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pixelatedlenses · 8 years ago

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“You Can’t Have Black Faeries”: Black Magic, Representation, And Fantastical Reads and Writing , or How I Started Writing Black Characters on Tumblr and Never Looked Back

So I’m going to preface this with the fact that this is a veritable essay that kind of winds: it’s not really organized and would never be published on a formal news site. It’s just my story, all of what I remember, and clocks in around 6ish pages. It was important for me to write this during Black History Month because over the last year, I’ve undergone a lot of changes, and my writing has changed with it. I hope that you’ll read this and ask questions, and continue to support me as I change even more. I love my blackness, I love my writing, and I love sharing it with you all. I suppose here’s the roots of how I got to be Spencer Avery, my pen name that I use for my core writing, outside of beng Tomi for art and light novels.

It’s my story, and is more stream of consciousness than anything else. Basically: enjoy, is what I’m trying to say. Also, this is, of course, one of the supplimental pieces I mentioned in my post about writing about BHM in Japan. I hope you come to understand another part of me, and see why my black is beautiful. .

I can honestly say that at 24, I love writing black characters.

I stick representations of myself –my culture, fat black folxs, nerdy black folxs, magical black folxs– into whatever I can, whether it’s a mundane romance tale set in a perfectly normal world or a princess stuck in a tower. It became important to me about… eh, three years ago that I start to normalize those kinds of worlds, that Black folxs were just as magic as a Tolkien elf or a Harry Potter wizard. We belonged in those worlds alongside European styled magics too.

But it wasn’t always like that.

I started writing fanfiction at age 13. I was confused about a lot of things: I felt wrong in my black skin, about liking girls over boys and flowers, felt at odds with the black girls that teased me and bullied me into buying them snacks. (And also called my mother fat to my face, which yeah, we both are, but you don’t get to call her that, you know? Geez.) Most of all, I think feeling a sense of nothingness prevailed: I was a black girl playing at being good enough to be white, playing at stepping outside my ethnic roots to somehow feel capital-N Normal.

Video games, thus, became a home for me: I found myself in Naruto, felt at home in the vast worlds of Kingdom Hearts, was brave and empowered in Pokemon was somebodies hero in the countless rpgs stacked next to my bed. I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that I spent more time connected to a set of double a’s or a charger than I did reflecting on myself. I think now, a lot of Blerds –black nerds – often do: we’re pushed out with anti-blackness from our own black folx, and left to imagine ourselves as meaningful in somebody else’s world. It’s quite sad, and perhaps why now, I write so much fantasy and fiction featuring a black character overcoming: it’s a message that still needs to be heard and echoed.

Nevertheless, I was a lonely kid. It was the height of MySpace, I was a digital roleplayer under the all too ridiculous name Naruko Fai Uzamachi –I literally just let out the most pitiful Regret Groan – and I was still on the hunt for that last, little taste of acceptance.

Hence writing.

I put up my first fic on Fanfiction.net sometime in 2007, most likely May. It was a hot mess, but I’m saying that millions of words later in 2017. At the time, it was a release: I was deep into the 801 –that’s Yaoi for the uninitiated, taking from the alternative pronunciations for 8, 0, and 1 in Japanese – community, having found a weird, hypersexualized acceptance amongst likeminded women who felt pushed to Western society’s fringes. I was everywhere I could on MySpace, Aarinfantasy, and any board I could find to somehow make my 14-year-old heart ache less. Fanfiction was there as another balm: I have memories of sneaking onto the computer at midnight, trying to turn the brightness down just so to not wake my mother, and clacking out my feelings about depression, hurt, growing up, and wanting desperately to belong to something.

(As I’m currently at work, I won’t like it: it’s explicit, and I don’t’ look at things like that on my on hours. I can tell you it’s called “Land and Sky” and was a SasuNaru fic, a hot pairing even in 2017. You can look it up on my Fanfiction.net account, and for fun, do a live reading with your friends. I’ve tried to rewrite it multiple times, and may try this year as it’s the anniversary and my writing is hopefully better. I think perhaps that’s my penance for teenage me’s horribly written yaoi: rewrite a SasuNaru fic every ten years for the rest of my life. Of course, it’s funny now: at the time, I was Ride or Die about that fic.)

