#but it's every where nowadays especially in danmei

[touchlikethesun]

one of the slogans i see often from antis, and especially since getting into danmei and back into BL generally, is the phrase "get help" being applied to people that are into harder kinks or "toxic"/"problematic" dynamics, and this bothers me quite a bit because... like why do you think those people are into that? whether consciously or not, most people are seeking comfort and catharsis thru media, and the excessive media consumption common in bl spaces especially belies a form of self soothing. while it's not a perfect solution, a lot of people in bl/danmei fandom spaces are trying to help themselves cope with trauma, and just because person A copes by reading thousands of pages of brief hand touches and lingering gazes and purple prose about capital 'D' Devotion, and person B copes by reading about taboos power imbalances and intense sexual acts and dangerous emotions (funnily enough i've found devotion is common to both 'sides' as it were), does not mean that person A and person B aren't engaging in the same fundamental behaviour

i do think there can be an issue if people are to forceful trying to push their taste on to others (altho i will say this goes both ways), and the moment you start being weird towards real people in real life then that is definitely a problem, but the condescending and dismissive "get help" towards people that are just expressing their tastes in fiction in spaces dedicated to just that i feel is unhelpful, unnecessary and frankly ignorant to the complexities of our fellow humans' inner lives

[sunshine304]

Yeah I saw minmoyu's post, which was worded very eloquently, and they really said it well :*it's not anyone's problem if someone is poor and can't afford to buy it* because that is very true, and I will be one of those insignificant people who'll gradually get purged out of the cnovel fandom on the grounds of being poor so I thought it's interesting that the moral side of the argument have such a lovely way of expressing that, their hot take really helped

Referring to this post by Minmoyu. It seems that all this escalated in an extreme way over on twitter (where I'm not and I'm thankful for that every day XD); some harsh and insulting words were said on both sides which is not okay. But that seems to be how twitter operates nowadays, sadly.

I do feel sorry for people who truly are not able to pay. And I'm sorry that this might mean for you that you won't be able to read some of it anymore. Capitalism is a fucked up system and the huge gap between the very poor and the very rich seems to be especially extreme in the US. I of course don't know where you're from, Anon, but just going from what I see on my dash about bad financial situations – the majority is from the US. And if a person cannot spare those $ 17,- to pay on jjwx because this would mean they won't be able to pay their rent next week, or they'll have to starve for the next three weeks, then it's understandable how very upset some readers of translated danmei are about the situation. There are of course also others, who have other reasons why they don't want / cannot pay, some more and some less convincing or reasonable.

I am in the lucky and privileged situation that I do not have to worry about basic living costs, simply because I've got a rather secure full-time job, lucked out with a really cheap flat, and several of my hobbies that I usually pay for were not possible during the last year (like going to the cinema). I am also lucky to live in Germany, where the social system usually acts as a safety net for people who lose their job or who have health issues etc.

Though I do acknowledge the problems of people who really cannot pay, this is still, at the end of the day, a problem of an unjust society and capitalist market structures.

It's not the fault of danmei fan translators, who provide a service for free and in their free time. Translating these works takes a lot of time. I've done a tiny bit of translation work for my job, which really had me struggling at times, looking up words even though I understood the sentence – but finding a fitting translation that didn't sound awkward was difficult. And that was only from English to German, which is quite straigthtforward!

So, as hard as it may be for some readers of translated danmei, the translators are free to do with their hard work what they want. Insulting them, grumbling about how "what they're doing is illegal anyway“ etc., ist just very disrespectful. Without their hard work, Western audiences wouldn't even be able to read danmei, or wouldn't even know about it at all. Because the fan translators could just... not translate anything. They don't need to do it for themselves. They understand the stories just fine. But they do it because they enjoy the stories so much that they want to make them available to a wider audience. And I don't think it's too much to ask that the people who can afford to support the author also do so. Because in the end, jjwx is a business and how many copies are sold of a particular danmei has direct consequences for the author (of course in how much they earn, but also increased popularity may lead to more adaptations etc.).

I guess I'm not the right person to really commiserate, because I don't have any stakes in this. I do have several danmei files saved, but it's not what I currently read. That's mostly fanfiction, tbh. XD And the many books I've piled up over the years... So if danmei would suddenly be behind a paywall, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it or be super sad. I'm just not invested enough. (I also, as I said, am privileged enough to pay that money, if I really wanted to read that particular translation.)

But I'm sorry for people who really got hit with this, and who are genuinely hurt by it (and not just being whiny babies because that's what you do on twitter).

As far as I can see, translators aren't locking the main works, but are for now going for some extra chapters that aren't necessary for the main story, or for advanced chapters if readers don't want to wait. This might be a good compromise for now, and perhaps when everyone has cooled down again, there can be a reasonable conversation about it.

