further reflections on fandom size, fandom quality, slushpile/archive-wading

uh, so, i seem to have started reading sga again, though only from links i find from other people (there's just no way i could go archive-wading again in a fandom that big). it's funny, but i have some old-fandom nostalgia and everything for it even though it hasn't even been a year since i stopped reading and watching it.

on the other hand, while i do dislike giant fandoms for the pure sake of their giantness, another factor which sends me away from them is the increased quantity of bad and mediocre which accompanies the increased quantity of good (and even more particularly the increased quantity of fanon, which is like the opposite of a kink for me - not even a pet peeve exactly, because my boundless fuming rage at fanon is really totally illogical and kind of hair-triggered - but doesn't persist in all fandoms since, like, you could never read highlander or the sentinel or tpm at all if you didn't like fanon sometimes). perhaps going from sga into small fandoms with much lower quality overall has let me regain some perspective, much the way even food you are getting a bit tired of (say, plain mashed potatoes) will seem like a good choice if the other dishes on the banquet table are those really gross fish things that nordic people like to serve for christmas (lax and sill, i think, but that's beside the point; you just have to know that i can only eat like a milligram of them at a time, even smothered in cream sauce).

my point, though i've digressed from it rather, is that in big fandoms there is so much fiction that if it were possible to rank all of it you could split the bell curve into 1/10ths and 1/100ths of a percent; whereas in tiny fandoms, distinctions of quality almost don't exist (and really don't seem to for most of the denizens) because there's so little to draw on that even if you force the grades into a curve the top six ranked stories might go below the mean quality. (and of course in other even smaller fandoms, there might not even be six stories total, but i haven't been reading in ones quite that tiny)(and of course, even if there's a total of 25 stories, which means the top six wouldn't go down to the mean, the sample's still small enough that it might be really improper to force them into a curve). the bigger the fandom, the better the mean story quality is likely to be (although i don't think that's a straightforward positive correlation at all). if you take "mediocre" to mean, say, 20th to 40th percentile, the high end of it is highly readable in a big fandom, whereas in a small one it likely suffers from multiple kinds of mechanical errors and unintentionally hilarious dangling modifiers (which, okay, is readable in the sense that you can read to the end of it, but by the end you're just wheezing with laughter, not taking the story-telling  seriously in any sense).

i can read from other people's recs, but my preferred method is to use those only as an introduction to a fandom; i'm a compulsive completist and never really feel right about it till i've been archive wading. so for my methods of reading, a fandom's size gets inconvenient as soon as it grows past the rate of fic-production that i can somewhat kinda keep up with reading. even if it's going to produce five reccable things a day and even if i had time to read all the bad and mediocre ones in between, the increased quantity of non-reccable will put me off. if it's five reccable things in, say, two weeks, and the accompanying twenty to forty unreccable things that go with them are stretched out over the same period of time, it's totally manageable. but if you prefer reading only from recs everywhere you go, a giant fandom is totally ideal; because you never have to touch anything below the mean quality (hypothetically, assuming reccers agreed about measures of quality, which i know is a counter-factual assumption).

vida cotidiana

first snowfall. it's not going to stick, of course. i love the way fallen leaves on wet pavement look like gold coins.

there's a middle-aged man in a wheelchair in our building. he's not as seriously injured as my dad and a lot stronger - he goes around in a manual wheelchair and he opens all the doors himself, and navigates into the elevator on his own. i still save him some time sometimes by holding the door for him. when we've ridden in the elevator together a few times we've tried to talk but he only speaks finnish (and i think maybe there was another, but nothing that i speak). i can say "i don't speak finnish" and "i speak english and swedish" and "i am american"¹ in finnish (score! a use for those six weeks last spring!), at least. of course, since we can't communicate my attempts always carry the possibility of getting in his way instead of helping when he is quite capable himself, but i still keep wanting to hold the door and stuff. ever since my dad's accident i feel a lot of kinship for other people in wheelchairs (and burning hate for people who use wheelchair van handicapped parking spaces when they don't have a wheelchair van, but that's another rant). i held the front door for him today when i was coming back with the dog and he insisted on my taking the elevator alone which i suspect was because my holding it was getting in his way (since he's ridden with both me and the dog before). i really need to learn some more finnish.




1. for the curious: minä en puhu suomeaa; minä puhun englantia ja ruotsia; minä olen amerikkalainen

ohmiya daily