Why is public discourse so frustrating now?

In late November, Emily did something she hadn’t done in a very long time: she went back to Tumblr and started discussing the fandom. especially, Hot competitionCrave Smash’s surprise hit series revolves around a love story between two close-minded hockey players, based on a queer hockey romance series that itself began, in part, as gay Marvel fanfiction.

In early 2010, Emily, who asked that only her first name be used due to harassment concerns, was a heavy Tumblr user. I went from gossip girl Fandom’s Rapture Fandom’s Sherlock From fandom to bandom (an umbrella term for fans of pop punk bands) to hockey. But by the end of the decade, she, like many other avid Tumblr users, had largely migrated to Twitter.

“I was in my early 20s, and I was trying to move to a new city, and I tried to be more of an adult about things,” Emily told WIRED. I left public spaces. then, Hot competition It happened, and Tumblr exploded.

“Old friends who I haven’t spoken to in years are starting to resurface online,” she says. “Everyone is saying, ‘Hey, have you guys seen this show?'” “I would say, ‘Tumblr has been activated. I mean, he’s really healed the fandom spaces on Tumblr.”

For those who haven’t visited Tumblr since 2010 (or ever), Emily’s description of Hot competition The camaraderie feels like the complete opposite of the discourse surrounding the show on other platforms, especially X (formerly Twitter). A Vulture article exposing the series’ popularity among women, as well as the “fujoshi” culture of pairing two male characters together in a steamy fanfiction, sparked a backlash that appears to have pitted anti-fandom cultures in coastal media against women who appreciate sex scenes. and Plot lines from Hot competition.

But the way this rhetoric plays out on X is strangely inconsistent with reality. Most culture reporters today don’t intrude into the fandom to shame and berate women — many of them, myself included, started out as Tumblr fangirls first. Although Vulture’s correspondent, E. Alex Jung, wrote about whether fujoshi culture is of interest to gay men, he ultimately concluded that women who write fanfiction explore their identities and desires more than actual gay men. Some of the crowd shots that followed were put on blast despite basically saying the same thing. Some of the fan backlash against Young’s article has focused on its connection to a very popular topic Hot competition Fanfiction near the end of the piece, which was later removed.

Like Emily, over the past decade, many fandom followers have migrated from relatively isolated fandom spaces like Tumblr to more mainstream social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and later TikTok. One of the reasons for Tumblr’s decline was the site’s controversial “pornography ban.” In November 2018, Apple briefly pulled Tumblr from the App Store after child sexual abuse material was found on the platform. Shortly after, Tumblr banned all adult content, pushing away users interested in all kinds of erotic material — including fans. Tumblr has since relaxed those rules, allowing nudity again, but pornographic content remains banned.

“It was something that changed the internet seismically,” says Amanda Brennan, a meme librarian and fandom expert who worked at Tumblr between 2013 and 2021. “Fandoms are so widespread. It’s all these different worlds coexisting now, and they’re not bumping into each other as much.”