A sign to tap

Come into a fandom late. Leave early. Write 100 fics. Write 1. Write none. Read every single fic written in your fandom. Read only your OTP. Write only your OTP. Write every pairing under the sun. Make gifs just for your friends. Make gifs to share with everyone. Make art. Make nothing.

Cheerlead from afar and keep to yourself. Join a groupchat. Yell about headcanons with your friends. Leave kudos. Leave comments. Make fic recs. Bookmark everything. Read or watch and then forget it.

Treat canon like gospel. Treat canon like a dumpster fire. Only read/write/art coffeeshop AUs. Decide your corner will be all hurt no comfort. Decide your corner  will be all fluff no angst.

Fandom isn't one size fits all, and there is no one right way to do it. So find what works for you, and don't worry about all of the outside noise. It doesn't matter how everyone else does fandom.

All are welcome.

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People seem to be really resonating with this so I'm putting it over here too.

Original thread

who's the stupidest type of anti and why is it antis in rpf fandoms. "proshippers dni" while engaging in rpf. do you know. do you have any idea. calling other shippers "schizos" because of age gap ships. my dude. my gal. it's all problematic. it's rpf. we're the sickos of fandom at large. you can't sanitise rpf ships.

bro we need to teach fandom history in schools atp

If posting fic online has taught me anything, it’s that I have no idea how the reader will react to anything. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Not the faintest clue.

Fics that I think I scribbled off just to get them out there get the kindest, most rapturous feedback. Fics I slaved over, agonized over, bled my soul into get a couple tepid replies. Fics I thought were me revealing the darkness and weird kink that lives in my brain, scared to even post it for fear of judgement, get, “Aaaw that’s so sweet!” replies. Baffling.

My conclusion? You just never know. You really just can’t know. When I did a workshop with 20 other writers I would try to guess what their critique of my story would be and I was right maybe 1 in 20 times. Only one other writer would have the same critique for my story that I had. And it wasn’t even always the same person.

The encouraging part about this is, if self recrimination, the fear that you know what people won’t like about your story, is holding you back, just say fuck it! You’re almost certainly wrong! All you can do is make it the best story you can for the energy you have. And yeah, sometimes that means scribbling it out in an evening and kicking it out to the void of the internet before you can change your mind or worry about editing it more than once because then you’ll never post it.

It’s all chaos, man. You don’t get to decide what the audience thinks. All you can do is create it and put it out there for them to decide.

a very gentle PSA that a writer is not a short-order cook, please do not try to order off the menu

I do wanna expand on this slightly because I have to stress - I'm not mad about this ask, and I totally understand the impulse. But I think it's a useful avenue of analysis to unpack a couple things about fandom, critique, and interacting with creators.

When an artist is in the process of making something, they might seek out peers to get another set of eyes on their work so they can polish it up. This is critique. It is specifically solicited from someone the artist knows and trusts the opinion of, and it can shape the art if the artist chooses to take it into account.

When an artist makes something and publishes it for an audience, they're presenting a completed work. A response to this will be analysis and review and can serve as a guide to buyers, readers, and writers who want to analyze why the story did or didn't work for them and what they can learn from if. It cannot change the work of art itself, although the artist might take some analysis/reviews to heart and use them as a guide to their own future improvement. However, this is inadvisable, because writers should generally not engage with their own reviews - it can be a form of digital self-harm to seek them out and obsess over them.

When an artist makes something, publishes it, and a community forms and starts expanding on the story or speculating where it might go in future, this is fandom, producing fanworks. This is also not something that can or should influence the original work. In fact, there are multitudinous legal reasons why it really, really shouldn't.

The internet has made it easier than ever to get in touch with artists, and it's also made it easier than ever for artists to serialize their own work. This combines to mean it is now very easy to contact a writer mid-story and tell them what you think they should do with it. To the person reaching out in this way, this feels like good clean fandom. It is no different from any other fan analysis or fanfic, except for the fact that it is being directed to the author and framed as if it were peer review, aka the only kind of story analysis that can actually be used to modify the original work.

However, it is unsolicited, and it betrays a sense of entitlement to the original work - a sense that is, factually, an element of transformative fandom as a whole. Transformative fandom takes a work that belongs to nobody but the author, and then treats it like an open source raw material to play around in. This is all in good fun, and it is 100% fine and great for fandoms to play with source material. But the line is drawn at the borders of the author's work. That is under nobody's control but the author. Only peer review can touch it, and only if it is invited in.

If you ask a writer to write their story the way you want it, you indicate that you think the story exists solely to be exactly what you wanted it to be, and that the author is simply failing to achieve this goal and needs correction. This is not true. The author is doing something. How you feel about it is entirely up to you, but the way the story goes is not.

I think some elements of fandom, for all its wonderful qualities, makes this very easy to forget.

nothing scarier than being a fan of a fic and then becoming mutuals with the author. like hi shakespeare. big fan of your fake dating au

Apologies in advance but I have to get serious here for a minute about the subject of "being intimidated by fanfic authors." This is more con-oriented than Tumblr-oriented but the sentiments are applicable to both.

It makes me so upset whenever I think of all the times I went to a con and couldn't seem to find anyone to talk to. After being on a few panels where I made jokes about the joys of writing about dicks and butts, I would walk around, and it just seemed like folks were all doing their own thing, not inviting me to join them. I would always think, Oh, story checks out, everyone is put off because I'm a weird freak, it's just like in high school. Then I'd go back to my hotel room and wonder what I spent all this money for, coming here to be lonely.

Then, in the days after the con, I would see posts from other con-goers, or receive messages: "omg berlynn i was too shy to say hello at the con but i just want you to know that your fics mean everything to me and you're so amazing."

I really do appreciate those kind words, but...it would have been cool to actually hang out with you, you know?

One time I had the opportunity to chat with with a trio of folks who were the guests of honor at this con because they were screening their gorgeous and charming fan film, and they confessed to me that the day before, they had walked into a room, seen that I was there, and walked out because they were too intimidated at the very idea of being in the room with me. (So I sat alone and silent in that room for 20 more minutes.)

The thing is, even if I was the most popular fanfic writer in the history of the world, connecting with other fans and forming friendships is the only compensation I get. I don't eat better because you liked my fic. I don't get a swag bag worth $5,000 when I check into my hotel room at a con because I wrote that one omegaverse fic that everyone read. I do what I do and I write what I write because I want to be part of a community of fans.

But I should note that all is not loneliness and misery for Berlynn. I have had some of the greatest moments of my life making connections with people who actually did speak to me at cons. Sometimes it was just a hug and a few happy tears, sometimes it was deep philosophical discussions about writing dicks and butts while sitting on the floor of a party suite at two in the morning...but several of my IRL friends are people who were not afraid to just reach out to me after a panel, or say hello at the bar.

Here's how it might go when you connect with your favorite fanfic author: One of my closest friends is someone who was a big fan of my work, introduced to me by a mutual friend. Sitting across from me at a restaurant not too long after our introduction, this person had to point out to me that, whilst gesticulating exuberantly over my meal, I had gotten some macaroni and cheese on my sleeve. After that, they were not so starstruck anymore, and now we live in the same building, which makes it easy for us to hang out and giggle over old TV shows together a couple times a week.

Probably there are fanfic writers who don't want to be bothered, who don't want to be messaged, who aren't in it for the social connection...but they are not the ones following you on social media. They're not the ones with their inboxes open, anonymous messages on. And they're not the ones strolling through the common areas at cons looking for an empty seat at a table.

Art doesn't have an expiration date

Have ye heard of Star Trek we’re still going strong *checks date* 58 years later