#call it an inkling or call it knowing the phandom

[phlondphil]

with the absolute power dnp have over society, i have a feeling eyebrow slits will become the new cat whiskers

[kae-karo]

hey! you're a phanfic writer, and i started writing a phanfic that i was intending to get back to, but i saw the video, how much phan has affected dan. in your opinion, should we as a fandom write fics about them now? creatively, i want to get back to mine - youtuber RPF was how i got into fandom and fanfic in the first place - and i was proud of what i wrote. ethically, i never want to pry into real people's lives again. if you choose to answer this, thank you. 💖

hi dear! oof, this is such a controversial question and lately for me (even before dan’s vid, but especially in light of his openness with what he’s chosen to share) i’ve questioned whether i feel comfortable writing phanfic - for me, the characters i write are based on dnp but, of course, i never actually see them as the real human beings dan and phil who i am actually writing about. which sounds kinda weird i guess as a clarifier but i don’t see the people i’m writing about as dan and phil, i see them as characters who share some key characteristics, but that doesn’t inherently change the fact that these are stories we collectively agree are based on dnp (or, in some cases, written about their actual real lives to the best of our abilities and knowledge and speculation and wishes) and, perhaps for me, it’s time to acknowledge that i may not be as okay with that as i was initially when it was fun and shiny and new and i didn’t feel the same empathy toward dnp as i do now cause, hey, they were just on the internet! they didn’t feel like real people to me (yet)

it’s easy to see dnp as these other beings, separate from the space we occupy as fans. which isn’t necessarily bad, but it can lead to a lack of empathizing, an entitlement to feeling like we deserve something for our hours of commitment to them - entitlement to knowledge, entitlement to their lives, entitlement to [insert thing here that we want and are not getting]. and an entitlement to do with ‘them’ (or their personas, or the concept of them put into fictional stories) whatever we want. and i think it’s that kind of mindset - a mindset a lot of us have had with dnp and have been conditioned to have by the phandom and the ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ mentality - that led to the invasions of privacy dan mentioned in his vid

now. to be clear. i think fanworks are incredible and amazing and the writers are so talented and thoughtful and imaginative and well-spoken, but maybe now’s the time to sit back and acknowledge how much we love them, how much we genuinely care for and support them. we had this outpouring of honesty and openness from dan the likes of which we never expected, barely hoped for in our wildest dreams, and alongside it we were presented with a request: privacy

is writing phanfic inherently going against that request? on the one hand, i and most writers acknowledge that our characters are not dnp because we will never know the true dnp by virtue of the fact that they do not share every little thing about them and their lives with us. but on the other hand, is it not still invasive to write as if we know them? as if we have all the intimate details of their lives? their relationships?

idk this has been a bit of a crisis for me as well, when i allow myself to think too hard about it. i love writing about these dorks, i really do, but there’s a piece of me that has always felt a little inkling of doubt about it, and it’s grown much larger in the past 6mo or so - i can never know for certain what they think about what we write, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable of them to feel uncomfortable about it. i wouldn’t blame them. they didn’t ask for us to write about them, about their lives, about our hopes for them or our issues projected onto them as a form of self-therapy, about them as a way to explore or even flex our knowledge of things so personal to them or their relationship they’ve been buried or deleted. they didn’t ask for us to pick and pull at perceived traits of theirs and expand them into entire personalities, such that we’ve created stereotypes among our own fandom about them that bleed back into the way we treat them, talk about them, talk to them

i’ve written over seven hundred thousand words about these dorks, and some of the things i’ve written are, for all intents and purposes, about dnp’s lives. they’re ‘canon’ works, as much as they can be, but so many of my more involved stories have never been about dan and phil, they’ve been about these characters who could really be anybody except they have black and brown hair and blue and brown eyes and they both like muse and mario kart and so hey, it fits pretty well, doesn’t it?

but the reality is that maybe it’s time to make my stories about other people, ones that don’t exist as false approximations of actual humans in the real world. my empathy gauge is painfully strong sometimes (i have trouble with like,,,,,,,even just pruning plants okay like i just really feel for everything so much) so perhaps this is something that weighs heavier on me than others, maybe i’m overthinking it or maybe i’m being too sensitive, i’ve certainly been called that before. but i think perhaps, as dan moves on to his new chapter, maybe it’s time for me to do the same