Talk:Football (Soccer) RPF
Women's football fandom
As women's football continues to grow, the fandom for it is getting bigger as well. I wondered if people had thoughts about the following:
- I know very little about the men's football fandom, so where I've been adding info about the women's football fandom, I've just been kind of trying to blend it in amongst the existing men's football stuff, but I'm not sure if that's the best approach. Broadly, I am guessing there are three possible approaches: continue to incorporate the information alongside info about men's football fandom as done to date, split the men's football and women's football pages across to separate pages, or use headers to divide up this page to make it clearer/easier to follow. All three have pros and cons, so I wouldn't want to guess on the best approach. I wondered if people had thoughts?
Thoughts on Women's Football Fandom
So I'm coming from the opposite side of things! I have no experience whatsoever in women's football fandom but I think we'd do a disservice to fandom history if we tried to pretend that Football Fandom is one big thing. My experience is that the fans of the women's and men's sides are quite separate. I know that the AO3 women's football tag used to be synned as a subset of the men's football tag and that this was only finally changed in, I think, 2018 or 2019? That might be worth discussing explicitly in this page.
I've made some edits to the intro paragraph just now because I think it's worth acknowledging that we really do have two separate fandoms here, in almost every functional sense. I'd encourage you to split out some explicit discussion of women's football RPF stuff in its own section, rather than trying to fold it into what's going on in the men's football RPF side. I've just added a bunch of old LJ links related to men's football, but they are very much *only* related to men's football.
I don't think we necessarily need separate pages, but some clearer acknowledgement about the fandom distinctions here might be helpful?
- Eatingcroutons (talk)
- That makes sense. The more I've looked at this page to try and figure out how to space it out, the more the trying to incorporate it in just makes it more difficult to follow. I know a lot of people in the UK who follow women's football also follow a men's team, but I don't think that being in both transformative fandom spaces is as common? I have seen a few people on AO3 who have works for both male and female players, but I don't think it's the majority. So, I think it's accurate to treat them as two related but separate fandoms. I'll have a think about how to move some things around to make the page more coherent, and I also need to look at those lists for the most popular individuals/relationships because I suspect they're somewhat out of date now. Thank you for your insight and perspective! Cookies and chaos (talk) 08:23, 24 November 2024 (UTC)