This is probably a good way to get myself blocked by people, but I have such a problem with how normalized it's become for fanartists to have a Patreon and lock so much of their art behind a paywall. It's not about copyright infringement. Like whatever, I don't care about that. It's about the fact that it goes against what fandom is supposed to be about. It takes something that's supposed to be about freely sharing and turns it into a business proposition. Fandom is supposed to be a gift economy, where we do this for the community and social bonds it brings, where we give generously with no expectation of getting compensated for it.

And beyond that (and at the risk of sounding petulant), it's not fair. Imagine how much (justified) shit a writer would get for posting like, the first paragraph of a fic and then going, "To read the rest of this, first subscribe to my Patreon!!" I'm not saying I have any desire to make money off of fanfiction. I don't. But I do think it's strange that the labor of not only writing but of gif making and fanvid making and writing meta and even commenting and reblogging, all these things that make up the backbone of a fandom, is done for free, and fanart has become a thing where it's almost expected that every artist will have a Patreon and lock much of their art. I really hate it, if I'm being honest.

I don't think you understand that, considering the amount of posts I have currently queued and, even moreso, the amount waiting in my drafts to be queued (bc my queue is almost always at full capacity), and considering how seriously obsessed I am at the moment and yave been for the past ¿two? months, I will be posting about the old priests yaoi movie (and book) for at the very least the entire year. but it's also likely it will become another of my permanent back burner fandoms that I sporadically go on a deep dive and save a bunch of posts to add to the queue. I cannot explain to you just how unexpected this was. I seriously can't believe I am considering this to be one of my main fandoms atm and realising it will most definitely become a long-term one. truly insane. I am so very happy about it though.

if you want more old priests yaoi content on your dashboard follow my fandoms sideblog (↑↑↑), I promise there is A Lot and Even More Coming Soon (And For The Foreseeable Future)

oh sure. not the weirdest ship I've shap.

happy pride

okay so spock (the alien in blue) essentially goes into heat. like literal heat like an animal. Anyway, spock’s in bloodlust in this episode and must go back to vulcan to have sex with his finace (or someone. but its supposed to be his fiance) or he’ll literally die. this is called pon farr and some backstory spock is half human and thought he wouldnt go through pon farr so he abandoned his HOT fiance to fuck around in space except oops pon farr happens so. he and kirk (in yellow getting his tits cut open, he’s also spocks captain and best friend) and their other friend mccoy go to vulcan so he can have sex with his fiance or get married or whatever so he doesn’t die. but then spock’s fiance (t’pring) is like no i dont want to marry spock i want to have him fight someone to death (which she can do) and spock at this point is fully in the ‘blood lust’ and is basically not in his right mind and doesnt get what’s happening. and t’pring picks kirk to be her ‘champion’ in the fight (her logic is that if spock dies in the fight she doesnt have to marry him and if kirk dies, spock will be so upset with her he won’t marry her anymore anyway). anyway kirk doesnt know that its a fight to the death and so he’s like of course i’ll do this fight if it’ll help spock and then he gets told it’s a fight to the death and he goes WHAT and right afterwards spock slices his titties open like in the gif. also eventually spock and kirk roll around in the sand and kirk fakes his death and THIS somehow knocks spock out of his blood lust and he goes back to the ship super sad bc he’s killed his ‘best friend’ only to discover kirk’s alive and we see one of his biggest smiles of the series (a big deal bc spock is vulcan and they dont show emotion). anyway this aired as the season opener in 1967. know your history and all that happy pride

To summarize, star trek invented fuck-or-die and spock attempted to resolve this by giving kirk a boob window and wrestling with him half-naked in the sand

The fact that this is accurate is fucking killing me

btw, it is widely acknowledged that this episode and particularly this scene is what spawned the first housewife trekkie fans and spock/kirk shippers as we know them, which in turn shaped fandom culture as a whole for generations to come. no, seriously, modern fandom culture and art including fanfiction as we know it today only exists because of the creative efforts of 1960s/70s housewives and a whole lot of the inspiration behind that passionate collective effort came from the homoerotic spock/kirk shippers, most of whom experienced their awakening with this exact episode. truly a historical moment.