This led to me often seeking solace in Asian characters: they were the closes analog to me. Brown and black faces didn’t match me in terms of how I felt; they reminded me of the same mocking laughter, harsh hands, and hurtful words that were hurled at me daily. I didn’t want to like them, but perhaps a part of me also realized I needed something. Asian person –specifically Japanese character – offered that something. They were ethnic enough in my young eyes, and were close enough. Sometimes, characters were a tanned brown, many shades away from my dark skin, but felt cousin to my desire for acceptance.

(Now, of course, I realize that wasn’t the answer and that Japanese-Americans are often ridiculed for their own desire to enjoy their culture, while Westerners –predominantly Americans of European descent – often police fan culture within Anime and Manga or general Japanese pop, and that has often led to exclusion. That’s not to say there aren’t black folxs out there policing Japanese-American consumption of their own culture too: there certainly are, and they’re just as wrong.)

Writing, thus, developed into a series of long worded fanfiction pieces that I posted all across the web, primarily on FF.net, which was my stomping ground for a very long time. I can still google my many pen names –Syrus Gardenia Fuze, which apparently I asked to be called, dozens of Japanese names with African-esque sounds, and eventually, Nagone, which I took kanji –immaturely and without any knowledge of the language, as I was studying Spanish and not even Chinese yet to understand characters and radicals– to mix together to form “a strong sounding name” which I still use today, but hope to change this year actually– and find my pieces. I get hits daily from kids going through the same growth I did: kids who message me asking questions about the fictional worlds I built, kids who express the same sadness, heartache, and loneliness of being classed as different. PoC kids who tell me that they’re looking for themselves and found it in my writing.

Growing up certainly hasn’t changed in a decade, you know?

However, by the time that college rolled around, fed-up, still black, now queer me was tired, and fanfiction wasn’t always doing the same things it had. I was sick of school, wanted desperately out and to move to Missouri for college, but was stuck in a mundane year. After a blow up at my bullies which resulted in me getting kicked out the band hall and nearly breaking a bass clarinet from dropping it on the ground, I stopped writing: I just flat out gave it up. It felt like it was putting away childish things, tucking away the past, and would let me move on.

Of course, at this point, you’re realizing that I didn’t stop as I’m talking about writing. Let’s continue.

I came back to it in college after my father died because I need Home again. I was still focused on Japan and Japanese media because Japan was cool: I hadn’t had the realization that Japan was a country, and hadn’t really delved into my studies that would lead me to a degree in History and Asian Studies focused on Japan and on showing a 360 view of the nation rather than “it’s got pop culture!” I was still hiding from being black: high school had brow beat me with “Why do we need Black History Month?” gorilla masks when Obama got into office –with friends remarking that I should be proud on of my people made if at 17 and 18– and general Southern Fried Racism that I was more than willing to reject being black. My pool of genuine black friends had grown from two to six: I added a few men into the mix -almost all are college friends I still love- and was steadily working towards some awareness that I was black and not secretly a white girl beneath.

Home was in writing more fics: still primarily yaoi, though I had dabbled in yuri and girl’s love with the arrival of my first partner. I was a bit more brazen and brave about what I wrote, and started showing PoC women together instead of solely Japanese men. It was a radical change, and made me feel a little bit better between regretting being queer and loving college. But there was still a stark absence of anyone black: in fact, I honestly can’t remember ever writing a black character for most of my early writing life.

So, I bet you’re wondering when that black part will come in?

Well, it starts probably in 2013ish when I made my writing Tumblr.

I’d heard about Tumblr through my fourth partner, an asexual with a penchant for wanting a mixed child because they were “cute” and wanting a boy despite being agender and stating that no one should choose gender.

