Without fanfiction authors, I might never have written. I went many years without writing for my own sake, and possibly would never have acted on that personal dream at all if it weren’t for the amazing fanfic authors who made me think that maybe I could do it after all. Without fanfic readers, especially my beautiful commenters, I doubt I would have continued to write. And without my wonderful writing friends to chat and plot and commiserate with, I would have been stuck and lost a thousand times. Thank you so very much to you all.
I mean it, though. Fanfiction, and the internet communities that allow it to reach its audience, are revolutionary. No one in my entired childhood or adolescence ever encouraged me to believe that being an author was a realistic or plausible life path for me. I wanted it, desperately wanted it almost as soon as I really began to read, when everyone else wanted to be a firefighter or an astronaut, I wanted to be an author. And yet I never wrote.
Why? Because authors were these faraway idols, masters like Ursula K. Le Guin or Tad Williams or Isaac Asimov, not real people with real lives, not people I could be. Because being an author was never portrayed as a career, but more as a self-flagellating exercise in suffering, submission after submission after submission followed by thin royalties if you were very lucky and very good and very persistent, all in one. Because no one ever suggested that I write just because I could, to create something. I never even conceptualized writing as a hobby until I encountered fanfiction.
And then I found these entire worlds of people writing just for the love of the characters, love of the worlds, love of writing. That was revolutionary to me. And do you know how ridiculous it is that I had an audience, that actual people, complete strangers, read and enjoyed the very first story I wrote? That through the internet and fandom, even the freshest, rawest authors can now reach a supportive audience? That’s magic.
We’re fixing something broken. A lot of things, really, as we transform worlds and make them fit us and make us fit into them, as we assert our right to create, as we find voices we didn’t expect in ourselves. It’s very powerful.
Tag: fandom
Listen, if you want to specifically go out of your way to talk up how you headcanon a character as aroace, headcanon it. Like actually TALK about it. Don’t just tack it on the end of your three thousand words about your fave ship or whatever to justify leaving characters out. Either don’t bring it up or bring it up and expand on it.
Because first of all, it’s often very clearly a pattern throughout some people’s fandom habits. The female characters they can’t demonise, the characters of colour who never seem to get a look in at slash juggernauts- they seem to get a one line “they’re aroace!!!” dismissal constantly. And second of all, aroace people have lives that are impacted by their being aroace and such a thing is worth showing and talking about, not using as a get out of jail free card!
Aroace headcanons are cool. It’s a shame fandom doesn’t actually tend to have them so much as they just skip over them. Like oh, you see Finn as aroace? Or Rey? Talk about it! Or just admit you ship something else and just get on with that! Don’t act like it’s a token you can pull out for extra points or w/e, it’s patronizing as hell.
(Good job to the people out there bringing us fun headcanons they actually care about though. It’s always a great surprise to see one someone has actually thought through for a character they really care about.)
Stuff kids on tumblr better relearn
1. You are responsible for your own media experience.
2. There is such a thing as a healthy level of avoidance towards topics that make you feel unwell or even (in a real-life clinical definition of the term) trigger you – but you are the one to actively take care of what you view.
3. Avoiding does not mean policing others.
4. You have no right to tell artists to censor themselves – you may criticize what others do, you may dislike it, that’s fine – but actively asking for censorship when you could easily unfollow or block a person just makes you look incompetent in your use of the internet.
5. Do not give people on tumblr or /any/ website the responsibility for your emotional well-being. Because these people do not even know you so no, you have no right to ask them to take care of you.
Good God reblog this more
I’m sure I reblogged this in the past, but everyday it becomes more and more relevant.
im bumping this for all the anons raiding my inbox rn like its the opening day of wow’s next raid….
My current least favorite thing about fandom culture is the thing where authors are expected to predict in advance how their readers will interpret the text and punished if they get it wrong.
Listen, I have quite a lot of trauma in my past, and I can’t always predict what will upset me, much less a hypothetical audience of thousands of strangers on the internet. (Some past surprises: a book about the history of rats in New York City, which someone gave me for my birthday because they knew I love rats, and a memoir about growing up with a sociopath for a parent. I’ve read plenty of material about sociopaths, and I’d already read two of this author’s other memoirs, but I guess I wasn’t destined to read that one.) Are we going to bar everyone but psychic social workers from writing fanfiction?
Not tagging for something you didn’t intend to imply will get you angry, guilt-tripping comments; refusing to change your tags according to an individual’s subjective reading will get you even more. Selecting “Choose Not to Warn” when you publish doesn’t get you out of jail, either, and the real fuck of it all is that even if you tag exhaustively for everything that might possibly give anyone the least little shiver of discomfort, you still have to explicate and contextualize it in your author’s note, because — as readers will jump to remind you if you point out where you tagged the exact thing they’re griping about — nobody actually reads the tags anymore!
