In fact, I fear I am a jack-of-all-trades.

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
rhewkath lizardlicks
co-superman

God, I’m tired of fandom and the weird need to both insist fanfiction is important and culturally relevant, but simultaneously assert it’s not important enough to critique the rampant racism/sexism/fetishization and myriad other issues.

It’s like... either it’s a valid art form and therefore criticism is necessary for growth, or it’s not. Pick a side and accept the consequences.

purplemoonfox

As someone who's spent a fuckload of time in academics and literary analysis there's a wealth of difference between an angry teenager screaming at you about how you're a bad person and worthwhile commentary.

purplemoonfox

I’m feeling really cunty because I had a bad day at work (I even got threatened!), so I’m going to expand on why certain kinds of ‘critique’ isn’t critique that would pass muster in a literary analysis setting at all, and why I was such a cunt as to specify angry teenagers vs. angry other groups of people.

There’s better posts floating about here about how half this site is just fundamentalist, conservative Protestant Christianity wearing a gay hat, but it boils down to this: lack of nuance (indeed, it doesn’t work with nuance) and an us vs them in-group/out-group dichotomy. Fandom, particularly the generation that grew up as fandom was becoming socially acceptable (the last 20 years or so), have grown up in an insular peer group of like-minded individuals, all of whom are its own support system handed legitimacy, not an out-group comprised of people who are doing an otherwise socially unacceptable thing, together (people older than 20 or so years.) I’ve seen people on here mutter unhappily about how they’re scared they’ll have to age out of fandom because the rhetoric they’re surrounded by tells them they can’t be in fandom over age 25, but they still love it, because you should be doing Adulty things by then...I assure you, you’ll need your stress outlets even more than you already do.

Anyway, literary analysis. It isn’t about calling things gross and making absolutist judgment calls and dying on that hill. I guarantee you, try that shit in anything more advanced than high school (they don’t get paid enough for this shit) and you’ll be that asshole sitting there crying about your failing grade and whining about your professor, when really it’s your own damn fault. (Side note: I ran into this a lot with any right wing people who found themselves in college, especially the veterans I’ve known, because their thought process also runs to the tune of making statements and judgment calls based off of preexisting notions when that’s not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the ability to show your logical work in a kind of literary deconstruction of a presented piece the way a mathematical proof might, not to demonstrate how ‘good’ your ability to judge already is.)

There is a gap a mile wide between commentary that goes like this:

“X is gross and disgusting and you can’t do that. Because you’ve done this thing, you are not acceptable.”

And something like this:

“The appearance of X theme in this work suggests a strong bias towards Y in the author. I find their work repulsive and refuse to read any more of it.”

Hell, you don’t have to just suggest. You can make statements about an author or their work though that really only sticks in any really reliable sense when you have the background on a known author to say that they actually are, for instance, a white supremacist (the movie Birth of a Nation anyone?), but, this doesn’t work so well with the relative anonymity of the internet (and I think that lack of context encourages such kneejerk responses because you’re flinging shit at a blank wall and they can’t, in some cases would be better advised not to, fight back; I’ve seen other posts discussing the changing networks of how fandom itself operates, where it used to be much more of a communal thing and not a vast, anonymous audience like what Tumblr gives you). Passing judgement and moving on to action--bullying them off the internet--has stopped being an evaluation and become a response.

It will, however, stick much more readily, if you have a whole group of people who are otherwise completely isolated from any other known context but are sociated amongst each other. You can say damn near anything you like about a group of people about whom everybody else knows nothing but which trusts you, pass yourself off as an expert, and sound like you know what you’re talking about.

That’s where the whole...teenager thing comes in. Teenagers aren’t stupid, they’re not evil, they’re not even wrong all the time. 

What they are is unlearned, and that’s just something that comes with age and experience (not to say that older people are, as a hard and fast rule, always right all the time. Fuck that noise). Some kids are wise. Some adults die never having been wise.

That being said, most kids don’t get nuance for shit to start with, just because of how old they are, and environment counts too. Nuance is often dependent upon experience. They’ve got zero experience with conflicting (but equal) norms because they’ve been at home with mom and dad, who have one norm, or a part of their external group, in the way fandom is. It’s also probably not insignificant that there has been a rise in this kind of absolutist thinking on all sides after 9/11; if you were born in 2008, the first year of Obama’s Presidency, you’ll probably be 13 this year. All you’ve ever fucking seen on TV is a lot of polemic garbage and people making more and more extreme absolutist judgments about the other side, while being uncooperative and unwilling to compromise because compromise itself is seen as a betrayal of the faith. 

Add all that up, and you’ve got a scenario where people confuse ‘applying correct judgment’ for ‘critique.’ Fanfiction is important enough to critique. The legitimacy of the content of that critique is akin to asking oneself whether the National Enquirer or the New York Times is a more reliable source.

roach-works

also, way too many people, especially younger people who are still working through (seriously underfunded) highschool english classes, don’t understand what ‘thinking critically’ even means. they think being critical of a piece of work means criticism of it, rather than thoughtful investigation and analysis of the source, the means, the motive, the result, the execution, the themes, the derivatives and antecedents. studying the composition and the context of a work. seeing if it did what it meant to, speculating as to what it meant to.

like, if a food critic goes to a restaurant and their only review is ‘this food sucked!’ that’s definitely a criticism but they’re not actually being a good food critic. they need to provide more of an analysis of why they didn’t like what they just consumed. and, ideally, food critics have much more to say than criticisms!

if your only interaction with media is to find faults and pass angry personal judgements, you might be great at criticizing it, but you’re lousy at critique and at thinking critically. and people who are used to genuinely thoughtful analysis are going to ignore you, because you aren’t saying anything worth listening to.