(I should add that they often remarked they wanted to spin the sperm of their donor to increase the rate of a boy, and would be sad to not have their child come out how they wanted. It made me feel very gross, and I was not at all sad to break up with them. It was for the best, and I hope that they realize now that it’s kind of gross to want a mixed child for their aesthetic and not because you wouldn’t mind having a child with multiple cultures. They were a nice person, but it’s alright to accept that nice people -even me- have microaggresions that we must constnatly work at.)

I started with a cosplay tumblr: it was dedicated to my costuming which I did often enough, and was made with the mindset of being a black cosplayer. This was a huge change, and it came solely because of an event the year before: namely, the murder-death killing of Trayvon Martin, a boy who was sent to rest by a man who is, simply put, a racist and hated him for his skin.

That changed my world: it was like I’d been literally seeing black and white, and suddenly, there was an entire spectrum of Brown that I fit into. I was a black person, ahd the potential to get killed for my skin, for not being submissive, for being a perceived threat, and that was scary. It was the kind of thing that, for months, kept me awake. I saw, for the first time, the ugly face of kind racism: I had white friends remark that President Obama wouldn’t know how it felt to lose a child like that because he was only half-black, and he was the President, one of the good ones. I saw that perhaps, I was perceived like that: that my intellect, my quiet nature, my bookish ways, and my gentleness were only Right because they were White, that a percentage of people around me where trading Me for being Good, and a Good Black.

(Insert another groan.)

So my writing changed with that: it became more active, more constant, and eventually in 2014, solidified into this blog with all the meager beginnings I could offer. I remember my first posts were from a roleplay senior year: they focused on the characters of our werewolf campaign. I think after that came some reposts from FictionPress –I really want to start utilizing that again this year, alongside Wattpad and other sns for writing– and then… well, then I started writing for myself. It started with fae –I’ve always like fae since I first read Holly Black’s Modern Fae series, specifically Valiant, sophomore year of high school– and so I started to transplant black features onto them. My fae ranged from sweet to scary, were villains, heroes, lovers, and friends. They were varied like I felt I was: black had stopped having a singular identity or word bubble of terms that were solely “ethnic” and was a mass of very difficult faces, all living very different lives. I mirrored that onto the supernatural, and it worked: I started to gain ground and felt that I was doing something right. It felt good, and that momentum carried into grad school, picking me up when I was down, giving me a place to escape, but also critically write about big feelings.

Simply put, writing was good.

(I also got into Legend of Korra heavy and started writing fic again. I’ve been on a two year fic break, but plan to pick it up soon, after I finish my current project which I still can’t talk about.)

You’d think that after nearly a decade of writing, I’d have written for myself, but I always think I was writing for others: it’s a habit I still struggle with because I’m a people pleaser and want to make folxs happy, but writing for myself was the most freeing thing I could ever reward myself with.

Now, I’d love to tell you I remember my first black girl, but the one I remember most –and the one that’s fairly well-known and recent– is Cobalt “Colby” Johnson, a college-aged, plump, chubby black girl from my novella Gelid. She’s from 2015, her story written in a month in a cast of all non-white characters. Colby is probably one of the dearest characters to my heart, and when I get a chance, I will rewrite her purposely quickly written story into something bigger, seal up her plot holes and give her more body.

Colby, as a character, was not originally meant to be an analog of me: I never set out thinking, “Yeah, this is me, but if I ended up in a crazy, month long adventure”. At the time, I was writing her as a challenge: finish one thing, and it would mean I could finish anything I set my mind to. Surprisingly, when I did finish, it gave me the strength to do just that: finish things, even if it took time.

Colby was the culmination of all the things I felt that big black girls needed: adventure, an acceptance of self. She was my swan song to the me that hated being fat, to the me that hated being fat and black, to the me that thought other black girls also wanted adventure. It was important to me that I give that adventure and have the black girl win: I gave her winnings in the form of a solid relationship with her mother that was genuinely healthy, a good friend, and the power of being a diety essentially. Certainly, thinking now about the story, there’s massive plot holes to how that all happened, but that wasn’t the point: it was getting that story out of me and out for people to engage with.