If I remember correctly, the term "slash fic" originated with those early trekkies writing spock/kirk (spock slash kirk) fiction. And the term "Mary Sue" is from a Star Trek fanfiction as well

ya know i try to be like a responsible adult, and be kind to people younger than me. but as i grow older i find that i really think fandom stagnates your critical thinking abilities. i’m not sure if it’s always been this way because i remember when i was younger and stupider, i felt that fandom was a good place to discuss and dissect media and that it gave me good insight to the shows i was watching/comics i read. now i feel like looking at any fan communities is absolute garbage.... it’s always about shipping, it’s always about angst. discussion is without nuance and wholly centered around who was ‘right’ in a given situation.

oh god and another thing, i see people who participate in fandoms of media who’s source material they have never even engaged in. like pure indulgence without ever having to think critically or analytically. and i mean never, ever, in anyway (watching/playing/reading/listening) engaged in the source. they have not even watched a play through of it if it’s a video game they just hop online and look at a remixed version of the same shit they always look at. i’m not going to be nice about this one you are legitimately not doing your brain or critical thinking skills a favor.

they do what

[ID: first image is a screenshot of tags reading “saw someone on tiktok say they use this chrome extension to plug the names of their fave fictional characters into books they read for school and fanfics from other fandoms and other people responded in agreement... it’s so weird to think there are large swathes of people who engage with media in the most narrowminded and masturbatory ways like how do you live like this your brain must be turning to mush”

second image is two side-by-side images of a fried-looking emoji face looking very disturbed in two different ways. end ID]

On Fanfiction

I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.

We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!

But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.

I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.

Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?

I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.

Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.

But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.

Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking. 

Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it. 

Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.

That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.

But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.

A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This is what stories are supposed to be.

This is what stories are.

Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.

Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.

Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.

We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.

Somewhere in my notes in the last few days I saw someone add some tags that I’ve been thinking about ever since. I wish I could find them again (or that I’d just saved their post at the time) because I think they made a lot of sense.

They were talking about how fanfic is becoming more and more mainstream while still remaining largely transgressive. It’s such an interesting dichotomy to think about!

On the one hand, you have sites like AO3 and realities like widespread high speed internet access being more and more accessible to larger and larger groups of people. This makes it incredibly easy for anyone at all to find and read fanfic.

On the other hand, you have the roots of fanfic. It was born out of marginalized groups such as women, people of colour, and members of the queer community deciding to take the stories that had been aimed at a largely male, white, heterosexual audience and inverting them into something they could enjoy and relate to. To this day, fanfic is a place where people write the kinds of stories that don’t get made into movies and TV shows. The kinds of stories that don’t get published or end up on the New York Times bestseller list.

Fanfic used to be written and shared in secret. People used to hide it. People still do hide the fact that they read or write it. But it’s becoming something that more and more people are becoming more and more aware of.

So now there’s a spotlight starting to shine on fanfic. People who aren’t looking for transgressive works are finding them where they always were. People who think the status quo is fine are getting upset when they enter a place where the status quo is constantly being upended.

The tags on that post that I can’t find made the point that popular media is curated and sanitized and stripped of most of its controversy in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. But that also makes that audience expect all media to be curated and sanitized in the same way. When they encounter the messy, controversial, ugly, radical, difficult things that people write in fanfic, they’re unprepared.

Fanfic isn’t big media. Fanfic authors aren’t being edited and filtered and polished - and nor are their works. The clash between the expectations of people new to fanfic and accustomed to popular media and the realities of what fanfic is and what it’s being written for - that’s part of this struggle that fandom is going through right now. It’s been going on since the beginning of course, but it’s getting louder every year.

I’m still thinking my way through this, but it really does make a lot of sense to me. If those were your tags, please let me know so I can credit you with the ideas at the core of this post.