So, this is much longer than I intended, and I ended up writing out my thoughts on this issue in general... Uhm yeah.

[momoliee]

[cfc ch66]

So now it’s xqc’s turn to kabedon he yu and bully him a little I see I see

Xqc can be so mean under all the fake politeness💀

Their showdowns are taking a whole new turn with all the sexual tension

“The service of the night is over” so sassy😭😭😭

He yu admitting that he’s using xqc to fill in the love he’s missing, he used to fill in for the family love and now it’s a different sort of love sighs

The last few paragraphs… :( the way he talks in an abandoned scared lonely madman sort of way, too scared to let go lest the person leaves so readily, how he doesn’t want to be kicked out even if it means staying by force :((((

It really explains why he yu is doing what he’s doing

Last but not least, regarding the author’s note :

Meatbun has every write to write whatever the fuck she wants to write, no matter how ‘morally incorrect’ it is. It’s fiction. She’s writing as a hobby, not a job. Idk what’s wrong with people nowadays telling authors what to write and what not to write instead of deciding for themselves what to read and what not the read, but damn y’all are so fucking entitled. These authors don’t owe you shit, especially when they’re creating for their own pleasure. Get off your high horse and go read the books that cater to your taste.

I’ll be honest, the reason I started reading danmei is cause I got so bored of the typical YA self sacrificing hero. It felt like I was reading the same damn story over and over again. I wanted more, I wanted more interesting and fleshed out characters. I wanted to read about characters with terrible morals, characters who do questionable things for understandable reasons, characters who want to sacrifice the world for their loved ones. Do you see me harassing YA authors who write about the good old chosen one kind hero? No

I simply look for what matches my tastes. Fuck off to where you belong and leave meatbun alone.

[deliciousscaloppine]

Hot Takes Galore: A brief overview of fandom backlashes that influenced fanfiction writing traditions as I have personally experienced them:

In today’s segment I am going to talk about copyright infringement.

First let me preface this by saying I have only ever been in 3 fandoms, starting from 2008 and I have never been terribly active - like this blog has been the most active I’ve ever been in any fandom ever. I am not going to talk about particular fandom dramas because I am pretty clueless about that. What I am going to talk about is that friction between “reality” and online spaces that brought about changes that are still in effect today in the way fanfiction is written and perceived.

In 2008 as I was entering, nearly every piece of fanfiction had a disclaimer about the author not owning the characters, which were the property of Corporate Entity X, or Author Y, and also not profiting from the work in any shape or form. At the time getting money from writing fanfiction was a gigantic taboo, and almost no one did it, or advertised that they did. 

But as I understand through convention culture printed writing did circulate in exchange for money (zines), and at least in Japan one could sell doujinshis (self-published stories and comics, often within the framework of another work) in certain events. Although this was largely considered “illegal” under copyright laws, and artists could be persecuted or blacklisted from entering the industry if discovered. That’s also why fanartists often to this day may screen where and when their work is viewed, and move to take down reposts, or call others to protest if artworks are circulated without permission outside of the artist’s page.

Older fandom people also hated authors that moved against fanfiction, a big case being Anne Rice, the vampire lady everyone - including me - copies when writing about vampires. And now I am going to talk a little about that.

Usually, writers, just sit somewhere cosy and write, and often they have no idea, absolutely no idea, on how to manage their writing properties - usually a lawyer does that, and lawyers want A Lot Of Money (A brief brush with justice and lawyers over a civil dispute I won, cost me 1000 euros out of nowhere, in a single day, and no I couldn’t avoid it because I was the accused one, so I had to appear with some representation). 

So sometimes, quite often, it’s a lawyer that activates a writer or other artist to move against “smaller” copyright infringements, in order to make bank. And if one suffers such a case, they should make it as apparent as possible to the other party that they have no money, and the pressure will go away immediately. But even MORE OFTEN a small copyright infringement, may lead to a sequence of bigger ones, and ultimately the de facto loss of rights from one’s writing properties, and of course revenue. 

And for a lot of published authors, they just don’t know for how long they can publish things - publishing houses that have them signed can close, book sales can drop, tastes change, personal problems, and anything else may mean that they could find themselves without a source of income at any point in the future, while they are aging and becoming more and more irrelevant. 

A very famous case currently, is that of Alan Dean Foster, the writer who has done some novelizations for movies like Star Wars and Alien, and is no longer receiving revenue from that - while his wife is hospitalized and their family needs the income - because Disney absorbed the company that had signed the contract with him, and chose to not honor the previous contract. To make them pay he will have to go into a huge legal battle with a corporate giant, which he cannot afford. But they still absorb income from these novelizations.

But how does fanfiction tie into that, and Anne Rice’s case (which if memory serves right, also went through a series of personal problems, including her husband’s death during that time). 

