One thing I wished fandom did more of: openly disliking something without having to add any moral judgments to justify disliking that thing in the first place. It’s entirely fine to dislike a pairing, or a show, without having to slap the ~problematic tag on it, or labeling people who do like that thing “deviants” or whatever label people are doing now.
I mean, man, I STILL judge people who ship Harry/Hermione, but I don’t pretend to be morally better because I liked Ron/Hermione as a kid. Ship wars by any other name are still ship wars, even if the vocab has changed now that we’re all on tumblr.
And–to switch from the Cranky Old Fangirl In Her Rocking Chair and put on my serious hat for a moment–it bums me out on a lot of levels to see the social justice language being co-opted this way. Fandom DID have a lot of issues with misogyny, racism, homophobia, and it still does, but as a fangirl who is also a black girl, I’ve always felt a little bit encouraged by the larger awareness of fandom recently that hey, this is an issue and at least we’re talking about it openly, rather than taking the status quo for granted. (Let’s be honest, the status quo still exists, but that’s a bigger issue.)
And now we’ve got this bizarre divide where people are misusing social justice language in order to berate other fans, and old-school fans are going “hah, you see! We’re so much better going back to the old ways!” And–no. The old ways sucked too. Fandom was still unwelcoming then, it still had tons of unexamined racism and bigotry–just look up the wank surrounding that old J2 Help-Haiti Big Bang if you don’t believe me. And meanwhile a lot of people, like me, are stuck in no-man’s-land, where we don’t want to go back to the “good old days”, which weren’t so good for us to start with, but we’re not crazy about what’s going on right now either.