#and shitting on other newer fanworks

[shimmershae]

“Real fan” should be stricken forevermore from fandom lexicon, ISTFG. It’s honestly such a bullshit, divisive attitude to take for anyone that wants to continue to enjoy the fruits of other fans’ imaginations. Any fan that loves a pairing enough to create on their behalf is a so-called “real fan.” Full stop. Maybe try encouraging and welcoming newer fans into the fold so the fictional works for our favorite ship continue to grow and give everyone something that appeals to their particular tastes instead of adopting the role of fandom gatekeeper and I don’t know. Maybe there will be a resurgence of fan engagement and give and take that keeps this ever-dwindling fandom alive and growing as new fans discover our couple and fall in love with them instead of doing your level best to keep it stagnant and small and awfully similar to a high school mean girls’ clique.

[areiphilos]

it’s kind of a shock to me dal/pony’s never been a big ship in the fandom (tho rn i can understand why ppl are not quick to ship charas who frequently refer to e/o as brothers — musical) when they’re both well-defined as indiv charas and share lots of moments together on paper and on screen (many of which worth mulling over) and can fit into the tropes many ppl clearly enjoy in their ships! (for instance making pony love drawing curly or steve…)

there are a couple of things that prevents it from being a big ship:

a lot of people are young, it's their first fandom, and they get scared off by the age gap. when you're older or at least have more fandom experience, it's not as big of a deal. a lot of younger people currently treat it like it's like a ten year old and a twenty-five year old which is just not correct. and a lot of newer people are really puritan brained in a way that is a bit disturbing. there was a little bit of dalpony on ff.net but ff.net is very hard to navigate and almost all of those fics were varying levels of ooc. (and i ate it up anyway)

i want to be nice but there's really no nice way to put it: a lot of jally shippers are extremely possessive over their ship and over dallas. jally is treated as the de facto ship of the fandom and dalpony isn't like tim/dallas or johnny/pony — pony is instantly pegged as direct competition to johnny and it makes a lot of jally people angry. i think what makes them angriest is that it de-centers johnny from dallas' narrative in their eyes and it subverts the line they always cite from the novel that is very jally. they tend to act very entitled over jally being the "default" ship and a lot of them get loud and aggressive over the existence of dalpony in general so that's stopped a lot of people. (there's also the fact that a lot of jally fans are johnny fans more than they are dallas fans so a lot of them perceive dallas as a prize for johnny rather than his own separate human being)

a lot of people in fandom, again bc it's first fandom and there's a young skewage, can't write in character for shit to be blunt. so a lot of ships where it involves a developed character shipped with an undeveloped or totally non-present character appeals to them cause they can just self insert or because they can just write whatever and not be held up to the same standards. you can do almost anything with curly and not have to check back to canon at all about him cause curly doesn't ever appear until that was then, this is now and he's not significant. most of purly is "dalpony with training wheels" for me with how it's written and more than one dalpony person has said to me they used to be into purly and switched or became a multishipper.

the musical and the proliferation of "they're brothers! you can't ship them!" that's going through fandom right now is stifling a lot of shipping. i've seen the musical via a bootleg, it's the most out of character version of canon and it's the most de-queered version of canon to come up. people, as a consequence, are buying hard into "platonic only!" versions of canon to the point that there wasn't even a surge of jally after the musical. if jally can't even make it, dalpony won't. (and they had a nugget of dalpony in there)

some other things is that people tend to move on from this fandom within months of each other or they're here for a long time but stick into one lane or there's lots of breaks between. so there's not a whole lot of consistency in presence, either. i think i'm the only dalpony who's been here the longest with the most influence (i hate dallyboy as a name so i picked dalpony and here we are using it!) and the most fanworks vs. people who've simply drifted away, been bullied out of shipping it (happens often, unfortunately, even though i try to support as many people as i can while maintaining boundaries), or go to other pastures. (though i will say some major shipfics haven't been going on as long or consistently as say fits even for other ships. i think the last major jally fic that was completed was 2019.)

[nientedal]

Disclaimer: I'm speaking as a person who's only been in the Megamind fandom for almost 8 years, so I'm not, like, an OG 2010-2011 fan. HOWEVER... I find it interesting that from what I've been seeing, the people loudly complaining about the sequel content are mostly newer fans. People who've been fans for at least 6+ years are hyping this UP and being optimistic despite the flaws. I'm just like "u haven't been here that long, can we stop shitting all over it before it's even PREMIERED?? GOD"

It really is funny that the vast majority of people who are screaming like Dreamworks shot their dog are, yeah, people whose names I've never heard. Not on Tumblr, not on Twitter, not in AO3 or ffnet comments. Don't get me wrong, I've seen a couple of the old Livejournal crew who are unhappy, but even they haven't been spewing vitriol (that I've seen). For the most part, those of us who are actually active in this fandom are ecstatic! And it's not a length of time thing, either - there's new folks kicking around who are just as excited as the rest of us!

I'd say I hate to say it, but I'd be lying - the people who are the angriest about Megamind Rules are the people who wouldn't care if it existed or not in the first place. They're people who watched Megamind and enjoyed it, but didn't enjoy it enough to be excited for more unless it meets their personal standards. They didn't enjoy it enough to look for fanworks, they didn't enjoy it enough to say anything. I'll buy that they do care...but they don't care enough to try to see any joy in this.

