dawnfelagund:

independence1776:

dduane:

janenx01:

marthawells:

neonperri:

scribblemoose:

suzvoy:

amelialourdes:

klaineandbiscuits:

therearecertainshadesoflimelight:

tresa-cho:

krytella:

playerprophet:

“why are you in fandom when you’re 20+”

because we built this kingdom, motherfuckers, with the trekkie zine housewives before us. 

So here’s a story. One Fourth of July I was walking down the street and ran into a BNF who I’d met a couple of times at a slash-centric con. It turned out she lived in the same building as one of my boyfriends at the time, which was nearby, so she invited me to stop by. She had a small group of friends there, and one of them was an older woman with short, white hair.

“How old are you?” she asked.

I told her my age, probably about 28 at the time.

“I’ve been reading fanfiction longer than you’ve been alive,” she said.

Here’s another story. A couple of years ago at GeekGirlCon they had an “elders speak” panel. It included some women who had organized Star Trek cons in the 70s and 80s. So, first off, we really have always been here, this is a kind of geekiness that has always belonged to women. And they talked about women doing fandom back then secretly, about having to ask their husbands for money so they could travel to meet other fans. And two of the women on this panel were a couple who’d met each other in fandom.

One of the main reasons I go to slash cons is to connect with my foremothers in fandom. A lot of them aren’t on Tumblr or Twitter, some never even really got into LiveJournal. But they’re still here, doing their thing, having Fourth of July parties and emailing with their friends about fandom. Our elders are our history, our proof that we have always been here, that “media fandom” (fandom of Western TV and movies) is our house that we built with our hands.

respect your fandom mothers and grandmothers you ungrateful little buggers

It’s just hilarious to me that kids on here think that your interests fundamentally change as you get older. Your responsibilities change and, hopefully, you start looking at things and evaluating with more life experience….which, btw, is why a lot of the over 30 people here side eye the shit out of you guys many days. Because lived experience and life experience makes you see things in a different light…even fictional stuff. But you don’t just all of a sudden turn 30 and become this boring person who has no interest anymore in all the nerd things and fandom you liked at 15 or 20 or 25. You are the same person. You still need an outlet for your interests and you still crave those safe spaces to geek out the same way you do as a kid. We’ve always been here. Other women came before us.

FYI In 1993, the most popular Superman website was run by a woman named Zoomway. She was a life long Superman fan who started the site after Lois and Clark hit the air and she had thousands of women (many of whom were older btw) who followed her site. She wasn’t some 20 year old kid. She was a grown woman with life experience decades older than most of you who was writing feminist commentary about Superman and attending fan expos before any of you were born. I was only a kid when I first starting reading her writing and she was the one who introduced me to Superman fandom. She died of cancer a few years ago and her loss was deeply felt.

Women older than you built literally every iconic fandom you post about on here.

I need the community I’ve found within my fandom more now at 43 than I ever needed it at ages 18 or 20.
The more life wears on me, the more I live and love and lose, the more I treasure this space of flails and joy and analysis over episode ephemera, shared with a chorus of voices flung far and wide around the world, small sections of which have become friends, shining lights who I look for whenever I log on. 

I joined fandoms when I was 18 and I’ve never looked back.

Been in fandom 20+ years and counting ❤

(also, omg ZOOMWAY)

First fandom 40 years ago. Still here. Squee is for life, not just for kids.

Fandom for 23 years, and I still smile at the memory of Zoomway and her absolute awesomeness.

Stumbled on my first Star Wars fanzine about 36-37 years ago.

I wrote Star Trek fanfic for the first time in 1978.

We’ve been here all along and we’re not going anywhere.

I wrote my first Trek fanfic just after ST:TOS premiered. I didn’t even know that fanfic was what I was doing: didn’t even know the genre had a name. Later on, when I was in nursing school, I came to know the women in New York who were in the process of organizing those first Trek conventions of the 70s. I worked some of those cons and made friendships there that last to this day. The people who ran private presses dedicated to K/S slashzines and presided over dealers’ tables piled high with them are now pro writers and editors with worldwide reputations… and they are still fans.

