meme_of_bilitis | I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

It's very weird, I get the feeling there are a couple of trolls always bringing up vegetables and Aja to derail it.

I honestly have no idea who Aja is. Someone brought her up in response to a post I made about serial killer AUs on FFA and I had no clue what that was supposed to mean or why it’s funny.

Aja is/was a famous fan who is known for having Opinions. She has a fanlore article, https://fanlore.org/wiki/Aja and is known for coining the term "eating your vegetables" to refer to writing and reading f/f. Also, she likes to write RPF about serial killers (and tried starting a wank when she couldn't, for Yuletide) and likes to send RPF fic links to the people they have been written about.

Unpopular opinion time: Aja’s fanfic writing is mostly fine. If she’d stuck with that and not her “fandom journalism” (and t-shirt burning!) she would’ve been okay.

Aja Romano (she uses her full name publicly, this is to help in googling her journalism/essays if you want to) is an old school fan FFA has a huge hateboner for mostly because of her involvement with Cassandra Cla(i)re and the associated Harry Potter wanks. Aja was in her inner circle for a while, though they eventually parted ways, with maximum drama if memory serves. If you say it's grudgewank over CC, they'll give a laundry list of other complaints (like serial killer RPF, or making some cringey comments/cringily failing to burn her shirt, or presenting herself as Representing Fandom, or supposedly portraying a cult leader positively after interviewing one of his victims--the Andy/TF scandal, which I'm not getting into here, but it's quite a rabbit hole if you do end up reading up on it). Some people came in later and do hate her for that stuff, but most of the reason she was under such scrutiny and became a running joke is more or less that she was on fandom_wank for Harry Potter wank, and the older fans continued to feel some kind of way about her.

She was a Daily Dot writer for a while. Very unpopular opinion, but I found her without knowing her fandom stuff and I thought most of her articles were pretty fun? I didn't come across the Andy one or the vegetables one, most were just pretty lighthearted fluff. There were other people posting fluff about fandom on that site. I think she would mostly have been pretty forgettable without the CC grudge. In hindsight, I've become less fond of people who try to mainstream fandom (as she did/does) like "fandom journalists" and acafans, because I think being mainstream has ultimately been bad for fandom, but this isn't personal to Aja in particular like the the grudgewank clearly is.

Aja's attempts to mainstream fandom are very definitely the primary source of my hateboner for her. (I kept a safe distance from HP fandom and while I remember some of the wanks the only two names I definitely link to HP wank in my head are CC and TF.) Aja goes way above and beyond the typical acafan, eg (and this is only the most recent example) tweeting at the people she RPF ships about it. More generally, she cannot seem to conceive that the fact that she is fine with putting everything out in the open like that does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that everyone else is too. Entire fandoms have had to lock their fic because of Aja's "journalism".

In fairness, my grudgeboner for her dates from Prince of Tennis rather than HP, and that was her first fandom after HP. (Which I remember because she was specifically trying to get HP fans to come with her over to PoT.)

I do think Aja has accumulated grudgeboners over a much wider plane over her fannish life than you think? She spent a very long time as a panfannish BNF and she just...is very enthusiastic and very socially tone deaf. HP fans just tend to be the earliest grudgeboners.

Personally I found it really distasteful of her when she tried to promote her podcast on Twitter by talking about how she was not going to cast actors with a considerable age gap between them because something something #MeToo and age gaps are dangerous. Like... what.

ayrt

Haha, okay I'll stroke a bit of a hateboner for that one. *In a real age-gap relationship, and ready to smack anyone who says 26 is too young to consent and I'm totally a monster*

I'm sure she's just hopping on trends without stopping to think about them, it sounds like her. I try to be a little generous with her because I myself joined fandom as a clueless 19-year-old with very low emotional/social intelligence and I think fandom in general tends to attract a lot of weirdos, geeks, nerds, and outcasts, so I guess I can get kinda geek social fallacy about it? That and sometimes I envy how much she puts herself out there and doesn't hide in shame and delete all social media when she makes some embarrassing faux pas. I know a lot of people resent that same success, but considering how much less successful I've been in my (non-journalistic, creative) endeavors mostly due to lack of hard work and anxiety about public exposure, I'd have to admit it'd be base jealousy. She's done a lot of things I can easily agree, "No, haha, that's terrible," but she's also done a ton of things that were inoffensive or even kind of fun, mostly because she's out there doing things.

