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Eric Brown's avatar

Toxic fandom has been a perennial problem in SF fandom for _decades_.

Harlan Ellison (yes, I know) delivered a speech at the World Fantasy Convention in *1984* detailing the terrible behavior of a certain subset of fandom.

(And yes, I know that Harlan Ellison had his own terrible behavior problems.)

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Peter Coffin's avatar

As always this is very good work. I have a slightly different model of fandom (reductive definition: market-driven, consumption-driven, externally-created identity and community) and reading this, for whatever reason, made something click. I don't really believe in a distinction between healthy and toxic fandom; I think it is like alcohol in that it is poison. Some people have a normal time with it and some people can't. It's a paradigm designed to find and utilize addicts. Thus fandom is a dynamic that is exhibited on a spectrum, making "toxicity" more fluid.

Not saying this to contradict anything here, as even with a slightly different model of critique, I think this post was, as always, correct and well done. Thanks for writing it, Mona and Kat!

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