Reading adventures

[cimorene]

I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what thefourthvine and norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.

Comments

[ngtskynebula]

This was fascinating to read. When you said: "...but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random))", it really caught my attention; this is smth I've never considered before.

My own fandoms are very, very small, and very, very flopped, plus I feel like either I missed the era of fanfic reclisting in the Brazilian fansphere (probably when Google Blogger was everybody's favourite platform to use, back in the late 00s and early 10s), or it just didn't exist at large, cause I could never count on it... well, maybe ppl used to do that back when Social Spirit still had a journaling functionality, hm. Still, I think it's a wonderful aspect of fandom. How curious to find out it isn't as "fool-proof" as it could've been, at least for some ppl!

I've always done it the harder, older way of just filtering through all the results in my fandom's tag, cause it's always so little fanfic to choose from, lmao, I ain't got much of a choice.

(In fact I spent so much inside small fandoms I was quite shocked to revisit Fairy Tail's category and be able to... choose genres, and tags, and cast. How weird!)

[cimorene]

In a small enough pool there frequently aren't any recs at all, or else it's faster to just read them all! I always have read multifannishly, although every now and then if I got interested in something new I might read it mostly or exclusively for a few weeks or months. Generalizations always work better for larger sample sizes, though. Tfv and Norah and I were all multi-fandom reccers, and I guess I was thinking about that kind of reading because it's the kind where you attempt, or need, to turn up new reading material.

In a single-fandom context the rec culture might well be different even if it was a megafandom. I've found places where multiple people seemed to think a rec was a matter of courtesy owed to the writer regardless of the actual quality. Sometimes I've found a useful single-fandom resource, like princessofgeeks's SG1 recs, but generally, it was rare even when recs lists were common to find really informative ones that included all the major header statistics, a sample, and a description - and that's what you need to have any conception of what you're clicking on in advance, and therefore the next best after a rec from someone you can trust. But a person who is reading just one fandom usually has higher investment and is willing to be more forgiving of flaws anyway, or at least they're enthusiastic enough to look for different qualities (like characterization, or using or not using popular tropes) than a multifannish reader who isn't as attached to that fandom. People in the grip of intense fannish monomania are more likely to read everything, or read direct from the archive at least, because they run out of recs or good writing and don't want to stop reading. Of course some people never do that, but I've seen enough discussions to know it's pretty common. I've usually been in the habit of going through the archive headers myself when I'm focusing on one fandom, even though I don't open most of them, but I usually have started a brand-new fandom with some recs first - or rather, I used to before the death of Delicious and the recslist culture in the mainstream media fandom spaces I inhabit.

[ngtskynebula]

"But a person who is reading just one fandom usually has higher investment and is willing to be more forgiving of flaws anyway, or at least they're enthusiastic enough to look for different qualities (like characterization, or using or not using popular tropes) than a multifannish reader who isn't as attached to that fandom. People in the grip of intense fannish monomania are more likely to read everything, or read direct from the archive at least, because they run out of recs or good writing and don't want to stop reading." That makes sense! Indeed, this is the behaviour I observe in myself and most of my fannish peers, and we're all mainly attached to a fandom at a time... we get extremely forgiving the less fanworks to sort through there is, lmao.

"I've usually been in the habit of going through the archive headers myself when I'm focusing on one fandom, even though I don't open most of them, but I usually have started a brand-new fandom with some recs first - or rather, I used to before the death of Delicious and the recslist culture in the mainstream media fandom spaces I inhabit." Visiting a new fandom first through reclists also makes sense, I think I actually did that in 2016, when I first discovered k-pop fanfic...? Back then I used to read a bit on LiveJournal, and the fanfics hadn't been published much earlier (usually in 2012-2014, so less than five years of difference), the authors were active there, so there was, still, at least a bit of a reclisting culture in this side of fandom, yeah. Mostly inbound linking, cause LJ wasn't exactly made for discovering fanfics, but yeah.

I didn't experience the Delicious era, but I wish I did. It seems very cool! I love bookmarking, aw.

[cimorene]

In some ways ao3 bookmarks are more useful, but in other way less. For a start, on delicious you could have a friendlist - a chronological feed of the bookmarks saved by the people you follow. This should be easy to make, but ao3 doesn't do it - maybe you could achieve it with your own rss reader though or something. But also, it was semi common to see informative and useful comments like reviews, summaries, and caveats on bookmarks there, but because they link more directly to the author on ao3 people are probably feeling compelled to only say unambiguously nice things, which makes them way less useful to other potential readers. But actually the majority of bookmarks on ao3 don't add any information at all, including most of mine. I think it's just laziness, because it's easy to save one with a few clicks, but takes time and thought to add informative notes and tags.

[ngtskynebula]

How curious, indeed! I love learning about fannish history, thanks for telling me about this <3 I don't think smth so "time consuming" has a chance of coming back in nowadays' fandom landscape, which is a shame... it is quite cool to think about. I grieve rec-listing a little, even after all of this, because I see it as the perfect compromise towards how reviewing professionally published books works, in the sense that it mostly respects how fandom is.

[cimorene]

Yeah... I agree. I miss it myself but I can't even get myself to do it the time-consuming way, unfortunately.😂