What creeps!

[elfs]

Last night Kouryou-chan left her purse on a table at one of the NorWesCon convention fan spaces. We recovered it from lost & found this morning. It had, for a little girl, quite a bit of money it, but this morning the money was gone.

What creeps. I expect better of fandom.

Comments

[grum]

I'm sorry Elf, but why do you expect better of fandom?* Fans are people too, and people, on the whole, are assholes.

Some of that is my inherent cynicism showing, and some of it is that I'm currently writing a paper on conscientious objection by pharmacists (ie, do they get to say they won't fill your birth control because their church says its immoral)

*I am actually interested in the answer to that question, it's not just rhetorical.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

You didn't ask me, but I'm answering anyway.

I usually expect better of fandom due to in-group vs. out-group behavioral standards. People tend to treat members of their group (in this case, fandom) better than non-members. A purse abandoned at a con is likely to belong to a fan, and is likely to be found by a fan; a purse abandoned at, say, a coffee shop, is unlikely to belong to a member of a group the finder identifies with.

[urox.livejournal.com]

Norwescon doesn't have a cohesive in-group. There are kids who live on the street who go. And due to the fringe fandom that attend, it is likely they didn't think it actually belonged to a little girl, but someone with a little girl purse.

[boiwondering.livejournal.com]

As much as I hate to indulge in the egregious logical sin of back-in-my-day-ism, I really do think that fandom and fanspace were much more like your expectation of it years ago, before the combination of the Internet and the social mechanics of population pressure led to a degeneration of social niceties like, say, not rifling through a little girl's purse for money. That's not to say there weren't assholes in the fan community before TEH INTARWEBS or the population explosion, just that they were considered the exception to the basic rule that fans take care of our own. Nowadays, fandom just looks like a microcosm of mainstream society to me, which is sad. Naïve of me, maybe, but I used to expect better of fandom, too.

I'm really sorry that Kouryou-chan lost her money. That sucks.

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

I completely understand that reaction. I'm in the SCA, and last year at Pennsic I my pouch fell off my belt between the archery range and the merchants. I walked my path immediately after discovering that I had dropped it. It couldn't have been more than 20minutes. I went straight to Lost and Found after climbing up the hill and coming back down. The pouch was there and all of my cards, but the cash was missing. I was sorely disappointed in people. There had been a small amount of cash, but could have easily been someone's food money for the entire week. All I could do was hope that who ever took it had more need of it than I and be glad that I could afford to have lost it. But, it really did make me disappointed in an entire group of people that I had always expected better of. Kindness isn't as widespread as I had once thought it was. :-(

~E

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Who says it was a fan?

Surely you realize that there are people in the world who actively seek out people who are vulnerable for their own gain.

Trolling large conventions for lost wallets is the least that is happening.

[urox.livejournal.com]

My husband actually had his camera stolen right out of his pocket at a convention. We knew it was gone within the 10 minutes that it happened.