#fanfic discourse

[screaming-universe]

Bashing Fics in the 9-1-1 Fandom

Inspired by @beforeastorm‘s very neat look at 9-1-1 bashing fics in August and in September 2024, I took another look at the numbers yesterday (23rd January 2025) and… it’s been interesting.

Methods and materials:

For that I selected the 9-1-1 (TV) tag on ao3 while logged into my account and thereby ensuring I would see both public and locked fics; beforeastorm only considered public fics so by god I hope that some of the increases can be explained by that. Then I used the Include filter function to search for [Character Name] Bashing. Where this returned nothing I employed the Search within result function to search for “[character name] bashing”, trying out variations (last or first or nickname). To double-check I also did this search for characters with established bashing tags, using the Exclude filter to ensure that I would not count any fic twice.

Some characters have a bashing tag for themselves and a couple bashing tag. For example: if you search for Margaret Buckley Bashing, you will be offered two tag: Margaret Buckley Bashing and Margaret Buckley and Phillip Buckley Bashing. As far as I could tell, searching for the individual bashing tag also always counts the couple bashing tag, so the couple bashing tags could be disregarded. A list of the characters I looked at is under the cut.

The numbers were collected in an excel file and assigned the characters categories: main (meaning main adult character), family, love interest and other. I also took note of the gender. I did some analysis in excel before having the smart idea that I might as well use this as a training exercise for R (and I am very bad at R).

Disclaimer: this will not include all bashing fics because sadly some people are not familiar with tagging or love letting people run into a fic they will not enjoy. Also while I much prefer it when people tag bashing, some are overly careful and may use bashing tags when not really needed. Still, I much prefer that to people not tagging.

Results:

Disappointing but hardly surprising at this point: the extremely dubious honour of being the most bashed character goes to Tommy Kinard with 660 bashing fics to his name. That obviously makes him the most bashed character of the love interest category, followed by Ana Flores (241) and then Taylor Kelly (118 ^^). The most bashed characters of the family category are the Buckley parents (347 and 325) followed by the Diaz parents (238 and 176), with the mothers being given more bashing fics than the fathers. In the other category, Vincent Gerrard leads with the 66 times his bashing tag was used. Chase Mackey is in third place with 26 fics, and in second place is the Firehouse 118 Crew (45) which probably could be rather counted to the main character category.

Which brings us to that category. Chimney has been bashed in 317 fics, making him the most bashed main character. Followed by Maddie with 223 fics and Bobby with 163. Out of all the main adult characters, Buck is the only one without an established bashing tag. There are 7 fics out there that you can find if you employ a variation of queries with his name + bashing; that is if I have made no mistake. Because honestly? Finding Buck bashing fics is hard. Athena and Buck are the only main characters with less than 10 bashing fics to their name.

Fig. 1: This fucking barplot was a pain to make but here we are! Characters on the y-axis and number of fics that use respective bashing tag on the x-axis. The total number of respective fics are shown next to the bars; colour indicates the category the characters have been placed in. Top: continuous x-axis to allow for an easier overview of the proportions of the bars, bottom: x-axis with a break to allow a closer look.

Dishonourable mention: why the fuck would anybody write a fic with Christopher bashing?

Honourable mentions: Boeing and dolphin bashing. It did make the otherwise pretty depression task of data collection much better.

Gender-wise there are more bashing fics about men (54.3%) than there about women (44.3%) (of course I did not look at every character so I will have missed a few bashing fics). If nobody was writing Tommy bashing fics, that would be flipped (male: 43.0%, female: 55.3%).

Fig. 2: A lovely pie-chart showing the bashing fics per gender, with male subdivided into Tommy, and the other male characters.

Which brings us to the tragedy that is the hate this fandom has for Tommy Kinard. If you add up all the bashing tags I found (which does not equal fics, some people are happily bashing away in their fics), then his account for about 20%. Which is insane, wtf.

Discussion:

This was really depressing tbh. I showed the bar plot to my sister and she asked me what bashing is. She’s been in fandom for years; she was in the supernatural fandom and has read fics and somehow I still had to explain bashing to her. So really: yay for us, this fandom really is something.

 If you look at beforeastorm’s tally from August, you’ll see that Tommy bashing fics began popping up in April 2024 and since then he has become the most bashed character (out of those I looked at, I’m pretty sure that this holds true).

Now you may be wondering why these characters are being bashed. Warning: the following part is based on my opinions. I did not read the fics of all 3291 bashing tag instances that I found.

In some cases it seems pretty straight forward: Vincent Gerrard, Chase Mackey, Doug Kendall and Olivia Ortiz need no further explanation. Other “villains” such as Jeffrey Hudson and Jonah Greenway have no bashing fics that I could find though.

