my common rant is about how Qan*n & similar worldviews show a profound lack of fandom training, especially in the sense that fandom experts know you can enjoy conspiratorial thinking & overinterpreting meaningless signs FOR PLEASURE without believing any of it to actually be true https://twitter.com/_sashayed/status/1336323875592839171

look back at your 1st fandom. Wasn’t it grand? Don’t you also now see the flaws in the source material & cringe a little at how eager you were to call it genius? Okay now repeat a few times, & eventually you learn the joy is in the hyperfixation & community, not a central truth.

There were dark larries before 1D, in other fandoms. You see the cycle enough & you begin to be able to enjoy the process of galaxy brain-ing without actually taking it literally. “Management won’t let them be in love!!!” has existed in every fandom, & is also what F*x News sells

People wrote dissertations about the plots in Stargate command. There were enormous dossiers tracking *NSYNC’s movement through Germany before they were famous in the US. People deciphered secret plots in BBC Sherlock while the creators were like “haha lockscreen. geddit!!!”

“Management” or “Stargate Command” or “The Watcher’s Council” or “The Alliance” or “The Machine” are all fandom constructs that allow an audience to believe in a coherent narrative in the face of chaos & iterative harm. Most actual conspiracy theories function the same way.

It is very very tempting to believe that people do harm in the service of a shadowy network of villains, rather than out of carelessness and selfishness and accidents and indifference. This appears in the narratives of most fandoms, and then repeats in the fandoms themselves.

Spend enough time in fandom, you begin to recognize that the impulse to believe in coherency of purpose and action is itself both enjoyable en masse AND unsustainable. Most people writing TV shows are on a deadline and just forgot about a prop placement from 3 seasons ago.

Anyway, everyone’s parents and weird aunts are in the throes of their first fandom experience, and they are reacting like 13 year olds: you guys don’t UNDERSTAND and YES I’m willing to burn down my life for this and YES I want a tattoo and ugh can’t you see all the evidence!!!!!

There are checks on your behavior at 13 that actual 52-year-olds believing in nonsense don’t have. They can just break shit, including governments.

anyone who wrote fanfiction about their theories and never talked about them offline (instead of buying a bunch of guns to prepare for “the uprising” and deciding epidemiology doesn’t exist) is a HERO. good job. your Angelcities page from 1998 was the mark of a good citizen.

oh and of course there ARE actual conspiracies, but as YWA often points out they are usually about some combination of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, while also being pathetically inept and largely public in a culture that lacks accountability

The syphilis study happened in public, w/multiple publications! Every serial rapist in circles of power has been known as a predator for years! No one at Enron tried particularly hard to hide what they were doing! Most villainy is done in the open, & proceeds bc of indifference.

We all want desperately to believe in “Management” (for some people, “the Left” or “the liberal media”) but it is a comforting fantasy. It is a security blanket that shields us from seeing just how bad things are and how complicit we are in the systems that brought us here.

Isn’t that grim? Wouldn’t you prefer to think of yourself as a warrior for truth standing up to a ravening monster?