And if you have any ideas for how we as fans can better introduce the newbies to the culture and expectations in fandom, I’d love to hear it. The better we can guide people into our space, the better they’ll fit in when they join it.

While I’m not entirely sure how, here are a few what ideas. If you’re coming into fanfic new, here is what you need to know. Perhaps other folks can think of more diplomatic ways to frame these thoughts.

This feels related to a post I saw a while back about how so much of fandom is rooted in neuro divergence. The hyper fixation, the “squeeing”, the encyclopedic knowledge. And how, as fandom gets more and more mainstream, those hallmarks of being a Fan get tagged as *cringey*

Idk. Makes you think.

I love almost every point here, but if there’s one thing I would tell new fans, it’s this:

Most fanfic is straight.

These are the best hard numbers I have (with multi/other including all fics labeled as more than one of m/m, f/m, and f/f along with ones labeled as multi/other):

AO3 is the gay porn bookstore, so AO3 is the site that cares about:

If you hate Bad Kinks, that’s fine. Just know that you will never get the kind of labeling AO3 has from the people who pander to the mainstream. If you want to get rid of The Bad Stuff, the kind of websites you’ll end up with are a sea of nigh unsearchable het, like Wattpad. And the same kinks will be there. They just won’t be labeled clearly.

People imagine that fandom is mostly queer because their own bubble is, because queer stuff sticks in their mind more as anomalous, making it seem more frequent than it really is, and because the only places that label clearly are the queer ones.

If you want to tear down the places with queer+freaky content, you will end up tearing down the only places that protect queer content at all.

No, literally no one missed that. For you, the big thing is underage. For someone else, it’s RPF existing at all. For someone else, it’s rape-as-kink.

I reiterate: If you hate Bad Kinks, that’s fine. But AO3 looks how it does because it’s opposed to censorship. A site less opposed to censorship would also be less into this type of metadata and would have less clear labeling.

Perhaps Wattpad’s terms of service would be more to your taste.

The politest way to tell somebody to go to hell has been found

I love how everyone on this website has the few (or many) fandoms they're in, the ones they're actively in and the ones they dabble in, the fandoms that they revisit once in a while and then there's the peripheral fandoms. those fandoms that you aren't in and you've never even consumed the canon but some of your mutuals post about it and you've culturally osmosised enough information to have a vague understanding of canon and you get maybe 1/4 of the memes/references and you'll like the occasional post in your dash about it, maybe even reblog or comment on some art, but you're not in the fandom yknow? it's just there, in the peripheral of your fandom experience

and I also love how as of last october every single person activity using social media now has Supernatural in their fandom peripheral regardless of whether they want it or not

have i ever told y’all about the greatest moment of my academic career

i was a freshman in college and i had this history teacher who was ~edgy~ and his hotness level on ratemyprofessor was off the charts and he was the first teacher i ever heard use the word “fuck.” anyway he would do this thing every so often where we’d have a “quiz” and the first two questions were always really easy and the last one was hard - they were all similar questions, and the point was to show what you learn about history and what you don’t. 

so one day he’s like okay kids time for a quiz and the first question was who killed abraham lincoln. the second question was who killed JFK. third question was who killed william mckinley. 

we all take a few minutes and write down our answers, and then the teacher asks the questions again so we can shout out the answers. everybody answered the first two with really no problem.

now, keep in mind that this class was at 9 a.m. and i was exhausted All The Time during my freshman year of college so i sat in the back in my sweats and never said a word and the teacher definitely had no clue who i was. 

so you can imagine his surprise when he asked the class who shot william mckinley and without missing a beat i said, “czolgosz,” pronounced correctly and everything. 

my teacher froze and in a very stern voice asked, “what was that? what did someone just say?”

i repeated: czolgosz.

my teacher: “who said that?”

i raised my hand, and my super cool history teacher glared at me. he then asked me how the hell i knew the answer. he said that in the TWENTY YEARS he’d been teaching this stupid class, nobody, not A SINGLE PERSON, had ever known the answer to that question.

i then had to quietly explain to a room full of people that there’s a musical called assassins and there’s a song about czolgosz shooting william mckinley at the great pan american exposition in buffaloooooooo (in buffaloooooooo)

The arts are important.

