I was nodding so hard while reading this post that I managed to give myself slight whiplash in the process.
Completely agreed on all counts. From what I recall, it was Tumblr that popularized this "cute fanart and horrific political reality right next to each other" approach. I remember a certain strain of 'slacktivism' entering fandom spaces as early as the LiveJournal years, but it didn't quite reach the levels of Tumblr and Twitter due to the structure specific to LiveJournal (separate, clearly demarcated communities meant that, for the most part, 'political reality dissemination' and 'fandom' tended to exist within separate spaces, minus incidents like Winterfox).
The irony right now is that, of the two large platforms we have, it's Tumblr that's actually better-suited to avoiding the above mix, due to the far more robust third-party extension support. As an example, I've blacklisted so many terms and muted so many posts on Tumblr that, for quite a while now, I've managed to turn it into solely a feed of fanart, fanfic, gifsets, fandom meta posts, etc. Doing the same is near-impossible on Twitter, due to a combination of the site not having a real tagging culture (hardly anyone tags 'US politics', for example) + much less in the way of third-party extensions, with Tumblr doing its best to kill off the few ones we do have.
This is one of the many reasons why I keep advocating for a return to segmented platforms, divided into clearly walled-off communities. Yes, it will lead to fandom fragmenting and splintering, but at this point, that's preferable to the damage done by throwing everything into a blender.
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Completely agreed on all counts. From what I recall, it was Tumblr that popularized this "cute fanart and horrific political reality right next to each other" approach. I remember a certain strain of 'slacktivism' entering fandom spaces as early as the LiveJournal years, but it didn't quite reach the levels of Tumblr and Twitter due to the structure specific to LiveJournal (separate, clearly demarcated communities meant that, for the most part, 'political reality dissemination' and 'fandom' tended to exist within separate spaces, minus incidents like Winterfox).
The irony right now is that, of the two large platforms we have, it's Tumblr that's actually better-suited to avoiding the above mix, due to the far more robust third-party extension support. As an example, I've blacklisted so many terms and muted so many posts on Tumblr that, for quite a while now, I've managed to turn it into solely a feed of fanart, fanfic, gifsets, fandom meta posts, etc. Doing the same is near-impossible on Twitter, due to a combination of the site not having a real tagging culture (hardly anyone tags 'US politics', for example) + much less in the way of third-party extensions, with Tumblr doing its best to kill off the few ones we do have.
This is one of the many reasons why I keep advocating for a return to segmented platforms, divided into clearly walled-off communities. Yes, it will lead to fandom fragmenting and splintering, but at this point, that's preferable to the damage done by throwing everything into a blender.