The kinkfest was a lot of fun! I was impressed with the turnout and variety. It is one of the more vanilla fandoms, and that can be hard to deal with, so I'm glad people are pushing the weird stuff more.

I've talked about my issues in other posts, but they basically boil down to me being a hockey fan long before I read hockey fic, and wanting different things out of it than people who came from other fandoms with no sports experience. There's a bunch of gender stuff, and a bunch of team loyalty stuff, and it can be hard for me to shut off the sports fan part of my brain and go along with the fandom norms. I'm also team #anyonebutthehawks, which makes it harder.

I don't have a problem with newbie fans, and of course people are going to pick up the most popular team if they come in with no sports loyalty whatsoever. But the assumption that everyone likes these two teams + the assumption that it's really mean and horrible to be negative about teams makes it hard if you have home grown team loyalties and rivalries.