IN DEFENSE OF DIGITAL

so the zine discourse going around is actually pretty interesting for me because it’s the kind of culture clash with an infinite number of prongs, and I find myself weirdly … in between a lot of them?

A few bullet points noted in good faith, but frank.

• personally part of the crew that views digital art as inherently more accessible than print (even *beyond* print/digital publishing - there’s webrings, webcomics, oaeki boards, RSS feeds, critique forums - all built in with a community that you don’t have to hunt down one-by-one.  and if you get burned by one, you can jump in another)  
  • (I wonder too - if my generation who didn’t have cars or were cut off from mailboxes from nosy/fudie parents are also defensive at how massive the freedom of stealthily getting on internet was in comparison - earlier generations aren’t going to get that nuance.)
  • (even now, if I wanted to have fun with R18 zine trades, my only options are fundie!parents mailbox and a work mailbox which uhhhhhhhh i quite frankly don’t trust strangers - even if they’re zinesters - to do the appropriate level of camouflage?
• I also admit to a slight … knee-jerk distaste at how low the technical quality of most zines are? this may have something to do with consuming doujinshi and a fierce spirit of competition with fanartists /around the world/ with a *very* high production level which may have fed into that “print works are only for *finished* aesthetic full-color effort”. vs, say the “scraps” section of dA that feel like what old-school zinesters are talking about in the “goddamn, chill out, zines are just harmless fun, you don’t have to be so anal about the quality.” corner.
  • completely different contexts, basically.
• that being said in the last few years I’ve tilted hard in the “support artists with physical books over anything digital” so I absolutely do get the surprising durability of print.  
• and also in turn, I do think the younger generation has a tremendous lack of respect how the previous waves of fen survived; I’m not going to straight out and say they were incompatible, but it evolved in very, very different ways and different priorities (art/fen as punk defiance vs art/fen as community, is the vibe I’m getting at first glance). 
  • not that there was no community before - but you didn’t make zines because you knew you were going to get 10+ instant comments about how other folks loved the same character and spinning off into meta discussions, you know?
  • (interestingly I’m starting to see how art/fen as community can be bad in the extreme with the very obvious example of the ones who post fanworks solely for attention, convention profits.
  • tl;dr moderation…….)

anyway wow that was a lot more thoughts than i thought i had lol