(Jon Ronson voice) limone

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Um … I said I was going to post some thoughts about Citrus Con and it’s been over a month how did that happen. I think I originally planned to structure this around some kind of grand narrative (dear diary, I have been plagued by various big brain thoughts recently …), but at this point, we’ll just see if I can coax it into something more substantial than bullet points. [Having written the below … yeah ok I definitely managed that. Incapable of not effortposting, I apologise to all and especially to my own self.]

I deleted my discord account in the great “fuck all of yiz” of 2024–5, but made a temporary one for Citrus Con because I was so sure I was going to have a good time based on the last one. And I did! Despite not being massively into smut on either the creation or the consumption side, and despite being perpetually unaware of what the popular BL canons are, it feels like this is the right kind of fandom space for me to hang out in. There were quite a few panels that focused on non-corporate ways of engaging with the internet, and some being run by people who clearly aren’t really in the independent web/fediverse/Dreamwidth space but had similar ideas to many of those of us who are: censorship is bad (cries in “recent internet news”), we need to encourage healthy connection online, et cetera. The small web meetup thread was also really lively. It kind of feels like we weird non-corporate internet nerds are taking over the fujoshi space, although I suppose that makes sense when the corporate side of the internet is so focused on amplifying profit-friendly content and shuttering the rest (cries for a second time in “recent internet news”). Maybe it’s that those of a fujoshi inclination [using this silly phraseology to avoid having to pluralise “fujoshi”] are driven to alternative methods of doing web things, and those of us who just like alternative methods of doing web things for the sake of it end up in close quarters with those on the fujoshi side, and we all become the best of friends. (But then I’ve always liked both doing niche things with computers and two men kissing, so explain that one.)

Something I loved about Citrus Con when I attended for the first time last year, and loved again this time, was the fact that it really celebrates amateurism. People create “bad” or at least unpolished fanworks, other people cheer them on – I feel like this isn’t seen much in mainstream fandom spaces, where the focus on metrics drives people to try and make their creations as professional-looking as possible (don’t get me started on my irrational hatred of those banners people make for when they share their fics on social media). The stuff we used to post online twenty years ago was often, by objective standards, not the result of skilled artistry – I mean, I was twelve years old, so obviously not in my case, but even among people who were already adults. I look back at old archives of FFX art and so much of it is badly drawn, I read old fics and they have terrible grammar and spelling, but people were having fun and creating stuff for the love of it. And we are amateurs, in the etymological sense – we should be doing this because we love it, we shouldn’t be writing any two guys fic for the popular fandoms that we don’t care about just to get “engagement” (and, er, raking in the advertising money for billionaire techbros? ok), we shouldn’t be creating a veneer of professionalism to fool people into clicking on bland fics in which nothing happens (consider the irreproachable grammar and punctuation of A “I”-generated fiction and the absolute nothingburger of content within). That’s why constructive criticism died: because if we’re putting our work out there with the underlying implication that it’s of professional quality, it’s expected that there should be no criticism at all. If it’s “bad” (in skill terms, not in morality terms), it’s failed and so have we, the named creator with a social media portfolio. And when we’re looking at other people’s fics and other people’s art, we know this, so we don’t give them constructive criticism either.

I’ve gone a bit off piste here (can’t help my innate tendency to circle back to “modern internet bad” … I guess there is a grand narrative after all), but what I wanted to say was that we don’t do fandom as a job – we do it as a way of connecting with people. And the two to three days of the anarcho-syndicalist Citrus Con utopia* are great at encouraging that, while the corporate structure of social media, supposedly built for us to connect with our fellow human beings, is actually, to coin a phrase, fucking shite.

*Having recently made the mistake of posting something in my usual flippant style in an online place where those replying (a certain community of velociraptors) seem to have thought I was deadly serious, I would like to clarify that I am not seriously attempting to assign a political ideology to a fandom event.

Something else I was thinking about at Citrus Con was the division between eastern and western fandom traditions – although to be clear, by “eastern fandom traditions” what I really mean is “traditions followed within western fandoms for eastern media”. I was first introduced to fandom through eastern media and while I didn’t start writing fic for eastern canons until many years later, I’ve always felt more at home using terms like “yaoi” than “slash”. There were a few people attending Citrus Con who appeared to be much more on the western fandom side and I did wonder what they were getting out of it … there was also a panel on “western BL” which I tuned into for about 10 minutes before deciding I had no interest in the media being discussed. I Guess I’m Just A Weeb (or more realistically, maybe the draw of American media for western fans is supposed to be that people find certain aspects of it relatable, and not being American, I don’t). But this made me think of the monopolistic fanfiction-archive-cum-semi-social-media-site (the one with three “A”s and an “O”). I was reading some of the early discussions in /otw​_news a while ago and I was struck by not only how western media-centric it was but also how little discussion of including eastern fandoms I found. There was a big debate about how the use of the phrase “media fandom” was seen to exclude RPF writers – and yeah, absolutely, I’ve written enough RPF myself to understand that. But there was nothing about how to account for the structural tropes of eastern fandoms – as we see today in the pretty abysmal tag wrangling decisions surrounding some canons. Somebody posted a list of existing fic archives to the comm early in the discussion and it contained only one multifandom archive for eastern fandoms and none in the fandom-specific section. (A couple of the comments then mention yaoi sites, although interestingly, they’re all in languages other than English, which seems to back up my “can’t relate to American media” theory.) I was thinking about these issues while redesigning my fic archive – I want to move away from the standardised (i.e. Americanised) terminology, so I’m using the terms BL and GL, using lemon and lime icons to mark sexual content, and generally taking inspiration from the eastern fandom archives of yore. And I think (quick, go back to the supposed subject of this post) Citrus Con empowered me to do that in a way.

It was the first time I’d used Discord since late 2024. I really left because I want to be minimally present on the corporate internet, but I also have a lot of unspecified hangups about engaging in online interaction so my engagement with Discord servers prior to the aforementioned “fuck all of yiz” had been steadily dwindling (something something FF16 fandom). Knowing the event was time-limited and so was my Discord account, which I deleted as soon as the con was over, meant I was much more relaxed about interacting with people. I used a lot of smile emojis of various kinds to help convey that I was just there to have a nice chill time, although I doubt there would have been any drama either way. I even did the occasional overshare (which, by my standards, consists of saying one single syllable relating to my physical and/or mental health. Yes I know I occasionally do that on this very website, like once a year or whatever, but I wish I wouldn’t). But it was all just in service of genuinely having a chat, and I know from experience that if this had been an ongoing thing I would have found it much more difficult to maintain my ability to participate.

The end of Citrus Con feels like the end of an in-person con. Everyone’s standing around having awkward but meaningful chats while the organisers turn the lights off and dismantle the stalls as a subtle and ineffective way of encouraging us to leave. I think that proves that they somehow manage to create an inclusive, exciting, “I’m in a conference centre with a load of other weirdos and I’m very tired” atmosphere. The variety of events they put on – watch parties, attendee-requested meetups, the artists’ alley stamp rally, the giveaway bot popping up in random channels, the session where everyone gets a common set of prompts and has to create something – I think that contributes to the feeling of actually being there. And I don’t really know whether that leads me into a nice conclusion for my grand narrative, with the obvious points already made (fuck the police; do stuff because you like it; capitalism bad as per; homogenisation of culture also bad), so I’ll go back to trying not to overshare my big brain thoughts and surely failing.