#and while I know that RPF (in most cases) has a right to exist and shouldn’t be censored

[kiwisandpearls]

ok im just curious about it so like if any proshippers can answer this question that’d be great

[evilwickedme]

Losing my mind at the kids reading Bruce/Batman fic

No cause I actually think about this stuff all the time. The Waynes are celebrities!!! Depending on your preference they could be international celebrities or local celebrities, but Bruce and Tim have both been the CEO of an international conglomerate worth billions, Bruce at the very least has to have been on the cover of TIME magazine and had a billion interviews about how-to-be-successful even though, you know, he's the definition of a nepo baby. So between the Waynes and the Batman being two of the most important cultural exports from Gotham, and the fact that WE openly funds Batman, there's gotta be some really good stuff in the celebrity and superhero RPF fandoms, right? It's just sort of obvious that people will start shipping them

So. Who brings it to the Batfam's attention? There are several possible avenues. I personally think it makes the most sense for Tim or Steph to have found it. They're both around 17-19, they went to school and had friends, so yeah, they're on social media. Tim has to have an online presence that's semi professional and so has a secret second account on all websites and apps, but Steph goes full fucking feral on main. I think Tim gets @ - ed a lot by weirdos, including people tagging him in their Tim Drake/YN fanfiction (sidenote do not do this in real life. Please don't do this in real life), but for that reason it might actually be that his blacklist is a mile long. Like he simply cannot see the word fanfiction on his Twitter feed. So Steph is the one that finds the one million BruBats fanfiction. She sees it mentioned and hunts it down. And then she sends it in the batkids GC and shit EXPLODES

Dick is very much like, a person with better things to do than be a weird gremlin online and he's never actually seen a fanfic before. He's heard of it because he gets asked weird things sometimes, but this is effectively his introduction to the world of fic and he's horrified. He steals Damian's phone so he won't see it which just makes Damian all the more curious and determined to read it. It gets physical

Steph and Tim take turns reading it out loud to Cass (Steph does Batman's voice, Tim voices Bruce) who finds the whole thing a little baffling. Neither Brucie nor Batman are particularly similar to her adoptive father and the concept of fic is a little out of her wheelhouse, although Steph does a very good job explaining the basic terms and reasons for its existence to her

Babs knew all along. This wasn't new to her. She's read worse things while doing research for cases

Duke reads the whole thing in one sitting (ish, it's really long). It's actually really good and he leaves some really thoughtful comments on the characterization and slow burn. The author doesn't reply but does cherish those comments forever

Jason wrote it Jason doesn't interact with the GC but babs literally hacked his phone to prevent him from leaving it so he opens it once a week to mark it as read and leave and he happens to open it in the middle of this shit going down and decides to check it out. He accidentally clicks on the relationship tag however and sees things you can't unsee. He literally runs over his phone and vows to go off the grid from now on

[getvalentined]

I didn't mean for this to get so long, so fair warning on that, and I know it's not meant to be super serious, but I gotta chime in on the claims of how influential destiel is to fandom and fan culture as a whole, because it's just so overstated.

I knew destiel wasn't patient zero for omegaverse! (I didn't remember that it was RPF. Bonkers.) I do think that destiel probably popularized the concept, but it's wild to see how people saying things like "destiel is as influential as Kirk/Spock! Know your roots!" while others claim the rights to something that 1. wasn't even related to the ship in the first place, and 2. features a lot of tropes that are clearly and heavily inspired by Amok Time/Pon Farr and are therefore the result of the very ship they're claiming destiel matches in influence.

For the record, I'm not being hyperbolic about that, it's actually been said:

If we're talking about overall franchise influence, Gundam characters have been featured on postage stamps in Japan, as has Rose of Versailles, a key inspiration for Revolutionary Girl Utena, which in turn was a major inspiration for G-Witch. Star Trek has also been featured on postage stamps in multiple countries, with a lot of them featuring Kirk and Spock specifically! I could be wrong, but I can't find any instance that this was done for Supernatural, much less prominently featuring Dean and Cas.

The day that Suletta and Miorine being married was stated as canon (before Bandai tried to walk it back and then later were revealed to be lying liars who lie), the series occupied three of Japan's top five daily trends on Twitter:

The day that destiel was canonized, none of the related tags made the top five at all for the States, and none of them did the following day, either:

It's worth mentioning that the big destiel event happened during the 2020 US Presidential Election, which was obviously a big fucking deal, but I want to point out that #GetWellSoonYoongi (well wishes for Suga of BTS after he tested positive for covid) managed to hit the third spot in the trends for the day that destiel got the most overall posts and searches, so it's clearly not impossible to overtake the election with a fannish topic.

I also feel compelled to point out that the overall volume of posts out of the States is higher than those out of any other country, so while some people are certain to trot out the overall post count as proof that destiel is clearly more influential, that is not the case when the States account for 105.4 million users and Japan accounts for 73.4 million. The States have almost 50% more users than Japan, of course there are going to be more posts.

Basically, the influence of destiel in certain remaining pockets of tumblr might be impressive, but outside that very closed ecosystem it's pretty minimal. This poll is based on tumblr's top 100 ships for 2023, where destiel ranked #3 (again) and SuleMio was new to the list at #59, above such staples as stucky, SasuNaru, JohnLock, Korrasami and Catradora, so it's not like it has no presence on the site—I personally haven't seen a non-meme destiel related post come across my dash since 2020, but SuleMio and G-Witch pop up a couple times a month. (Gundam in general pops up pretty much daily. I do not follow any blogs specifically catering to this franchise or series in any capacity.)

Claiming that destiel stands head to head with a fandom juggernaut like Kirk/Spock—a ship which is also on that list at #48, having moved up nine spaces since the previous year in spite of having existed since 1967—because you personally engage with it more often than you do with ships like SuleMio is a pretty egregious overstatement of its impact on fan culture as a whole.

Asserting influence that does not exist as an argument for why people should support destiel instead of a ship that's also on the list from which this bracket was made and therefore is also rightfully included in this poll, because you've never happened to see it before, is ridiculous. Claiming that SuleMio only exists because of a series with significantly less cultural impact than the ship's own parent franchise is even more ridiculous.

God forbid women (or any country other than the United States) do anything.

Tumblr Top Ships Bracket - FINALS

This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with many of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement, and refrain from harassment.

[fozmeadows]

race & culture in fandom

For the past decade, English language fanwriting culture post the days of LiveJournal and Strikethrough has been hugely shaped by a handful of megafandoms that exploded across AO3 and tumblr – I’m talking Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Dr Who, the MCU, Harry Potter, Star Wars, BBC Sherlock – which have all been overwhelmingly white. I don’t mean in terms of the fans themselves, although whiteness also figures prominently in said fandoms: I mean that the source materials themselves feature very few POC, and the ones who are there tended to be done dirty by the creators.

Periodically, this has led POC in fandom to point out, extremely reasonably, that even where non-white characters do get central roles in various media properties, they’re often overlooked by fandom at large, such that the popular focus stays primarily on the white characters. Sometimes this happened (it was argued) because the POC characters were secondary to begin with and as such attracted less fan devotion (although this has never stopped fandoms from picking a random white gremlin from the background cast and elevating them to the status of Fave); at other times, however, there has been a clear trend of sidelining POC leads in favour of white alternatives (as per Finn, Poe and Rose Tico being edged out in Star Wars shipping by Hux, Kylo and Rey). I mention this, not to demonize individuals whose preferred ships happen to involve white characters, but to point out the collective impact these trends can have on POC in fandom spaces: it’s not bad to ship what you ship, but that doesn’t mean there’s no utility in analysing what’s popular and why through a racial lens.

All this being so, it feels increasingly salient that fanwriting culture as exists right now developed under the influence and in the shadow of these white-dominated fandoms – specifically, the taboo against criticizing or critiquing fics for any reason. Certainly, there’s a hell of a lot of value to Don’t Like, Don’t Read as a general policy, especially when it comes to the darker, kinkier side of ficwriting, and whether the context is professional or recreational, offering someone direct, unsolicited feedback on their writing style is a dick move. But on the flipside, the anti-criticism culture in fanwriting has consistently worked against fans of colour who speak out about racist tropes, fan ignorance and hurtful portrayals of living cultures. Voicing anything negative about works created for free is seen as violating a core rule of ficwriting culture – but as that culture has been foundationally shaped by white fandoms, white characters and, overwhelmingly, white ideas about what’s allowed and what isn’t, we ought to consider that all critical contexts are not created equal.

Right now, the rise of C-drama (and K-drama, and J-drama) fandoms is seeing a surge of white creators – myself included – writing fics for fandoms in which no white people exist, and where the cultural context which informs the canon is different to western norms. Which isn’t to say that no popular fandoms focused on POC have existed before now – K-pop RPF and anime fandoms, for example, have been big for a while. But with the success of The Untamed, more western fans are investing in stories whose plots, references, characterization and settings are so fundamentally rooted in real Chinese history and living Chinese culture that it’s not really possible to write around it. And yet, inevitably, too many in fandom are trying to do just that, treating respect for Chinese culture or an attempt to understand it as optional extras – because surely, fandom shouldn’t feel like work. If you’re writing something for free, on your own time, for your own pleasure, why should anyone else get to demand that you research the subject matter first?

Because it matters, is the short answer. Because race and culture are not made-up things like lightsabers and werewolves that you can alter, mock or misunderstand without the risk of hurting or marginalizing actual real people – and because, quite frankly, we already know that fandom is capable of drawing lines in the sand where it chooses. When Brony culture first reared its head (hah), the online fandom for My Little Pony – which, like the other fandoms we’re discussing here, is overwhelmingly female – was initially welcoming. It felt like progress, that so many straight men could identify with such a feminine show; a potential sign that maybe, we were finally leaving the era of mainstream hypermasculine fandom bullshit behind, at least in this one arena. And then, in pretty much the blink of an eye, things got overwhelmingly bad. Artists drawing hardcorn porn didn’t tag their works as adult, leading to those images flooding the public search results for a children’s show. Women were edged out of their own spaces. Bronies got aggressive, posting harsh, ugly criticism of artists whose gijinka interpretations of the Mane Six as humans were deemed insufficiently fuckable.

The resulting fandom conflict was deeply unpleasant, but in the end, the verdict was laid down loud and clear: if you cannot comport yourself like a decent fucking person – if your base mode of engagement within a fandom is to coopt it from the original audience and declare it newly cool only because you’re into it now; if you do not, at the very least, attempt to understand and respect the original context so as to engage appropriately (in this case, by acknowledging that the media you’re consuming was foundational to many women who were there before you and is still consumed by minors, and tagging your goddamn porn) – then the rest of fandom will treat you like a social biohazard, and rightly so.

Here’s the thing, fellow white people: when it comes to C-drama fandoms and other non-white, non-western properties? We are the Bronies.

Not, I hasten to add, in terms of toxic fuckery – though if we don’t get our collective shit together, I’m not taking that darkest timeline off the table. What I mean is that, by virtue of the whiteminding which, both consciously and unconsciously, has shaped current fan culture, particularly in terms of ficwriting conventions, we’re collectively acting as though we’re the primary audience for narratives that weren’t actually made with us in mind, being hostile dicks to Chinese and Chinese diaspora fans when they take the time to point out what we’re getting wrong. We’re bristling because we’ve conceived of ficwriting as a place wherein No Criticism Occurs without questioning how this culture, while valuable in some respects, also serves to uphold, excuse and perpetuate microaggresions and other forms of racism, lashing out or falling back on passive aggression when POC, quite understandably, talk about how they’re sick and tired of our bullshit.

