It's that time of year …

[jlh]

If you've been around not just fandom but online life in general for a while you notice that pointless wankiness comes in waves, at specific times of the year, and is generally driven by bored teenagers and college kids who want to stir something up for their own amusement. The winter holidays are a key time for this, of course, but so is right now, that dangerous time between the end of many college terms and the start of many summer jobs, made even worse in media fandom because so many shows are on hiatus for the summer.

There's already been some ridiculousness on fandomsecrets where the OP said that they were bored and wanted to get people angry—though of course sometimes that's just a backward justification. (For those of you vaguely paying attention, it was secret #75 in yesterday's post, the one about adults in fandoms all being creepy. Hello, generalize much?)

In light of this, does anyone else think that the decision to have this LJ election at the time of maybe second-greatest wankiness is a bad idea?

Comments

[misscake]

I'm with on the nature and ridiculousness of wank, but I found this comic strip rather relevant and wanted to share. :D

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Heh. Maybe yaoi fangirls are relatively hip? I can't think of anything I'm up to that is particularly hip!

[mmichelle.livejournal.com]

I never really thought about wank in regards to time of year, but now that you mention it, you're completely right. Wasn't it around beginning of summer in '03 that all the Gryffindor Tower stuff came to a head? Or am I remembering incorrectly? Oh, wank. LJ should have planned better.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It definitely was. And the hate memes are usually either at the beginning of the summer or at the Xmas hols. There's a particular online personality that is so uninterested in taking online life or really much of anything else personally that they like provoking people to make trouble to entertain themselves, and if you get upset that's your own fault for caring too much.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Ah, I love young people upset at older people doing what they're doing. As if they just assume they're going to stop and play golf when they get out of college. I remember some girl on FAP once complaining about adults in HP fandom and who ever heard of any adult who liked children's books? And I was like...you do know that children's books are written, published, designed, edited and marketed by adults, don't you?

Also I have to say...most of the people I've met in fandom have been older than college age.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

With very few exceptions, the people I've met in fandom have been out of college. Of course, Ali and I met when she was in college and we're still super close friends. But in the end that person said they were only talking about "creepy yaoi fangirls" who had no lives, and didn't bother to make their fandom secret more specific. Well, and then she went on to say that she was bored and wanted to stir some things up.