I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.
Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.
The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.
Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.
Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.
Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.
By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.
There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.
1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.
2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.
3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.
So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.
this is great!
It also complies with the “killer theory”. I don’t remember exact names, but people in online games are generally divided into four groups:
- explorers research game opportunities, they don’t mind playing alone, usually don’t hurt others, but sometimes they can exploit game weaknesses
- achievers play to win, to gain points, popularity. They need both explorers who know all perks, and socializers - as their followers and support
- socializers - they play because their friends are all here, they like to be together, they are usually most of the players, they can be easily led astray
- killers - for some reasons they come to hurt others, be it hurtful remarks in the chats or disturbing behavior
A tiny amount of killers is manageable and even profitable. (All four types are important). Killers raise stakes for the achievers, give socializers something to talk about in their groups and give explorers incentives to invent something new.
Angered explorers are the top predators here - but they must be seriously offended, and since they play on the outskirts of the game, killers rarely fight them. Killers usually go for the weakest (socializers) or most noticeable (achievers).
But if the game, by its design, somehow attracts to much killers, who scare socializers, leave achievers without their rewards and - by choking the environment - make it boring for the explorers (what I gonna explore here? ten kinds of dick-related-nicknames? Pff!) - they effectively kill the game.
This is awesome. In fandom terms, I think whether a fandom tends to be, in general, a pretty decent place to be with a small tire fire here or there, or one big flaming dumpster fire, probably has a lot to do with who the 1% in that fandom are. If you’re unlucky enough to be in a fandom where a couple of the tire-fire people are the ones who run the exchanges, or the most influential shippers of your particular small pairing, or the big BNF, you are screwed. Even though the vast majority of the fandom undoubtedly still consists of sane and decent people, it’s going to be really hard to avoid the 1%, and they’ll actively drive people out.
On the other hand, some of my best times in fandom have been in calm, sane corners of fandoms that I knew had raging dumpster fires going elsewhere, but I never had to deal with them because my part of the fandom was quite nice.
Large fandoms are a mixed blessing that way … more and bigger tire fires (and more visible to outsiders), but also, with more people and more ships, it’s easier to find cozy little pockets of sanity in which to nest.
It’s gotten so fashionable on tumblr to hate on The Beatles but who else is going to eat rotten wood and contribute to soil fertility in complex forest ecosystems?
This is very funny, but can we also just talk about the strange irony that lies behind The Beatles pushback? Because it mostly has to do with sticking it to obnoxious, self-important men who all believe they share some deep, ethereal connection with the spirit of John Lennon that makes them superior to the populace at large, especially when it comes to all those foolish young women who only listen to popular, music-industry garbage. Except, they’re totally unaware of the fact that when the Beatles first became popular, they were massively reviled by…obnoxious, self-important men who believed their appreciation for folk music made them superior to the populace at large, especially when it came to all the silly teenage girls who only listened to popular, music-industry garbage, and acted like fools screaming from their stupid Beatlemania obsession.
Like, the Beatles have effectively been put on a pedestal but the same people who hated them for being teen girl music in the early 60s, and it’s weird AF.
They literally changed the relationship of British culture to the working class and class markers such as accents. They were innovative and had an incredible understanding of music, despite not having any formal training of musical education, which set a new standard for what was expected of modern musicians and opened doors for others. And while the frustration at four British white dudes becoming the poster boys for a genre invented by black people is absolutely legit, that frustration is more about the culture that posted them as such. They weren’t co-opting, they idolized both Elvis and who HE took from, without an understanding of race relations in the U.S. or what it even meant that Elvis rose to success on the backs of men who never got recognition. There’s a story about Paul McCartney, and how he was floored to see a black woman forcibly removed from a whites-only space when they were on tour in the U.S. His reaction? The band refused to play any venues if they were segregated, forcing Southern venues to sell integrated seats.
I have a lot of feelings about the Beatles, and I usually let posts on this site go by when they throw vitriol at them, because I don’t have the energy. Yes, John Lennon was abusive. He also actively worked on changing, not just his behavior, but his relationship to the world, his relationships, and to fix the core of the problem, not just the symptoms. Which is ultimately what we want from our abusers, isn’t it? Being publicly shamed, taking them down a peg, getting revenge on them – it’s satisfying, but ultimately unfulfilling and perpetuating the cycle they began. To see them change, work on themselves, challenge themselves – that leads us to feeling safer. Which is all we wanted in the first place.
Every shitty opinion of the Beatles I’ve heard seems to be a reaction to how other people see them, not the band itself. Fine, you don’t like their music, but if that’s an integral part of your identity, that it somehow makes you cooler or better than others, then you’re trying too hard and you’re just kind of annoying. I think Oasis is garbage but I don’t shove it in people’s faces who love them, because it’s a subjective argument and all I’ll do is make people feel shitty, which, why would I want to do that? You can think the Beatles overrated, but the gazillion bands you DO like who were inspired them probably disagree with you. You can see them as privileged white men, but in their own time and place that context isn’t what it is now.
But to be perfectly honest, the thing that bothers the most about Beatles lore is the bullshit about Yoko Ono breaking the band up. George Harrison was bailing and wandering off on his own for months at a time way before she and Lennon started dating, and the biggest turning point for the band was when - after they had been fighting for weeks - they took a two week vacation during which McCartney hired his father in law as the band’s new manager, even though everyone else had told him a dozen times they don’t want this guy as their manager. And within like ten seconds the guy sold off half the band’s catalogue, which is how Michael Jackson eventually ended up with all their songs (and left them all to McCartney in his will). The band broke up because they started playing together as kids and now they were 30, and also because Paul was kind of a dick. And Yoko Ono got blamed for it, because she was too avant-garde for the mainstream, she was too Asian and female without trying to look like Brigitte Bardot, and she was too present alongside John Lennon when people wanted him to be the person they projected onto him. She challenged his abusive tendencies and pushed him away when she wanted to, and helped him and empathized with his pain, which is an admirable act of kindness, admirable only because she maintained boundaries for her safety and well-being. She challenged him to be a social activist and helped him educate himself, and even though he fell short sometimes, he literally strengthened important social movements. The FBI didn’t keep a file on him because they thought he was helping their white supremacist agenda in the 70s. People still hate on Yoko, still make jokes about her, the same “obnoxious, self-important men who all believe they share some deep, ethereal connection with the spirit of John Lennon” as tikkun put it, without realizing that most of his work that they love was inspired by and helped along by her.
And finally, a sidebar: George Harrison put on the first charity aid concert, not only making them a thing, but also establishing a standard that celebrity visibility could and should be used to bring attention and support to issues like famine. And the did it by listening – not by barging ahead and deciding that he knew best what was needed, but by listening and acting based on learning from someone close to the problem.
what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”
That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?
I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.
(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and
Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