They don't care enough to look anything up before sneering at the Doom Syndicate for being a "retcon" despite the massive amount of material out there supporting both the Doom Syndicate's existence and this plot (big "thank you" to some chucklefuck YouTuber in particular for that one). They don't care enough to stop and consider if there might be budget concerns for an IP Dreamworks was totally radio silence on for more than a decade. They don't care about who's writing it, or who's on the production or voice acting teams. They only care about jumping on the hate train, and I am FURIOUS about it, because I am scared to death that Dreamworks is gonna shitcan this before it even gets released. If that happens, I will be a level of angry that defies description. Because the people who did not fucking care one way or the other will have killed it, and the people who loved this story enough to be excited to see more will have nothing. Again. Newer people in this fandom who are bitching might not have the background to realize this, but if this is killed right out of the gate, THERE WILL BE. NOTHING. ELSE. When I say "radio silence" I mean Dreamworks all but refused to even LOOK at Megamind, for more than a decade.

That's not even getting into how much of a slap in the face it would be to the team who worked so hard on this. If anything could gut me hard enough to kill my desire to write anymore, it'd be that; I can't even imagine how the writers and voice actors and animators might feel in that event. I hope we never find out.

But yeah, uh, tldr: can we not fucking shit on something that literally has not even premiered, seriously. Can these joyless shitbirds PLEASE do something that sparks joy for them instead of shitting on something that sparks joy for others, goddamn. The animation looks fine, y'all are just mean.

[queerofcups]

probably your inbox is not the place to put this, but i was scrolling your blog and saw your post about it. younger fans experience of fandom is so much about surveillance because they are constantly surveilling each other. my current fandom is relatively young (kpop), and in the first month there was a callout post about someone who kudosed a smut fic about an extremely underaged character. i don't even know how they found that kudos, except through very dedicated stalking of [1/2]

oh yeah, my inbox is open for these kinds of discussions, even if I take a while to answer.

yeah, that's not super surprising but is a real fucking bummer, nonny. i do think its a real ourobourus of people doing surveillance, so people act surveilled, so people think its normal to do surveillance and I don't know what the answer is other than to like...develop community with people who will just let you like the shit you like? and/or who are prepared to have conversations about like...fic preferences not being a reflection of real desire and desire often being a complicated, difficult thing. and also like...doing fandom in a healthy way?

and, as much as i understand it, all I see, when I see newer fans talking about like...not leaving kudos on a fic that's more than a year old or being so deeply, deeply scared of being *seen* is an existential threat to fandom as a hobby and as anything like a community (which, lol). like, I know people have very big opinions about writers wanting kudos but like...idk man, kudos feel good! comments feel *really* good. having someone hold up your work and say "I like this thing" is absolutely fuel! and if fanwork creators of all sorts are just kind've...making things and chucking them into a silent void, eventually some of them, maybe most of them, are gonna be like...what's even the point?

Sorry, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but when I get past my initial frustration and confusion with the way that newer fans act, I mostly just feel really sad for y'all. Because it doesn't have to be this way. Don't get me wrong, fandom has always had its share of -isms and bullshit and people being assholes but the throughline of fear of being seen that I see in newer fans feels super disheartening and makes me really sad for y'all.

[elfwreck]

hello, on fanlore dot org is there such a thing as too many stubs or too many related fanworks on a single page? or is there some sort of ideal number or reasons/guidelines for related fanworks? (off topic: there seems to be a lot of "holes" wow.) also, are there any fandoms you all are more interested in than others or any "less important" or "wrong for here" kinds of fandoms? Also is there anyone available to ask about, say, how to split up pages into sections, or split things into new pages etc? hope you are having a nice day!

WE CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY STUBS. We have all of "Stub September" when we encourage people to make more of them! All the stubs is good! Moar stubz plz!

(err. sorry. Is just. More content is better then less content; stubs are better than no pages.)

There are a LOT of holes. Especially in newer fandoms. We need a thousand new editors throwing random content into Fanlore. Gardeners can clean it up. We don't care about grammar, page structure, timelines, any of that - We can fix badly-written pages and even research extra details (dates, URLs, etc.) but we can't make content about topics we don't know.

Fanlore, unlike Wikipedia, does not have a "notability" requirement. Does not have a "receipts/references" requirement. We know that much of fandom is in small communities, is not recorded outside of those communities, and the only references might be "a forum that dissolved six years ago" or even "someone remembers this paper zine but nobody seems to have a copy."

(And while that could be taken as "ahahaha I can just make shit up!" err... no. Fanlore does have a pack of editors and staff that watches the content. We remove things like "obscure actor puts their bio and movie list on Fanlore to increase their searchability.")

We don't have a list of "most wanted fandoms." (And the "wanted pages" list on Fanlore is a wiki-software generated list of "the most empty links" - most of them are individual fan names.) I made a list, at one point, of stuff I think Fanlore is particularly weak in:

Many current megafandoms (too many to list - right now that includes Genshin, Untamed & the rest of MXTX, BNHA, FNF, FNAF and video game fandoms in general, etc.), modern zines (the ones planned & sold entirely online), all things TitkTok, notable Discord servers (although, again, no notability requirement - if you want to make a page for a fandom Discord with 13 people in it, THAT IS FINE), TTRPG fandoms, all things podcasty...

Sorting out the right approach can be tricky. We should cover sports fandoms, but we're not covering who-won-what; we're covering the fanfic/art/etc interest in sports fandoms.

For "how to split pages into sections" - the time-honored approach to wiki editing is "find another page with the structure you want, copy its code, remove its text and replace with yours." We're working on page outlines that will have the structure built-in, but those will be optional. (Some are linked here: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Help:Starting_a_new_page#First.2C_a_template)

For things like splitting to new pages - that's going to be a page-specific question. Fortunately, we have a place to discuss these things: The Fanlore Discord https://discord.gg/fA663KpC

(link will be good for a week; people can ask for a new one when it dies.) (It's not secret; just trying to avoid bot swarms that find old links.)

