Toxic Nostalgia

There's an HBO documentary called Class Action Park about a New Jersey water pack and playground that was notorious for injuring and even killing its patrons. On Twitter, Jason Sanford links that park and people's tolerance of it to the dark underbelly of SF fandom, using a concept called "toxic nostalgia". 

What really clicked everything for me was when @chaneyj  wrote "A lot of the good old days were quite bad and not healthy for any of us at all. It hurts for some people to admit that because, as I noted earlier, those days were so formative to our identities." (5/14)

I grew up on classic science fiction and fantasy. It was formative to my identity as a SF writer and fan. But in the years since I’ve also learned how many of the authors I admired in my youth were actively harming others. (6/14)

And how fandom tolerated and enabled racism, sexism, and abuse for decades, and refused to welcome many people into the genre. How the SF/F genre literally helped birth a sham religion to fleece people. (7/14)

It's a thoughtful read that acknowledges the flaws of the past without indulging in the excesses of modern cancel culture.