An analogy: one of the most helpful and important tags on AO3 is the one for homophobia, not just because it allows readers to brace for or opt out of reading content they might find distressing, but because it lets the reader know that the writer knows what homophobia is, and is employing it deliberately. When this concept is tagged, I – like many others – often feel more able to read about it than I do when it crops up in untagged works of commercial fiction, film or TV, because I don’t have to worry that the author thinks what they’re depicting is okay. I can say definitively, “yes, the author knows this is messed up, but has elected to tell a messed up story, a fact that will be obvious to anyone who reads this,” instead of worrying that someone will see a fucked up story blind and think “oh, I guess that’s fine.” The contextual framing matters, is the point – which is why it’s so jarring and unpleasant on those rare occasions when I do stumble on a fic whose author has legitimately mistaken homophobic microaggressions for cute banter. This is why, in a ficwriting culture that otherwise aggressively dislikes criticism, the request to tag for a certain thing – while still sometimes fraught – is generally permitted: it helps everyone to have a good time and to curate their fan experience appropriately.

But when white and/or western fans fail to educate ourselves about race, culture and the history of other countries and proceed to deploy that ignorance in our writing, we’re not tagging for racism as a thing we’ve explored deliberately; we’re just being ignorant at best and hateful at worst, which means fans of colour don’t know to avoid or brace for the content of those works until they get hit in the face with microaggresions and/or outright racism. Instead, the burden is placed on them to navigate a minefield not of their creation: which fans can be trusted to write respectfully? Who, if they make an error, will listen and apologise if the error is explained? Who, if lived experience, personal translations or cultural insights are shared, can be counted on to acknowledge those contributions rather than taking sole credit? Too often, fans of colour are being made to feel like guests in their own house, while white fans act like a tone-policing HOA.

Point being: fandom and ficwriting cultures as they currently exist badly need to confront the implicit acceptance of racism and cultural bias that underlies a lot of community rules about engagement and criticism, and that needs to start with white and western fans. We don’t want to be the new Bronies, guys. We need to do better.  

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, “Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.

[olderthannetfic]

Do you know what the origin of the "sold to One Direction" thing is? I know it's a common trope (or was), but, I have no idea where I first heard of it, where I learned it was a thing. How do weird tropes like that get started, anyway? Why do some concepts take off and become huge parts of a particular fandom, but others don't? (And does this particular premise show up in other RPF contexts as much?)

--

tl;dr - Wattpad circa 2013, probably

--

I'm only familiar with that from doing Wattpad research. I don't think it's a major RPF thing, at least not under that exact name. Horny f!sub is kind of the Wattpad way, so a lot of the popular tropes there make sense from that perspective. I've definitely seen plenty of badtouch sexy slave/kidnapping victim/stalk-ee stuff with BTS and other music groups. But maybe somebody reading has more specific 1D history knowledge?

As for why one thing takes off and another doesn't, the big answer is:

Historical accident

We can look for patterns, sure, but a lot of it is ultimately survivorship bias. That's the thing where we look at what's remaining (successful companies, popular fic tropes), and we assume they have some special property that made them survivors and then extrapolate from that. But maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it's a different type of causality than the one we're looking at.

For example, a trope in a popular fandom will spread farther faster than a trope in a dinky little fandom, so maybe fandom size is what matters and not the nature of the trope. Most analyses assume it's the trope itself that matters.

On an individual basis, many specific tropes get popularized by a particular famous author or fic that other people imitate. Some get popularized by a fanworks exchange or fest. (That's how 5 Times fic spread.) But why do they stick around long term? Why do they gain traction elsewhere?

Aside from random chance, it's probably something to do with broad applicability and easy entry points.

So, for example, the show The Sentinel doesn't actually have Guides as such, but the AU added an official role for the other dude to make the two of them super destined. Sentinel AUs took off across a ton of fandoms. (Less so these days, but I've even seen them in BTS, so they're definitely not gone.) The AU version is basically soulmates + potentially codified top/bottom roles + superpowers. People like fantasy AUs. They like frameworks to fit their ship into. The trope isn't highly specific otherwise, so it can be tacked onto many settings, both real world and sff. It fits two-person ships easily, which is most popular ships. One can do some worldbuilding about whether there's One True Guide for a given Sentinel or whether the bond is more a matter of choice. Guides might be equal in numbers/prestige/public visibility to Sentinels or not. The existence of all this can be openly known by everybody or a secret like in the show.

A/B/O has a similar level of "proof my ship belongs together" stuff with room to play around with worldbuilding. It also overlaps heavily with prior popular tropes people like for pretty obvious horny reasons. Same with plenty of tropes. They're often a slight remix of already popular stuff.

Sense8 AUs, however, never really took off as a thing. I saw some fans sadfacing about this, but in this case, I think we could have predicted it. Why? Simple: the concept involves OT8, and that's not going to apply to most people's fandoms unless they happen to like a kpop group or a superhero team with 8 people. The 8 also don't have specific roles that would make this simpler to write. If you're going for less OT8 and more of a complicated network of relationships, that's a complicated story to write and it has much less of a template to work from. So low applicability + high barrier to entry.

Hogwarts AUs, on the other hand, are super popular. Why? My guess is that the biggest reason is that a million bajillion times more people know Harry Potter than know Sense8. Hogwarts also has some canned roles that are more obvious: which house is your Fave? Shit that could be in a clickbait-y personality quiz is easier to write fic about than something that requires you to make up everything yourself. But also, four houses are easy to keep track of in a way that all those Myers-Briggs types are not. Add too much mandatory complexity, and it gets too confusing.

--

If I had to guess about the popularity of Sold To One Direction, I'd say a lot of it is due to the problem of getting Mary Sue or y/n into the room with them. Why is she there? This fic concept provides the answer in one quick title or tag. Sexy slavefic and dubcon have had broad appeal since forever. There's room to go really dark or fluffier. Some of the fics are nothing but ravishment fantasies, while others are more abuse recovery stories (where 1D are better than whatever came before).

I don't think there's some simple answer for why this specific thing and not a closely related trope became such a known trope in 1D. Probably, if some BNF had posted a ravishment fantasy with a different pithy title at just the right time, some adjacent trope would be big instead.

As for why I've heard of this trope, it's absolutely due to 1D being a fucking massive fandom such that its popular tropes occur very frequently in a sample of Wattpad writing of the right eras. It definitely owes its lulzy memeticness to fandom size: lots of people care enough about 1D and 1D fic to know what the trends are and make jokes about them.

Here's Huffpo being dicks about 1D slavefic back in 2013. They don't mention the exact phrasing though. Here's a pretty standard specimen from 2013-14.

I presume this was also a big thing on Quizilla (RIP) and I see extant examples on Quotev. Sadly, these and Wattpad are fucking hard to study, and a lot of the meta-writing types stick to AO3, so I don't see as many good analyses of this part of fandom.

Any 1D fans want to weigh in?

[kabbal]

You operate under the idea that the internet is, or should be, a safe for work space. And it's not. Individual websites may be, but internet as a whole isn't. And most fanfiction websites definitely aren't.

Archive of our own allows erotica. That's a fact. That's their policy. They do have things that ressemble what you mean by "sex fic being under a cut" but they've always allowed sexual content of all kind, and they'll always do, because they made that choice when creating the organization. Other fanfic websites may have other policies, but the fact remains that a lot of them are, fundamentally, NSFW spaces where one should in fact expect to see fictional sexual content.

If Millie Bobbie Brown, even when she was a minor, decided to go on Ao3 and look up fanfic that specifically depicted her, even with an E rating and all the nastiest tags in the world, and then clicked on the "I understand this fic contains mature content" button, and then gets uncomfortable because of what she reads, then I'm sorry, but that's on her.

That fanfic might have been written by a 45yold man. That fanfic might also have been written by a girl younger than Brown herself. In any case, it has a right to exist, because it's someone's individual creation. Yeah, it might read as gross to some people, but most RPF writers don't, in fact, try to share their work with the celebrities themselves.

Yeah, some people might dig it up to plaster it all accross Brown's front door, but poor boundaries like that are not the fault of the fic. It's the fault of the people who found it and decided to make it everyone's problem.

You know a trend I really hate? TV hosts who do that exact thing. They have a intern go through fanfic websites and then confront celebrities with their finds. And yeah, sometimes it's uncomfortable, because the celebrity did not consent to seeing themselves written doing certain things. But you know who hasn't consented either? The fic writer! Who just got their work plastered all across mainstream media!

And while we're still on the topic of celebrities's right to consent... Yeah no you shouldn't have to ask them before writing about them. Going "Hey Millie, can I write 167k of you falling in love with your costar" is actually far worse in terms of boundaries than doing that same thing quietly in your corner of the internet.

Celebrities shouldn't be able to dictate every part of the public discourse around them. If they did, you wouldn't know all the shit Tom Cruise has done in the name of Scientology, or that Helen terrorized her staff. When you become a public figure, you go public. People are allowed to think things about you, especially when - as rpf writers often already do - they don't reach to you personally to tell you what they think.

The same way a celebrity should know better than to look up hate groups about them, they should know how to keep their eyes away from fanfiction. Especially written fanfiction that can't possibly be mistaken for their own words the same way a deep fake could.

Once again, fanfiction is a niche ass hobby. You don't get ao3 results when you Google most celebrities (except maybe Misha Collins lol) so it is, in fact, possible for those celebrities to stay away from these spaces.

a genuine question since I’ve seen this being debated a lot

feel free to give your reasons / thoughts on this but please also remember to respect other people’s opinions

[madamtrashbat]

A couple of thoughts

We doin' okay, Cats family? We're good? Good. I have one last thing to add.

This is kinda about pro- and anti-shippers, but it's really more about fandom culture in general and just my experiences. You can read it, if you want, or not.

Up to you.

I've been doin' this for a while. A good fifteen years at least, closer probably to sixteen. I've been doing things in fandom for longer than some of my mutuals have been alive.

(Oh Jesus)

And there's something I gotta tell you guys, both as a person who has been doing fandom-y stuff for years and for someone who literally has college degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing.

Being an anti is not normal.

And I know that comes across as harsh and mean and it sounds unreasonable but I'd like to explain what I mean by that.

I can trace back being an anti to two main sources: Voltron and Star Wars. I was never into Voltron or really even around anyone who was but I remember the screaming and fighting over the ships, and I remember the hellish crusade that began when people dared to ship Rey and Kylo Ren together. It was nasty, guys. It was absolutely insane that suddenly people were doing this over fictional ships, that people were being sent actual abuse and hatred because someone wanted the broody shitlord man and the unwashed desert scrounger to smooch. Like... imagine that in real time.

I was not, nor have I ever been, a Reylo shipper, but you know what I did, when that ship began, and I didn't like it? I ignored it and went about my day. Because that's how I was taught. Nothing in the fiction world was worth fighting over. It was not worth getting into arguments over. What was the point?

Then the antis got bolder, started branching out, and when people like me started standing up and saying, "Hey, stop being a dick to people!" someone hired the world's best PR machine and suddenly people who were not antis were pedophiles and abusive and incestuous.

How's that for some whiplash.

This anti movement of berating, bullying, harming, and threatening has been their MO, and it's dangerous. And now, they all buy their own bullshit. They actually think people like me are all out here twisting our mustaches like Snidely Whiplash and diddling kids. Without a shred of irony, they believe this.

Proship only labeled itself that as a response to the antiship, and antiship, make no mistake, named itself first. It was not anti-pedophile. It was not anti-incest. It was not anti-abuse.

It was all about disliking fictional ships that other people enjoyed, and thus attacking people over it.

And it's pointless. It's driven a child to suicide. It has gotten people fired. It has ruined careers, livelihoods, friendships. For nothing. For a boogeyman that doesn't exist.

Sex experts across the board all agree that what gives us our jollies is not at all what we want in real life. There's some wild statistic like 70% of women have had a sexual fantasy about rape at least once in their lives. About rape! That act that most AFAB people have a deep ingrained fear of! And we've used it to get off! Because sexual fantasy isn't that deep. Our brains are idiots. And since time immemorial, we as humans have written just the most fucked up shit.

It's even in the Bible. Humans have been nasty forever. And it doesn't mean shit.

It's in the TV shows. It's in our movies. It's in our books. It's in our music, our podcasts, everything. Being an anti is not the way of humanity at all. Ever. Except for like... maybe the puritans but they sucked so who cares about them.