So for a lot of writers, fanfiction may be that tiny breach that may threaten their rights in the future from tresspases of distribution networks. Meaning, people write vampire fanfiction based on Anne Rice’s work? What if another publishing house used the template of her works (historical settings, bleeding orifices, religious themes, homosexuality and sexual trauma etc) and produced a royalty free series of such works with a team of professional writers that do not own the work - who often have less rights, like not owning the characters, or the storylines, participating in a very small scale, so their payment goes down etc)

And in this way EVERYONE SUFFERS. Big Name Published Author fades into obscurity and goes into poverty and payroll writers are horrifically abused.  

A lot of hobbyists, and hobbyist writers whose sole dream is to be published in some shape or form, do not really care, and do not concern themselves with the legal aspect of creation, or the technical skill that it takes to produce writing on a consistent basis, which can only happen if you’ve got your basic needs covered. So they might see this type of backlash as inherently privileged. 

But it’s not really a privilege, there has been a global recession in basic working rights for everyone, and lovers of fiction don’t have to condone, of course, attacks against them, but they need to put that kind of backlash in perspective. Someone did write the content you enjoy, THEY ARE NOT DEAD YET, and may have opinions on how it should be managed, especially when it pertains to their livelihood. 

It’s a delicate balance that we all must keep in order to keep corporate regulations out of it.

For instance with the recent danmei explosion The Untamed brought forth, Ao3 was banned in China. Now a lot of you might know that this was caused by some real person fic involving the actor Xiao Zhan, which led to a whole other level of drama. But make no mistake this was a political act to protect the interests of the domestic publishing industry as it prepares to do an international opening that will bring in several billions from foreign markets.

Because Ao3 has been expanding as a platform globally it brings about changes, and in many cases steals readers away from traditional publishing, so it becomes unacceptable economically for a bunch of hobbyists to influence tastes, market mores, and create sensationalism around certain properties out of literally the blue. This is not a good thing for a lot of corporate thinking, they set the product and we are supposed to buy it. We are not supposed to go, it would look greater with a bunch of anal, and then put forth a million words altering the character of the intellectual property.

Why you ask? Again, because another publishing industry might choose to imitate the style of danmei fanfics and produce works that hijack readership, or lead to breach of contracts, making an unsafe environment for workers in this industry (Xiao Zhan’s case.)

Nowadays I see more and more fanfic authors coming out of their shell to ask money for writing in the form of donations, patronage and commissions, as fandom involvement is also becoming vastly monetized. The market of conventions coming into social media platforms. A strange more exists still in which while “legally wrong”, as long as money is not asked on the publishing platform (Ao3), it may not count as copyright infringement. But fanfic authors, may still be treated with hostility for this, for not “deserving” to profit from someone else’s properties, or even worse for “stealing” readership. 

For instance a recent argument I have seen from lgbtq authors, is that they remain unsupported by fandom spaces, who often proclaim themselves as lgbtq or lgbtq friendly (something that is not true), but at the same time they are not looking for published lgbtq stories, or authors, or even treat these with open hostility, or a lot of bias.

Fandom is not comprised from “readers” in the traditional sense, definitely not friends of literature, and it’s free, no one really has to pay anything to read a published fanfic.  So it’s a pretty loose demographic with no set characteristics, and no interest in investing time and money in something for long. It’s an online social activity and not a readers’ movement, highly influenced by peer pressure and branding. It’s basically a gigantic group of people who don’t really do anything for no one, and may develop a parasitic connection to intellectual properties (I am sorry peers, it’s the truth). 

And it’s perhaps the biggest counterculture scene at the moment in the developed world. To this day it treats even its own authors with tremendous suspicion, disregard and dismissal, meaning that even if someone can get some money and recognition locally through writing fanfic they are on thin fucking ice at all times for all the reasons but mostly attracting unnecessary attention to themselves and subsequently the scene.  A pattern that we will see is endemic to all forms of fandom backlashes.

So to this day in contrast with fanart, fan writers may not be compensated for their troubles, but may also be ousted from their domestic professional spaces for writing fanfic that may infringe on their intellectual property. 

The thing is, for me, that fandom culture can become incredibly supportive of corporate practices that harm actual people (writers, they are people too) but when they realize that the same corporate practices may be used against them, it’s too late to realize that it’s not a lottery of who wins by crying more, and by the time that happens, a corporation or industry who has used them to do its dark bidding, can stop catering to them  because ultimately they have become again irrelevant once a well defined demographic of  readers and viewers has been secured.

So if you are going to do counterculture, at least do it right. Be respectful of the writers/authors of the content you consume and mindful of their troubles, do not generate public strife that brings in political regulation in favor of corporate interests. Become interested in writing culture, support your fanfic authors with lasting engagement in their work, even if it escapes the narrow confines of a certain fandom. It’s simple. Eat, live, pray, fuck, or something.