The Buckley and Diaz parents getting bashed is also not surprising. Can’t say that I’m wild about it since my experience with reading fics that tag bashing was usually “here’s a random evil person I made up and then gave the name of an existing character”, but I understand where people are coming from.

Now the main characters… I’m just gonna say it: it’s people who have wronged Buck – according to some of the fandom at least. Chimney’s crime: the punch (no, I’m not defending it, but some people really have run with this). Maddie’s crime: not telling Buck about Daniel and then wanting to talk to him about it when he didn’t want to. Bobby’s crime: not allowing Buck back to work. Hen’s crime: idk, being Chimney’s bestie?

As for Eddie: I guess he’s a misogynist now, if you ask some people? Idk, it’s not like I read the summaries of all the fics because there are too many and also just no.

The love interests – which yes, in this case all happen to be Buck and Eddie’s love interests, imagine my surprise – happen to be “in the way” of shipping I guess. I did look at other love interest or ex-relationships and could find nothing.

Tommy’s crime: loving Evan.

Conclusion:

If you write bashing please keep tagging it.

Appendix:

All the characters I looked at: characters with no bashing fics I could find, characters with an established bashing tag, characters with no established bashing tag but bashing fics can be found

Main adult characters:

Athena Grant, Bobby Nash, Hen Wilson, Chimney Han, Evan Buckley, Eddie Diaz, Maddie Buckley.

Recurring characters, family:

Michael Grant, David Hale, May Grant, Harry Grant, Beatrice and Samuel Carter, Emmett Washington;

Marcy Nash, Tim Nash;

Karen Wilson, Denny Wilson, Antonia Wilson, Nia and Mara;

Albert Han, Chimney’s father/Sang Han, The Lees, Jee-Yun Buckley-Han;

Margaret Buckley, Phillip Buckley, Daniel Buckley, Doug Kendall;

Christopher Diaz, Isabel Diaz, Helena Diaz, Ramon Diaz.

Recurring characters, love interests:

Tommy Kinard, Natalia Dollenmeyer, Taylor Kelly, Lucy Donato, Ali Martin, Abby Clark;

Kim, Marisol, Ana Flores, Shannon Diaz;

Eva Mathis;

Tatiana.

Recurring characters, others:

Firehouse 118 Crew Bashing;

Chase Mackey, Vincent Gerrard, Jonah Greenway, Jeffrey Hudson, Councilwoman Olivia Ortiz;

Josh Russo, Lena Bosko, Ravi Panikkar, Claudette Collins, Brad Torrance;

Boeing, Dolphin.

[webshood]

I'm a Jason Todd drug denier, if you write him doing drugs we're actually enemies. /lh

If you write kid him smoking cigarettes, that's okay because it's canon and nicotine is appetite suppressing, you can use it to make a good fic of him dealing with starvation and homelessness. However, the moment you make him (adult or kid) smoke weed, just know I'll be outside your door and you'll start coughing blood in three days

[fgmetanoia]

If they ain't FERAL and absolutely desperate for each other I don't want them

[groundzero-v]

It's a bit surreal to have to say this, but please don't rate fics in public bookmarks on ao3. If you need to, you can do that in the private bookmarks, but I'm so sick of people treating fics like this. It's always the people who never comment as well.

Don't get me wrong, I totally get leaving 10/10, 20/10 and so on, it's cute way to show you loved the story, but imagine you're an author that poured so much free time, blood and sweat into working on a fic and the only thing you get is a '3/10' '5/10'. Or even 'mediocre. 6/10'.

Have a little compassion for how nerve wrecking it's to share your work (and for free!). For how we desperatly wait for any comment or nice interaction only to receive numbers like this like a punch to the face.

If you need to treat fics like this, do it in private bookmarks, not where the author - but also everyone else - can see.

[justsumtransdude2000]

There is a very weird discourse going around about censorship in fandom right now. Ao3 censorship would not only logistically be a nightmare for the people on Ao3's team, but would also defeat the purpose entirely.

Archive of Our Own is a place where people can write whatever the fuck they want, and read whatever the fuck they want. Judgement free, as long as they don't tell anyone IRL. Censoring things that are uncomfortable will 1) lead to the censoring of works that are not romanticizing this thing (this is how mass censorship works, especially on the internet. Ao3's team cannot read every Rape/Non Con fic and decide personally which ones are and aren't romanticizing it) and 2) leads to things that are 'controversial' being censored. And suddenly you can't write and publish anything with kink in it at all because it can be taken as romanticizing harmful dynamics. I saw someone lump in watersports with the romanticization of stalking/rape.

AO3 has and should always be a don't like don't read space.

[wileycap]

[spoilers for atla]

I don't like (and at the same time I like it very much) how fandom makes Zuko into a Soft Widdle Ducky.

Like, yeah, he's awkward and traumatized. But he is very much a warrior prince at the same time. Look at his confrontation with Ozai: "you're going to listen, or I'm going to cut you in two with my swords".