I shocked a teacher once because I could recite the preamble to the US Constitution (got bonus points to), She asked why I’d taken it upon myself to memorize it. I had to explain it was in a School House Rock song….

I shocked church with my ‘math skills’ when they were asking how many seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, hours in a day, days in a year, now how about minutes in a year - and I call out five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes without pausing to think, cos Rent

Once aced a religion class pop quiz that asked me to list all of Jacob’s sons since they’re the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. The one and only time I’ve been thankful for Andrew Lloyd Webber. I even got points for getting the birth order correct.

My little brother got extra points in a social studies class once for knowing “O Canada” in its entirely (we’re American and grew up in Maryland, for context) because my older sister went to undergrad in Maine and her acapella group learned the Canadian National Anthem could sing it whenever the hockey teams played Canadian teams.

Who says the arts don’t have real world benefits?

When i was in high school, my history teacher asked what historic technology caused the biggest alteration in military tactics. I answered stirrups, and explained that the ability to brace against the horse to use a weapon and the better maneuverability vs a chariot created the entire concept of cavalry, which led to modern tactics, etc. The teacher said I was the first student to ever give that answer and that I was basically correct, and then asked where I had found that out. I then had to explain I had read it in a Star Trek novel.

when I was 15 once in English class (English as a second language) my teacher (who hated me bc I never did any homework but my exams and essays were always really good) told us she'd recently learnt a new word; procastination, and asked if anyone knew what it meant.

me, awkward fifteen year old, trans and not out yet, in a class with 20 amab dudes and three afab people, one of them being me, with absolutely no friends in this class, rises my hand and explains to the class what it means. This teacher tells us she just learnt the word last week, we in spanish don't have a word for this and she loved it, and asks me how I knew about it.

I then had to explain to my class that I knew the world because Daniel Howell (danisnotonfire back then) had made many youtube videos talking about it, and to my horror my teacher said she'd check him out

I love how everyone on this website has the few (or many) fandoms they're in, the ones they're actively in and the ones they dabble in, the fandoms that they revisit once in a while and then there's the peripheral fandoms. those fandoms that you aren't in and you've never even consumed the canon but some of your mutuals post about it and you've culturally osmosised enough information to have a vague understanding of canon and you get maybe 1/4 of the memes/references and you'll like the occasional post in your dash about it, maybe even reblog or comment on some art, but you're not in the fandom yknow? it's just there, in the peripheral of your fandom experience

and I also love how as of last october every single person activity using social media now has Supernatural in their fandom peripheral regardless of whether they want it or not

huh, so apparently everyone relates to having spn shoved down their throats now,,

I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality,  that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

Tumblr. Tumblr is what happened, with its never-ending scrolling, with its lack of nested contents (or ANY comments, when fandom sailed here from the old world), with its tags instead of membered communities.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.

“When authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers”

Well that reframed my view of every fandom I’ve touched for the last five years, and it explains a lot.

I really cannot emphasize how the lack of comments and nested comments impacted fandom. It turned fandom into a series of one-way relationships. Social media is extremely uninteractive compared to mediums like journals and forums.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Keep reading

This is an excellent read on Tumblr fandom, and encapsulates some of the things about the platform that give me pause before posting.

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

Likes and drafts are private - you can collect posts in a place where no one sees them but you. It doesn’t have to be a public statement. It can just be a thing that caught your interest for whatever reason, that you wanted to be reminded of.

I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t already to read this essay on how web 2.0 has changed fandom

it’s not just tumblr, or twitter, it’s a fundamental shift in how people act online in the era of social media and algorithm-driven interaction towards advertising revenue