For "related fanworks" - I personally like lists of 3-8 or so, ideally with a brief description of why each of them is notable. "This was one of the first with this pairing to have [trope]" or "this is a fan-favorite shows up on many rec lists" or "one of the few from Character B's point of view" or "this is by the most prolific writer in the fandom" or whatever. But there's no specific limit or requirements.

If you want to note 20 specific fanworks for a fandom... rather than cluttering the fandom page, each of them can have its own page. Here's the (intimidating) link for Star Trek TOS fanfic: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:Star_Trek_TOS_Fanfiction And here's the handful for IT fandom: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Category:IT_Fanfiction. Both of these are fine. (So the main page might have "example fanworks" and also a link to the fanfic/fanart category page(s).)

It's um. Complicated. Check out the Discord where you can ask questions and get more detailed feedback?

[genshinconfessions]

It disgusts me how easily some people in this fandom jump to telling others to harm themselves.

A Genshin artist I follow on Twitter, who IMO makes extremely unproblematic work, has left Tumblr because of the gross messages she is receiving. Because "I don't like this" translates to "I must attack the villain!!" for some people.

At this point, you could fill a book with all the stories of creators getting mistreated by members of the community. Kind of messed up.

:/// we totally agree with you. this is smth we've actually talked about in our down time lol how genshin is Literally just some pixels on a screen and it's really not that serious. like yeah, it takes inspiration from real life conflicts and places and things that exist, but such is art! art comes from life! that doesn't mean such art accurately represents said life, and it certainly doesn't mean that anyone should attack anyone else over a difference in opinion regarding the game.

and regarding fanworks -- god this is such a young fandom. i keep saying this but genshin is SUCH a young and new fandom, with young and new members. fans attacking fanart/fanfic is smth almost exclusively seen in younger, newer fandoms with younger, newer fans, and it's because--like you said--they don't know how to separate 'i personally don't like this thing' from 'this is a bad thing that should not exist'.

i see so much of this in the genshin fandom, even when i'm not actively trying to engage with it: if it's 'problematic' to like tartaglia (because he tried to drown a city and is part of a literal mafia), how no one should be liking dottore and if you do you're a shitty person (because he performed human experimentation and other fucked up things), and i shit you not, that liking ayato is a red flag (because he was the mastermind behind many inazuma plots but never showed his face so he could seem innocent).

like, guys... it's a game. fiction is not the same as real life. you can enjoy a fucky wucky little character and still realize that they're a bad person in the story. you can enjoy a fucked up little gremlin and not agree with their actions and thoughts. you can enjoy a piece of media without subjecting yourself to the purity mindset. i hate to say it but some ppl on the internet really take it too far with the purist thing; yeah it's good to know that a certain character's actions would not be acceptable irl, but that doesn't mean you can't like how they're written, or their personality, or even their appearance -- because they're fictional. nothing they do in the story will affect real life.

now, if you're going to emulate them irl, maybe don't do that...

katheryne from liyue

[saltslimes]

Re: that last post, I have for a really long time talked about the phenomenon of “fic begets fic” but it is really a thing. Having been on kind of the ground floor of newer fandoms, or having been in fandoms that had an explosion of specific types of works (lookin at u, FFXV) there was absolutely a movement of fics imitating or inspired by other fanworks. And I have seen this in countless other fandoms.

If you create something passionately, be it meta, fic, art, and so on, there is a chance people will be inspired by it. Fandom is at its core, a conversation. When I was still active in FFXV people would chat with me, I’d talk to other creators. We inspired each others work. A lot of people would more or less pitch me fic ideas (just through ordinary chatting/fun fandom convos) and sometimes I ended up writing those fics. It was a win-win scenario. But it happened because we were all enjoying fanworks together. People who were there to shit on other fanworks, who were mad about the themes/styles we were working in... they sucked to be around. They contributed nothing.

You can whine that fandom doesn’t suit your preferences, or you can put something out into the world. And even if it doesn’t take off, you will be a richer person for having tried making something yourself. You have the opportunity to start the conversation you want to have, and there is a very real chance people will respond! They will engage. But you are responsible for making your own fan-space that’s right for you. You cannot demand other people’s spaces change to your preference.

[nostalgia-tblr]

I agree but also I don't? Let me think with my hands here for a bit...

There have always been short-lived fandoms and they tended to be the ones with a limited amount of, well, "content" (by which I mean canon content). Movie fandoms would usually be over and forgotten within a few months - I know this because as A Poor I would generally first see a film when the DVD was cheap enough in the supermarket and as a general rule by the time I saw a film its fandom would be long-dead.

The exception being a franchise like PotC, LotR or Marvel (& etc) where there are multiple films coming out at intervals that revive and feed the fandom with new stuff.

So everyone in the notes saying "Doctor Who" or "Star Trek" or even "Harry Potter" are still active because they're old is naming something with a large amount of canon content (massive, really, in the first two cases - you might never run out of new stuff to watch) and we can't really compare those to a Netflix drop of 6 to 8 episodes of something. Modern TV/streaming seasons are shorter which means we have less to work with when making fanworks.

Gifs... Look, I know gifmakers work hard but at the end of the day they're all giffing the exact same scenes with a faithfullness that fic and fanart don't require. Yeah all the popular (shippy, v often) scenes will be giffed within a few days, and unless the gifset is doing something fancy and artistic with it there's only gonna be so much demand for "the exact same shots as the gifset I reblogged 30 seconds ago except the colouring's a bit different maybe." Fanfic reuses tropes and so on, but two fics about such-and-such scene will never be as similar as two gifsets of that scene, purely because of how much the artist/author is being called upon to invent and add themselves.

