getting redefined by the people it was meant to define so that it no longer defines them but they can use it to define other people to their benefit.

And it all links back to increasing these parasocial relationships where you are expected to know everything about someone because if you do, they’re trustworthy, and then the responsibility to “Keep people safe” gets put onto them, and refusing to take it is damaging that parasocial relationship… which leads to even more hatred and negativity.

And that isn’t even getting into how showrunners, VAs, etc. often get treated to the point many will delete or private their social media.

Tldr: Mindless and rapid consumption, predatory/abusive people, and increasingly parasocial relationships have basically caused fandom to rot.

Something that I honestly mourn the lack of is that twisted and skewed surrealist perspective from 90s cartoons and games. There aren’t too many examples of it either before or after the period. In golden age cartoons, perspective could be exaggerated, but it was usually still rectilinear.

This type of perspective, on the other hand, is like the warping of space time or a funhouse mirror. Something about it just makes me happy. It’s how I would choose to design the universe.

I know a few artists that work in this style sometimes but it’s still incredibly difficult to find.