okay but there is something disquieting about this urge to cast fan writers as altruists. they give us all this for free!! well, no.

they’re sharing

it’s a key difference in perception. fic isn’t given. it’s shared. it’s part of a fandom community— in which readers are also an integral part.

it’s probably inevitable mission creep from the increasingly transactional nature of the internet and fandom-as-consumerism, which was always gonna happen after corps worked out how much bank there is to make from those weirdo fan people

but like. fandom is sharing. i think we’ve lost that somewhere.

On the rest of the internet, there are creators and there are consumers. Those roles have been, for most of the last ten years, transactional. I put out; you receive. Sometimes you give me money; most of the time, it’s just your attention (which is turned into money by other means).

But fandom doesn’t have consumers; we have readers. And they have forgotten–or maybe they’re new and didn’t know–that they’re an important part of fandom, too. You have a place here, even if you never write or draw or gif or edit. When a creator posts a thing they made, it’s a bid that says, “Look at what I love. Do you love it, too?” And when you reach out to say, “I love it, too,” you’re saying, “Let’s love it together.”

I have watched people get increasingly weird about comments and reblogs on both sides of this argument. And I know why, because I’ve felt the difference, too. When fandom was centralised on Livejournal, we had comment threads on every post, and talking to each other was easy. When we were forced to leave, we scattered, and AO3 was there for our work, but the community was lost.

I took a long break from fandom during the 2010s, and when I came back, I saw a lot of one-way broadcasting and not the same kind of community. Because that’s what the rest of the internet looked like. YouTubers and Twitter comedians and freelance writers just trying to make a living at a dozen different outlets. Which is to say, I understand why fandom is like this now.

But I want to remind you of what it used to be. Some people write fic, and others make rec lists. Some people make gifs, and others write meta essays. Some people know logistics for publishing zines, and others can fill the pages with art. You have a place here along with everyone else, whatever you can do. Find your thing, do your thing, and then reach out to someone else and say, hey, let’s do this thing together.

I’m 43 now. I found fandom in 1996, when I was so obsessed with The X-Files that I needed to more. I read and read and read for years before I ever reached out–by email!–to tell someone I loved what they made. (Lurkers, you too are part of this community!) When I finally worked myself up and posted my first story, someone reached out to me and said, hey, come join us. Let’s do this together.

So I’m reaching out to you because I used to be you. There’s a place for you here. And the way to find your place is to leave a comment on a story you love, reblog a post with tags, send an ask. Fandom is not only fic or fanart or gifs. It’s all of us together.