Which is as it should be. Fandom isn’t something you need to grow out of to prove your adulthood (or justify it to others). And it’s their own insecurities that people trying to push that position on others are running from. So fuck that noise. Long-term fannish lives are the original Slow Burn story… and it’s one we’ll still be writing for years to come.

All of this. I love that my primary fandom home– the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild– is built and maintained by women older than me (I’m in my early 30s, btw, and I’ve been in fandom since the early 2000s).

The thing that sometimes contributes to younger fans thinking fandom belongs to them?

Free time.

Older fans– used loosely to mean anyone older than early 20s– often have full time jobs (with a possibly long commute), a living space to take care of, maybe a significant other and/or children, offline friends, religious obligations, meals to cook, and a whole host of other things. There literally isn’t the time to devote to fandom that teenagers and college/university students tend to have.

Older fans might only belong to a site or two, not out of a lack of understanding that fandom is on new platforms, but because they literally don’t have the time to keep up with fandom on said new platforms. (Or maybe they prefer the older platform and see no reason to change, but that’s getting off topic.) So on sites where older fans aren’t, younger fans seem to forget we built fandom because we’re invisible.

Also, many of us came on the Internet at a time when you didn’t give out personal information to people you’ve never met, especially when fanfic fandom was a Don’t Talk About It thing. Fandom only gained its modicum of respectability in the past few years. There are still a multitude of locations in the world where fandom is not understood and plenty of areas where specific parts of fandom (slash, for instance) would either be socially penalized if people knew you wrote it or is outright illegal. So there is a very real Real Life-fandom divide for some people. People you may think are young could very well not be simply because they don’t post personal information about themselves in public spaces, including in creators’ notes.

Tumblr itself perpetuates this “older fans don’t exist” simply because the reblogging set-up divorces the creator from the content, the blog with any information from the post. Also, it’s very easy to follow a bunch of similar folks and assume that the entirety of the site is like your dash. That is simply not true.

Older fans have always been here. Older fans always will be.

Thank you to all who contributed to this post. Indy, thank you especially for articulating so well what my own challenges in fandom as an older fan–am I really an older fan at the age of 36?? I suppose I am!–have been.

I constantly regret that I can’t read more fanfiction. I barely get to read fanfic at all, to tell the honest truth. It’s not that I don’t want to–every other story on the SWG catches my fancy and I think, “This! This one! This one I will make time to read”–but “making time” isn’t really possible very often. It’s the same when reading my Dreamwidth flist and even surfing Tumblr. I’m a teacher tackling a number of professional challenges this year–writing new a new humanities curriculum for three grades then teaching it, implementing a new writing curriculum, and serving for the first time as a teacher-leader, to say nothing of serving a challenging and high-need student population–and I frequently work ten- to twelve-hour days and minimum six-day weeks. And I believe in what I do. I believe in and love what I do so hard that I can’t just set it aside. Ironically, I became a teacher in the first place because, in the misty origins of my fannish experience twelve years ago, other fannish women encouraged and validated my love of writing and language to where I threw my life aside and went back to school to get my teaching credentials and MA in humanities.

I do spend many hours in a typical week on fandom, but that time mostly goes to running the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild.

I have trouble thinking of myself as an “older fan” because I still feel like a neophyte when I consider the history of the Tolkien fandom and fanfic in particular. The first known Tolkien fanfic was published in a zine in 1958. Even online fanfic has been around a while: I came onboard well after the Silmarillion fanfic community was established and fangirled some of the “first wave” Silmfic writers harder than I fangirled Tolkien. A few of them are still around, and I still get butterflies when I see they’ve responded to something I’ve written or posted.

I think the history of fanfiction–of women engaging with each other creatively and intellectually, using that shared interest to build lifelong friendships, and producing art that they want to see, largely free of the influence of a straight-white-guy-produced pop culture and Western canon–is too important to forget. Whether new fans want to engage with our stories and the sites and groups we built and the history we made or not, it blows my mind that anyone would find it worth only of forgetting.