*puts on her ranting boots*

[effervescible]

I know that sometimes it feels like fandom ceases to be a collection of different people with different opinions about a common interest, and becomes more like some kind of hive mind groupthink place. If that's true, then the hive mind of Bleach is a kid with obsessive-compulsive drawers who meticulously labels every drawer in his kitchen, each of which contains special holders for whatever utensils or other items go inside. In Bleach fandom, there is no such thing as a drawer labeled "Misc."

This is entirely my personal view and not something I would try to enforce upon fandom, but here's a little guide I've made just now to answer the question of whether you should start a new community for the pairing you just love.

1. Do you like this pairing?
2. Do other people like this pairing?
3. More than ten?
4. Are they all on your friends list?
5. Does this community offer anything that cannot already be found easily elsewhere?
6. Are you aware that creating a comm will not in fact drastically increase fic or art output?
7. Hit yourself in the head with a shovel.
8. Do you still want to make the community?
9. Make the community.

For the sharp-eyed Bleachfen on my flist, yes, this was prompted by the brand-spankin' new bya_ulqui community, but I have nothing against the pairing in particular and I bear no ill will when it comes to the mods. I am just so fucking tired of Bleach fandom's need to divide as if on a cellular level. Pairing comms for the more popular pairings make sense. They're always in business, and people who don't like them would probably get annoyed by all the traffic. They even make sense for pairings that are low traffic but still keep chugging instead of going dormant.

But seriously, why make a new comm instead of using the ones we have? Did asterisk_plus and bleach_yaoi and hell, even bleach_het suddenly turn invisible? Especially when it comes to pairings of characters that haven't even met or don't already have crack-loving fans. Nine and a half times out of ten, having a comm for a certain pairing isn't going to prompt new stuff for the pairing. They almost always end up with a small flurry of activity and then die.

It doesn't bring fans together. It's more likely to divide the fandom because once a pairing comm exists, people start feeling like that's the place where everything for that pairing should go-so either the audience is drastically reduced because it's a crack comm, or they just crosspost it-which makes the pairing comm redundant.

What happened to communities bringing fandom together instead of spreading it out?

Comments

[nomoreprinces.livejournal.com]

I did my eye roll too when I saw that creep up. I learned my lesson with the Ishida/Rangiku comm. It's a dead comm with less than a dozen members and it's only something firstmidnight and I played with. Now she and I have moved on and been swallowed by another pairing and we're not gonna make a comm for it because you're right. The community doesn't need it and it would only be used by me and gal anyway so what's the point? asterisk_plus and kurosaki_clinic are fine and have been around since the beginning. Why go further and branch out when the core of the fandom belongs to those two groups?

Bah. Bleach is silly, but I hear some other fandoms are worse. They scare me.

[jaina.livejournal.com]

No doubt. Comms like ichi_ruki are one thing, especially since some fans can't sheath their claws if they even smell a rival shipper around. Just for traffic management, bigger ships should have their own comms. But there is really no need to micromanage everything!

[nomoreprinces.livejournal.com]

Oh. I ditched ichi_ruki. I felt like because I was also a member of ichi_hime and ren_ruki that I was getting modded by an overzealous hypershippymod.

It was honestly retarded.

oh noze im not a true otp fan. *rollseyes* wtfever. I'm not a fandomsheep!

[jaina.livejournal.com]

Heh, I just mentioned in chat with a friend that people can also enjoy pairings but not feel the need to be in communities for them.

Heh, I don't think you could accuse Berry and Loyce of being hypershippy at ichi_ruki since they hardly ever post. I'm just tired of the bitching between those three ships. Not everyone does it, but the ones who do are loud, and it gets old seeing different ship members accuse one another of the same damn things.

[nomoreprinces.livejournal.com]

Some pairing comms just generate drama and those 3 do and that one is just the most voracious of the three with some of its members. It's fun to watch annoying to get caught up in.

[jaina.livejournal.com]

I think we're watching different versions of the comm, because people hardly ever start yapping about other ships on ichi_ruki anymore. Possibly because when they did, people would be all "GOD, WE'VE BEEN THROUGH THIS BEFORE, CAN WE JUST CHILL AND ENJOY THE SHIP?" And then utenatai would post porn.

Yeah, it can be fun to watch fans spaz out, but when you're ready to go home but stuck in the middle of the crowd, not so much. (Hi. I like metaphors.)

[nomoreprinces.livejournal.com]

Heh yeah it's been months since a wank war started.