Regardless, Colby became me because writing is a part of me: every character takes from their owner, right? Colby was no different. But she was magical because she did something special to me, and made me crave writing again.

(Please search the Gelid tag on the blog. I really love this story because it changed me, and once I wrote it, I finally stopped looking back to my mistakes and started to change my writing to be more self-serving. And hey, if there’s enough interest, Gelid will receive a published rewrite and maybe even an ebook form like I had formerly planned.)

After that, a cork was popped, and I’ve been writing a lot more black girls since. Black folxs I should say as most range from AFAB persons to trans and genderqueer, genderfluid and fully other: dragons who take female form but are just them, otherworldly entities, fae who don’t need human gender roles. Honestly, I feel the momentum is still here even though I had to step back from writing to transition my life to Japan. I’m still writing black girls, though now, my life is influenced by half-Japanese and African-American folxs, writing for an often underserved part of Japanese society.

The fantastical is a powerful thing, you know, and when a pen is your sword, you can do a lot of great things. I wish that younger me had the ability to see that would be our reality one day: yet I’m glad I didn’t because realizing that was sweet, if not hard fought for, and makes writing even more valuable to me.

This year, of course, will bring more black girls, along with Japanese writing, largely because of my new environment. I have plans for many stories with all black fae communities, returns to old characters like Colby (Gelid) and Flavia and Sorrell (Polychromatic (18+), a piece from the wonderful SSBB, which was a dream come true!), a magical girl series called end game that contains black duotagonists, and lots of other stuff. I won’t reveal my entire hand: I want to keep some things close to my chest, but I can say that 2017 –and perhaps the rest of my life– will be the Year of Black Magic, of celebrating my skin through writing, of realizing worlds where real society is tossed out and equality, fairness, and mutuality reign.

I’m going to end this telling you that I’m still a work in progress: a decade of actualized self-hate is not cured by writing some pretty badass black folx overnight, or even in a few years. Loving my blackness, writing my blackness, and living both of those things are a daily effort, and sometimes, it gets beaten down and I feel worthless because ultimately I am a human. I’m not invincible. Yet I still find the ability, day by day, to rise up and be proud of me.

I’m but one of many black writers, but I’ll say that I’m proud: a decade of writing, a decade of The Struggle, and I’ve arrived. I love my life, and especially love my writing. I hope to share it for as long as I can on here, and everywhere for the rest of my life.

Say it loud: Spencer Avery’s Black and Proud!

tl;dr: I won’t ever have an all white story again, and honestly, probably never a story without 96% POC characters. It may be the case that I’m that one writer with the Token White Person in the future: I often wonder if that’ll be true. I don’t mean that in a negative way either: I love writing characters, but I also think it’s important that little black girls and black folxs can see themselves succeed not through strife, but through living in other worlds and engaging with life without having to always Overcome. Strife is not a Black Descriptor: it’s not all we are meant to do. Once I write black, I sure ain’t going back: ugh, that’s the wrong tense, but you get the point. I love writing representation for people who look like me, who are dark brown, darkly toasted, and proud. I don’t know if I ever could stop: the thought makes me rather sad. I hope that 14-year-old me who sought representation in tidbits, in girls like Tally Youngblood who I desperately hoped had an inkling of actual melanin, would be proud: that me would love to know that there are fae and witches, princesses in towers and deities that look like me: black, curled hair, big-brained, and adventurous in whatever they do.