I feel kind of torn between, as I said, no longer feeling mainstreaming of fandom or fandom journalism is something I can support or endorse in and of itself, and disliking "disposability politics," since despite her many (seemingly, many) flaws, she is a pretty catchy writer, like her posts were fun to read, and I'm not liking this trend of, if you've ever had a bad opinion or had your foot in your mouth, you don't deserve to have a career in something you're good at. Which isn't to say she deserves my (apparently pedo/problematic/basically a rapist! thanks Aja! What a wonderful way to characterize a lesbian who dates consenting adults!) support in particular, ehhh I'm just...bad at condemning people wholesale, especially people I don't know.

I'm not liking this trend of, if you've ever had a bad opinion or had your foot in your mouth, you don't deserve to have a career in something you're good at.

I think the key with Aja is not that she put her foot in her mouth once, but that she continues to demonstrate the same self-aggrandizing disregard for anyone's interests but her own, over and over and over again. She keeps doing it, is the problem. Otherwise there would be no "Oh, Aja" meme.

+1

If it were only the receipts from 10, 15 years ago that kept getting dragged up, then I’d be with AYRT. But Aja keeps doing it. Aja’s foot is permanently in her mouth.

+2

The Ronan Farrow thing was only a few months ago. She has not learned better in decades, and if anything is doubling down with her "we need to normalise RPF" rhetoric.

I often check the @tumblrmetrics/@fandom stats on what ships are trending on tumblr, because the notes are a great place to spot the type of anti who's into being loud and in your face for attention, and those are good accounts to block. A lot of the anti handwringing is over Thorki, Reylo, and any Voltron ship that isn't Klance, but every time a RPF ship comes up on there, there are people aghast that that exists too.

I don't even RPF, but it seems "RPF authors shouldn't be attacked," and "RPF authors should be acknowledged and condoned by the celebrities they write about" are two entirely different battles. RPF is like mushrooms! Some people love them, some hate them, but they only grow in the dark!

What Ronan Farrow thing? I missed it.

Re: wank containment area

(Anonymous) - 2018-08-12 07:29 (UTC) - Expand

+100

It's not that she put her foot in her mouth once years ago; it's that she's been and still is putting her foot in her mouth on a regular basis in the present, and she does it in a way that could cause a lot of trouble for other fans.

I kind of knew that nonnies would say this. But that's the thing. Expecting that mistakes are just a thing you make years ago, then you always know what you did wrong, move on, and grow into a person that doesn't make mistakes anymore...it's a nice fault, but it isn't realistic! I, too, put my foot in my mouth 15 years ago and it still happens today. And the thing about being someone who makes your living on opinions and relentlessly puts out content is that you're going to find new and inventive ways to embarrass yourself. I briefly had a tumblr that was popular for opinion, which no one paid me for or anything, but for every 20 opinions people loved and reblogged or followed me for, there would be the one where I didn't word things right or I was just wrong, and what got me out of that scene was that that would be the thing people would remember, that would be what stuck in their minds five, ten years later. When LJ started veering into SJ shortly before the tumblr migration, I remember how if you put your foot in your mouth you'd get people smugly saying they were adding an LJ Note for you with a link/quote of What You Did. And if you look for just the bad things over a lifetime, you do indeed keep finding them. We aren't literary characters with one tragic mistake in our youth. Even as a nonny, I get people professing their love for me and I get them saying things that make me question my value as a person, and I sometimes even wonder if they're the same people. And the thing is, it's the very trait of talking a lot itself that both gets people liking you for it and eventually gets your foot in your mouth with statistic regularity. I don't think one exists without the other. You keep talking, and the foot falls in eventually. It doesn't go away.

