Id-vortex fic tends to make me squirm with embarrassment and bail early.
It takes a very good writer -- or a writer whose id-vortex happens to map very very closely to my own -- to make me not react the same way!
I didn't mean to imply that anyone necessarily wants to perceive themselves as different, only that fandom is so varied even in the best of times that there really isn't ever (IME/IMO) a true 'center' of 'this is what the majority of us like'. You really only find that if you narrow down to a subset of a fandom and call that 'your' fandom. In other words: it's true to say that for most fans, they're probably not in alignment with 'the majority' since there's not really a true 'majority' to align with, but at the same time it's also probably true to say that when fans find fans of like minds, then they are in alignment with that area of the fandom that they consider 'theirs'. And that's the beauty of the internet (and better search/tag functions in archives): that we can find a sub-set of a general fandom where we are in alignment, for the most part. ...even when the predominant external impression of a fandom differs from our sub-set's intentions/likes.
Which is why I'm not trying to define 'fandom' -- because if defining fanfiction is hard, defining 'fandom' is damn well impossible.
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Date: 1 Jun 2010 09:08 pm (UTC)It takes a very good writer -- or a writer whose id-vortex happens to map very very closely to my own -- to make me not react the same way!
I didn't mean to imply that anyone necessarily wants to perceive themselves as different, only that fandom is so varied even in the best of times that there really isn't ever (IME/IMO) a true 'center' of 'this is what the majority of us like'. You really only find that if you narrow down to a subset of a fandom and call that 'your' fandom. In other words: it's true to say that for most fans, they're probably not in alignment with 'the majority' since there's not really a true 'majority' to align with, but at the same time it's also probably true to say that when fans find fans of like minds, then they are in alignment with that area of the fandom that they consider 'theirs'. And that's the beauty of the internet (and better search/tag functions in archives): that we can find a sub-set of a general fandom where we are in alignment, for the most part. ...even when the predominant external impression of a fandom differs from our sub-set's intentions/likes.
Which is why I'm not trying to define 'fandom' -- because if defining fanfiction is hard, defining 'fandom' is damn well impossible.