Antis believe a lie. They believe a lie and they hurt people for it. I am not in any way, shape, or form exaggerating when I say I am fearful for those who regularly interact with me, because I am worried that one day the art they make or the "clout" they carry isn't going to be enough to save them from their friendship with me and antis will tear them to shreds. Because that is how they behave. They may not think they're bullies, and they may think they're in the right, but I want you to look up the Youtube RPF kid who killed themselves over anti harassment. Look at that horrible ask I just got. This is how they behave.

And that is what proshippers stand against. It's a stance against bullying, harassment, threats. That is it. There are plenty of proshippers out in the world that would never, ever think of writing anything involving someone underage, or between relatives, or involving anything gruesome. Because that's not what it's about.

Antis are new in the world of fandom, and they are the absolute root of toxicity. I do not exaggerate. They waste the time of agencies actually trying to eradicate CSAM by sending them art someone drew of a teenage character that isn't real. They've driven people to suicide. They've outright admitted to not caring about actual humans as much as they care about fictional ships. They have shown time and time again that they are not above abuse, vitriol, and bullying. There are blogs that post stories from ex-antis who say they were afraid to say anything different than their anti friends for fear of righteous backlash.

I repeat: I am legitimately afraid that my friends are going to get dogpiled and harassed because they dare to be my friend. That fear is not baseless. And it's all because of the way antis act.

I am liberal with the block button. I try to maintain boundaries because I don't want to see any of that shit as much as they don't want to see any of mine (though only a very scant few actually block me back, which is a joke in and of itself). But it still slips through. And I hate it, every time I see it.

Because this is not the way we're supposed to be. We are not supposed to be at odds with each other. We are supposed to share and have fun and be joyful about some people in lycra.

But because some people wanted to put on the pilgrim hat and play Morality Council to someone who's been doing this for years, I gotta tiptoe around people that think I'm actually out in the world diddling children. Do you know how fucked up that is. Do you know how that feels? To not only have someone make that judgment without any evidence, but to tell it to other people who don't know me either?

When someone finally snaps and starts biting back, it's not out of nowhere. And antis never, ever see themselves as doing something wrong. But they are. They are wrong.

Can I let you in on a little secret?

Seriously, just between you and me, come here.

If you think it's wrong to bully someone because of fiction, then you're proship. That is the long and short of it. No more or less. I hate to break it to you, but that is the only definition, and anyone who says it's something else is lying to you for their own gain.

And sure, there are lots of people who try to hide behind the proship label as they do shitty things. But antis do the same. Humans being assholes and trying to blame it on something else is not new.

The fact that people have come to me and told me that the antis have made them feel uncomfortable, that they're afraid if they do something they might view as negative they might receive hate, that people are actually AFRAID of people in this fandom, is not okay.

There was a fandom I was involved in where one of the prominent people actively hated me and I was never afraid of what she would do. I am afraid of the antis in this fandom, though. Because they have teeth and they like to use them.

Fandom isn't supposed to be like this. Nobody should be screaming at teenagers for talking to adults in fandom, infantilizing them like they're not a whole autonomous human. Nobody should be telling someone to kill themselves because they ship Tuggerstrap. Nobody should be afraid of the other people in their fandom.

Antis, if any of them even read this (I doubt it, but just in case), I want you to look around. The people who are neutral are not afraid of what the proshippers will say to them. They are afraid of you. You and your ilk are the ones causing the damage, and you are the outliers in the entire world of fiction. You're a loud minority that thinks it knows better when it knows absolutely nothing.

Ruminate on that.

My blog is still a safe space from bullying, abuse, and nastiness. If someone is being mean to you, you will always find a friend here. And if you can't say the same, then what's wrong with you?

Be excellent to each other. Stop making people afraid.

And sit down and ask yourself what it is you really want when you make vague posts about people and tell people vicious, awful things. What are you hoping to gain.

[spatort]

I’m at my parents’ house and I have too much time on my hands apparently, so it’s time for a trip down memory lane! More specifically, a trip into the weird world of 1990s for-profit teen idol RPF, such as this beauty:

No, I did not find this at my parents’ house, I bought it second-hand specifically in order to make this post because I’m a person who enjoys studying fan culture in her free time. So, if you’re wondering what the hell the monstrosity pictured above is, and why it exists, don’t worry, I’m about to answer that question extensively.

LONG (AND HOPEFULLY FUN & INTERESTING) POST UNDER THE CUT

Let’s start with a bit of history: In the pre-internet era, fan culture differed from today in a few key regards. Although fanfiction existed, without the internet it was much harder for fans to share their stories with each other. Large fandoms such as Star Trek did have fanzines where fanfic could be printed, but all in all it was a much more niche thing than it is today with millions of fics accessible on AO3.

Fan culture in general, however, was a big thing in the 90s – particularly when it came to pop acts that appealed to teen (and tween) audiences, such as the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, or (mostly in Europe) the Kelly Family. When I was in elementary school, you basically had to pick whether you were a BSB or an NSYNC fan – and god forbid you were a Kelly fan like me, then you were the lowest rung on the social ladder and the target of relentless mockery. Like many German kids in the 90s, me and my sister would religiously read teen magazine BRAVO, cut out every single bit of material about our faves and collect them in folders and self-made fanzines. We created fan art and fanfiction without having words for these things. Without the internet and social media, fans did not have a constant stream of content about their idols, and were left with no other choice but to cling to every bit of information they could find in magazines, on TV shows, or on the radio.

Enter a savvy businessperson who comes up with the perfect merchandise product to sell to these popstar-obsessed teens: fan novels! These books, featuring taglines such as ‘The novel for all Backstreet Boys fans’, typically revolved around a relatable female teenage protagonist who is a fan of the celebrity or music group in question, and usually ends up meeting their idol or, gasp, even becoming romantically involved with them. As far as themes go, they look pretty much exactly like your classic self-insert RPF. Except there is a big difference setting these books apart from ‘actual’ fanfiction: Rather than being written by real fans to express their ‘fannish’ feelings about the subject, fan novels were most likely commissioned works created by professional romance authors purely to profit off of actual fans. There is very little background information available about this ‘genre’, but I did stumble across an academic work on Google Books which featured a passage about these fan novels (translated into English by me):

There are several commissioned works by professional authors, which could be mistaken for fanfiction. Especially in the 1990s, when lots of boy bands were on the market, many books of this kind were published. […] These are fictional stories for fans [redacted].

Jennie Hermann: Backstreet Girl. Projektionsfläche Popstar - Wenn der Fan zum Schriftsteller wird (2009) [Popstar as Projection Surface – When fans become writers]

One of the things I find most intriguing about this type of commercially published fanfiction is the question of personal rights. Obviously, the celebs in question or their management must have consented to using their names in the story, their pictures on the cover and so on – because a profit could be made with this. Especially with the fan debate around RPF allegely being unethical, I wonder if the celebrities themselves were aware someone was writing these stories about them, putting words in their mouth, and if they had any clue what exactly happened in these novels. Now, I’ve read a couple of them in my own youth. Some of them deal mostly with the state of being a fan, e.g. I recall a novel about a girl who is so obsessed with Leonardo Di Caprio that she doesn’t pay attention to real life guys at all, only to learn that her actual dream boy has been in her life all along! This story did not feature Di Caprio himself as a character, it was more about the protagonist’s arc of realizing your idols are not all that matters in life. Others do describe fan encounters with teen idols, and some even feature (hints at) romance with a celebrity. When I decided to purchase a vintage copy of one of these books, I opted for one of the latter category, precisely because of the popular argument that writing romance stories featuring real people is somehow ‘wrong’. For only a couple of euros, I was able to get my hands on a weird and wonderful relic of fan culture: Mein Frühling mit Nick (My spring with Nick) by the likely pseudonymous Maxi Keller, heralded on the book cover as ‘the novel for all fans of the Backstreet Boys’.

The story revolves around 16-year-old musical prodigy and designated wallflower Katharina, who lives in a German small town and cares about nothing else than playing the organ – certainly not about boys, let alone ones that are super-famous American pop stars. This means she is not initially a fan of the Backstreet Boys, which I guess is something of a trope itself – the protagonist meeting a celebrity by chance without knowing who they are and the celeb being thrilled that someone doesn’t just like them for their fame. Anyway, the boys visit Katharina’s hometown while on tour in Germany because band member AJ is doing some research on his German ancestors who happened to live in this very town. Katharina runs into them, she and Nick (who was only 17 himself when this was published in 1997, so it’s legal) fall in love at first sight, she helps them dig up information on AJ’s ancestors and finds out the two of them are related, the boys invite Katharina and her friend Saskia backstage after their show and … nothing happens. The book is 200 pages long and Katharina doesn’t even get one kiss with her boy band sweetheart, even though they mutually crush on each other right away. Perhaps that’s as far as the band or their management agreed for the novel to go – a hint at romance, but no trace of any on-page action, no matter how innocent.

That said, the book is so hilariously poorly written that it was still very entertaining to read. Although I could not find out anything about the author Maxi Keller, and therefore assume this might be a pseudonym, their writing style very much suggests that their are a professional romance author who usually writes for an older audience (plus, the book was published by Bastei Lübbe, who also publish a range of cheap romance novels known as ‘Romanhefte’). The language is extremely flowery at times, and even teenage characters speak with an eloquence that is hardly age-appropriate, with some 90s teen slang peppered in at unfitting times (such as the overuse of the English word ‘girl’). Often the novel loses itself in pointless detail that does nothing to move the plot forward (such as an extensive description of a house party hosted by Saskia’s rich parents, with minute details of their luxurious lifestyle and assets, even though Saskia is only a supporting character in the overall plot). It appears as if the author is desperately trying to fill the pages with meaningless drivel so they don’t need to write too many scenes featuring the presumed main attraction, the boys themselves.

If Keller was indeed merely hired to write this, and is not a fan themselves, one must still admit that the author did their research when it comes to the band. Whereas fanfiction typically assumes that the audience is already familiar with the characters and often skips any introductory descriptions of their appearance or personality, Keller makes sure that even a reader who is completely unfamiliar with the Backstreet Boys can keep up. The author delivers extensive descriptions of the boys’ appearance and demeanor, even spelling out their full names repeatedly, and frequently peppers in ‘fun facts’ such as ‘Kevin was raised on a farm in Kentucky’. While an actual fan might do so to prove how knowledgeable they are, and earning their status as a ‘true fan’, in this case it only seems like Keller really wants to show off how much research they did – as if not a single piece of information they took in must go to waste by not being used in the novel.

When it comes to the question how realistically the non-fannish author replicates the way the boys act and speak, there are two barriers to delivering a well-founded answer: Firstly, I was personally very young when BSB were popular and I really don’t remember too well what each member was like. Secondly, the elephant in the room: the language barrier. All of the aforementioned fan novels were written in German, and the problems posed by writing about an English-speaking band interacting with German OCs (and teenage ones at that) are addressed poorly, if at all. Pretty much all dialogue is written in German, and the audience is left to assume that everyone is actually speaking English whenever the boys are involved – except the novel does nothing to explain why two 16-year-old German girls would be able to express themselves so effortlessly in a foreign language. (Remember, the internet was not a thing, so German kids were not exposed to the same amount of English in everyday life as they are these days.) It would have been easy to make one of them a language nerd who gets straight A’s in English class, and give the other a British parent and make them bilingual. Instead, Katharina initially even worries about the prospect of having to talk to boys at all, and in English on top of that! But when she actually does, the language barrier never comes up again. The suspension of disbelief expected from the reader is therefore immense. The language barrier also gives the author an easy way out when it comes to imitating the way the boys speak in real life – there is no need to take into account idiolects or regional differences (such as ‘you guys’ vs. ‘y’all’) if the boys’ speech is essentially translated into a foreign language. However, I wanted to give you guys (or y’all, if you will) a taste of how Keller attempts to write a scene where AJ and Nick discuss the latter’s crush on Katharina:

I would argue that this sounds realistic enough for what it’s worth, if a little cheesy, which is excusable in this genre. Perhaps a true 90s BSB fan would beg to differ, so if you happen to be one, feel free to drop me a message. But in my semi-professional opinion, this most likely holds up for readers.

