okay I am going to answer this as kindly and as calmly as I can and try to assume that you are asking this in good faith. because my friend, the fact that you feel the need to ask is, to me, The Problem.
[this is, for the record, in response to this post]
fanfiction writers are not *posting content.* (I also have reservations about engaging with the term “content producer” or “content creator” but let’s put that aside for now, I’ll circle back to it.) you say “they seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author” as though it is strange, off-putting, and incomprehensible to you, when in fact that is the point of writing fanfiction. it is a way of participating in fandom. it is a way of building community and exchanging ideas and becoming closer with people.
if authors wanted to solely ~generate content~ that would get them attention (?? to what end, the dynamic you have described seems to equate algorithmic supremacy as winning for winning’s sake, as though all anyone wants to do is BUILD an audience without ENGAGING with them, which I cannot fathom but let’s pretend for a moment that is, in fact, true) then like. if that were the case why on earth would they choose a medium in which they categorically cannot succeed and profit, because it isn’t their IP?
you are equating two things that are not at all the same thing. to the degree that parasocial relationships are to be avoided, and “that person is not trying to be your friend they are trying to entertain you, please respect their boundaries” is a real dynamic – which it is!! – like. you have to understand that the reason that is true for the people of whom it is true is because it is their JOB. they are storytellers by profession, and they are either through direct payment, or sponsorship, or advertising, or through some other means, profiting off of your attention. i don’t say this to be dismissive, many wonderful artists and actors and comedians and any number of a thousand things that i enjoy very much go this route but they do so as a *career choice.* and so when you violate the public/private boundary with them, you are presuming to know a Person rather than their Worksona. the people who work at Dropout or who stream their actual play tabletop games or who broadcast on TikTok or YouTube are inviting me to feel like i know them to the degree to which that helps them succeed in their medium and at their craft, but there MUST be a mutual understanding that that’s a feeling, not a fact.
however.
a fanfiction writer is not an influencer, not a professional, and is not looking to garner “success.” there is no share of audience we are trying to gain for gain’s sake, because we are not competition with one another, because there is nothing to win other than the pleasure of each other’s company. we are doing this for no other reason than the love of the game; because we have things we want desperately to say about these worlds, these characters, these dynamics, and because we *want more than anything to know we are not alone in our thoughts and feelings.* fanfiction is a bid for interaction, engagement, attention, and consideration. it is not meant to be consumed and then moved on from because we are NOT paid for our work, nor do we want to be. the reward we seek is “attention,” but attention as in CONVERSATION, not attention as in clicks. we are not IN this for profit, or for number-go-up. there is no such thing: legally there cannot be. we are in this because we want to be seen and known.
like. please understand. i am now married to someone i met because of mutual comments on fanfiction. our close friend and roommate, with whom i have cohabitated for over a decade now, is someone I met because of mutual comments on fanfiction and livejournal posts. that is my household. beyond my household, the vast majority of my closest personal friends are people with whom I built relationships in this way.
you ask why fanfiction writers want THIS and not “the norm,” but the idea of everything being built to cater to an algorithm to continue to build clout, as though the only method of reaching people is Distant Overlord Creator and Passive Receptive Audience being “the norm” is EXTREMELY NEW. this is not how it has always been!! please think of the writers of zines in a pre-internet fandom, using paper and glue and xerox to try and meet like-minded people in a world that was designed for you to only ever meet people in person, by happenstance, in your own hometown. imagine the writers of the early internet, building webrings from scratch to CREATE a community to find each other, despite distance. imagine livejournal groups, forums, and – yes, indeed, of course – comment threads IN STORIES – as places where people go to *converse.* in the past, we had an entire Type Of Guy that everyone knew about, the BNF (“Big Name Fan”) whose existence had to be described via meme because it was SO DIFFERENT THAN THE NORM. treating fellow fans like celebrities or people too cool for the regular kids to know was an OUTLIER, and one commonly understood to lead to toxicity.
in the past, I have likened writing fanfiction to echolocation. i am not screaming because I like hearing the sound of my own voice, though i can and do find my voice beautiful. i am screaming so that the vibrations can bounce back to me and show me the world. the purpose is in the feedback. otherwise it is just noise.
does this make any sense? can you see, when i describe it that way, why an ask like yours makes me feel despair, because it makes us all sound so horribly separate from one another?
perhaps I will try another metaphor:
a professional chef who runs a restaurant will not have her feelings hurt if you never fight your way into the kitchen to personally tell her how much you enjoyed the meal. that would, indeed, violate a boundary. professional kitchens are a place of work, and you have already showed her you enjoyed the meal by paying for it, or by perhaps spreading your enjoyment by word of mouth to your friends so they, too, can have good meals. you show your appreciation by continuing to come back. if a bunch of people sitting around randomly happen to have a conversation about how much they love the food, it wouldn’t hurt that chef’s feelings to not be included in the conversation. however: EVEN IN THIS INSTANCE, it is ADVISABLE AND APPROPRIATE to leave a good review! you might post about how much you like this restaurant on Yelp, and it would probably make the chef feel great to see those positive comments. but the chef doesn’t NEED them, because the chef is, again, *also being paid to cook.* that’s why she started the restaurant, to be paid to cook!
i am not being paid to cook.
i am at home in my own kitchen, making things for a community potluck where i hope everyone will bring something we can all enjoy together. some people at the potluck are better bakers, some better cooks; some can’t cook at all but are great at logistics and make sure there’s enough napkins for everyone; some people come just to enjoy the food, because that’s what the party is for. and if I, as this enthusiast chef who made something from my heart for this reason alone, learned after the fact that a bunch of people got together in the parking lot to rave about my dish but no one of them had ever bothered to tell me while I sat alone at my table all night, occasionally seeing people come by to pick up a plate but never saying anything to me – of course that would bother me, because I am not otherwise profiting off the labor I put in. this is not a bid to be paid, because if someone WERE to say “hey, great cake!! here’s five bucks for a slice” i would say no, friend, that is not the point and give them the money back. i’m not trying to Get Mine. I am in it to see the look on your face. I’m in it so you can tell me what about it moved you, so that I can say back what moved me to make it in the first place. so we can TALK about it.
because what happened in the first place is this: one time I had a cake whose sweetness, richness, flavor, intensity, and composition moved me so much that I *taught myself to bake.* so I could see how much vanilla and sugar was too much, so I could learn how to make things rise instead of fall flat, so I could even better appreciate the original cake by seeing for myself the effort and talent and inspiration that goes into making one even half as good.
learning to do so is a satisfying accomplishment in and of itself, yes.
but I also did it because at the end of the day we should EAT the cake. and it’s a lonely thing, to eat alone when a meal was always designed and intended to be shared.
so, to answer your last question: i’m not surprised, i’m just sad. because somehow two things that were never meant to be seen as the same have been labeled “content,” and thus identical. and it diminishes both the things that ARE intended to be paid for AND the things that are not, because it removes any sense of intimacy or meaning from the work.
i hope you know i’m not mad at you for asking. but i’m frustrated we’ve come to live in a world where the question needs to be asked, because the answers are no longer intuitively obvious because we’re so siloed.
ALT