In my experience tumblr is not a great platform for fanfic, even if you're just linking to it, because tumblr prefers visual works (which is valid!) and the reblogging and comment functions have never been ideal for discussion anyway. And AO3 is massive and you don't have sign in to drop a comment but in, say, the LiveJournal days you'd be commenting on a fic by someone you followed (most likely) so you knew them a bit and were more likely to feel comfortable talking to them, and there was sometimes a reciprocal transaction at work when they commented on your fic in turn. I may love someone on AO3 but their fanfic is literally the only contact I have with them. I don't know who they are, I have far less personal connection there.

If you go far enough back in fandom (even just to the 2000s) there was nothing we could offer each other but words and that made words our currency and so we wrote a lot of them.

Even fannish meta (now "Discourse" for some reason) isn't ideally-suited to tumblr as compared to LJ - no threaded conversations, no ability to lock to a limited audience, and oh my god the way some tumblr themes will fuck up a post to unreadable within even three or four reblogs with additions.

Add to that we're not "supposed to" add to the OP (like this!) but to use the tags to add our thoughts and as the complaints about "prev tags!!" remind us the tags are lost on a reblog unless you screenshot or copy/paste to add them onto a post yourself. So an utterly amazing insight can be lost so easily in the tags of a post and we're scared of getting told off if we splurge our thoughts in a format that can be preserved and passed along without effort from the next person along.

The ability to time-travel (archiving) is also a bit shit on newer sites, and the real-time focus makes commenting on older posts harder and scarier or even in some cases impossible.

LJ comments showed up in your email and LBR who didn't at least once get into a fannish fight there one night and wake up the next morning to replies on a topic you no longer gave a shit about? But if you *wanted* to keep up a discussion for a 50-comment thread then you could. And anyone joining in later would get neatly threaded within it.

I didn't unfollow on LJ because fannish posts were interspersed with more personal ones (helped by the friends-lock option where you could talk without everyone on the internet overhearing - imagine that!) so when they left My Current Fandom I might keep them cos I felt like I knew them, I'd read their lives and they were funny or whatever. Like there's a "moot" I have on DreamWidth that I don't think we've been in the same fandom together since about 2006... but I also followed along while they struggled with IVF and started a family and so by 2008 she was someone I felt pretty close to as internet relationships go. We had the chance to share our lives and often to have more in common with someone then Current Fandom. Tumblr is different because when I finally grow bored of gifsets of X And Y Do Something Cute In One Of The 12 Episodes Of My Current Show that's kind of the only thing I was sharing with that fandom's tumblr moots and so when I leave a fandom there might be no point still following someone for that sort of thing. And they feel the same way about me, which is fine! We don't have to marry each other to share a fandom for a while!

Short-form content generally doesn't appeal to me and can allow for limited creation or discussion (Tumblr is for gifs, Twitter is not much use for anything but Hot Takes, TikTok is for... I dunno I found it literally unusable so clearly that's not one for me) but I think the loss of long-form text content hosting is more the issue than the latest media/canons themselves. SPN gets a mention in the OP and aren't there about 15 seasons of that? So again it's about the amount of canon content we have to work with as fannish creators. We can only transform a work so many times before we run out of things to say about it and need to find a new one.

Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.

We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.

The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.

Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.

Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.

There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.

Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.

We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.

[talenlee]

February Wrapup, 2023!

February Wrapup, 2023!

Smooch month draws to a close, and with it, I understand, the ending of Winter in America. That’s got to be rough, having a smoochy romantic-vibes event when you can’t go outside because the icicles are forming on the walruses, or whatever happens in places that are cold. My whole life, I’ve only ever seen Valentines day as a thing that happens when the sun is raging high and the beautiful botanical gardens are second only to Places with Air Conditioning to go do something special with someone you care about.

Where was I? oh yes, a roundup of articles I wrote this month and reasons you, you, you might want to check them out!

Let’s check out first of all, what I wrote this month about games in the Game Pile:

Love Letter, a small card game with a powerful, flexible engine, Love Letter is a game with a lot to recommend it and a lot of variations. I like it a lot and I like how it has permutations and the way it can present flavour.

The Romance Options of Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition, I promised myself a long time ago, I’d follow up on an older article with all the newer characters from the enhanced edition. This is a twenty-ish minute video where I talk smack about characters in a twenty year old D&D game, but I also still feel really invested in it.

We Need To Talk, which I think was an interesting game more than I thought it was engaging. Check it out to learn about a game with an interesting language model.

Eyes On The Prize, a two-to-four player TTRPG about fake marriages in courting mayhem. It’s so good, and

And this month’s posting in the Story Pile:

There She Is!!, an early 00s web-animation that people seemed surprised to learn had multiple parts, or more parts than they knew, and then seemed even more surprised to learn was about uhhhh racism. And funnily enough, because it’s about racism, it gets into some Real Shit even as it’s a set of beautiful animations of poppy, fun, sweet Korean music.

Shikimori’s not Just A Cutie, an anime about nothing featuring nobody, that I nonetheless watched twelve episodes of and want to recommend to anyone who wants create even mildly better fanworks.

My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom!, an anime I really liked about a beautifully stupid stupid beauty and her collection of hotties. This one takes a dip in quality later on, but I still think that the article is good at conveying the things about it I liked.

Eat, Play Love, because I think it’s a good tradition that Fox and I should watch a Hallmark movie together every year because if we find ourselves starting to go ‘oh this is actually quite good’ we know we need to see a doctor about mood altering medication.