#black history month #bhm2k17 #writing while black #pocharibhm #black writing #black characters #poc characters #think piece

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jixiani · 5 years ago

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In defense of fanfiction

I’ve been thinking about fanfiction lately, (really I’ve been thinking that I should really be taking some of this time to write more, but that’s another post) AO3 just had their yearly fundraiser so of course the old discourse over the site and its history was dragged up again and then Sarah had brought it up this morning and well, I have a lot of strong feelings on the subject. Let’s start with a little personal background: I have been reading and writing fanfic since the late 90’s. It started out as something silly my best friend introduced me to and we would sit in her mother’s computer room and giggle over ‘speculative fan fictions’ and participate on months-long roleplay scenarios on chat boards and take turns passing notebooks full of handwritten stories back and forth which were every bit as terrible as you’d think two 14-year-old girls could come up with. Unfortunately, we were in the Vampire Chronicles fandom so we had a front-row seat for the Anne Rice and her lawyer's debacle that will from here on out be referred to as “The Dark Times”. We watched our friends’ work get pulled, our RP sites close down, we feared that we’d get a cease and desist letter, we hid our notebooks and dreamed up our stories exclusively verbally. I was deeply ashamed of my secret love of fanfic for years. I kept writing, but I kept it secret, I kept reading it but would never admit to it. Fanfiction was something shameful, taboo, some terrible sin akin to watching porn, and not the good socially acceptable kind of porn. But time moved on and fandom moved on and fanfiction started to be more acceptable. I joined Fanfiction.net, I wrote some stuff on Livejournal (although I still kept it set to private). I read A LOT of fanfiction, jumping fandoms, and leaving reviews. People I admired came out as liking and writing fanfiction. Of course, then the purges hit. Strikethrough and the like. I’m not going to get into that here, because that’s a rant all its own. Anyway, those were also some dark days as fandom searched for somewhere to land. I stumbled over Archive of our own a few years ago and I aggressively support them whenever I can because they fight for the fandom. Now I speak out in defense of fanfiction whenever possible. I’ve attended panels at conventions about fanfiction, I support and share posts about it from my favorite authors, I let everyone know that I’m proud of my fanfic (although I still don’t post it, that’s because I tend not to finish things and I don't’ want to get someone excited for something I know I’m going to abandon in a month, not because I’m ashamed.). So let’s talk over some points because Sarah brought up a good point today. Why is fanfiction such a shameful thing in the fandom community, and in the writing community? One of the people on my friends list who I admire and is a professional, published author once rolled their eyes and scoffed when I said that I wanted to go to the fanfiction panel at a convention. Yet, no other facet of fandom is treated this way. I brought this up on Sarah’s post and I’m going to reiterate it here. Fan artists are not scoffed at, people flock to their tables in artist’s alley. Fan-made comics and doujinshi have led to careers writing and drawing comics and scripts for the same series their fanwork was based on. No professional costumer or prop maker sneers at cosplayers, in fact, there are now professional cosplayers. Fans wait in line for hours to watch masquerade skits at conventions. Fan-dubs like Dragonball Z Abridged and Nescaflowne are hugely popular and have led to professional voice acting gigs and production studios. But if an author dares to mention that they got their start in fanfiction? The horror, the outrage, the hate mail. Yet so much of our media could arguably be called fanfiction. Dante’s Inferno? John Milton’s Paradise Lost? The Aeneid? Classics? Yes. Fanfiction? Also yes. Joyce’s Ulysses is just an AU of the Odyssey. Anything written about or based on myths? Anything involving King Arthur? Sherlock Holmes? Shakespear...Oh you can cry adaptation all you want. Let’s face it if it’s written by some old white guy it’s literature and a classic and an innovative reimagining but really it’s just fanfic and it’s everywhere. West Side Story is a fanfic of a fanfic since Shakespeare based Romeo and Juliet off a poem by a similar name. My Fair Lady? Pygmalion AU. Hamilton? Real Person Song Fic! 50 Shades series, Mortal Instruments, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, hell there are literally hundreds of published Jane Austen fanfictions. John Gardner’s Grendel is a retelling of Beowolf. The Wiz, Wicked and the rest of Gregory Maguire’s books? The Wizard of Oz doesn’t enter public domain until 