So, to answer the initial question that drove me to purchase this book: Do fan novels like Mein Frühling mit Nick count as fanfiction?

If we assume that something is only a fanfic if the author themselves is a fan of the subject matter, then I would argue no, Maxi Keller is probably not a fan themselves and therefore this work of for-profit real-person fiction does not qualify as fanfic. However, fan novels definitely have a (however small) place in the history of fan culture and fan-adjacent works, and I personally found reading this relic both entertaining and insightful!

[spnfanficpond]

May 2020 Angel Fish Awards

(New Angel Fish design by @slytherkins!!)

Every month all of you fantastic writers work your asses off to post some truly incredible stories. Our Angel Fish Awards are the way for all of us, as a community of writers and readers, to lift each other up and give praise to those who have captured our attention and deserve a few kind words.

The monthly Angel Fish Awards are peer-nominated, meaning ANYONE IN THE POND CAN NOMINATE ANY POND MEMBER’S FIC. While the Pond was founded to support the Guppies, everyone in this community deserves to be showered with love and feedback, and we hope that by opening this up as a Pond wide system, we’ll be able to share the love as far as it can go.

NOTE: WE’VE BEEN HAVING OCCASIONAL PROBLEMS WITH ASKS GOING MISSING. Please use the Submit button when submitting your nominations and make sure you’re signed into Tumblr or your URL won’t show. (If the form asks for your name and email address, then you’re not signed in.) If you like, you can also send a message to Michelle @mrswhozeewhatsis or Mana @manawhaat to check and make sure we got your submission.

Be sure to read through this whole post as people who were nominated more than once only had one tag activated for tumblr tagging purposes!

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE MAY’S ANGEL FISH AWARDS!

Nominated by @focusonspn

A Night on the Town (oneshot) by @supernatural-jackles

I completely love this fic!! Jensen is a total sweetheart, it’s really easy to read and all those words felt like only five minutes. This is everything a Jensen!girl could’ve asked for!!

Hunger (oneshot) by @impala-dreamer

HOLY. MOTHER. OF. HOTNESS. It was a fucking pleasure for my eyes to read every single word of this fic!! hot as hell, dark, Demon!Dean and in character as always.

Nominated by @mrswhozeewhatsis 

Handkerchief (oneshot) by @babypieandwhiskey

I don’t usually read RPF, but this is an AU, so I dove in. Mechanic!Jensen with a magical supply of handkerchiefs, ready and willing to clean up whatever mess I find myself in? SOLD. Sweet, appeals to my love of Jensen’s back-pocket bandannas, and it activates my competence kink! Excuse me while I go wibble in the corner.

Nominated by @supernatural-jackles

Still The One (oneshot) by @luci-in-trenchcoats

I have a lot of respect for the way Michelle writes such difficult topics. She approaches them with such grace and accuracy, that makes it all the more realistic. This series is no exception. I deeply enjoy this series and the way things are playing out between Dean and the reader. It’s an extremely heartbreaking story that most of us don’t really think about until it’s put into this kind of perspective. This one is still ongoing, and I’m extremely excited to see how she handles the rest of the story. I highly recommend checking this one out. Just heed the warnings beforehand.

Nominated by @peridottea91

Healthy Competition (Series) by @kittenofdoomage

This! Omg this series! I love it so much!! It’s slower moving but keeps you itching for the next chapter and is oh so relatable. What woman hasn’t had body image issues? And what plus sized woman hasn’t had to deal with rude jerks and bullying? This fic is actually super realistic and hits all those relatable issues. Can’t wait to read the rest!!

Dangerous Signs (Series) by @kittenofdoomage

Ok, let me start by saying that I am a sucker for a good “character transported to alt. universe/world” fic. That said, I got soooooooooo addicted to this fic! It was so well written and you could just feel the reader’s hesitation and torn emotions. Should she stay? Should go? Ugh! Fantastic!! Also, kudos for the Norse mythology!! *chef’s kiss*

Nominated by @thegirlwhorunswithwinchesters

Cotton Candy (oneshot) by @ellewritesfix05

“It was always nice knowing [...] you could always find ways to bring light into Dean’s life.”

And he damn well deserves it! This was so sweet. No one can resist that “I didn’t do it” smile of his ;)

The Oath (Series) by @thecleverdame 

This series is definitely dark, but it’s so so good. If you’re okay with reading about the heavy subjects covered in these chapters, you won’t regret giving this series a try. I can’t seem to stop diving into all of this author’s content. She’s just too good.

Choices (CYOE) by @talesmaniac89 

I’ve been excited about this impressive project since I first saw the announcement post. Though I’m ashamed to say I haven’t gotten into reading the full thing yet, I plan on making time for reading ALL the different endings. I’m excited to see the different ways in which the story plays out, depending on the brothers’ personalities. For now, I’m recommending this first chapter, the starting point, which was already a beauty of its own. If you haven’t started yet yourself, prepare to be amazed.

Not Safe (Oneshot) by @torn-and-frayed

I love this. Spicy but sweet… Is that a cringy enough way for me to try and put my thoughts into words? I also just really miss Bobby, man.

nominated by @impala-dreamer

Safe Here (series) by @because-imma-lady-assface

This is one of the greatest Dean series. Ashley writes Dean amazingly well, too well sometimes, and this series gives him exactly what he needs; a place to feel safe and find comfort. I love this one so much!

Losing You (series) by @idreamofhazel

This is a superbly done Sam series that has stuck with me for a long time. I literally can’t go into Bed, Bath & Beyond without thinking about the ending <3

nominated by @kittenofdoomage

Blind Luck (oneshot) by @crispychrissy

A great Sam x reader that hits the holy trifecta of smut, fluff, and angst.

 Blood And Water (series) by @crashdevlin

Pretty sure I’ve recc’d this before but it’s such a good series, so twisted and angsty, my dark little heart loves it. Heed the warnings!

Just Sam (oneshot) by @dontshootmespence

This might not be everyone’s cup of tea but for me, it’s perfection, because I am a kinky bitch and any other kinky bitches out there would definitely enjoy this XD

nominated by @deanwanddamons

Private Party With A Rockstar (oneshot) by @mummybear

@mummybear Has been working her butt off this month for her RolePlay May. She wrote this story for me and put me in it (my name is Sian). Rockstar!Jensen is one of my weakness’s, and she knows that, and clearly knows me very well too, as included everything I like 😉

She’s Not You by @winchest09

@winchest09 is one of my fave authors. This is a super cute, super fluffy fic which really cheered me up.

Dangerous Signs (Series) by @kittenofdoomage

I LOVED this series. it was so good and lots of fun with some very sexy going’s on. Rhi’s work is just fantastic 💕

Wedding Bells (oneshot) by @katehuntington

This one shot is super cute and fluffy! I love her writing so much and this is not exception 💕 

Not Much Left (oneshot) by @impala-dreamer

Demon!Dean is another of my weakness’s and fic really hit the spot 🥵🔥

Dear Dean (series) by @smol-and-grumpy

This series made me laugh, made me cry, made me horny and made me gasp. One of the best series I have read 💕

nominated by @emilyshurley

Jensen’s Self Care Routine (oneshot) - @luci-in-trenchcoats

It is just adorable. People taking care of themselves for their loved ones. You can’t get more fluffy.

The Proposal (series) - @katymacsupernatural (Ongoing)

If you love fake dating fics, you’ll definitely love this one. Really like the character of “the reader”.

Private Party with a Rockstar (oneshot) - @mummybear

This one is both hot and adorable at the same time

You shook me (oneshot) @myinconnelly1

It’s Myin writing Demon!Dean what more do you want? No seriously that’s the perfect combination

Dancing the Spiral (oneshot) by @myinconnelly1

One of the only times I genuinely felt like a fic was creepy in a good way. And the passing of the whole thing is great. Am I little biased because its Myin, yes but that doesn’t make the fic any less good. sure it’s on the longer side but definitely worth it.

The only exception (series) - @ne-gans and @negans-lucille-tblr

I have only read the first part so far but I had to mention it. It is a serial killer AU so read the trigger warnings just in case.

Make it Big (series)- @negans-lucille-tblr

Again I’m still catching up It’s one of those fics I thought I won’t like reading but was really glad that I started.

Cast no Shadow (series) @kittenofdoomage

It’s Rhi, I can fangirl a lot about her fics. Really enjoyed (?) (that might not be the right word) the whole fitting a new relationship in existing ones. Felt to real in a weird way. It might seem like I don’t like the fic because of how I’m wording this but that’s really not the case.

Nominated by @deanwinchesterswitch

Sunshine (oneshot) by @talesmaniac89

If you like angst, this is the fic for you. It is utterly captivating and heart wrenching. It’s a cut your heart out with a dull centuries-old wooden spoon style hurt. The use of the song lines in this fic is well thought out and poetic. Make sure to have a box of tissues handy. If you don’t at least tear up while reading this, then you don’t have a heart to cut out, and your soul is already in hell.

Choices (CYOE) by @talesmaniac89

A clever interactive series where you get to choose your favorite Winchester, and the ending of the story. This is so detailed and intriguing. I loved the story I ended up with the first time, and excitedly went back in to pick the other options. Each story was unique and well written. 

Babe I’m Gonna Leave You (oneshot) by @waywardbaby

This one shot is an absolutely stunning piece of smut. The lack of dialogue makes it that much better. All you’re left with is the option to feel the detailed emotions—sexual tension to the max.

No Words (oneshot) by @because-imma-lady-assface​

Beautiful, detailed, and heartbreaking. Dean’s pain and need for comfort are palpable, and I cried while reading it. I can’t find the proper words to describe how this fic made me feel, but man did it ever make me feel.

Sky Full of Stars (oneshot) by @smol-and-grumpy​​

This is the sequel to Something Just Like This and is just as exciting as the first series. A roller coaster of suspense. The characters continue on their journey of love, dealing with the good and bad that comes with every relationship—the perfect combination of angst and fluff with a healthy dose of smut.

Something Just Like This (oneshot) by @smol-and-grumpy

A perfect combination of big badass Dean and soft, fluffy Dean, along with all the incredible smut your little heart could desire. I usually don’t like to read a series until it is complete, because I am impatient and don’t want to wait for the next chapter to post. However, this story was intriguing and sexy, and I couldn’t keep from reading each chapter as soon as it posted and then eagerly anticipating the next.

Nominated by anon

Request 42 (oneshot) by @thegirlwhorunswithwinchesters

This was super-duper cute!! I love frustrated soon to be parents especially when one of those parents is Dean! Great work, well worth the read!

Just A Daydream (onesho) by @maddiepants

This fic is refreshing with its canon-ness! I love Sam's little dream, and you get so wrapped up in it, you forget. Absolutely masterful and HOT AS HELL! Also, Tall People, WTF? 

Thank you all for the awesome work and great feedback!

These are not actual awards! This system is set up so everyone in the pond has a chance to share the love and promote a fic/author that has grabbed your attention. The more people that participate, and the more everyone remembers to submit their own fics after posting, the better this will be :D

THANK YOU ALL AGAIN, KEEP UP THE AMAZING WORK, AND AS ALWAYS, HAPPY WRITING!

[snowtimeisbesttime]

Thoughts and questions (remix) on Friendsim Volume 10.

Tegiri:

-Tegiri is so fucking dramatic and personally I love it. // His new Troll Call bulletpoints tone down the assorted internet references and reinforce that he kinda sucks with a sword and is conflicted re: Alternian law vs not really wanting to kill people; they also give him another pinch of weeb points.

-Does he have (a replica of) Marquise Fucking Mindfang’s sword??? and while we’re on the topic of ancestors, was that a fucking Signless manga?????

-Tadashi Inu joins the list of Extremely Good Lusii

-Looks like the rebellion is growing by the moment! Meanwhile, Tegiri himself definitely has some doubts about murdering people because the law says so, and seems to be aware of it? (the whole “pull of the light vs path of darkness” thing in his good end) // also like i'm reasonably sure that the “dont murder ppl” thing was the path of darkness??? and he's literally voidbound And a derse dreamer??? in case i messed up and it was the “pull of the light”... he Is shown with closed eyes most of the time, even though it's because of sharingan contacts reasons, but he’ll have to see the light eventually.

