Musings About Inazuma Eleven Fandom Activity in 2025
Another backlog post! This was was written on the last quarter of 2025.
So it's been a few months since I returned to the IE fandom. It was unexpected really, I had built an deployed two whole websites with my writing and none of the fics I read reignited that passion. A couple of months later, I was wandering through my site, I clicked on Like Gravity and Water, a SomeFubu fic set in AreOri, and the urge for more IE content just exploded. I needed more.
I did what any starving fan does in 2025, I typed AO3's web address and I gobbled fics like I was possessed. I dusted off Of Flowers and Mirrors and published two chapters. I even revived my Tumblr account, sought active blogs, and got up to date with the latest hapenings of the series.
On my new digital homes, I sought other IE fans and ventured into other sites. Specifically, Mastodon, Dreamwidth for the former, and Pillowfort and LiveJournal for the latter. I found that were wasn't any regular IE fandom activity in any of these sites (please tell me if I'm wrong, I want to be wrong).
However, I didn't feel disheartened. This was research after all. Knowledge is power. This meant that, and to my chagrin, that Tumblr was indeed the place were the IE fandom was most active. Oh and Reddit too but I have no intention of joining them as they aren't the side of the fandom I want to engage with.
Now, this conclusion was truly disheartening. After the 2018 Tumblr purge and other personal experiences in the indie web, I have become passionate about decentralized social media. With my past experience in Tumblr and this new knowledge, the fact that such a place that doesn't care about its fans is home to the part of the fandom that I want to engage with is like... compromising in a way I would rather not.
For the more time I have spent back in Tumblr, I have identified several features from mainstream social media that feed consumerist culture which hurt fandom communities.
- Comment to Reblogs to Like ratios
- Likes are the bane of my existence because reblogs are what makes Tumblr social. Without sharing, there is no community. Cool things need to be shared, not rot in the Likes tab in everyone's account.
- Tags are a thing but I seriously cannot bother to understand how to use them apart from organizing posts in my own blog. Either way, I barely check tags in the search bar unless I'm seeking something. I rely on my dash and people I follow the most. (Heck maybe I am doing smth wrong but Tumblr is a hellsite anyways so I don't care!)
- Anyways reblogs are frigging important how are people supposed to get feedback otherwise?! Likes were a terrible idea on Facebook fifteen years ago and they still are in all mainstream hellsites!
- Decentralization in a Centralized Social Media
- I'm not parting from the events of 2018 because that's an example of site owners who don't care about their users. People, including fandom people, have been leaving social media sites. I'm also referring to the bird site.
- These massive migrations from centralized social media cause fandom events, conversations, and other fandom-related activities to get locked behind these sites. Okay, some do give a way to download your data but how easy is it for non-techy people to add that data into new sites, say Xtter to Bluesky? Migration from these walled sites demand from peoome time-consuming efforts to reestablish their presence in other sites. There's also the issue of migrating followers which is naught impossible and the most practical is promotion and praying that people do follow a new account.
Epilogue? (as far as mid 2026): At the end of the year, I tried using Bluesky to interact with those cool IE cool peeps but I deleted the account the next day and moved to Pillowfort instead, damn it all. Turns out I didn't need to convince peeps to ditch Tumblr because the the staff works hard at making the experience so threatening to its userbase that it made several peeps move to Pfio. This story is how I was sort of a pioneer on Pfio (I wasn't the first IE fan so this is a bit of a stretch) who took it upon themselves to revive the community and makes it a welcoming place when the time was nigh.
Last updated: 1 day, 6 hours ago
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