2035. The Magnificent Seven? Kurosawa called and he wants his seven samurai back, he’d also like to reclaim Yojimbo from A Fist Full of Dollars. Speaking of tv, how about Black Sails? It’s a fanfiction prequel to Treasure Island. Any comic book not written by the original creator. Any book series based on Star Wars, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, etc. I could go on all day. So why is it, when so much of our popular culture consists of what basically boils down to fanfiction, that fanfiction is seen as a shameful indulgence, as “cheating”, as trash?Part of it boils down to sex. Read any article that brings up fanfiction and there will invariably be a line where the author distances themself by saying something along the lines of they don’t personally read it, or how slash fic isn’t their thing but to each their own. (Both quotes from some of the sites I pulled the above list from) A lot of people seem to think that fanfiction is just porn, and while yes there is some fanfiction that is porn and some of it is very good, the same can be said for regular fiction as well. People don’t blush and giggle over Lord of the Rings, yet when I say that I’ve read fanfic that’s longer than Tolkien’s trilogy I may as well be talking about how I read Aragorn/Boromir slash fic regardless of what the actual subject matter was. Yes, there’s sex in fanfiction. A lot of it is gay sex. You can read Lolita in school but Harry Potter fanfic? Gasp, think of the children! Even if that fanfic happens to be about what if Petunia loved Harry like a son instead of pushing him away and neglecting him. There is some really fantastic fan fiction out there. Some of it has sex, some of it doesn't. Some of it deals with queer characters and experiences, some of it doesn’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with erotica and it’s an entirely separate issue. Not every fanfiction is a 50 Shades-eque erotic rewrite of Twilight, and even if they were, so what? A lot of fanfiction has to do with wish fulfillment. You want to know what happens next, or what would happen if this had happened instead, or if there was this character. You want to see someone like you in your favorite fandom. I had wanted to adventure with Bilbo when I was a kid. I wanted to go on adventures and fight and ride dinosaurs. These desires don’t go away just because we grow up. I got into roleplay and larp and gaming because I still enjoy make-believe. I write for a lot of the same reasons. Everyone wants to be the main character. Fanfiction gives you that chance. You can write yourself into a story, you can write someone that’s like you, you can write someone that’s nothing like you but what you want to be. So, let’s discuss our old friend Mary Sue. She gets trotted out as an example every time someone brings up fanfiction (or any uppity female character ever). Mary Sue was born in the 60’s. She is an actual character from a Star Trek Original Series fanfiction. Yes, fanfiction existed in the 60’s. Mary Sue was the brightest and prettiest girl to come out of Starfleet, she managed to be in all the right places at the right times to save the ship and capture the heart of Spock. Self insert fics and Mary Sues are at the heart of why we should be terribly ashamed of our fanfiction habit. Except, what was Luke Skywalker if not George Lucas’ self insert Marty Stu? There are countless male characters that are as bad or worse than your typical Mary sue and they are never called out for it. Seanan brought this up in a post once about her character October Daye, her editor had said that the character was too competent, too cool, and that it was unrealistic and she should tone it down. She had him replace the character’s name with “Harry Dresden” and reread the story and suddenly it was fine. There are a great many articles and essays about our friend Mary Sue and I implore you to read some of them. She is not the enemy we make her out to be. Fanfiction, on the rare occasion that it is accepted, is seen as some sort of training wheels, or baby’s first writing. It’s amateurish, it’s juvenile, it’s just not very good. If we are not ashamed of it, then it’s expected that we are only using it as a starting point to hone our writing and move on to professional published works. It’s either that or something terribly self-indulgent that should be kept to ourselves. Some fanfic writers do go on to become “real” writers. Seanan McGuire has always been very open about how her agent first approached her after reading some of her Buffy/Faith fanfiction. Some “real” writers also write fanfiction. Neil Gaiman won a Hugo for his Chronicles of Narnia Fanfic. Ursula Vernon and Mercedes Lackey write fanfiction in their spare time. Some fanfiction writers never become published authors, not everyone wants to. Some are happy to have a dozen 150k fics about their favorite fandom, or maybe just one 500k epic, some, myself included, may only have one short fic posted somewhere. There is nothing that says that you