I also wrote about some Dungeons & Dragons stuff this month. I talked about the way you can use Skill Challenges and flashback mechanisms to make what’s normally a very brief, boring check into a big character moment for the whole group when discussing Group Flirts. I examined the Leadership feat, which turned into ‘I just want a boyfriend‘ a lot of the time. While trying to build out Cobrin’Seil so it’s not just four basic spaces and vibes, I wrote up the Nation of Visente — an art deco magepunk modernist society that keeps trying to buy its way out of the consequences of endless expansion (and is that going to work?).

As for my own relationship to smoochy topics, I did some writing about what it’s like to learn to date in a fundamentalist church, and the ways that messes everything up for everyone. I talk about how shipping can be a great way to explain to people the kind of person you are, what you value, and why you value it. There was room to drag other media for how it handled romance, though, with an article on Homestuck’s unnecessarily complicated explanatory terminology and a full article dunking on Keitaro Urashima, the embarrassing successor to Tenchi.

I looked at a couple of different game design ideas, too! First, I examined a concept of taking an idea for a visual novel, then seeing how I’d need to change the game design to accommodate a variety of mechanical needs. Then, later on, I considered how two different games happen to have names that can inform a smoochy game, when I looked at The Mind & The Heart, and how those two concepts might work for a particular kind of game fiction.

This month’s shirt design is fun because of the other things I can do with the basic template. Other shapes, other silhouettes, other fonts, a lot of different ways to use this basic genre, ideally with things I understand better, going forward. If you want this shirt design, you can get it in multicolour, white text, and red text versions.

I wasn’t nearly as pressurised as I was during January but I’d be lying if I said February wasn’t a rough one. While I wasn’t dealing with a lot, people around me were often grappling with serious problems, and that meant that I spent a lot of time doing scaffolding work. I’m not in a position to do everything everyone needs, unfortunately. It’s a rough one, holding on with both hands as best I can to everyone. It’s been a month of some challenging days, and a few problems that just keep on coming back into my life.

I haven’t bought anything? I know that may sound odd, but when it comes to things like new games or toys or anything like that I haven’t bought anything new. I’ve been trying to make sure I eat healthier if I can, which means that I’ve been eating a lot more beans from a tin and veggies given a bit of swift heating.

I at the start of the year wrote down ‘get more early nights.’ That’s a bold proclamation to have in the summer, the time of year when I sleep the worst.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Diary

[t00thpasteface]

favourite tf2 headcanons? yours or other peoples?

ohoho man. grab a seat anon, and let me tell you a really long and stupid story about a headcanon i had many moons ago...

i got into tf2 over the summer of 2011, when i was 14. somewhere at the end of the 2010-2011 school year, i went to a function that the local high school held to acclimate next year's incoming freshmen. while i was there i bumped into a friend from elementary school who i'd lost contact with, we traded Skypes (where my skypers at???), and he got me into this awesome game called Team Fortress 2, because, hey, it just went free to play!

(here's my proof i joined literally one week after it went f2p)

here's what you need to know about 14 year old Shebbz: i was extremely autistic. i had just found out about tumblr after spending my formative years on deviantart. i still did not process that i was a comphet lesbian. and i LOOOOOOVED scout! i loved him so much. scout was everything to me. he was ME and also he was my BOYFRIEND and i was drawing him on EVERY surface i could use a pencil on. all i played was scout. i was not good at it but that didn't stop me. i was textbook 14-year-old crazy and scout was the chosen vessel for it. also i drew like this:

ok. so. i'm insane. i love scout. thunder mountain is my favorite map because it's the prettiest and that's the only metric i judge anything by. and every day i talk tf2 with my friends at lunch, which is about three to five obnoxious 14 y/o boys. and i fucking wish i still had the paper or at least a scan of it, but one day i had the BRILLIANT idea for a headcanon for scout.

okay so get this, i tell my friends at lunch as i'm unzipping my backpack to grab my notebook. scout is so funny and cool right? nods of agreement. he's obviously way too cool for the other mercs to handle. he's hip and with-it. well, check out this idea i just had, i think it's got a lot of potential. i slide a piece of paper over the table to my very dear friend who got me into tf2.

it's two panels. the first has scout holding up his own drawing of the thunder mountain skybox scenery, storm clouds and all, and he's saying, "look guys, i drew thunder mountain!" in the second panel, all you see is bullet holes through the paper and, presumably, into his torso meat behind it. "ow," he says. he's crying a little.

now i thought i was really onto something here. i was excited to get talking and explore more headcanons branching off of this one.

but my friend shut that shit down IMMEDIATELY. lo, my obsession with scout has turned into bastardization! i have lost touch with the canon! at this point i have woobified scout into something completely divorced from the soul of the character! and my greatest crime-- baseless projection! put that bit from jurassic park about the scientists here. clearly, he surmised, i had been poisoned by all those saucy yaoi askblogs i'd been following at the time. (hey, leave askheavy out of this!)

i was ashamed. embarrassed. he read me like an open book. i felt like the scout in the drawing. i put the drawing up, did away with my frivolous little headcanon, and resolved to be more of a stickler for canon-accuracy in my fanworks. hell, i nearly ended up becoming something of a fandom police myself. but i always felt a little slighted. yes i was projecting, but because of that, it was so personal! so what if it was totally baseless? it meant something to me!!

anyway, that was late 2011. seasons came and changed the time... i later had a falling-out with that friend (for totally unrelated reasons) and switched high schools to a newer fancier one. i got diagnosed with bipolar and i was trying so, so, SO hard just to get out of bed and scrape through my classes with C's and D's.

