Your Naivety is Charming

[4thofeleven]

Talking to some RL friends yesterday, fanfiction came up. There’s something kind of cute about talking to otherwise wordly people and having to explain to them that, no, the authors tend to be female, that yes, it’s mainly slash (and then needing to explain what slash means), and that of course the majority of Star Trek fic is Kirk/Spock, why would you expec t anything else?

Of course, it does occur to me I might spend a little too much time online that it actually surprised me that there’s still people who didn’t know things like that. I’d have thought that sort of thing would have trickled into mainstream awareness by now…

Comments

[nic]

I tend to forget that not everyone knows about fanfic/slash these days!

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

We need a terrible CSI episode to introduce the mainstream to it, like that awful one about furry fandom...

[sunnyskywalker]

My city recently had one of those fluffy news segments on the shocking revelation that - get this - some sf/f fans are girls. Who talk to each other. If this is newsworthy, knowing about fandom demographics and K/S must be graduate-level knowledge. Hell, some people still have trouble with the concept of science fiction and are shocked to learn that, say, time travel is not a new story idea. It's a bit baffling. I mean, I do my best to ignore sports and sports fandom and don't understand the purpose of sitting on sticky metal bleachers waving a big foam finger*, but at least I know about it, and have some idea what terms like "penalty shot" and "foul ball" mean.

*Or whatever it is that other fandom does

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Well, it's possible you don't know what penalty shots or foul balls are, and what you think is sport is in fact just as hilariously inaccurate and baffling wrong as mass media's understanding of fandom... *grin*