Y’all I’m screaming

#suggests that EITHER there will also be a gay skating show in 2036#or that the gay skating shows will come closer and closer together like kaiju (via @jabberwockypie)

opposite ends of an extremely specific and completely bonkers spectrum

Help us find the missing siblings!!!!

Bosch, Hieronymus The Garden of Earthly Delights, right panel - Detail man ice-skating on large ice skate (mid-right)

me: i wanna talk about my ocs

someone: ok tell me about your ocs

me, suddenly convinced that every single thing about my ocs is stupid and cringy and probably offensive: i. have them

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc

and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that's just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.

Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.

I started reading this book of essays by the children of paramilitary figures from the troubles and you have to read this paragraph from the son of a uda brigadier that sent me into the stratosphere

Just imagining being in charge of the west belfast UDA in the early 70s and you go on television to do your whole we're the UDA we hate you thing and you come home and your gay son is so mean about your outfit that you get angrier than you've ever been in your life. it's a good thing for this dude that the provos didn't know that they apparently could have won by getting some catty gay people to tell loyalists they looked stupid two years into the conflict

Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House.

After the hell of the past two days, this reminded me of what America could and should be about. It’s a little pocket of hope when our administration is trying to extinguish diversity and community and basic human decency and replace them with fear and hate and division.

Almayer’s folly, 1951, Rene Magritte

whenever you take too much time to write something know it is because stephen king has been stealing your life force

annoying when shows set in the medieval period have the women with thier hair just long and unstyled and out . girl go put on your wimple girl 🤦‍♀️

like there are so many fun medieval hair and headgear options, it's so boring just seeing loose beachy waves meant to appeal to 21st century beauty standards

put that hot prince in a gay little hood with an ostrich feather or so help me god

media literacy includes understanding why a media product was made, to whom it's being sold, and the assumed preferences of its marketing demographic. narrative is not produced or sold in a vacuum.

Alex Kapranos on fan fiction in conversation with Canadian online review magazine Chart Attack in November 2004:

"[Fan fiction] was pointed out to me at one point and I thought it was very humorous," Kapranos says. "The thing I didn’t realize is that there are so many hot blooded girls who are really kind of into this voyeuristic thing about homosexual sex. At first I thought they’d been spying on my private life and then I realized it’s just fantasy."

"I think it’s brilliant. It’s really, really funny. And I like that sort of thing cause it means that there’s people who have imagination who are inspired by your personality and the things that you’ve done, so it’s a good thing," he says.

"There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fictionalizing a genuine character as long as you make it clear that you are fictionalizing, which I think all that slash stuff does."

[...]"It’s what we do in songs as well," he says. "I mean, we take characters who are around us and write stories, write songs about events that have happened in their lives. Of course, when you tell any story, you make it dramatic, you use the tools of drama to make an exciting story. All they’re doing is an extreme example of what we do."

I think part of the reason gideon has such a hot girl mini breakdown when she realizes she's accidentally been stealing palamedes's girl is that it seems like engagement with her sexuality has been, like, her sole source of joy in life. she tries to run away and the only non bare necessity she packs is her dirty magazines, she grounds herself in high stress situations by thanking god that at least hot women still exist, this is all she has going for her, it's her one thing. and now she learns that apparently she just spent the last few weeks accidentally using her one source of joy to kick her new friend in the shins over and over again and he never even said "sorry um but when you swing your foot back and forth in this spot that's actually my tibia you're making contact with."