2014. june. i'm 17 and i'm borderline comatose now that it's summer break and i have no reason to get out of bed in the morning. what little creative energy i have is directed towards my askblogs with incredibly inconsistent and sporadic results. and i really don't play tf2 much at this point. no energy for it.

but then... a light in the shadows. a triumphant fanfare. at long last, there's another tf2 animatic, and it has hand-delivered unto me the sweetest validation, the coldest dish of revenge, the delicious ice cream sundae of justice:

scout has drawn a picture of spy getting hit by a car.

[kidical]

In your one post, since you mentioned being in the fandom during its early days, do you have any fav stories or fanworks from over the years or even any of the more recent ones? Lately, ive been seeing these little video game projects on youtube based on the pastas, some i remember being called funkin drowned and mic of time. Theres also this other thing on youtube ive seen going around called the macabre experiment, like an analog horror series about some pastas, with its own lore about em. Kinda cool to see the fandom still making projects.

definitely !!!!!! i was a huge fan of candle cove and still am, which isnt an unheard of creepypasta but its kind of its own like. sub-community that used to be a lot more popular back in the day.

there are also some i remember being more prevalent at the time that i didnt necessarily like myself but have been kind of forgotten, such as characters like the thing that wears mommys skin, suicide sadie, mr welldone, nathan the nobody, hobo heart, username666, seedeater, b.o.b (i think hes become more of an scp type thing nowadays similar to the rake), mr widemouth, zero, lazari, tails doll, kagekao, scarecrow etc etc etc. theres more lost episode creepypastas than i can even begin to talk about, and some from entirely fake series trying to mimic candlecoves success with an edgy bite (happy appy..... holy shit i hate happy appy.....)

there are newer creepypastas too that werent there when i first moved on to different interests that i was surprised to see when i came back, characters like kate the chaser, nina the killer, puppeteer + jason the toymaker + whatever that jester guys name is (they were all KIND OF getting popular by the time i left but they didnt have the same reputation they do now), the expressionless and whoever else i dont really know. i definitely love nina the killer a lot i think the concept of a fangirl gone nutzoid is really interesting to explore and i think i mostly started liking her out of spite just because of the amount of hate i saw for her for literally no reason.

this isnt to say all of the ones i mentioned in the first bit are Forgotten and Never heard of a lot of people still draw them but theyre much much harder to come by than fanart of say. jeff or masky or sally.

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

to be clear, this is about

the fucking Frog Thor deleted scene, which is not canon

the various implications about main-timeline Thor and Loki in the Party Thor episode of What If, which the head writer came right out and stated in interviews, demonstrating a total lack of understanding of the first Thor film in general

trends in fandom attitudes about Thor and Loki’s relationship and Loki's characterization since probably Ragnarok but intensifying with the introduction to the fandom of new fans of the show, which have explicitly included categorizing the above characterization as fanon when it is…literally canon, not because it’s in a media tie-in but because this children’s book is only stating something that was already very clear onscreen to anyone not watching with weird preconceived notions based on biases, retcons, or misconceptions

attempted retcons in general, whether they’re deliberate or just the result of a lack of attention to continuity/detail/care

to be equally clear, this is not about

hating Ragnarok in general (I don't even know that this is really a thing anymore, now that the show exists to be hated instead)

hating the Loki show in general

hating newer fans in general because I'm extremely not about that, I'm not even making a value judgment between interpretations of Loki, I'm just saying that every single person who's acted like only the show and maybe Ragnarok have shown his true personality and everyone who liked an earlier characterization gleaned from the preceding three entire movies was literally making that characterization up from whole cloth owes a whole lot of people an apology

but also, I continue to think that an awful lot of other people approached Ragnarok somewhat and the show definitely with a "look at this bitch eating crackers" attitude that mostly made themselves and everyone else miserable

and frankly I also think everyone who's insisted that only OG Loki is real Loki and show!Loki is wildly OOC because he was an idiot in season 1 or whatever should at least apologize to every single fan who looked at show!Loki and went "holy shit this boy has ADHD like me" because 1) same and 2) that explains a lot of the seemingly OOC behavior

and I also continue to practice and encourage a "yes, and" approach (within reason) where Loki canon is concerned, which is to say, the earlier stuff is true, and the newer stuff (that actually happened onscreen, in the final cut) is also true, and retcons are bullshit for lazy cowards, and part of the point of fanwork is reconciling all of that in a way that makes sense when canon doesn't quite get there by itself, and that's okay

actually, fuck everybody who’s been trying to retcon these extremely basic pieces of characterization WHILE TELLING THOSE OF US WHO OBJECTED THAT WE MADE IT UP for the past ~7 years

(source: a super basic children’s book released with the first Thor film)

[armoredsuperheavy]

A Thousand Cakes and Yours Among Them

I’m flattered by recent attention on Tumblr for my bookbinding posts, and I’m glad the practice of binding fic has resonated with folks!

I periodically get questions about being able to buy these books. I thought I’d address that publicly.

The Gift Economy of Fandom

The vast majority of my bookbinding projects (over 90 and counting so far) have been strictly volunteer - that is, I’ve read the fic, or been recommended it by a trusted friend, and chosen to bind it, based on my own arbitrary evaluations.

Binding means two copies. One goes to the author, as a gift. The other I keep in a slowly growing archive. They are not for sale at any price. Nobody is paid for their labor, and I am not running a business. I am spending out of my own pocket for every piece of paper, every tool, all shipping costs. I accept small tips from authors if they wish, but they are under no pressure to send me money, and a tip doesn’t come remotely close to the value of my labor hours. But why should they pay me? They wrote the entire goddamn book for free.

