{"id":442,"date":"2004-03-03T16:58:29","date_gmt":"2004-03-03T21:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/03\/03\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-19T20:15:47","modified_gmt":"2005-10-20T00:15:47","slug":"fringe-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/03\/03\/fringe-group\/","title":{"rendered":"Fringe Group"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I tend to hang around the fringes of fandoms. There are many reasons for this — in a large group, I fall naturally into the role of spectator, however assertive, bossy or otherwise loud I am in a smaller group, for one — but it’s undeniable that one reason I avoid attempting to move toward the center is the fact that fandom has grown increasingly toxic.<\/p>\n

I don’t remember it being like this when I first began hanging around fannish groups. The USENET fan groups I started out on were occasionally flamey, but it all seemed very good natured and overall everyone was just excited to find so many other people who liked the same thing that they did. The ladies of alt.fan.tv.quantum-leap (and it -was- mostly women) were positively friendly. They seemed like nice, mature, interesting people you’d like to have as friends.<\/p>\n

Jump ahead 10 years. The internet has exploded and now everyone takes for granted the fact that they’ll be able to locate other fans and easily communicate with them. And with that, the level of discourse has plummetted, pettiness and stupidity run rife, and it’s worth more than I’m willing to spend to really get into it and try to locate the few pockets of sanity that must still exist.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I even wonder if that’s a false assumption — the sniping and cattiness has spread as far as the KS list, which just boggles my mind: LM Montgomery fandom is not a place you’d look to expecting flame wars. Harry Potter, anime… not okay, but expected at least.<\/p>\n

I was thinking about all of this in the car as I was driving today, as the feeling that I need to try something -new- has gotten quite strong of late. I can’t do it until I’m finished with school in May, but at that point I am resolved to do something completely different. Something free of this toxic, draining atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Of course, my first thought was doing more volunteer work for the Democratic party.<\/p>\n

And no, the irony of this thought did not strike me for some minutes.<\/p>\n

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I tend to hang around the fringes of fandoms. There are many reasons for this — in a large group, I fall naturally into the role of spectator, however assertive, bossy or otherwise loud I am in a smaller group, for one — but it’s undeniable that one reason I avoid attempting to move toward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}