have to use your hobby to turn a profit. (By the way, for reference, War and Peace is 561,304 words, Dune is 187,240 words, you cannot make the argument that fanfic writers don’t put time into their craft when they have more words than Tolstoy under their belt.)Some of the ‘training wheels’ analogy is true. Fanfic is a terrific gateway to writing. It teaches pacing, plot, character development, how to take criticism. If I ever do write something professionally I will not be nearly as afraid of the red pen as I am of bad reviews. Anonymous readers are the most ruthless critics. May the literary gods preserve you from ever having your fanfic read aloud as an example of how terrible and ‘cringy’ fanfiction can be. There is a lot of fanfiction out there that is written by teenage girls, and it reads like it was written by a teenage girl, but the only way to get better at something is to practice. Fanfiction allows budding writers to do that. There are no rules, no one standing at the gates to bar entry, and entire communities of people willing to give advice and commentary. Sometimes it’s less helpful than harmful, but there is something about posting a new fic and waiting for that first ‘like’ or ‘kudos’ or a review. There’s something to be said for instant gratification. I have read a lot of really terrible fanfic. I have slogged through stuff that would make Mary Sue herself cringe. I have read about the ½ vampire, ½ werewolf, ½ fairy long lost princess. I have read grammar that would make your eyes bleed. Not all of it has been confined to fan works. I have read fanwork that has had me convulsing with silent laughter to the point that I wondered if I would die. Dialog that was ten times better than anything I had read in a professional novel. Fanfiction should not be judged by its worst offenders. We don’t hold Dune to the same standard as Twilight. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not terrible and cringy because 50 Shades of Grey overuses the phrase “Oh my.” There is some absolutely terrible fanfic out there and there is some pretty terrible published fic as well, but we don’t hold that against most novelists, so why do we hold it against fanfiction writers?I guess that brings us to the elephant in the fandom. Sexism. Fanfiction has historically been something written by and for young women and there is nothing more shameful than something liked by a young woman. Boybands? The color pink? Horse Girl books and Sparkly Vampires? Society hates them. We mock them. It is not acceptable to enjoy them. Sound familiar? How many times is something considered cool until a woman decides that she likes it? We as a society hate women and hate the things they enjoy and we hate teenage girls the most. Think of how much people hated selfies and duckface and instagram. How much hate was directed at Britney Spears, One Direction, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber? Whether it has a basis in something or not, we hate them, we make jokes, we share the memes. We write them off as having no substance, as being stupid, not worth our time. Belittling of teenage girls for their interests and fandoms isn't a new phenomenon. Remember Mary Sue? Not only that, but a lot of fanfiction is gay. Women and gays are still the punchline to a lot of jokes and we can’t ignore that that plays a big part in people’s hatred of fanfiction, even if it’s not on purpose. Fanfiction has always been a bastion for people that couldn’t find stories about them in popular fiction. A lot of mainstream main characters are straight guys. A lot of fanfiction main characters are young women or gay men. Now, I admit that I’m oversimplifying this, and especially in recent years as it is becoming safer for people to come out as other genders and queer and as having mental illness or not being neurotypical, you are seeing more of that reflected in the fanfiction community. I don’t want anyone to think that I am purposefully leaving anyone out of this. The fanfiction community has not always been so great at being inclusive of people of color or transgender, it’s getting better, but I’m not going to stand here and pretend we’ve always been perfect. In the last several years I’ve seen a lot more inclusion. As I said, fanfiction has always been a home to the “Other”, as that expands to include more individuals so too does the community. Fanfics provide us with a place to work through issues and present perspectives that we don’t get to see anywhere else, without having to create an entire world from scratch. It’s accessible to everyone. I’ve spent the better part of an afternoon researching and writing this. I hope that I was at least partially coherent and I got you to at least take a look at why you feel the way you feel about fanfiction. I’m not sure if I exactly got across the points I was trying for, there’s a lot more eloquent, well thought out arguments out there from more knowledgeable people. Check out Seanan McGuire, she’s got a lot to say on the subject.

