Snowflake 2021 - Challenge #15

[osidiano]

Challenge #15

Talk about Your Snowflake Experience. What did you come into it thinking or wanting? Did you get that? Did you get something else? Did you learn anything new about fandom, others, yourself? Are you glad you did it or thought it a waste of time and energy? You can tell us. We’re all here to learn and grow. What did you learn? How did you grow?

So, I came into Snowflake on a low note, as I'm sure most people did because 2020 sucked, and I was really really wanting to get even the tiniest feeling of joy and self-fulfillment that I used to have from fandom again. I was hoping for some bright spots and a sense of community. And I got that! I'm reading more fanfic, and trying to get through some meta. I have a bunch of fics and resources and wishlists bookmarked for later. It's been really nice and I'm glad I decided to participate and allocate time for it, even if I couldn't commit to being a mod this year.

A lot of people wished for folks to be more inclusive and to listen to POC fandom voices during the Wishlist Challenge, and I'm reading through the linked posts and trying to educate myself. It seems like most of the conversation has been happening on Twitter, which is definitely not part of my sandbox, so there's a lot of stuff that I'm reading about for the first time. It's a little bit exhausting, and totally depressing to think that that is some people's whole fandom experience, all the time. But I am glad that I'm doing it, even if it's hard and messy and uncomfortable. I feel like it's especially hard because there aren't a lot of acceptable spaces for me to talk about what I'm reading. And like, a lot of people have said a lot of stuff about it in their blog posts and on their Tumblrs and in their Twitter threads (and there's like a college text on it, but idk if I can stomach dropping $60 for the ebook knowing that it's written for other academics when I don't have a background anywhere near this, but I digress), but I recognize that I am early in the journey and it would be really douchey of me to comment or try to summarize on those blog posts/threads, because that's their space and they don't owe me their labor but I do need to converse to get through it, you know? I have to hear myself start to make the problematic rationalize before I really get it and go "OH. Oh, that's . . . yeah, I get how that's racist now." So yeah. That's been my big learning/growing thing from Snowflake. :B

Comments

[sjh2009]

I'm so glad to hear that Snowflake has helped fan the spark of fandom back into a flame for you. I was out of fandom for four years thanks to various things happen in real life and joining Snowflake last year helped me fall in love with fandom all over again.

The world is a very different place from the one I knew as a young person. There is so much more awareness of race, colour and gender and I frequently find myself having to google words and acronyms just to understand, but I am learning and the challenge has given me a far better understanding of how the world is for other people.

Thank you for joining us and taking part in the challenge. Snowflake wouldn't be the success it is without our wonderful participants :)

[osidiano]

I hear you on the Google front. It's tough being old and having been out of the loop! I think I've gotten better at identifying my own problematic behaviors, but sadly I still have to make them in order to catch them. I was reading through some of Rukmini Pande's twitter posts, and I was like "what the hell, where is this happening, what fandom is this messed up I've never seen that??" and the second the thought flitted across my awareness, I had to stop and remind myself that I have a very curated fandom experience and I've actively avoided most forums and Twitter and Tumblr. I mostly write gen and white slash in Western fandoms now; the majority of my writing with POC characters are from my anime days in the early 2000's; the few times that I've wandered into anything that looked confrontational was when I was in my drunken rage spirals and it was so ugly that the minute I was sober enough to disengage I fled; of course I haven't seen it, I've literally been trying not to for most of my fandom life.

[sjh2009]

All these new platforms confuse me! I do have a Twitter account but that's mostly for news headlines, breaking news, local news, and cats, lol. I don't do fandom on other platforms and, fortunately, Ive managed to avoid any of the confrontations or drama within fandom, although I have a couple of friends who were, sadly, forced out of various fandoms due to confrontations and bullying as other people didn't agree with what they had written, it's so unnecessary, fandom is big enough for everyone to write what they want.

[osidiano]

I think that's more wank than anything else, though. And I mean, I am also in the DLDR camp and believe to let people ship or kink as they please without needing to justify themselves. But like, someone was talking about blatantly anti black rhetoric, and I was like, "yeah, okay, if someone is posting a white nationalist manifesto on AO3 and trying to pass it off as like, idk, fandom meta, that shit should get taken down, but is that happening?" And apparently that is happening and we as a fandom can't agree that that's not okay?? It should be easy to say "listen, we don't want that on this archive, go post elsewhere," and make them keep it on their personal blog/journals. And yeah, it does get a little more gray area when we start talking about inherently racist canons, but the idea that we can't institute policy change until it's perfect is ridiculous. The policy already isn't perfect, and any step in the right direction is *a step in the right direction,* you know?

I know that I don't agree with the "let's include Racism as an Archive Warning Tag," but that's mostly because it doesn't make sense to me. I've used a Racism tag on fic before, not to tell readers that I'm racist, but to let them know that racism comes up in the fic and is a theme we touch on, in case they don't want to deal with that right now. But unintentional racism is a thing authors can't tag, because it's unintentional, we've grown up in a racist society and gone through racist institutions and of course we've internalized some of those influences. All we can do is try to be better as people and as fans.