somniloquence

I think the historical context is lacking for a lot of people.

Yeah, and I guess that's something I keep thinking might help put things into perspective for the hostile people who are so terrible to the vidders after the show. But I don't know a way to make that known -- you can't really lecture folks at the show, and you can't force them to go to the history panel, so... how do you communicate how things have changed or shifted for folks who are new to the experience of cons and shows in general? I doubt there's a way to do it, but I wish there could be. Just because I think history creates perspective -- it helps those people who are totally self-focused (not you!) to see a broader mind-set than they have, and maybe, must maybe, it could eliminate a lot of that lashing out that happens.

As we get more and more of our entertainment online, I worry that the instant gratification and narrowing of fandoms and subsets of fandoms means more of this in the future... I don't know.

I mean, I whined a lot when my friends started writing Smallville, which I've never much liked, but the whining always happened with the understanding that I wasn't actually going to change anybody's mind,

heeee... you are so not alone. The first two years of Smallville, I was at a point where I just sat in the back of the room at the vid show and drank, because it was all Smallville and Stargate, it seemed, and neither appealed to me (except that there were some great vidders in both fandoms, so I learned to lighten up, but it was *hard*!) I'm so used, now, to the whole none of my fandoms are here that I think I *forget* what it's like to be on that end of it, like you were this year -- where you're going, well, these are great vids, but they don't speak to me in any way. So it's good for me to be reminded in some ways, because I do get so involved in the show that I forget what that experience is like.

I'm already a little bit oversensitive about feeling like I'm uncool because I have so few fandoms compared with a lot of people these days, and I think those two factors combined to give me a frustrating vidshow experience -- but I didn't mean to knock y'all who put it together, at all, and I hope that my con report didn't come across that way.

Not at all! That's why I wanted to distinguish between the people like you who said things in a thoughtful, considerate manner and those nasty-attitude jerks who, especially on comment sheets, just have to berate people for trying to communicate artistically with them. And I know exactly what you mean about limited fandoms -- I am in love with many, many things, so I make tons of vids in weird little fandoms and stuff, but the stuff that totally floats my boat, that makes me just so passionate I could burst... there isn't a lot of that out there. I can't bring the "het slash" vids anymore to the con (that's a whole area I thought about writing about, but didn't), so that limits me even further, because I'm so bifanual and have so many different types of things that appeal to me.

i think that whole connish/fannish thing is going to keep being an issue -- I just hope that it doesn't continue to be an issue in the way that some people made it, where they deliberately set out to hurt the feelings of the vidders. *That* is not a dialog about change and growth and understanding; it's just plain selfish. Hopefully, though, as long as we have folks like you bringing reasonable understandings of how the con affects them, we can change things for the positive.