I approach fandom in the old-school way, as a community-focused practice and a “gift economy” - something a lot of newer participants of fan culture are drifting away from as the incentive to monetize fan works grows. The reasons for it are understandable. But I think this shift in fundamental approach is going to cost us a lot, as a subculture and as a community, in the long run. 

Do we really just wanna be customers/consumers and “content producers” in fandom? Fuck that, I want an actual community. I’m not a content producer. I’m a person making connections to other people and slowly growing a modern day online queer found family.

Because I seek community in fandom, and see fanwork as contributions to the “potluck”, I see this as just bringing my dish to the party here. I brought a cake - and it seems popular. If anyone else brought another cake, we’d have MORE of it and nobody would complain. Two cakes, and so forth.

What I’m getting at is, these are not PRODUCTS for you to BUY. These are artifacts of a community and a demonstration of community activism.  In order to GET one, you must get involved. You must either write a brilliant longform fic that I’m into,OR you can become a Guerrilla publisher in your own right!

Commissions

I’m uncomfortable with taking commissions and have only done it I think three times. Every time, I had to be convinced to do it. And I spent every penny of it on supplies and shipping and whatnot.

There are two main reasons I’m not open for commissions:

1 It immediately shifts the calculus of whose work gets printed. People with spending money get to see their chosen work in print. People without, not so much.

2. I’m less able to self-direct which work gets printed. I like the power to choose what to bind. I say what gets printed at my house. No outside money is steering that decision. The decision is not driven by money whatsoever. 

Without the money, I don’t have to give a fuck about the optics of which book I chose. I don’t have to worry about follower count. I print a lot of work that got “canceled”, authors beset by purity police for being “problematic”, etc. If I were trying to run a profitable business, these works are the last ones I’d choose to print. And that’s exactly why I’m printing them here.

OK but I want a Book, Sell Me One

Well, don’t wave money in my face. I’m sorry, that’s not why I’m here. See above.

If you’d like to actually take up bookbinding similar to what I am doing, I can provide you with information to get started. There are no secrets about my process, just trial and error and a shit ton of work. Just drop me a line. 

I realize that not everybody has the resource of time, money, or patience to figure out how to make books like mine from scratch. But that doesn’t mean you’re completely out of options.

Preservation of fic doesn’t have to look like a completely bespoke handmade book with sewn signatures and hand marbled papers.

It also doesn’t have to be a professional-grade 200 page glossy hardcover kickstarted mega-project with 100 contributors.

I’d really like to see the practice of print zines come back. Print your fic in a booklet and sew it up with a piece of thread. Mail it to your fandom friends. Go guerrilla publisher yourself. And if you didn’t write it, don’t forget to give a copy to the author: it’s the only ethical way to make use of their work.

I don’t want to be the only bookbinder to ever touch a fanfic. I want lots of people binding. Two cakes - nay, a thousand cakes, and the feast of cake was legendary and not soon forgotten, and slices of the cake were passed down to our children and grandchildren, and the cake survives even after we are gone. Let’s get baking.

- May 2020.

[codes-and-stuffs]

okay so i feel like i have to explain myself to any followers i may have who are expecting like lore analysis and all that because i have a wildddddddddd way of consuming content in this fandom

*clears throat*

when i first entered this fandom, there was a vast variety of different types of content that were all being created at once, and it was extremely difficult to cover all of them at once. at the time i properly got invested, i still had plenty of schoolwork and revision to do and there was uncertainty as to blah blah you get it i was only able to pick certain streams. now, there were two main choices here:

1) watch the streams that were counted as 'lore streams', which mostly were decided by how important the fandom found them as the term had not been coined yet, or

2) watch the streams i found particularly interesting, fun, or good for background noise

i picked 2.

don't get me wrong, i was invested in the story! but at the time, the general interpretation from my area of the fandom was that you watched all the streams (like, all of them) or you picked a streamer and analysed from their pov. this was pretty easy to do - i stuck with fundy and tubbo, the former of whom i watched youtube videos for while entering the fandom and the latter of whom played my personal favourite character.

as time went on, i opened myself up to other streams - i loved tftsmp, watched a few tommy streams, really liked niki's videos, and so on - and also to fan-produced content. this is standard procedure for me; i will usually turn to fanworks after consuming all content for some old media. with mcyt, it felt even stranger, what with dual wielding new content AND fan content. really, really wild shit here, okay? especially for me, joiner of dead fucking fandoms.

as time went on, new content started to... decrease. i got a lot more used to variety content and enjoying the streamers' general content rather than just the dream smp narrative. we've all seen the droughts (or most of us have, i believe) and it was during those times that a lot of newer fans joined. a small split in the fandom began to show: the ones who were here for the fandom, and the ones who were here for the story.

i think i was, at this point, here for the fandom. i still enjoyed fanworks, loved talking to people about the characters and plot, liked making friends and playing minecraft with them and even venturing into other mcyts out there (we've all had our last life phase (if you haven't, i recommend it)). the story is still something i keep up with, but... i won't watch all the important streams, i guess?

the point of tracing my entire involvement was to come back to this: i'm used to watching streams out of choice, so i can't really find myself watching lore streams unless i really really want to, you know? i'll read a recap, but that's it! however i will still post pretending i know everything that's going on, classic dsmp analyst style ;)

ramble over!

tl;dr i don't watch lore streams much bc i am used to sticking to only a few povs, but i will probably still be up to date about them!

[likeabxrdinflight]

Wait, what? How in the world can someone think zu.tara is so terribly racist but zu.kka isn't? That's not how racism works???