-In the process of connecting all these dots I remembered that classpects didn't really play a role in the writing of the Friendsim routes and that put me out a little but regardless, he's probably going to have to choose between following what Alternia says is right vs what his conscience says is right, and I think he'd probably choose the latter, be it because dersies have more rebel vibes or because the consequences for choosing the former were unacceptable (ie: the whole Polypa should have been culled because her lusus died thing)

-Also looks like all teals have some kind of Law Thing. Tirona’s got the whole tattleterror thing, so Stelsa’s the only one that might be an exception now.

-Things that exist on Alternia: Fullmetal Alchemist, Boku no Hero Academia, Fate:Stay Night, Overwatch, Megaman, One Piece (one of Tegiri’s figurines resembles Luffy), Sugoi Quest for Kokoro, Naruto and who knows how many more that I’ve missed.

-Regarding that list and what I’ve seen on my dash, as far as we know Tegiri has good taste in anime.

-About Tegiri’s troll sharingan contacts: either cosplaying as a different (higher only?) caste IS illegal, or it’s not but Tegiri always has his eyes closed anyways because he’s Just That Extra. Considering he wants to stick to the rules, I think it might be the second. Also, the troll Uchiha family are seadwellers confirmed.

-Polypa’s also an anime fan!! And the protagonist’s still her moirail… wonder what might come of this in Act 2?

-An aside: Tegiri thinks he’ll have to kill Polypa eventually (yeah, good luck with that) because she doesn’t have a lusus, so either she’s above the culling age for that but he thinks he has to right his “wrong” (saving her life), or she’s not and Diemen is very lucky he hasn’t had any close friends before the main character.

Zebede:

-Zebede’s got the protagonist’s yearn for Friendship up to eleven, and then up to eleven again. What he doesn’t seem to have is the emotional maturity required to not guilt-trip the fuck out of people.

-Regarding this, my theories are: the friends he has are assholes, and/or they live literally in the opposite side of the planet.

-On psionics: the owner of the anime shop’s eyes were both pink and they seemed to have weak psionics; maybe only the strongest ones get two-toned eyes? Taking Cirava into account, probably only the most powerful of these can become helmsmen… Meanwhile, Zebede confirms that 1: not all golds are psionics and 2: golds (and presumably other potential psychics like burgundys or bronzes) can have other powers, such as animal communion!!!

-Bee communion sure seems like a convenient power for a beekeeper. Perhaps the trolls who have this power become beekeepers, in the same way that jades become carers of grubs and strong psionics become batteries. Now I have to wonder if Sollux had it too… (the 2nap) // Wow Sollux why does your lusus let you have two sets of powers??

-Who was expecting Zebede to write RPF? I wasn’t!

-please please please tell me he did not send that fic to Cirava…

-Speaking about Cirava, they’ve been looking for us on the internet since we left their hive. They also retwitted our post!

-Seeing as there wasn’t even a peep of hatched2dance in Vikare’s route, being kpop on main might be a cultural taboo on Alternia. // Or the most likely explanation, that Zebede replaced Vikare as the kpop guy just as he replaced Beekeeper as well, the beekeper guy. His other new Troll Call bulletpoint ramps up just how far he lives from everyone else, from 3 hours to 2 days.

-We now have a Car. Hopefully we’ll figure out how to get rid of the GPS chip, assuming the bees didn’t fucking destroy the former owner.

-About the car, though… it was conveniently unlocked as if left for us, and it drove to Zebede’s hive without any kind of input besides turning the autopilot on??? The protagonist even says they don’t have any idea of where his hive is… that isn’t ominous as fuck or anything

[wellknownwolf]

I want to move into a new phase in my relationship with fandom, as I mature with new experiences. I'm not sure what exactly that looks like though. What is your take on the parasocial affection inherent in an RPF like Rhett & Link? Or even the deep attachments that can form with fictional characters? Or a desire to emulate fantasy worlds? I'm sorry if I've made you uncomfortable with all this, it's just that it's been a long time coming, and once I got started I couldn't stop. - Natasha (5)

First, let me post the full question, since it came in 5 parts:

Hey, it's me again. Your 'mystery inquirer', as you so adorably dubbed me. You're right, I had forgotten I'd sent in that ask. Just now, I couldn't help but think about a scene from Life After, as I am wont to on a frightfully regular basis, which is what got me back here. When you said you pondered over my seemingly simple, banal question for a good while, and wrote out a beautifully thoughtful answer like you always do, it made me happy.

Your narrative voice is similar to my own, and it made my chest ache in a certain way to have gotten such a response to what felt like a random shout out into the abyss (though it obviously wasn't, I sent it directly to you, I guess it's more what it felt like taking a chance on a conversation with a random stranger online). And now I'm cringing a bit at how melodramatic all sounds. But I'm committing to it, anyway. That's the beauty of anon, eh?

Wolfie (is it presumptuous to call you that? Please do forgive me the liberty I'm taking), I must admit. I'm quite envious of this community you have with @missingparentheses, @lunar-winterlude, and other wonderful people. Since childhood, I've been head over heels in love with fandom. Not a specific fandom, I've been a traveller through dozens, but fandom in general. I've read probably thousands of fanfics, spent countless hours daydreaming about beloved characters and their stories.

To the point where, in my most recent and worst depressive episode, it may have been for the worse, if I'm honest. Escapism and yearning to the point of impairment, engendering a sense of constant bereavement. But it's taught me so much about life and its wonders, I can't write it off as just some damaging habit. It's such an integral part of who I am, a deeply curious soul (shout out to my Enneagram Type 5-ers out there!). But I don't anyone to share it with, and it can get quite lonely.

I want to move into a new phase in my relationship with fandom, as I mature with new experiences. I'm not sure what exactly that looks like though. What is your take on the parasocial affection inherent in an RPF like Rhett & Link? Or even the deep attachments that can form with fictional characters? Or a desire to emulate fantasy worlds? I'm sorry if I've made you uncomfortable with all this, it's just that it's been a long time coming, and once I got started I couldn't stop. - Natasha

.....................................................................

Thank you for giving me so much to respond to, Natasha.  Thank you for continuing to reach out.   I accidentally wrote something like a paper in response to your thoughtful question.  I even conducted a little research and cited a source.  ENGLISH TEACHER, ACTIVATE!

Also, for what it’s worth, I feel at times that I communicate exclusively through shouts into the abyss, so it’s a language with which I am at home.  In fact, it is this very technique, this experiment with intense vulnerability at the hands of a virtual stranger, that earned me one of my absolutely most-treasured friends: @missingparentheses.  I have poured out a great deal of my own melodrama to her, and she has received it and reciprocated it in a way that, three years later, continues to teach me how to be a better friend.  In short, I’m a firm believer in diving straight in when it comes to new friends.  Cringe not; I’m on board.

So let’s dive.

R&L is really only the second “fandom” with which I’ve been involved.  Third, if we count my preteen obsession with ‘N Sync (and considering how much wall space I dedicated to their posters and self-printed photos, we probably should).  My point is, while I don’t have much experience with the community facet of fandom, I do relate to your feeling of near-obsession.  Or clear obsession.  

I know the feeling of escapism you’re describing, and I know the yearning and melancholy that can come on our worst days, where we feel like “real life” will never measure up to the color and brilliance of the worlds we spend so much time considering. These worlds, these characters and their relationships, their challenges, victories, and defeats all seem so purposeful: they’re the plot points we use to craft the stories in our heads (regardless of whether we’re writers at all).  It can be much harder to view ourselves as protagonists worth analyzing, viewing and reviewing through new lenses, perhaps because we’re warned against navel-gazing, perhaps because our self-perception just won’t allow for it.  Maybe a little of both.

But yes!  It teaches us!  We DO learn about life, other people, love, risk, all kinds of things through what we consume in these fandoms, so I would never classify it as a “bad” thing.  We hone our imaginations and learn to pay attention to our own emotions as we recognize feelings from our favorite shows, games, books, and characters arising in ourselves.  

I used to be a little afraid of the fact that I was always telling myself stories, internally imagining myself as someone else, a player in the worlds I often loved more than my own.  I suspected that someday, somehow, I would be caught playing pretend all the time in my own little ways.  I was a bright and ambitious young woman, so why would I give so much of my mental energy to such frivolous pursuits?

In my first semester of graduate school, though, I learned from a Lit. Theory professor who intimidated the hell out of me that we all do this.  We’re all telling ourselves stories all the time, some of which are true and close to objective reality, some of which are more subjective to whatever fantastical (or fandom) material we last consumed.  I’ve whispered my own dialogue in the shower, but so have you whispered yours in your head (if not also out loud in your shower!).  And through this act, however it is performed, I have made those worlds part of my own.  So have you.  In this way, they are real, and I no longer feel fearful of being “found out.”  

When we have those moments of doubt, though, when we wonder whether we’re going too far, it probably stems, at least partially, from the “us v. them” divide between fandom and mainstream society.  We love our little worlds, but we also feel that twinge of anxiety that we might be bordering on obsession, that our guilty pleasure might be discovered and we will be socially punished for it, namely, as Joli Jensen writes in “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization,” because “the fan is characterized as (at least potentially) an obsessed loner, suffering from a disease of isolation, or a frenzied crowd member, suffering from a disease of contagion. In either case, the fan is seen as being irrational, out of control, and prey to a number of external forces” (13). According the consistent covert (and overt, at times) messages of the mainstream, “[f]andom is conceived of as a chronic attempt to compensate for a perceived personal lack of autonomy, absence of community, incomplete identity, lack of power and lack of recognition” (Jensen 17).  Yikes.  That doesn’t feel good to admit about ourselves, does it?  

Luckily, it’s bullshit.

Treating “fans” as others (outsiders, people who can’t form relationships or find fulfillment in the “real world”) “risks denigrating them in ways that are insulting and absurd” (Jensen 25).  Those who take this stance, who see fans as victims of hysteria or desperate loners, do so in order to “develop and defend a self-serving moral landscape.  That terrain cultivates in us a dishonorable moral stance of superiority, because it makes other into examples of extrinsic forces, while implying that we [members solely of the mainstream] somehow remain pure, autonomous, ad unafflicted” (Jensen 25).  In short, that us/them thinking just makes people feel better about themselves by pointing out an easily-identifiable “other.”

 I have also grappled with the concept of parasocial affection, particularly with R&L.  I was well into writing my first Rhink fic when the thought crossed my mind, “Oh my god, what if I actually met these people someday?  How would I look them in the eye?  I’d feel like a crazy person (again)!”  From the safety of the Midwest, I laughed off the thought.  And then a year or so later, they were announcing their first tour. And I was still writing, here and there, still deep in my affection for them, sometimes wrestling with the thought that I’ve devoted so much energy to people who would never know I exist.  

It doesn’t matter that the attachment was in the most obvious, tangible ways only one-sided.  As an adult who is ever-learning how to navigate the worlds of her own creation and the ones over which she has far less control, I view my intense attachment to characters both real and fictional with deep fondness.   And while I may not receive affection or attention directly from the sources (R&L, fictional characters, sports teams, who/whatever we build fandoms around), I am still earning some very real rewards for my involvement: Because of them, I found my way to a participatory culture in which I was supported and encouraged to express my creativity.  This gave me the push and interest that I needed to hone skills that have not only made me a better writer, but also a better teacher and mentor.  With fandom comes the ability to immediately strike up a conversation over shared interests. With fandom comes a sense of belonging in what we have proven is an awfully divisive world.  

Right now, I’m consuming far less fandom-related material than I did a few years ago.  I don’t really watch GMM anymore and I’m on a break from Ear Biscuits (though I still love it), Gotham ended over a year ago and I’m not in the habit of reading fics right now, and I can’t yet play the remade Final Fantasy 7, so that’s out for me, too (though I know I will fall deep into that well once the game is in my hot little hands).  This all happened by itself.  I never consciously moved away from these sources; I just floated on to other interests and other levels of interest, knowing that if and when I wanted to dig back in, I could always come back.  

