Thread by @dynamicsymmetry

So old tweet obviously but I’m listening to the 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back podcast’s Let’s Read of the book and I have to echo something other people have said: this is part of such an unforgivably thin and flat understanding of fandom and it’s deeply annoying.

https://twitter.com/bombsfall/status/971388534925021186

And this isn’t me defending the book, or even fandom. It’s saying that analysis like this—honestly I’d barely call it “analysis”—is either ignorant or dismissive of the fact that curative fandom and transformative fandom are completely different forms of fandom.

They’re both at least somewhat complicit in how capitalism works destructively in popular culture, but you can make a case for one being far more so and the other being in many respects ANTIcapitalist in nature.

Transformative fandom isn’t uniformly anticapitalist but there’s a lot of that braided through it. In the metacriticism. In the way many people working within it are aware of the issue. In the way it’s still mostly committed to being a gift economy.

Like, come on.

Again, this is not me delivering a wholehearted defense of fandom of any kind, transformative or otherwise. I merely do not like flat lazy analysis, especially when it comes from a leftist position, because we’re supposed to be better than that.

This kind of tweet is why I unfollowed that account a while ago btw

And when you lump these very different forms of fandom together, you are also erasing the ways in which they’re deeply gendered and in which many marginalized people have traditionally found a safe haven in transformative fandom. You’re erasing them and their experience.

You’re also erasing the ways in which transformative fandom has been *hostile* to many marginalized people, especially trans people and BIPOC, in ways that are highly distinct from curative fandom.

Just. Don’t be lazy. That’s all.