My problem is that I have trouble getting past the concept of fandom as a "community." It's not a community and hasn't been one for a long time. Actually, it hasn't been one since the dawn of internet fandom.

(Later note: I didn't mean to, but I see I went off the deep end here and there. Be aware that my scornful references to "fans" refer to Them, not Us. We, of course, Do It Right, while They are hopeless morons. This is neither a fair nor a balanced view of fandom, which should surprise no one.)

(We now return you....)

Before the Internet (BtI), fandom was, more or less, a sort of community.

Conventions were small, run on a shoestring, informal, and cosy. (Beyond the Trek Machine that kicked in in the 80s, I mean.)

Fanzines were sold or passed from hand to hand. A few of these fanzines were discussion-based and included debate on stories and shows. Larger fandoms, or those with more passionate adherents, had their own discussion zines, but everyone was pretty much aware that they were a part of something larger, something known as "fandom" and it had a flexible but defined "shape" to it.

There were standards of behavior, too. There weren't that many people "active" publicly, so what you stood up and in public, or even via a round-robin letter discussion, was going to get around. (I'm not saying there wasn't a percentage of fans with no concept of acceptable behavior, just that they were fewer and farther between when there were, on the whole, fewer active fans. As is natural.)

BtI, bad behavior got you talked about, and not in the way most of us want to be talked about.

There were zines of dubious, not to say gawdawful, quality, but not thousands of them. Not many fans were willing to lose money in publishing something just as a vanity effort. Also, you didn't get much feedback on zines. Even if you sold a hundred copies, you weren't going to get a hundred loving feedback notes. (This was a Good Thing. It encouraged the talentless to stay out of writing.)

And then...the internet. In the very early days, things weren't much changed. On-line fandom was difficult to find and the "communities," while they tended to be more isolated within show-specific fandoms, were still largely self-policing.

The voices of sanity, at that point, still seemed to outweigh the lunatics. (I found on-line fandom via Highlander, BTW, just as a point of reference. There were some nutcases around, but we knew who they were and it was possible to avoid them.)

It was...you've all heard this before, but bear with me...The X-Files that really started the avalanche of mediocrity.

Suddenly (!) there were thousands of breathless little girls squealing over Mulder and Scully in lurrrve and they couldn't have cared less about quality, continuity, or the (really) ground-breaking nature of the show in the first season.

There were the conspiracy-theorists debating whether or not Chris Crapfest Carter knew something about our government that he was trying to tell us. (Absurd, but they made for some interestingly paranoid discussions.)

There were the science buffs, hotly debating the feasibility or otherwise of various gimmicks on the show. (They left first...TXF was anything but "science" fiction.)

And that was all well and good, as far as it went, but as with so many human endeavors, it went far too far. First, the media discovered and celebrated these "philes", attracting an avalanche of newbies to the fandom.

These weren't "fans" finding a new fandom, you understand. These were people who discovered the concept of fandom while in the throes of obsession, thus piling fanaticism on mania with just the results you might expect. Chaos. No rules, no boundaries, no restraints.

(That's good and bad, okay? I remember those early fanaticism days with bemusement...I can't remember a show that was as immediately addictive as TXF in a long time. Nor one that generated as much discussion and debate and breathless anticipation. But I, I hasten to point out, am not really prone to public displays of idiocy.) (Well, not often.)

(Don't even get me started on the decline of on-line fanfiction inspired by the reams and reams of truly abysmal "stories" posted by these clueless idiots, but I could make the same argument that the flood of unreadable garbage that TXF inspired has a direct relationship to the overwhelming FoUG most fandoms see these days.)

And, of course, as the show went downhill, the fandom changed. They always do. Enraged and disappointed fans, unable to take their ire out on Those Responsible, turn on each other like staving hyenas.

That, I think, set a pattern for on-line fandom in the years that have followed. There's the first rush of enthusiasm for a show then, when the summer re-runs go on for too long or a beloved character leaves or the direction of the show changes or whatever happens, the fans turn on one another.

There are fights, wars, and flames, and every day a fresh crop of "newbies" joins the throng. They see what's happening and assume that this is "what fandom is" and they mirror the behavior they're seeing. Because of how they were indoctrinated into fandom, they look upon it as an arena for bad behavior...for acting out in a way few of them would have the nerve to do in real life.

So, you see, in the end, it's all back to The X-Files. And it's all Chris Carter's fault.

(This is so not where I was going with this, but I always think that at the point where I'm able to blame CC for the world's ills is a good place to stop.)