I can't lie, I totally felt a twinge of sadness when I heard about Panic at the Disco breaking up. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY, EITHER! This is similar to when I recently found out Socks the cat, as in Bill Clinton's presidential pet, died. (Ahaha, apparently he has his own wiki article.) For some inexplicable reason it made me do a little :( on the inside because despite my total non-interest, I used to hear about it a lot! The ~end of an era~ and all that.

While I'm being honest, I completely camped out on the spnanonymous thing ALL AFTERNOON yesterday. I am a huge sucker for anonymous memes, and I mean that in the least wanky way possible. I don't like to sit around and bitch about people (well, any more than anyone else does), but I am always fascinated by how that kind of forum turns into a place to just... talk. I would never normally enter into a Dean/Castiel shipping debate with anyone, but for some reason I found myself doing exactly that over there. And it was fun! I didn't have to feel like I would be branded some kind of squee-harshing wanker or whatever if I said something that people didn't agree with.

It's really quite sad to me that fandom has reached a point where being honest and direct seem to go hand in hand with alienating people and being That Guy. I remember back in Ye Olden Days, when fandom was structured around impersonal forums of communication rather than FOLLOWING EACH OTHER'S LIVES, that kind of thing was totally par for the course. You rarely ever saw a mentality of, "Oh, god, not another Person/Person shipper, STFU! Get out of my fandom!" unless the people involved were particularly crazy. I would actively engage in shipping arguments and character-defending arguments with people on eGroups (HAHA that's going back) without ever feeling like those sometimes violent differences of opinion meant we... couldn't agree on anything at all. But I'm constantly seeing people (uh, sometimes on said anonymous memes) getting griped about and sometimes called out for their vocal/vehement standpoints on things.

None of that is SPN-specific, obviously, it's just kind of a general theme in today's LJ-centric fandom universe. As someone with a laundry list of unpopular opinions that's about a MILE LONG, I usually feel like I should can it rather than open up. It's my journal and I can cry if I want to, but there's always that feeling like if I post saying "DEAN/CASTIEL IS A BREATH OF FRESH AIR, PLS STOP WHINING ABOUT HOW THESE SHIPPERS ARE RUINING YOUR FANDOM" people are going to huff and defriend me and I will be left only with Dean/Castiel fans to talk to.

Is this my imagination?? It might be, but I feel like I see this kind of thing all the time. It's the nature of Doing Fandom in such a way that your "friends" are a list of people tuned into every passing thought or fancy that you might want to share. The argument or justification would appear to be, "Well, if you are a Dean/Castiel fan and I am revolted by that pairing, why would I want to read your LJ and hear you squee about it and post picspams and stories that will make me sad?" Which makes sense, but seems like epic fail on some kind of basic we-are-social-human-beings level. I mean, see above: even though I never read those particular posts in detail, I saw so much Panic at the Disco related stuff on my flist a few years ago that their passing makes me empathize with friends who REALLY DO care about them. And it's okay that I had to scroll a bunch.

I feel like I should add a disclaimer here that I actually have never read Dean/Castiel and probably never will. HAHA, this is my point.



ETA: I think another important factor at work in this is the popularity thing. In days prior to LJ I don't think anyone was worried about rocking the boat because there wasn't this ~consequence~ of seeing its ramifications in actual numbers. This makes it more understandable, I guess, because everyone just wants to be liked. AND BE A BNF.