It usually starts to poke out it's head when a new OP/ED or color spread surface. Thought it's usually nipped rather quickly.

[firstmidnight.livejournal.com]

yea i really shouldn't talk cos i made ishi/ran comm and the ishi/renji comm almost two years ago now.... but renishi has over 100 members but they at least have canon interaction. still isn't something i'll do again.

ah, bleach. the world of 19u9i8u,0774893 comms (it has so many we ran out of numbers and had to use vowels!)

love the guidebook.

[nomoreprinces.livejournal.com]

RenIshi would have fallen into the "wtfuseless" pile had it not been for the Szayel fight. Now it's justified and there are legitimate fans of the pairing and there is fanwork for the pairing now.

We were just ahead of our time. Heh.

And the thing about half these segmented pairing comms is that they're born out of RP where in that universe they were able to pull that pairing together. RP born pairings do not make sense outside of their RP and shouldn't be subjected into the fandom as a petcomm. They don't work. ._.

However it does work when you post these rppairings fit them into canon and actually build a following for it slowly but surely by posting into bigger comms not only do you get fans of your work but you also get fans of the pairing and that's when a pairing fanbase starts to grow.

[rosehiptea.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not in the Bleach fandom but I've seen this in other fandoms too, and I don't understand the urge to make new comms for every pairing. If it's a popular pairing for a huge fandom and it gets a ton of fic all it's own then it might make sense, but other than that, not really.

There are a few comms for individual Hellsing pairings, at least one of which I like, but I just don't care enough to want to join them all.

[laurie-bunter.livejournal.com]

You know what? I totally agree with you :) You always make so much sense!

Bleach is my first manga fandom, so yeah I was kind of boggled by the number of communities it had. Over the months I've realized that a lot of communities (and FCs, like in Bleach Asylum) aren't really necessary because they don't generate any new discussion or fan works.

I like a really weird pairing -- Byakuya x Yachiru -- and I thought long and hard if I wanted to make an FC for them, but I decided against it. Yeah, a couple of other people are into it, but it's not enough for sustainability.

[jaina.livejournal.com]

I do, except when I don't. ;)

Fandom is changing all the time. When I got started in fandom, it had largely moved on from newsgroups to mailing lists. Livejournal didn't even exist. Now fandom is largely on Livejournal and mutated from there. Makes me wonder what it would be like if it had found a non-journal based place to roost. Would we still have so many individual gathering places?

I love grown!Yachiru/Byakuya. It's so crazy it just works.

[sailormac.livejournal.com]

When I was primarily active in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom, I created a community for a lesser-known pairing (RussellXEd) primarily to get all the fics about the pairing together in one place, so that anyone who wanted to read RussellXEd fic would always know where to look for it.

But, we had a couple of very prolific writers for the pairing at the time, so I knew we'd actually have something to put in the community. In a case where almost nobody is writing the pairing, a community makes no sense -- especially if there's general fic communities for the fandom.

[ellonwye.livejournal.com]

Hm, did they delete the entry from soul_society?

[jaina.livejournal.com]

Yep. Chickens.

[angstymcgoth.livejournal.com]

I agree totally--and I've seen it in other fandoms, but possibly it's because Bleach has such a huge cast of characters that it has so many pairing comms. I'm kind of split for this fandom personally, because I love a lot of pairings and will read fic for them, but most of the weird-pairings with pairing comms don't even have a lot of fic for that pairing posted to it--it all gets dumped to bleach_yaoi or something. And as much as I like random/misc pairing comms (because you can always try something you'd never look for yourself), the amount of traffic and bullshit posts to bleach_yaoi made me leave it.

I dunno, bleach_news does such a good job of recording new fic posts it's a blessing beacuse I don't need to be on so many comms. And for the few that I am on, nothing pisses me off more than the "Crossposted to seven different places omg!!" >:(

[jaina.livejournal.com]

I love Bleach News. There's an example of a fandom thing that does bring people together rather than dividing them. I've read a lot more fics with different pairings because I see them linked there. If BN didn't exist and they stuck to their specific comms, I'd never notice them.

[spicedrum.livejournal.com]

totally read the last word in your subject line completely wrong


heh

[jaina.livejournal.com]

You are a DIRTY girl.

[fadingembers.livejournal.com]

So I shouldn't start that Genryusai Yamamoto <3 Claude community, you're saying.

[jaina.livejournal.com]

Don't make me hurt you. I know where you live.