No Boundaries? Why NOT Just Anything Goes in Online Communities...

[shanghaiedinla]

"Because it is my name! ... I cannot have another in my life."

You know the old maxim: without your good name, you have nothing. Arthur Miller undoubtedly had this thought in mind when the wrote John Proctor's closing salvo in The Crucible. So it stands to reason that most people would be very cautious about putting it on the line. If only that

Comments

[anonymous]

Well-said, per usual

[shanghaiedinla]

Yay, it worked this time. Nice to have you here -- my blog misses you! (But then again, it misses me, too....)

You raise some excellent questions. As I said, fandom behavior is fascinating.

I take it you think, then, that this is solely a byproduct of the grieve-up/slow disintegration of fandom you wrote about many months ago now? No doubt it is in part, though some of it dates back before the primary catalyst of all this (i.e. CS 2012). Why? Well, I guess I have dual theories. One, I think many of us sensed on a subconscious level that M/M were not going to last the duration of the series because of DS' contract status. And the fandom split -- which predated Matthew's demise but NOT DS' lousy attitude -- IMO reflected this fear. Again, subconsciously. Two, I think the "first movers" in fandom, those who were there from the beginning, were/are very territorial and insular about DA. I remember your talking about S1 being a super-secret club ... and these folks, I think, miss that. And even the ones who weren't there from the

[anonymous]

I do think there's a sense of missing "the way it used to be." Speaking as someone who was in fandom from (almost) the very beginning, the idea that it used to be all rainbows and puppies is simply ignorant. M/M shippers were a hated bunch when DA fandom is small, because of the notion we took over the show and made it all about M/M. This was back during (you guessed it!) S1-S2 hiatus