Heaven banning. Even when we’re communicating with people, there’s a certain deadness to the Internet. That’s a given with any non-physical activity—there’s a certain deadness to watching TV, too. We see, and I don’t think fully appreciate, the fingerprints of an attempt to alleviate this anxiety everywhere: the prevalence of body modification-based digital communities, like RWBBs, high raw vegans, and pro-anorexia; mimetic TikTok dances; the flattened experience-hounding or authenticity-fishing of Facebook, Instagram, and even early 2010s Vice Media. Asexuality. Tangentially, these early communities have a unique texture that I think is worth calling out. Pre-social networks, you see this last gasp of the authentically weird. I’d say the real death rattle was Facebook groups, meetup.com being a close second. But they’re subcultures that defied commodification in a real sense—there was something about them that was intrinsically unglamorous, even freakish. I’m not suggesting that the identities they formed around were necessarily freakish, just the way they were expressed digitally. From the outside looking in, many of them read like they weren’t just hard to find, but only committed people had an interest in joining them. Self-selection may have been more judicious in the 90s and early 00s, though that’s just my guess. Around 2008, many of these identities started coalescing into Tumblr groups. In the case of asexuality, I hypothesize that people fall broadly into two camps. Those with an affinity for “asexualness” and those who are reacting to the culture o the platform. As an affinity, some qualities are understood as inherently “asexual.” In my post Affinity vs. Experience, I describe how this functions with lesbians. It’s common for people to say they’re a lesbian, but they truly mean they identify with some essential lesbianness. They’re not labeling an experience; they’re labeling a set of desires or interests. As a reaction, the asexual community exists in the absence of affinity. Tumblr was a high-traffic platform teeming with adolescent sexuality and pornography. I sense that users bought into that structure, and instead of critiquing the site, they critiqued themselves: asexual aromantics come to describe people who lack hypersexuality, not sexuality, period. Projection and the headcanon. There’s headcanon (what’s true about the story to you, even if it’s not explicit in the text), and then there’s headcanon that’s so divorced from the reality of the work that I struggle to understand it. The other thing that stands out to me is that it feels trivial when it’s a random YA book character, but it becomes much more curious with Real Person Fandoms, like bands, public figures, or actors. I’m not even thinking about “How must the One Direction boys feel about this?” here, because who cares? What’s more interesting to me is what this says about the fan’s psychology and how they read people. More musing about Borderline Personality Disorder.
My next movie night. Zyzz. Oh… and before I go: quarterly pulse check. What would you like to see more of? Less of? You’re a free subscriber to Default Wisdom. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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2022/06/02
Heaven banned for your terrible headcanon.
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17:19
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