I might have mentioned this before, but developments I am genuinely glad of in fandom over the last couple of decades:
Way less bashing of canon female love interests in order to hook up two male characters – some of that is the advent of the OT3 as a solution to love triangles, but it’s just as common to have the canon couple break up amicably and realistically, or simply tweak things so that they were never a couple, but still like and respect one another as friends
The rise of the reader insert fic, which I’m convinced has taken the pressure off to create an OC for people who really just want to write self-insert fantasy, thereby letting them do what they actually want and (hopefully) helping to lessen the stigma around OCs for those who really want to create OCs
Linked to that, a decrease in the amount that the accusation “Mary Sue!” gets flung around, and intelligent criticism of how gendered the whole “Mary Sue” concept has ended up
Less pressure to “explain” how a character could end up with a character of the same gender in fic, when they’ve always been paired with other-gender characters in canon
A decline in the popularity of extensively mocking/dragging individual fics for bad or inexpert writing (such as through writing MSTs in response where the canon characters read and reacted to the fic), which, looking back, was a pretty shitty thing to do to writers just starting out
Much less likelihood of getting virulently homophobic comments on any given slashfic (”My poor [favourite character] isn’t GAY, how dare you!”)
And, of course, the shining glory that is AO3, an all-inclusive single archive that’s actually run and controlled by fans, meaning no hours spent paging through webrings to find one author who has four fics of that pairing you love and then reading them over and over for months, and no chance of waking up tomorrow to find all your fic purged because some internet company got a pissy letter
I mean, don’t get me wrong, fandom today is no picnic; it’s not like homophobia or sexism have gone away entirely (and to an extent they’ve gone underground, which complicates things), and of course we have the new puritanical backlash, which can sometimes be even more complex to challenge. But fandom back in the day was far from perfect, as well, and some of the ways things have changed are a real breath of fresh air.
Bringing this back around because a) it started getting more notes than anticipated, so I thought it might be worth a rerun and b) someone tagged it #fanthropology and I cannot believe I never thought of that word, it is glorious.
That’s an awesome list! OCs and self-inserts are so empowering!
I know writing groups and writing games existed even 200 years ago, let alone 20. Yet there are new tools that make it easier for newbies or casual fans to join one-time or recurring events. I see more quick, open writing games and memes on Tumblr. Art and writing “salons happen” in live streaming on Picarto and ask-nights on Tumblr. Gift exchange events moved to AO3. Writing groups are on Discord, Line, Skype.
The #1 thing I’m looking forward to with my master’s thesis is when my drafts will inevitably come back with “antisemitism” corrected to “anti-Semitism” and then I get to explain that Jewish scholars do things differently
I guess the most professionally academic thing to do here is find the explanation for why we spell it as one word, and then quote that as a footnote on my first use of it
Here’s the footnote I used in my most recent paper — feel free to steal it!
“The question of whether to write “anti-Semitism” or “antisemitism” is thorny. I follow the lead of Jewish Studies scholars who argue that antisemitism refers not to a hatred of ‘Semitism’ but specifically to the hatred of Jews, and therefore should be left unhyphenated (while I acknowledge that this position is far from universal). See, e.g., Doris Bergen, “Christians, Protestants, and Christian Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” Central European History, Vol. 27, No. 3 (1994), 329; and Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (University of California Press, 1996), 16-17.”
This is the reason I write it the way I do. There’s no such thing as “semitism”; antisemitism was always meant to refer to Jew-hatred.
Good explanation. The term “Semitic” comes from a late 18th century German pseudoscientific racial theory that tried to trace the lineage of different ethnic groups back to the biblical Noah’s sons (Ham, Japheth, and Shem). This is, needless to say, total horseshit. Linguists still use the term “Semitic” for the family of languages that includes Hebrew and Arabic, but aside from that, the term is not legitimately used anymore. There is not now and never has been an ethnic group calling themselves “Semites.”
The term “antisemitism” specifically was coined in 1879 by German racial theorist Wilhelm Marr as a deliberate attempt to make hatred of Jews appear rational and scientifically validated. It was never meant to refer to hatred of all so-called “Semitic” peoples, just Jews. It replaced the more usual term “Judenhass” (Jew-hate), which Marr thought sounded vulgar.
Simon Schama uses “Judeophobia” in his books except when referring to the specifically German race-theory-based phenomenon, which seems a little more precise to me. Judenhass is still probably the most accurate term.
Yakushima Island, Japan, is home to some of the oldest patches of forest in the world and listed as a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Made famous through the animation film of Hayao Miyazaki: Princess Mononoke, the visual reality of Yakushima seems almost as unreal as the movie.
tora42's nonsensne 