When I was younger, I was someone who was considered “strange” due to my affiliation with many different fandoms and communities. As I grew up I had little to no internet restrictions, so I found many communities in elementary school, that most wouldn’t find until middle schooll. In those spaces on apps like Tumblr, Wattpad, and Amino, there was a universally understood rule; if you don’t like something, block it and move on. There will always be parts of communities that are frowned upon, or do things that are morally wrong and stupid. Great examples of this are the Furry community and the Homestuck community; just because there’s a portion of the community that is strange and shunned by most, doesn’t mean the whole community behaves the same way. This was a known and respected part of fandom culture, but it didn’t take long for other digital cultures to quickly overtake this. The rise of cancel culture that came mostly from TikTok in 2020’s quarantine destroyed the previously understood foundations and rules behind fandom spaces.
In 2020, massive amounts of people began using TikTok. These people that had come from all different kinds of cultures and cliques all had gotten a chance to interact with each other without the fear of judgment outside of the internet. However, judgment on the internet soon became harsher than any real judgment a person could experience in person. Cancel culture would spread like wildfire through TikTok and Twitter, and it didn’t take long for people who understood cancel culture more than fandom culture to make their way into these spaces. As the cancel culture flooded communities, many people lost interest in the communities they had once been in due to the sudden levels of hostility and left the communities they felt secure in. It didn’t take long for the new fandom norm to become cancel culture, and it’s made many people – both those that had done problematic things and those who hadn’t – very nervous to be a part of any online space. Thousands of people are too afraid to express themselves online in these spaces that are meant to be friendly and just for pieces of media due to the harsh treatment of others. TikTok had opened floodgates for people who did not understand fandom culture to be allowed into these spaces, and it has destroyed a large majority of communities due to the hostility now present in these communities.
Through the years, people have been slowly reinstating the old norms and expectations. Large social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok are heavily based around cancel culture still, but smaller platforms have begun coming back and regaining their popularity. These smaller platforms are where people have brought back the way things used to be, and the ideas from this have begun making their way back onto TikTok.
