astercontrol:

Anyone else remember the days when it was just the default assumption that whoever was powerful enough to own the copyright on your favorite media was like, at least 95% a terrible person

like, obviously you were a fan, so that meant they were capable of an occasional good idea here and there. Or maybe their ideas were 100% dogshit on the intentions level, but you still found something in them that resonated… and you still took those wins, even against the express wishes of the creator or owner. because where else could you get them?

And regardless of how or why the good bits happened, the person obviously was an evil ball of sexist racist homophobic transphobic slime. because practically everyone with that kind of power was. or at least pretended to be, right? Whenever a famous person strayed too far from that rule it was always a fucking scandal.

And so of course you hated the copyright owner. And of course you didn’t act like they had any authority on anything regarding the property or its fans! Whatever they said about their own interpretation of their characters– or their opinions about fanfiction writers– was irrelevant and was treated as having the absolutely zero weight it deserved

And anyway, their views about fans creating fanworks could range from “sad nerds with no life” to “plagiarists I’m gonna sue” but were rarely positive in any way

….which reinforced the already strong feeling that fanworks primarily, above any other relationship to the almost-always-shitty property owner, were a weapon to use against them

I don’t know what my point is here. It’s just… I do remember those days. and the contrast between that, and a lot of the assumptions taken for granted about fandom these days, has been feeling…. very strong to me for a few years now

in retrospect the memories feel kinda like we were playing in a rented house in ways we knew would piss off the landlord

and yeah we’d talk about how we loved this house, but it was like “I love how these rooms are shaped because they are the perfect layout for displaying my collection of pride flags (even though i know perfectly well that they were built that way a hundred years ago for optimal control of all the underpaid servants, and that the guy currently renting this house to us would still rather we have underpaid servants than pride flags)”

and while i now recognize this was a deeply fucked up way to live… I somehow also feel it’s deeply fucked up to act as if the only two possibilities are “the landlord and builders are awesome people who fully intended those rooms to be used for pride flags” or “those rooms aren’t really any good for pride flags and you’re a bad person for renting that house at all”