So in the 90s, on like Salon, which in retrospect was in fact somewhere you went to get lively and clever rarities parsing all the culture of the day,

and in the broader acknowledgment of TV-era mass culture as important, academic Xena journals and serious analysis of what 3-camera sitcoms really were and why it was important when they jumped the shark

You’d hear about the development of SF fandom, and conventions, and all these chains of inheritance, and “also women wrote mimeographed erotic gay ‘slash’ fiction about characters, which was somehow important”

and I was like “mmn, that’s colorful but I can’t possibly picture it being that important”