We’ve always had slop.

There I said it.

Look I don’t like to criticise other fans. I don’t want to impinge on others’ enjoyment of the V franchise. But the truth is there has always been a small amount of online fan content that has very little to add to the V discourse. Stuff I would class as slop. This type of content has one thing in common. It is all low effort to conceive and create.

The V fandom has always had low effort, low engagement value internet posts since the very beginning. Not to mention names, but there are certain avatars that have been around posting trite nonsense on various platforms for decades. Low effort engagement has been with us through our various iterations of online fandoms: message boards; fanfics; memes; social media; and now AI generated “art”. It’s like the numbers, they have always been there, they will be there to the bitter end.

To be fair to the individuals posting this content, they are mostly harmless. Usually these are outliers who can be easily ignored or avoided, because there are only a few of them. It’s easy enough to scroll past stuff you don’t care for, and there’s always the mute or hide buttons if someone is really crapflooding the feed.

This was a good system. I got to enjoy V without being a curmudgeon (as much). They got to enjoy V without me raining on their parade. All was well with the universe. Until recently.

AI for better or worse encourages laziness. For large parts of the population it encourages them to disengage their brains. Then there are those who have been disengaged mentally or socially from the get-go.

It’s not so much the existence of slop as the intensity and scale of it which has increased. And it has been mostly enabled with AI. Suddenly there is a very low bar of entry as a digital creator. People can prompt AI tools to create any old crap now. It makes a nonsense of the talented creators who have made art, written books and produced thoughtful commentary on V. It has meant people really don’t need to put too much into what they create anymore. They can generate terabytes of content without even thinking about it.

Within the space of a month, what used to be a mostly enjoyable set of fan groups on Facebook has become a wasteland of click farming and AI generated rubbish. You can try to block them but there are literally dozens maybe even hundreds of them. They are legion.

Poor administration is also to blame. Administrators of many of these Groups are either asleep at the wheel or not even on Facebook anymore. They could even be marketers pimping out Groups to click farms. Who knows. What this has lead to is a total destruction of intelligent discourse and enjoyment of fan creativity.

All of this had ruined many V Facebook Groups for me. I was feeling pretty sad about it because that is the only place with an active V fandom. Go to any other social media platform and its tumbleweeds.

*****

That was until this week. This week something positive happened. Someone started a new V fandom group. One with rules.

– Participants will be screened to check they are human before they may join. Hurrah!

– There will be no AI. Double hurrah!

– Politics isn’t exactly banned but this is not another forum where people can perpetuate the ugliness of the ongoing culture wars! Oh be still my beating heart.

This was everything I could ever hope for. Where can you find this utopia?

V: The Freedom Network Fan Community

I really hope this new Group will grow as more like-minded people join up to celebrate V. I also hope the spirit in which this group is launched will be long lasting.

What I want to see is the actually interesting fan creations, whether that be the models people have created, fan art, fan fiction, cool merch they had when they were kids, blogs, thoughtful discussion. Not to mention the people who kindly share their pics of people they’ve met and places they’ve been connected with V. That’s what I look forward to seeing again in this new group.

To get all the negativity out of my system, I made the following bingo card. (I’ve been stewing on this issue for years guys.) Here’s every kind of post I could think of which adds no value to the fandom. Consider this my definition of low effort slop:

Now let’s get back to enjoying V again hey.