It’s a whole lot of nonsense that seems mostly rooted in misogyny, but it’s not cool to say you just don’t like katara, so they make up a lot of nonsense...the “homophobic katara” headcanon, which I’m pretty sure NEVER EXISTED before the netflix revival, also came from the newbie zuk.ka fandom...

I’ve seen shit like “zutara doesn’t work because katara was MORE traumatized by the fire nation than sokka and erasing that is racist,” which sounds a lot like people are trying to quantify trauma which................maybe don’t. and then there’s always “a lot of fire lady katara tropes are racist and so zutara is bad” but then somehow zuk.ka is exempt from that because sokka is a guy...? 

make it make sense people. like it’s fine to just admit you want to ship the two hot boys together, I’m not gonna shame you for that, but you do not need to position your ship as morally superior to others to make it valid. especially to zutara. 

And to be clear I am not saying that zutara shippers can’t be racist, or that there aren’t some racist tropes that zutara fans have leaned on, especially in the older fanworks. there’s a lot of zutara content out there that’s aged pretty badly over the last ten to fifteen years, and there’s a lot of fire lady katara stuff that’s...not great. but you don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water- there’s a reason this ship has been so popular over the years. the characters have chemistry. like they just do.

but the new wave of discourse just really baffles me because it’s not at all what I was expecting. I thought the kataang v zutara ship wars would start up again and was dreading that, but instead it’s turned into shipping conflicts based on the perceived morality of the ship which...maybe I should have expected that given recent fandom trends. but I was kind of hoping that would stay away from the atla fandom. 

oh well. I’ve always had a fondness for zutara and even if it’s not my main ship anymore, that’s not going to change now. and it’s not that I think zu.kka itself is a bad ship, or that there aren’t lovely people who like it, I’m sure there are...but it’s not a small number of newer zu.kka fans who are part of the fandom purity brigade, and they’ve brought that culture from their other fandoms into the atla tags. I wish they hadn’t. 

[gachagon]

Tbh I think this is largely due to just how mainstream and popular fandom as a whole has become. Before, "fandom" was this thing that only nerdy people talked about online in shame and in secret because "normal" people wouldn't get obsessing over a piece of media like this.

But over the past decade or so, we've seen whole fanfictions be published into books, and those books get made into theatrical releases, and those theatrical releases became netflix movies that anyone could watch anywhere at any time.

Greedy corporations have gotten their paws on this fandom thing ages ago, and they realized they could make a shit ton of money from it.

And apps like Wattpad have been pushing this idea that your fanfiction can be the next "After" for years now, and get its own netflix movie if it just gets popular enough. So now, while people are still very much making these fanworks out of love and passion, the public perception of them have changed drastically. What was once something seen only as a niche hobby, has become an avenue for people to make a quick buck if they're "popular" enough. This is also why I think the way newer fandom treats one another, and older fandom treats one another is so different now.

Nowadays younger fans of media won't even really leave long winded comments talking about the work, they'll just write really short blurbs or keysmashes. And while I do appreciate comments like that from my younger readers, I've just grown used to people leaving long comments or at least a paragraph talking about the work. Social media has hammered in this idea that if millions of people aren't simultaneously reacting to your post or work, that it must not be good enough. And so these kids go to other platforms like Tumblr and A03 and they expect these sites to just function the same way, because literally EVERY social media site nowadays focuses purely on engagement.

People who don't write fics or make fanart just consume it now, and don't see that there are actual people behind this stuff, because to them everyone just cares about "reach". Who cares if an artist or writer gets credit for something if they have such and such amount of followers? Now if you get popular online, people expect you to try and make it into some kind of job instead of just casually accepting the fame, because the internet has just changed now. We no longer see people with lots of followers as just "people with lots of followers", but "content creators" or "influencers", you know?

And if someone does get popular, they're put under this microscope and people will talk about them like they have a civil duty to be a perfect little angel who does no wrong. On tiktok this is just made worse by the fact that artists and writers will get chased off the platform if they do anything even one person dislikes. All it takes is one person to go "Idk guys I think they're kinda strange..." and then that fame goes out the window, and now all anyone wants to talk about is how they don't like this artist or writer, and how they're just 'waiting' for something to happen. And if something does happen with this creator, then ppl will go "see I knew the whole time they were weird lol" because newer fandom has also begun to heavily police what kinds of fiction people can engage in (but I'm not really getting into that now)

what with all this talk of fanfic and ai and feeding other people's work without permission into ai programmes to 'finish' a fanfic or whatever... it's just showing how people see fic as 'content'? a fanfic as something mass-produced and official, something to consume at a distance and then talk about in a vacuum? something to use for your own purposes and something over which you have a claim?

fanfic is written by fans like you. written out of love and passion and a lot of effort and hard work, so that the author can share their enthusiasm for the characters and stories with other fans. like you. they aren't these untouchable, faceless people above you – they're your peers. gifsets, fanart, fanfic – they're all made by your peers. mutuals. friends.

if you want to know more about the fic, talk to the author! so many fic writers leave their socials in the end notes of their fics – talk to them! they're not going to be affronted or judgemental. chances are, they're going to be over the moon that you like their work and want to engage and discuss the characters and the themes etc. they made you happy with their fic, and you would be making them so happy in return! (and what does a happy writer do? write more!)

as a fic writer, I made one of my closest tumblr friends because she read my fic and left a really nice comment, and then we got talking and brainstorming loads of headcanons and fic ideas together! fic writers want to talk! if you enjoy someone's presence and contributions in a fandom, let them know!

and for the love of all that is good, don't feed someone's hard work into an ai programme!!! whether you post it (which is just horrible tbh) is beside the point – you're facilitating the plagiarism of their fic!