I used to feel quite sad at the thought of someday “moving on” from these intense interests.  I couldn’t fathom somehow falling out of love with those bands, actors, or video games.  But for me, the transition into wherever I am now has not been painful in the least.  I’m glad I knew the intensity that I did, and I’m happy with the distance I have now. And there’s a good chance I’ll be fanatic about something else someday.  I’m looking forward to it!

 Here are some responses that I couldn’t organically fit into my essay:

Yes, you can call me Wolfie if you’d like.  That name started with @missingparentheses (her second appearance in this answer!), and quickly became a reminder to not take myself too seriously.  

Second, I don’t think I know any other Type 5s!  I’m a type 8. 

Also, here’s my MLA formatted citation for the Jensen source:

Jensen, Joli. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.”   The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, Routledge, 1992, pp. 9-29.

[destinationtoast]

TOASTYSTATS: HOW BIG IS WATTPAD?

I’ve been wondering for a long time how much fanfic is on Wattpad, how fast it’s growing, and how it compares to other major platforms.  Especially after @fffinnagain did some analysis showing that posting rate on AO3 has surpassed posting on Fanfiction.net (FFN), and @fansplaining suggested in a recent episode that they thought maybe Wattpad has been turning away from fanfic, I was curious how Wattpad compared.  

Only AO3 reports the exact number of fanworks on its site.  To estimate the number of works on FFN and Wattpad, I wrote a script to sample random works from each site.  (See details below).

You can see all the images in higher resolution on imgur.

So which site has the most fanfic?  

It turns out that it depends how you count. See the first figure above.

As of late October/early November, when I was grabbing these numbers, AO3 has ~4.2M fanworks.  AO3 additionally has ~50K works in the Original Work category.

All works on FFN are supposed to be fanfic, so I took the estimated total number of works to be the total amount of fanfic.  (A fraction of the works in the Misc category appear to actually be original work, but I think generously that number could be estimated as 20K original works, which doesn’t substantially change my estimate that FFN has ~7.7M fanworks.

Unlike AO3 and FFN, Wattpad is a general self-publishing platform, and “Fanfiction” is only one genre that authors can choose.  When you do a search on Wattpad, the site says there are 4.1M fanworks matching the term “Fanfiction.”  Based on sampling, I estimate that there are may be more like 5.1M works in the “Fanfiction” genre.  And then when I hand categorized 100 of them (based on title, summary, tags, and sometimes the first page of the fic), I realized that there are a whole lot of pieces of fanfic that the authors have placed in other genres (e.g., “Romance” or “Random”).  Including works in other categories, I estimate closer to 8.0M fanworks.

Thus, Wattpad has either the lowest amount or highest amount of fanworks of all the platforms. ;P  But it seems reasonable to think it probably has the most fanworks, or close to it.  This also means that when they say they’ve had “over 400 million story uploads,” they are presumably counting individual chapters.

I’ll also get to this more in future posts, but according to both my sample and the site’s (confusing, opaque) search results, Fanfiction is the biggest genre on Wattpad.

If you’re like, Um, okay, so if it’s so big, why don’t I know anyone who uses Wattpad?  well, that’s a reasonable question.  I'm hoping to explore a number of differences between Wattpad and the other platforms in future posts.  But partial spoiler alert -- Wattpad seems to most often be used for RPF, especially K-pop and other bandom fic.  It also looks like the users skew more international than on the other sites (based on the distribution of languages -- e.g., Wattpad has lots of Spanish, Filipino, and other languages from across Asia, Europe, and Latin & South America). It possibly skews younger as well.  And listen to/read @fansplaining‘s recent episode on monetization of fanfic for some great discussion of other platform differences.

Keep reading for more about site growth and missing works.

Update: 

A clarifying note from @elizabethminkel about @fansplaining‘s comments:

“When we discussed Wattpad turning away from fanfiction, we were specifically talking about the platform, not its users. (I don’t think you made that assumption having listened, but I don’t know if it’s super clear from your description.) Wattpad has said things along the lines of, ‘Fanfiction has only ever been about 20% of our platform”—which it looks like it continues to be! So the interesting question here is how a platform continues to scale with user-generated content when a solid portion of that content has kind of maxed out monetarily. Like, more and more fic will be published on the site, but that doesn’t mean more and more profit for Wattpad or its users—which is a problem within the tech industry’s current models.“  

She also has some excellent observations about a bunch of Wattpad content not being very fic-like, which I’ll hopefully dive into more soon -- thanks, Elizabeth! :)

/Update

Which site is growing fastest?

FFN is the oldest site, but growth on the platform slowed and then started decreasing somewhere around 2012 (based on my samples and Finn’s work).  I.e., there are still works being posted each year, but at a decreasing rate.

Meanwhile, both AO3 (founded 2007) and the “Fanfiction” genre on Wattpad (founded 2006) are growing fast; posting rates surpassed that of FFN in 2015 and 2014, respectively.  Wattpad appears to be growing fastest.  As of November: 

Wattpad’s “Fanfiction” genre received at estimated 1.6M new works so far in 2018, which means I’d estimate (very) roughly that there could be more like 2.5M new fanworks total, including ones in other genres. But that’s based on my hand labeling a sample of 100 works from various years, and it assumes that the ratio of unlabeled:labeled fanfic on the site has stayed roughly the same over the years.  That assumption may not be right.

AO3 has 0.9M new works so far in 2018.  

FFN has 0.3M new works so far in 2018.  

Based on past patterns, I predict there will be big surges in production rate in AO3 December due to annual holiday breaks and gift exchanges -- it looks like this seasonal surge occurs more dramatically on AO3 than on FFN, though it happens on both.  I don’t know about seasonal production patterns on Wattpad.

Which site ends up with the most deleted or unpublished works?

Update: With huge thanks to @zz9pzza for clarifications about AO3 and examples -- I’ve rephrased most of the following from them:  As of a system update around 4 years ago, AO3 only assigns 1/3 of possible story IDs to actual stories (to avoid numbering collisions), which means that most of the “missing” story IDs were never actually assigned. For instance, the following sequence of story IDs would be assigned: [16686808, 16686811, 16686814, 16686817, 16686820, 16686823].  Some quick estimates lead to thinking AO3 may have more like a 14% deletion rate -- far lower than what I show in terms of missing story IDs.

Do the other platforms also have similar explanations for their large missing ID rates?  Not necessarily -- FFN does not appear to be doing a similar thing currently (Nov 2018); there are recent sequences of several ID numbers in a row corresponding to actual stories (e.g.: 3119884, 3119885, 3119886, 3119887).  Wattpad also does not appear to be skipping IDs, as I found some pairs of IDs in a row, and recent sequences of story IDs with very few missing (e.g., 159620101, 159620102, 159620104, 159620108, 159620110).  So while these platforms may not have assigned all possible IDs, but I can’t detect any regular pattern to what’s missing, as is the case for AO3.

I updated the slide up at the top, but in case you clicked through from an older reblog, here it is again:

 /Update

AO3 and Wattpad both assign a new story ID to each new draft of a work, meaning that all unpublished works have URLs that don’t correspond to stories (edit: but as mentioned in the update above, AO3 doesn’t assign all possible IDs to stories).  FFN only assigns a new story ID at the time that a new work is published. All platforms also end up with some published works being deleted, either by the author or the platform (works can be deleted for being spam or violating TOS -- e.g., being explicit on FFN).  Thanks to Finn for this info -- see their post for more details.

As expected from the fact that it doesn’t assign story IDs for unpublished works, FFN has the lowest missing work rate fewer missing story IDs than Wattpad -- but it’s all due to deletions of previously published works (some done by FFN, which has done a number of mass deletions due to TOS changes, and some presumably by the works’ authors)  Wattpad has the highest missing story ID rate, but it’s unclear what that indicates. Many of these Wattpad works could be drafts that haven’t made it out of draft form yet. And some (maybe a lot) of the IDs may never have been assigned to a story in the first place; that is a side effect of some methods of database construction.   It also seems (based on notes in the summaries and titles) that on Wattpad it’s very common for authors to revise works that have already been published, and it’s possible that many authors use Wattpad’s “Unpublish” option to temporarily revert existing works to drafts.  I also found a few cases of spam/advertisements in the sample of 100 fanworks I hand classified, so possibly Wattpad has such a high missing works rate in part due to spam takedowns.

Detailed methods

I used AO3 Work Search to determine the exact numbers for AO3.  

All sites assign higher story IDs (the numbers found in URLs) to more recent works, so on the remaining two sites, I found the highest newly published work ID I could and used it as a maximum.  For Wattpad, the max story ID was about 160M.  For FFN, it was about 13M.  I sampled 9000 URLs on Wattpad, of which 1176 had stories.  I sampled 3500 URLs on Fanfiction.net, of which 2048 had stories.  (Feel free to use the data for your own analyses.)  

(Aside:  more recently, I’ve seen a few MUCH higher story IDs on Wattpad -- closer to 650M.  So I did several samples of 1000-2000 URLs using that higher number, and I couldn’t find any stories with IDs over 167M; it seems like there are very few with the much higher numbers.  I also double checked my belief that story IDs were assigned in order that drafts were created by graphing date published against story ID and found it to be accurate -- there were a few stories published long after their story IDs were assigned, but generally there was an increase in story ID by date published.)

In both cases, I drew the samples in batches of 500-2000 fanworks at a time, and I averaged the estimates I got from each subsample.  For Wattpad, I got a mean estimate of 20.83M fanworks overall (stdev = 1.42M; stderr = 0.50M) and 5.11M works in the “Fanfiction” genre (stdev = 0.60M; stderr = 0.19M).  For FFN, I got a mean estimate of 7.65M fanworks (stdev = 0.19M; stderr = 0.08M).  

I found a kludgey way to search FFN that I *think* returned most/all of the works on the site.  The results contained 7.60M works (close to my estimate of 7.65M), so that also strengthens my confidence in my estimates.  

[more toastystats] 

[thecloserkin]

book review: Marian Veevers, Jane & Dorothy (2018)

Genre: Biography

Is it the main pairing: Yes

Is it canon: Yes

Is it explicit: No

Is it endgame: No

Is it shippable: Yes

Bottom line: Y’all fools: Stanning Lord Byron and his half-sister Augusta whom he didn’t even meet until he was nearly grown, never mind whether he actually knocked her up. Me, an intellectual: William and Dorothy Wordsworth are right there, eloping to the countryside and spending the rest of their days holed up in a picturesque cottage composing poetry.

First let’s have a detour where I yell about Crimson Peak (2015, dir. Guillermo del Toro). A few of the recent asks about incest vs. the patriarchy got me thinking about this line from Jane & Dorothy: “the malevolent power of married women over their spinsters-in-law.” Between the wife and the unmarried sister it’s obvious who has more power and it’s clearly not the spinster sister-in-law—and yet Guillermo del Toro would have us believe that Edith in Crimson Peak is helpless before Lucille’s resistance to giving up the skeleton key (the one that opens every room in the house). Edith is made out to be the victim of Lucille’s bloodthirsty unhinged jealousy, when she’s not only THE WIFE she’s got ALL THE MONEY, she’s literally holding all the cards??? It doesn’t add up. This biography is the antidote to that. It looks at the paucity of options open to your average 19th century girl who just wants a Room of One’s Own to write in, and situates her bid for freedom in the context of having no good options. The trouble with “Crimson Peak” was not that Edith wasn’t relatable or that I didn’t identify with her; when Thomas tears her down in that faux-breakup speech he attacks her on the terrain where she’s most vulnerable, her abilities as a writer. The trouble with Crimson Peak was that this beat would have hit so much harder had it landed on Lucille, a woman who’s WAY more vulnerable than Edith by dint of having (1) no marriage prospects and (2) no inheritance. Without Thomas this bitch has (3) no survival strategy either! Otoh take away Thomas and Edith is still left with her dad’s $$$, Edith still has Alan waiting in the wings to swoop in & save her, in other words Edith will be just fine. No wonder Lucille feels so threatened!! The situations are not even comparable. Here then is Jane & Dorothy which offers two case studies of women whose impulse to write & create was just as strong as Edith’s, but whose plight was much closer to Lucille’s ie. precarious as fuck.