Control your own experience. Read tags and notes thoroughly, blacklist terms, unfollow at will, block liberally, make like-minded friends, prioritize positive feedback to the creators whose work you do enjoy, and for the love of sanity, please remember we’re all just nerds dicking around on the internet and the ao3 user agreement doesn’t say anything about playing your therapist.
look, fandom as a whole certainly has its own built-in biases and problems that need to be addressed
but like
every so often i think about all of the deep, nurturing lifelong friendships that only ever happened because one day two internet strangers were like ‘oh hey, we agree on which fictional characters should kiss!’
people who are right now helping each other survive via connections they initially forged by liking the same sailor moon girl or something
the internet is a goddamn garbage pit but it is also a goddamn miracle
Real talk, I’m pushing 40.
At 18 I remember thinking that somewhere in the world there were people who shared my interests and who would want to be my friends, but they lived far away, and I would never meet them.
Despite joining various clubs and living in the dorms, I didn’t connect with anyone at university. To fill my time I decided to play around on that new thing called the internet and check out some fandom sites.
I now have a husband, a best friend, friends I’ve been visiting annually for 17 years, over a decade of regular convention attendance, people I hang out with to discuss my interests, people who want to read my fic or hear my ideas, and literally none of that would have happened without the internet.
Here is the secret to fandom:
Give zero fucks about what anyone else is doing.
Seriously. I mean it. Because inevitably you will love something that no one else loves. Or you will love something that everyone loves and people will shit all over it because it’s “so trite and unimaginative and done.” Or you will love something that no one else has ever heard of. Or you will love something dark and edgy and or obscure and people will roll their eyes and say, “What, do you want people to think you’re dark and edgy and obscure?”
Alternatively, you will not love the thing that everyone else loves, and you will wonder what precisely is wrong with you that the sight of that thing is aggravating the shit out of you now when the whole world sings its praises as one.
People will irritate you. They’ll irritate you with headcanons that make no sense and misinterpretations of canon. They will make the same jokes 500 times. They will overwhelm your corner of fandom with something you either are tired of hearing about or don’t care about. They will post art that isn’t theirs. You will meet people who think you are the greatest person ever and bombard you with messages only to wander off when they find someone new or shinier; you will meet people whom you admire and who do not really seem to notice you exist.
So give zero fucks about it. Seriously. Like what you like, blacklist what you need to blacklist, and ignore everything else. Be friends, play nice, enjoy it. And in the meantime, just do you. Like what you like, love what you love, and to hell with all the rest of it.
Reasons to Join the Tolkien Fandom
– old. like really old. older than star trek old.
– immortal. existed for over half a century before anybody thought about making movies. will keep existing after people forget them.
– full of nerds. hardcore nerds who do good research. A+
– full of nerds. like actual climatologists and geologists. official nerds who publish in official journals about speculative science in a fantasy world.
– high chance they will read your fanfic/meta. Tolkien is not an easy read and they probably have the patience/skills to get through your writing easy
– what is canon? we just don’t know
– appreciates my excessive collection of nature photos. Mostly trees and mountains.
– likes shiny things
– does not approve of keeping shiny things. sometimes approves of stealing them
On being “too old” for fandom:
Imagine describing fandom to someone with no prior knowledge of it at all. What’s the need-to-know?
You’d tell them it consists largely of online communities who organize via blogging sites (and formerly message boards or mailing lists); fiction and art that’s often erotic in nature, and is sometimes commissioned or sold via self-promotional sites like etsy and society6; conventions that people travel internationally to attend; cosplay that takes so much skill to assemble that some people do it professionally; analysis of the source material backed by fans’ knowledge of subjects that range from medicine to weapons operation to feminist social theory to stage design.
I can imagine a lot of reactions, depending on the person, but I’m having trouble figuring out who could hear that and then conclude most of the participants are kids.
I will be moderating a panel on Fangirling Over 30 next month, and I was looking up this post so I could quote it at at the panel, and I just wanted to throw in, additionally, something that is implied above but not stated outright:
Who do the young’ins think are performing the executive functions of fandom? Who’s paying for a domain name and server space so they can host a fanfic archive? Who’s establishing and moderating message boards and mailing lists? Who’s throwing a ‘zine-assembling party at their house? Who’s forming an LLC and liaising with a hotel for the convention they’re organizing? Who’s doing the research on intellectual property to determine what constitutes fair use so that fan artists know what they can sell and where?