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speckofvoid · 7 months ago

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Yeah! I love the way that so many people can interpret his work in so many different ways. Growing up as a queer autistic kid I saw myself in bilbo and Frodo in a way I never quite saw myself in any other media. In a way the “MC is different than everyone else TM” kind of trope that is prevalent in modern media, especially in the 2000s and 2010s when I was growing up, made it harder to relate to the MC because everyone was always commenting on how DifferentTM they are and how crazy and special they were. Tolkiens works do have an aspect of that with Bilbo and Frodo being part Took and the conversations with gaffer and sandyman. (There is a facinating essay about the use of the word queer In Tolkien that discusses that conversation in length it’s very good) The way they’re DIFFERENT TM is more subtle and their desire to be normal and fit in especially at the beginning of the books was something I really related to.

Im in NO WAY saying that this is THE interpretation or that I’m right in any way but they can almost be seen as coming out stories as well as coming of age, coming into yourself, accepting who you are, loving those who are different, and finding the friends who will support you no matter what are all themes in the book that are prominently featured. The otherness that Frodo and Bilbo feel and then come to accept (especially on Bilbos part) can be read as accepting of their own identities. Both bilbo and frodos adventure fundamentally changes them in a way they can never come back from and both seek the journey west into valinor as beings who are whole. They’ve accepted every part of them, they know they’ll never be the same. That just spoke to me as the little kid I was and I feel that’s why a lot of queer people find a home in this VERY Christian man’s writing. Where ever there is a sense of accepting otherness in yourself there will always be queer people.

I remember sitting by my window looking at the busy road right after I had finished the hobbit for the first time. I hated reading before that because I had never found anything that touched me and kept my interest. I remember thinking that something in me had fundamentally changed, that the hobbit had opened my eyes in some way but I didn’t know how. I know how now. I started to accept the parts of me that were different and strange, I started to think of myself as just having a little Took in me.

There are so many ways to read tolkiens work, and you gave LOVELY examples, whenever I see quotes I’m like WOAH this person means business! And it’s with mini essays like yours that I got into reading essays on queer perspectives on Tolkien. I’ve seen so many readings of it and so many different interpretations and I thought I’d just throw my hat in the ring. A lot of my experience being queer is flavored by my experience of being autistic and I’m sure that can come across in my ramblings. Just gotta add a pinch of tism in there. Most of this is based on the hobbit and my own experience with bilbo and I would LOVE to hear more about it from other people! But yeah I feel that the fundamental sense of otherness that is presented as a good thing and a thing to accept and explore is why so many queer people flock to lord of the rings and the hobbit.

Day seventeen of drawing with office supplies until they stop me

I feel like I should post some of my actually good art. Anyways here is my drawing of today and the continuation of yesterdays drawing as lord of the rings has thoroughly grasped my psyche. I read two chapters of the silmarillion yesterday, almost bled from my eyes but it’s really good! so so dense and the only way I can process it is to read it aloud and uh making up pronunciations is better than not understanding it. Anyways second hobbit lesbian and expect more, who do you think gave her that flower? I usually don’t put hobbits in blue since I think the hobbit described them as often dressing in greens and yellows? I think? Or did I gaslight myself into thinking that? Either way that’s the color palate I often use so I broke free a bit from that. Either way I associate a grey blue with Gandalf since the movies decided that a blue grey is better even though the blue wizards do exist and are god knows where. Can you tell I’m being dragged back into a hyperfixation? Thanks autism! Please talk to me about this.

#lotr #lord of the rings #queer identity #queer in Tolkien #Tolkien #please talk to me #hyperfixation #now I’m reading someone’s thesis on lotr and their experience being queer within that space #it’s very interesting

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