I picked this book up because it’s actually a dual biography of Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, and I’m a basic bitch and Jane Austen is my eternal favorite. I’m going to focus on the Dorothy chapters but rest assured I read the Jane chapters with equal gusto. Jane Austen (b. 1775) and Dorothy Wordsworth (b. 1771) were both born into the British pseudo-gentry, which means they were too highborn to go and get a paying gig as a governess or companion but not highborn enough to have any independent source of income (neither of them had a dowry settled on them). While the two women never crossed paths, the arcs of their lives run in parallel as they pursue divergent strategies to secure their futures. So the primary imperative here is to avoid a life of domestic drudgery. But the secondary imperative, because these are both perceptive girls with rich inner lives, is this:

For an intelligent woman, confined to a society which denies her higher education and restricts her existence largely to the home, the male companion with whom she shares her life is her chief provider, not only of security and affection, but of intellectual stimulation.

This is a popular romance novel plot, do I want to marry a man who is a bore (possibly also a boor) or do I want to starve hmmmm. The point is that women are frequently starved for both affection and intellectual stimulation, and it’s little wonder Dorothy fell so hard for her brother William when he showered her with both. Dorothy and William were separated as children when, after the death of their mother, she was sent to live with an aunt in West Yorkshire (she was seven, he was eight). Nine years later they reconnected and sparks flew almost immediately. I mean I think their letters speak for themselves:

”the last time we were Together William won my Affection to a Degree which I cannot describe.”

What kind of brother needs to “win” his sister’s affection? Most of them treat sisters like furniture.

”Never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness,” he wrote, “but I have wished that you could be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it.”

standard “everything beautiful either reminds me of you, or makes me want to share it with you” pablum but EXTREMELY effective for all that

but enough he is my brother, why should I describe him? I shall be launching again into panegyric

Dorothy: hahaha but don’t you think my brother was looking mighty fiiiiiine today

”his attentions to me were such as the most insensible of mortals must have been touched with”

”I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.”

That letter is from William, and you have to remember that William was supposed to be a huge dick who routinely ignored his friends’ missives leaving them in suspense whether he was alive or dead and yet he managed a lively & regular correspondence with Dorothy for years before they moved in together. It’s almost like he treated her … special.

”that sympathy which will almost identify us when we have stole to our little cottage”

These kids are already plotting their elopement jfc! Here are some snippets from Dorothy’s diary from much later, after they have in fact achieved The Dream of their own cottage:

”After dinner we made a pillow of my shoulder, I read to him and my Beloved slept.”

”The fire flutters and the watch ticks and I hear nothing save the Breathing of my Beloved and he now and then pushes his book forward and turns over a leaf.” It is a picture of domestic contentment such as Jane Austen draws to portray a genuinely happy marriage.

”After we came in we sat in deep silence at the window — I on a chair and William with his hand on my shoulder. We were deep in Silence and love, a blessed hour.”

This is literally #goals. Veevers points out that “the conflation of marriage with home, spinsterhood with insecurity” meant that “William was promising the kind of permanence and safety which women usually found in marriage.” Dorothy really thought she could Have It All: a home of her own and a rich, stimulating intellectual life shared with the man she loved. And she proceeded to spend the rest of her life making fair copies of his poems. Hell, she pushed him to be a poet in the first place (it was not at all clear initially that this was the best plan for William, who could just have easily have embarked on a career as a political polemicist, but it was Dorothy who pushed him to be a poet, Dorothy who spent the rest of her life copying out his verses in her fairer hand). Early on Dorothy & William befriended the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was so envious of their bond that he complained, “You have all in each other, but I am lonely, and want you!” Can you b e l i e v e Coleridge actually said that. If one of you hoes doesn’t write me the William/Dorothy Historical RPF that’s Coleridge Outsider POV I s2g I will do my damnedest to die of consumption.

Veveers sums it up this way: “It was a relationship few women would be able to have with their husbands, for, at the time, the two sexes were expected to inhabit different mental landscapes.” To put it bluntly women had ovaries instead of brains; they just weren’t interested in the same stuff a man was. Otoh you have William and Dorothy Wordsworth, actual soulmates: the historical consensus is there is “some uncertainty as to whether she would be best described as muse, emotional support, secretary or co-author.” And she didn’t hide it, either. This is where you really see the difference between Dorothy, who is so open, and Austen heroines like Eleanor Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), Fanny Price (Mansfield Park) or Anne Eliot (Persuasion) who also feel things deeply but had to regulate the bejeezus out of their emotional responses. This is Dorothy:

After any separation her joy at meeting her brother again was uncontrollable. “I believe I screamed,” she admitted on one occasion when there were witnesses.

Uncontrollable screaming in front of witnesses every time she’s reunited with her brother??? WE STAN. This is how low Dorothy’s spirits sink whenever he’s gone:

”I slept in Wm.’s bed, and I slept badly, for my thoughts were full of William.”

adkfjdkfjdkfjdk I just want to add that when William is home the floorboards are so thin that she can hear him pacing in the bedroom above hers, so his insomnia keeps both of them up at night but she doesn’t mind, she can’t sleep until he falls asleep, she would probably give up a kidney or a lung if she thought it would sell 500 more copies for him. I’m torn between GIRL HE AIN’T WORTH IT and stanning her even harder for being so ride or die on any topic that touches her brother (later, when he has kids, she decides William’s kids are smarter and better-looking than everyone else’s kids).

This is the most iconic line in the entire book, from a letter Dorothy writes to an interfering relative who deplores Dorothy’s judgment for throwing in her lot with a penniless failson like William:

”I affirm that I consider the character and virtues of my brother sufficient protection”

The icily scathing tone of the setdown is PERFECTION. But also, this just in your brother abandoned his pregnant Catholic mistress in France. You know this. Yet here you are gallivanting around the countryside in his company. In fact, when he proves too much of a coward to tell your uncle himself about the existence of said pregnant mistress—this is the uncle who funded all of William’s education and reasonably expects some return on it—he delegates Dorothy to break the news. Dorothy also winds up in charge of all correspondence with the poor girl, who writes occasionally asking for a little money or when is William coming back to France to marry me, and it’s Dorothy who has to fob her off. And this whole incident—the revelation of the French mistress, the break with the family, William refusing to take holy orders to become a clergyman—is so pivotal in their relationship! They were close before but this is the irrevocable step when Dorothy decides to join her fate to his. And her motivation could not be clearer:

William’s outspoken affection for her seems to have first aroused a reciprocal love in Dorothy, but it was his fall from grace, his isolation and his need of a friend, which provided the final catalyst that raised her gradually deepening affection into wholehearted, single-minded devotion.

She saw his need and responded almost involuntarily. She is a RESCUER.

Dorothy, was in one way, very fortunate to have fallen in love with her brother. “Rambling around the country on foot” with a slightly disreputable brother might bring down the censure of her more conventional relatives, but it was a good deal safer than rambling about with a man who was not a brother.

This is the kind of behavior that if two unrelated people engaged in it must have resulted in the man being honor-bound to extend an offer of marriage, because a woman has nothing if she doesn’t have her virtue. Two siblings roaming the countryside, picking flowers and wading thru streams and stargazing? My god what PRIME fodder for fake married tropes! Just present yourself at the first inn you come to as a married couple and then guess what? There was only one bed!!!!

at Grasmere “there was an unnatural tale current of Wordsworth … having been intimate with his own sister.”

tell me MOAR omg this is so deliciously Gothic i keep thinking about that line from Wuthering Heights “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

at Alfoxton, “the master of the house,” it was said, “had no wife with him, but only a woman who passes for his sister.”

PASSES for his sister trololololol like they don’t act the way you’d expect of a brother and sister, like they’re too into each other.

And it was generally accepted that immorality and radical anti-British sentiment went together.

But really William got much more staid and less radical as he got older, and Dorothy was never political because her energies were centered on William William William. On top of which it’s hard to overlook the fact that William would go into Dorothy’s journals and “borrow” her words and publish them verbatim as his own; he felt as entitled to her intellectual labor as her domestic labor, and there is nothing radically egalitarian about that. So I definitely don’t think this is a case where incest is subversive so much as incest illuminating existing hierarchies & oppressions. Veveers writes: “An unmarried woman’s hold on her own time was extremely fragile. She could be made use of in any crisis, transported against her wishes” to fulfill another family members’ needs. Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra evidently shouldered both their weights when it came to this sort of emotional labor: writing letters of thanks & condolence, minding their brothers’ children, calming hypochondriac aunts down, attending births of little nephews & nieces. Cassandra doing all this extra labor gave Jane the space and time to write. Moreover Jane had formed the ambition to write. Dorothy, on the other hand, thought anything worth saying was already being said by William. And she didn’t have her own Cassandra to share the unceasing burden of housework with:

In fact, the domestic labor and childcare that lay ahead of Dorothy were almost indistinguishable from the duties she had escaped at Forncett rectory. But now she was to be living in a home she had chosen, with a man she loved.

Did it matter in the end, Dorothy’s rebellion? If she’d remained a hanger-on in her uncle’s household, living on his charity, her life would not have been outwardly all that different. I have to believe that her choices did matter, of course. It would be easy to sit here and speculate that if Dorothy had not poured all her mental and physical resources into supporting William’s career, she too might have produced another Pride & Prejudice, but naturally we cannot know that. What we know is that Dorothy and William were 100% in love, a fact that anyone with a modicum of reading comprehension can verify by reading their letters. Why is this not more widely discussed? William Wordsworth was not exactly an obscure poet. The explanation, again, comes back to patriarchy:

The idea that Dorothy might have inspired (or felt) desire at Dove Cottage was as abhorrent to mid-20th century academics as it was to gentlemen of the early 19th century … who preferred to think of unmarried women drooping and degenerating after the age of 25, rather than maintaining a subversive and disturbing sexuality.

I wish I could say that William and Dorothy grew old together at Dove Cottage. What actually happened is he got married (she talked him into it—she chose a mutual friend of theirs whom they’d known for ages) and accidentally fell in love with his wife oops. His new wife was neither young nor pretty, in fact she was painfully plain, but that William became genuinely attached to her there can be no doubt. Dorothy continued to live with them and look after their children until her death. So I think we have avoided the worst case scenario, the malevolent-power-of-the-married-woman-ruins-her-spinster-in-law’s-life scenario: This is what happened to Jane Austen when Jane’s father unexpectedly announced his retirement, uprooting Jane and Cassandra from the Steventon rectory where they’d lived all their lives and forcibly removing them to Bath, where Jane was so miserable she did no writing for years. All this upheaval on account of Jane’s brother and his wife wanting the Steventon rectory and its income for their own! The accursed woman was probably measuring the drapes before she’d moved in. Anyway, it is fortunate this open enmity did not characterize Dorothy Wordsworth’s relationship with her sister in law; they were fast friends and they remained friends after the latter’s marriage to William. But instead of William-and-Dorothy forming the nucleus of life at Dove Cottage now it was William-and-Mary, and if this did not sting at least a little Dorothy would not be human. She had been supplanted in William’s heart. I CRY.

