Fandom - Disenchantment

First, the story. Hopefully it will stay there for posterity, while CC wipes the fandom's collective memory, deleting archived fan fiction and mailing list postings, in preparation for her career as a published author. I sure hope her publisher has some serious cross-referencing mojo and liability insurance.

So, for a long time I used to be a real Cassie Claire fangirlboy. Sure, I've heard something about plagiarism and I knew there was a story behind the founding members of fictionalley.org leaving FFN (and why it was called "The Site That Must Not Be Named" by some people) but all those people (e.g. Heidi) are really big and central to the fandom I knew*, so they must have been in the right, and the opposition (FFN, not R/H-ers) must have been in the wrong, and I never thought of going to the source and finding out for myself what the story was. It's a sorry excuse, but I wasn't the only one who fell for it. What really surprised me was that in all that time (five years!), I have never heard RJA say "Wolf, CC is a plagiarist. Those lines you love in her story were not written by her. Here, read this". I think I respect RJA more for it, though I still would've liked to be told. Maybe people assumed I know?

So, once again, I'm worshipping the cool kids from the sidelines, thinking that if I follow their LJs some of that coolness would rub off. I am quite disgusted by myself. It reminds me of Dave Winer and the founding of Atom. I used to be a fanboy before I started reading Tim Bray, Joe Gregorio, Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim. Looks like the sheeple instinct is strong in me.

* - SQ's and GT's apparent fanatism didn't help. Now I pity the poor folks at portkey.org (though I agree with many of the reasons for H/Hr), but then the people who didn't mix well with the people of Schnoogle always seemed decidedly more strict and less cool.