Introduction
Red Flags In Fandom is about empowering and enabling people to see the warning signs to hopefully reduce and even prevent negative, harmful, and/or dangerous incidents within the fandom community.
Fandom is wonderful, often with people who are creative, compassionate, passionate, and compelled to build, engage, and enhance communities.
When I first got started around the mid-90s there were maybe one or two conventions a year that people could attend, now it's common to see more than one convention happening at the same time.
For example, decades ago when a fan convention was mentioned, the common response was a dismissive '...oh, that...' - now a common response is 'OH THAT!'.
Unfortunately with the growing appeal of fandom, come those who engage in unacceptable ways, often at the expense of others. That element has always existed in some form or another, but from personal experience it seems the frequency of such incidents have increased.
The goal is NOT the mention specific people or events - but rather the situations that have happened and the ramifications of those red flags being ignored, dismissed, and even obscured by intent (deception).
There are of course other concerns that can be categorized under different or additional groupings - for simplicity the eight red flags presented here are more common and arguably more important (note the first and last flags capitalized), an early draft version of the presentation had almost 20 flags.
It's not an accident that the red flags poster looks similar to a WHMIS warning label - appropriately both warn about toxic properties in the environment.