Because I’m literal shipper trash I want to end on the bittersweet note of SIBLINGS EXCHANGING RINGS AS A SYMBOL OF COMMITMENT EVEN THO THEY CAN’T LEGALLY GET MARRIED. This is Dorothy’s description of the morning of William and Mary’s wedding, right before they leave the house to attend the ceremony:

”I gave him the wedding ring—with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before—he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently.” It might be said that William married her before he married Mary, and that Dorothy was making a promise in that upstairs room try like the one Mary was about to make in church.

it’s been two months since I read this book and i’m STILL SCREECHING byeeeee

[miseriathome]

Requested (cross)post about celebrity rpf

[Real person fic] is almost always about celebrities. And at a certain point, we don't actually understand or know celebrities as real people. After all, celebrities are never actually genuine to the public--even if they seem genuine, it's always a part of the role they play as highly public figures. Celebrities as we know them are personas that real people put on. Fic about them by people who have never intimately met them before is actually fic about their personas--not about the real person. Likewise, as always, fic isn't actually a representation of what you want in real life. You can absolutely write fanfiction about Martin Freeman/Benedict Cumberbatch while being aware of/respecting their real world relationships with other people, and their potential forever lack of interest in one another along those lines. So to that extent, I don't see why rpf about celebrities should be a big deal.

And because I like pointing out grey areas as a way to illustrate why lines are drawn in the sand and nothing matters, here's a bunch of bullet points:

What about self-insert non-rpf fic? What about second-person/reader fic? Aren't there real people involved in those? What if your original character is a thinly-veiled real person?

How do anti-rpf folks feel about Hamilton? Or Bohemian Rhapsody? Or that Steve Jobs movie? Is it only okay when the real people are dead? What about The Social Network? Or that movie about the Obamas? How far in the past do real events have to be to be acceptably reportrayed with creative licenses taken? Are SNL's incredibly timely political skits acceptable? Or are these things only okay because they're professionally produced? In which case, isn't this all just catering to the invisible line between professional authordom and fanfiction authordom that literally constantly shows up in fandom wank as a blatantly obvious double standard?

To follow that train of thought, is it wrong to make posts like "Steve Irwin definitely forgave that manta ray in heaven?" Because you're literally setting up a fictional interaction about a real person against that real person's consent (since, after all, he could have secretly resented and hated that rayfor killing him, even despite his public persona saying it was just doing its job! Because the disjoint between celebrities' public and personal lives is not one you're privy to seeing!) What about posts that are like "Marie Kondo loves you?" What if it's not true? You're literally putting words in a real person's mouth. Where's the line when it comes to acceptable shared comfort illusions based around real people, and when does it start being "too much" and turn into unacceptable real person fic?

Isn't it kind of fucky to say things like "I ship the Obamas?" I mean, what if behind closed doors, their relationship is actually super abusive? Then you're shipping real life abuse! And what if they got divorced? Would you stop shipping them? Or would you continue shipping two people who don't want to be together against their consent? /s

You know when little girls fill up notebooks with "Mrs [their name] [celebrity name]" because they have crushes on celebrities? That's literally a ship. It comes with daydreams about getting married and being domestic and doing interviews because now you're famous. And daydreams are just... unwritten fic. So if an entire real person fanfiction exists in somebody's mind, is it still a problem? Or is it only bad when somebody can see it? What if that little girl tells a friend about those daydreams? What if she writes the fic in a notebook? What if it's in a word doc? What if it's on a private only-those-with-a-link-can-access webpage? What if it only gets sent to people who signed themselves up to be part of a fic-sharing email chain? What if it's on a tiny blog under a read more? When does a fanfiction actually become a fanfiction, and therefore policeable the way thoughts can't be?

What about when the daydream is subconscious? What if it was a dream somebody had about real people? What if they write it down in a dream journal? What if they tell somebody else about it? What if they submit it to a crowdsourced dream journal online?

Where's the line between a fic and a headcanon? When we made memes about Joe Biden desperately wanting to share government secrets, was that going too far? Is role play based on real people fucked up? Because if it is, then the source of the "then perish" meme should be morally appalling.

Boy, do I have thoughts about people who fight over who a celebrity should "get with." Lots of people will only stan the person that somebody is currently with, speaking to that person's decision to be involved with them... but is a show like The Bachelor where you're supposed to root for somebody with a high probability of being wrong exploitative? The people on that show are all real people, and the proper way to engage with that show is to want two of them to get together, but you don't actually know if they will. So really, you're headcanoning and you're shipping. About real people. While also doing exactly what those tv shows expect you to do. Because it's almost like this wank is a nonissue in regular life.

What about tabloids and reality television? It's well known that tabloids lie and reality television is partially scripted/omits things in favor of creating dramatic and entertaining narratives.

What about when it's a fic about somebody whose public persona is very obviously not like their real self? What about when somebody plays a fictional character, but that fictional character has the same name as their real life self (The Colbert Report, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show)? How do you navigate that? Is it okay to write about the fictional characters they play? Or if that crossing a line because in some sense, those fictional characters are still them?

Here's the thing: Being anti- something doesn't do anything. It's not even an ideology, it's just a moral code that nobody else has to adhere to. And especially when it comes to a decentralized, non-industrial, unpoliceable phenomena like fanfiction, there's no way to change what people are putting out or why or how. So really, you have to suck up the fact that even if you hate it and it goes against your personal morals, it's going to happen, and then the real question is "what are you going to do about it?" And that's where an anti- morality falls flat, is because they either can't rise above moaning about it or they go out of their way to attack people for having different moralities. So in my opinion, the far more productive and uplifting ideology is to go "okay, this thing exists and I just have to live with that fact. What can I do to help people?"

And... I think also.......... the argument that real people aren't consenting to be a part of those fanfics falls flat when those real people aren't actually a part of the process of creating that fanfiction. You don't get to consent (or not) to something that doesn't involve you, that doesn't affect you. And the idea that these things affect celebrities is ridiculous. Wank about real person fic, headcanons about OC's, etc are ridiculous. Fanfics are thoughts put on paper and published, and really it's only possible to be against what you can see. If you loudly decree that (any type of) fanfiction is wrong, the least that happens is literally nothing, and the most that happens is you manage to chase it out of the public eye, but it will nonetheless continue on smaller websites or in email chain or in physical zines or in personal notebooks or in peoples' brains. But if anti- types are just satisfied with having it out of sight and out of mind, then they don't actually care about the arguments they're making about peoples' rights... and this effect could have just as easily been achieved by those people curating their own environments to not contain real person fiction, instead of treading on the toes of people writing it.

Being a celebrity means being known and being interpreted and even being misread. In fact, being a social being comes with these risks. People will misunderstand you, misread you, misattribute things to you, misremember you, miscategorize you. I think there are a lot of people who fear what it means to be known, and they channel their anxieties and insecurities into "defending" the "rights" of others not to be misrepresented in others' minds. But that's not how being a secure person works. Becoming, for all intents and purposes, a persona in the minds of others--being turned into a caricature and being framed and reframed through every lens possible--is part of the job description of being a public figure. People are supposed to think they understand something about celebrities. Celebrities are supposed to sell themselves as fantasy/outrage fuel. If a celebrity weren't interesting enough to invoke masses of people thinking about them, they would be out of a job. People are supposed to turn celebrities into dolls to play with in their minds, and there's no shame in engaging with culture as culture is set up to function.

Obviously this write-up overlooks non-celebrity real person fic which has more nuance to it, but ultimately I think the point that “people are going to do it anyways, so what are you going to do about it?” still stands.

[chasingnewdawn]

Writing “Chasing New Dawn” - Characterization and echoes of Fanfictional Roots

A month ago, a facilitator of one of the writing groups I’m part of asked an interesting question. You see, she doesn’t write fiction. Like, at all. And she wondered, with a certain sense of wonder, how those of us who do write fiction make stuff up.

It’s a question that becomes a lot more interesting in my case - seeing as how I’m not exactly starting from scratch.

For the most of you who don’t know it, Chasing New Dawn owns its entire existence to “What Did Zoey Say?.” I wasn’t that big of a fan of Zoey 101 back when it actually aired, but I watched enough episodes that the reunion short film thingy resonated. . And after I finished watching it, the old theme song, the bloody theme song, got stuck in my head. And it wouldn’t leave. For days. Like, I literaly spent two days with the song playing in my head over and over and over... ... Until I had the vision of a power armor snapping into place around Zoey, Iron Man style. 

That was enough to kick the song right out of my head. But the image intrigued me. 

From the get-go, the story itself wasn’t going to be a fanfic. I mean, I could have done a Super Sentai style Zoey 101 AU, but so long as I was going that far off canon, I figured I might as well make it original.

When it comes to characters, doing something original is actually kind of liberating. You don’t have to keep the characters consistent with the source. If anything, the less true to the source you are, the further you get away from the fanfic territory.

As I’ve written before, in the original show, an argument could be made that Quinn was autistic, but it was far from sure thing. But since Riley was an original character, I could run with it. And, because I decided to base her high-functioning autism on my high-functioning autism, I wound up giving her some of my interests (dance music!) and quirks (dealing with stress by pushing my fingernails into the sides of my fingers, the way she isn’t entirely sure what to do with her hands, the aversion to shopping malls). And her backstory was actually inspired by a conversation I had on the train with a guy who grew up in rural Appalachia. 

One thing to keep in mind is that, like I said, I was more of a casual fan of the original show. When I went back to look at the character bios, I realized that there is some important stuff that I just plain forgot - like how Zoey had a younger brother who was on the freaking show. Which, again, is where writing something original comes in handy, because you don’t have to follow any of those things. 

It has been an interesting process. Maddie is clearly inspired by Zoey, but I also kept in mind that I was writing a leader of a senshi team, so she is more strategic, and understands people better than Zoey ever did. And the fact that, unlike Zoey, she grew up in a posh and not very happy family made a difference. Nicole was fiercely loyal to her friends and “boy-crazy” (in a kid-TV friendly way). With Liamhain, I could push that “boy-crazy” part in the way the original show never could - but overall, a lot of her personality was actually based on a sketch I drew while brainstorming. The fact that I wound up drawing a curvier woman with a lot of curly hair, a huge smile and lots of flowing fabric and big artisan jewelry shaped how I developed the rest of the character. Including the fact that she was named “Liamhain” (Originally, I had a placeholder name “Connie,” but it sounded too much like “Corey,” and, once I had a better idea of what her character was like, I decided that she needed an old-school Irish name that would trip up people trying to pronounce it). 

Corey wound up being the closest to his Zoey 101 inspiration. Like Chase, he is a caring, overall decent and quietly supportive person who harbors not-so-subtle feelings for a female lead. I just amped up his idealism and made him more of a rule-follower... And, more fundamentally, I tried to think of the ways his positive qualities, including his devotion to Zoey, could actually work against him. I sort of set a challenge for myself - how could I take the character I was usually inclined to like and make him less likable, while still preserving the fundamentals. 

Tony feels a similar niche as Michael, in that he’s a best friend of female lead’s love interest, and a generally cool and supportive, but... Well, that would be spoilers.

With others, I went further away from their inspirations. Like Logan, Daisuke started out as a rich guy who hit on everything that moved, but, to be honest, I was more thinking of a classic “bad boy love interest” archetype than Logan. And, just as I tried to find something negative about a nice and caring guy, I tried to find some positive traits in a bad boy. And tried to better justify some of the brooding characters like this often do. 

Raveena’s calm and collected, deadpan and generally responsible perfectionist who acts she way she does in response to her upbringing doesn’t have much in common with Lola other than some fashion choices and the fact that she joined the cast later. And while there are some elements of her backstory that Victorious fans would recognize, she’s no Tori Vega, either. And Shelby owes more to, well, Shelby Woo than she ever did to Dana. 

Of course, the fact that in the story’s present, Chasing New Dawn characters are 10 years older, and somewhat wiser, makes a difference, too. It lets me put in more character development, and allows them to evolve a little. 

Like I said, it is kind of weird creative state to be in, because I do sometimes pull elements from the original show. Like, while I was writing what would become the first few chapters, I completely forgot Logan and Quinn dated. I decided that this was an interesting element to bring in... but because, by that point, the characters diverged enough from their inspirations that I had to make up the whole new justification for why they would ever be interested in each other. And Daisuke and Riley wound up having a supportive friendship in their backstory that Logan and Quinn most definitely didn’t have. 

It’s a murky territory - and an interesting creative place to be in. Especially in the age when a Twilight AU got turned into a best-selling book and movie trilogy, and a One Direction RPF fic got turned into a book and a movie while changing literally nothing but names.