Hint: not kids.
The fandom playgrounds we’ve been frolicking in for 50 years did not materialize out of thin air. They were built by the people who are “too old to be in fandom.” Respect them.
Older fans: People should be able to write what they want without people assuming depiction equals endorsement
Teenage fans: OMG you are LITERALLY a criminal right now. LITERALLY.
Perhaps it’s my age speaking, but I’m starting to miss the way fandom used to be fifteen years ago. Mostly since back then the concepts of ‘darkfic’ and ‘don’t like, don’t read’ were properly understood and adhered to (usually). The situation with darkfics was interesting in particular, because the entire premise was that the author could write incredibly fucked-up things, with the understanding on their part that shit was indeed very messed-up and with no pretense to the contrary (what usually gets termed ‘romanticization’ these days).
Now? You’ve got to run an entire rigmarole of explaining the difference between romanticization and just straight-up exploring a horrible dynamic in writing as, you know, a writer. And even after that, you’ll probably have to deal with the whole invasive ‘explain every trauma you might’ve gone through, so strangers who otherwise don’t care if you exist can decide if they give you Permission to use writing as a coping mechanism’ mess. Fucking hell.
I’ve said it before. Learn to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Learn to tell the difference between what someone explores on the page as a writer and what that same person believes and advocates in their day-to-day life.
Truth.
Hey guys, remember squickfics? I remember squickfics.
all too well
I loved how we tried to outright one-up each other in squicks and badwrong. Well *I* can write something more fucked up than *yours*!
I know there was moralizing in the past too, but the majority opinion after Strikethrough was outrage, when it was about someone getting their blog deleted for Snarry art. While there were a few people who were okay with that even then, they got drowned out by the outrage. I feel like today, fandom would have thrown a party and sent LJ flowers. I see blogs getting deleted for obscenity even on tumblr (mostly guro blogs, though I think they might be getting deleted for shota? Keep in mind this is 100% drawings) and no one even cares. The outrage back then caused mass migrations off LJ, and spawned AO3 and Dreamwidth. Maybe it’s less of a big deal since it’s not a fandom/megafandom thing, but more of a niche fetish, but getting TOSed for porn used to be a huge dealbreaker in fandom settings. This is why all fictional portrayals of anything are allowed on AO3, no matter how offensive.
It’s also a thing where our generation of fandom pretty much gets slaughtered by these new and changed rules if we dare to get popular or famous for anything. Nobody cares about my old socially unacceptable kinkfic, because I’m fucking no one, who’d bother me about it? But if I somehow had a bestseller or something, they’d dig up all the dirt, all the old LJ commentfic where someone said, “I bet you couldn’t make this badwrong thing work” and I said “IS THAT A CHALLENGE?” Look at Rebecca Sugar, stuck with problematic fave status despite all her great work on Adventure Time and Steven Universe, because back in the day she did some porny Ed Edd and Eddy art.
I actually sincerely wonder sometimes, because it feels almost intentional. We had a renaissance of female creativity, and dozens of fandom alumni went on to have successful careers in creative fields. We taught each other, challenged each other, beta’d each other, shared feedback, and made a community where people who otherwise might not have had a voice could create and reach an audience. And now some of the very things that made that culture unique are condemned by the next generation of that same culture–but only for those who dare to become successful, only for those who go mainstream and monetize. You can still write all kinds of filth on AO3, if you have the sense to keep a low profile and never be anyone important, the only time that really changes is if you have the gall to start getting attention and praise, even if it’s for other, vanilla stuff. It’s a way of making sure no one can ever really like you. It correlates much more to popularity than problematicness, for example, I’m approximately 9,000 times more problematic than say zamii070, but she got the bullying because she’s much more popular than I am, and people can’t stand that.
All the “tell me what trauma you’ve experienced” is rarely applied if you’re a nobody. It’s just a particularly nasty way to deal with people who dared to get “too popular” and put them in their place. Either they’ve been through trauma and you rob them of their privacy, make the worst moments of their life fodder for casual analysis, imply they might be lying about it, and hopefully trigger the shit out of them, or they haven’t, and you get to say they’re a shitlord who is so bad they practically caused that trauma to happen to other people. It’s really win/win for the bullies, no matter what the answer is. It’s how we keep ourselves down as a community, by making sure no member of the community is allowed to rise up and “make it.” We’ll teach you how to write, how to draw, how to vid, how to code, but you definitely aren’t allowed to get too big for your britches and start thinking you’re something special. You’re already problematic, and if you aren’t, we can make you problematic.
This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.
Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 