All of which I didn't say, mostly because Aja is not the hill I want to die on! Though I liked some of her Daily Dot articles years ago, it's not like we were besties or anything. I didn't want to say this either, because it's probably one of my Proof I Haven't Changed Bad Opinions, but I really don't like acafans/acajournalists for a specific reason, which is that I feel that, as their work is meta, they profit off fandom as a whole's labor, and they use it to "get things"--money, prestige, a good grade. I don't mind stuff like toastystats because that's not about "getting things" but about giving something to fandom, but I cringe so bad when people write papers about fandom--even if, hypocritically, I've read some of them. It makes me bitter because it makes this profit off other people's labor of love, and because I haven't had the opportunities they have, and to tell the truth, neither have a lot of fans. We're all equal in fandom, until some of us go to college and some of us don't, and then the labor of those without opportunity somehow translates into a path to prestige and money to those with opportunity? I don't like it. Hell, I don't mind when people sell fanworks (another Terrible Opinion!) but at least they're selling their own damn labor, not mine, even in the form of an anonymized data point. I still sweated and toiled over that goddamn anonymous data point. And unlike say, owners of a platform who might use your fanwork to generate revenue in one way or another, they don't even give anything back, no matter how smugly they think they do. Some kid's college paper on fanfic sex makes us cringe to think of the professor reading it, we don't feel served. The articles might have been fun--in the past, most articles about fandom tended to be inaccurate pearlclutching disasters, so reading stuff by someone who actually knew what fandom was and didn't awkwardly space "fan fiction" on the edge of erupting into moral panic was refreshing. But it's become increasingly clear she has a mainstreaming agenda, which isn't an agenda of serving us with fun stories about ourselves, but exposing us against our will to outsiders, because she assumes we weren't perfectly capable of exposing ourselves but avoided that deliberately. And she has used fanworks as more than anonymous data points, which means that she got paid while the fans who worked on the pieces she "spotlighted," at very best, got used. Since the exposure was often very negative for them, worse than that, but even if it had been neutral, they write fiction and she gets a paycheck. It should be some kind of rule, if we can't make money on our fics, you can't make money analyzing or discussing our fics!

That fandom is mainstream now definitely can't be laid at her doorstep. There were much larger changes in the social media landscape that probably made that inevitable. At worst, she was probably trying to burn a shirt while the house was on fire, and the shirt got burned despite her efforts. But I still don't like the results.

And yet, all that said, I'm bad at grudgewanking people I haven't met. I'm bad at following them and always thinking the worst of them and waiting for them to fuck up again. I don't like it. It's bad energy. I do take back that it's all grudgewank for CC, though one really must not underestimate how powerfully CC is/was hated, and how old fandom_wank fans influenced new fans as they came in. I think her "fandom journalist" game was going to earn her attention even without the CC drama, so yeah, it's legit that she's hated for that stuff. I think last I heard she's writing for Vice? That's high-profile. I'm not really happy about it either.

That's a huge wall of tl;dr to say "honestly, I'm not an Aja stan but I still think you're all way grudgey and don't realise you've been brainwashed by fandom_wank", anon.

Re: wank containment area

(Anonymous) - 2018-08-12 16:24 (UTC) - Expand

I try to be a little generous with her because I myself joined fandom as a clueless 19-year-old with very low emotional/social intelligence and I think fandom in general tends to attract a lot of weirdos, geeks, nerds, and outcasts, so I guess I can get kinda geek social fallacy about it?

NA: Aja's pushing 40. She's been at this shit for years now. And, yes, if you're defending someone who's written a flattering portrait of Thanfiction, or who's sicced a fandom on someone for changing their Tumblr URL, you are engaging in Geek Social Fallacies and you need to stop.

/was never in HP fandom, didn't know about her until long after the CC thing, and can't stand the woman

DA "written a flattering portrait of Thanfiction"

It was worse than that. She interviewed some of Thanfiction's victims and then threw out most of what they told her to give him a chance or whatever.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_strange_lives_of_Andrew_Blake

DA

Oh gosh, I had forgotten about that. Yeah, there is no "oh well she put her foot in her mouth back when" about that. That is legitimately harmful.

I am dubious of your claim that ~most people on ffa hate her because Cassie Clare. I came into fandom waaaay after that and hate her for things like her attempt at outing hockey fandom, her weird vegetables femslash essay, and her general need to show herself as the Fandom Expert to the Outside World on topics that she in fact knows nothing about.

DA The claim that people only hate Aja because she was once part of CC's Inner Circle makes no sense if you were there at the time. CC and Aja had a major falling out, and during the whole bad_penny situation, Aja showed up to position herself on the "I knew it all along, the Inner Circle was toxic, I am Vindicated" side of the argument. If the only reason for the grudge was CC grudgewank, people who hated CC would be on Aja's side.

It's not about CC, or at least it's not about CC for most people. It's about the many, many, many other "oh, Aja" moments over the past, what, 15+ years now?

+1

Heck, put me down as someone who bought her vindication in the Inner Circle wank and actually bore nothing but good will toward her post-HP fandom, which she slowly but surely wore away with her approach to fandom coverage on Daily Dot.

+3 Days late to this wank, but I actually spent time as a casual friend of hers because I was so sympathetic to her over how the Inner Circle treated her. (I still am? Idk. I think that was a shitty time for her and I don't think she deserved it. I just also think she milks that sympathy to try to get passes on alllllll the obnoxious boundary-crossing shitty shit she's done ever since.)

+2
And I bear her no ill will for that, except then she had to tweet RPF at the actors, and. No.