During the series, Zuko almost never struggles with immediate action and decisions - but he's really terrible at measured, considered action and decisions.

I want to see that side of Zuko in fic. Like, a former war minister gets out of line? "Right. Let's take this outside. Do you want fire or steel." Sure, by the end of the series he's much more mature, grounded and peaceful, but so many fics I read, he just kind of folds when people get aggressive with him, when his more canonically true self would likely just go "yup, that's a threat, first you're going to get your ass beat and then I'm throwing you in jail, I don't really care how influential you are." And I want to see him deal with that.

That being said, I still enjoy all those fics where Zuko's personality is basically 🥺🔥

[perseidlion]

Social media has convinced people that their attention is a commodity. So in that context, it makes sense that people new to fandom would think that just consuming fanwork on AO3 is enough and that it gives the writer something.

But it doesn't. There is no algorithm to feed, so simply consuming the fic does not give the writer any benefit. Unlike when you watch a TikTok all the way through, which does help that person in the long run by serving their content more, which could lead to monetizable opportunities.

"What about the hits?" you might say. You mean the thing that could just be someone clicking on it, reading two sentences, then clicking away? Clicking the wrong fic by mistake? Their browser reloading when they restart their computer a few days later? Hate reading?

Unless they're told, a writer has no reason to believe that people enjoyed their fic (or kept reading it in the case of a multichap.)

AO3 already has an extremely low-effort way to say thank you to a fic writer and prove you're a person. The kudos button is right there.

But social media has trained a whole generation that interacting with something posted on the internet will shape their online experience in some way. So they resist it.

Between that and them thinking they're doing a writer a favour by simply consuming their work (that the writer cannot monetize and was done out of a labour of love to be part of a community) we are seeing the unraveling of the social contract of fanfiction.

Fic writers are being told more and more to produce with no expectation of engagement, and that asking for people to say thank you or acknowledge our work in some way is being entitled. That we should be grateful that anyone wanted to read our stuff at all, even though we can't tell from hits alone if someone ACTUALLY did.

The majority of fic writers post their fic to be part of a community. If that community no longer exists and they're treated like content mills (with no potential to monetize their work) what is the incentive to continue?

We write for ourselves (work we want to see, and to tell the stories in our head) but we post for the community. If there is no community, what is the incentive to post?

And what is the incentive to post regularly? To write 100k+ word lovingly crafted fics with arcs?

There will always be people who will post their work no matter what, but I would bet that the fics these people like the most are the big epics that post on a consistent schedule.

This problem has gotten so dire that some writers have resorted to setting bars for engagement in order to post more quickly, or to post at all. That is not a community-minded attitude either and I do not endorse it, but it's a problem people who refuse to engage with work have created.

Writers always have done the mental math when it comes to engagement. If people are loving it and kudosing and commenting, we will be inspired to write more quickly. If people engage less, the updates will probably be slower. If the engagement stops, that fic may be abandoned or even deleted. This has always happened. Writers are just saying the quiet part out loud because of the disappearance of a give and take of the community.

It's not wrong to want to know if someone likes a fic. It's not entitled to wish that the people who are getting enjoyment from the work tell us they're a person. This is not a call to gas up every fic writer you see and stroke their egos or something. But if you got some joy from it, please give us some joy by telling us. It doesn't even take a lot of people doing this to keep us going and to keep community alive.

Fic is one of the last places where creativity cannot be monetized. You can't treat it like a platform where work can be monetized.

[slowlyshamelesscolor]

What is Neutralship?

Neutralship, often known as ship-neutral, refers to those who are "neutral" or unconcerned with shipcourse. They may be pro- or anti-leaning, or completely unaligned.

Neutralship also means your anti harassment. That implies you will not bother someone about their fandom preferences, or pass judgment on their fantasies or ships.

Neufic - those who identify as neufic may be pro- or anti-leaning, or wholly unaligned; they are neutral on fiction and do not engage in ship discourse

And for short, we are called newts.

The purple flags are peacefic. The pink is neutralship.

Peacefic Emoji combos - ☮🦢, ☮📖, 🌈☮, 🌈🦢, 🦢🌙,

Neutralship emoji combos - 🎀 🫧, 🎀🌙 , 🫧🎀 , 🌈🎀, 🌈 🫧, 🌈🌙

Neufic emoji combos-  💎 🦋, 🌈💎, 💍🦋

[lunaroserites]

Tagging the og poster since I stole the picture of Twitter/X from Papa Woof und Krampus und Bleaken. @blackheartbiohazards

But this. THIS.

If you don’t like something don’t read it. The discourse over tagging and warnings with fanfic is ridiculous. As long as something is tagged or made a warning you cannot bitch at someone about it. You’re responsible for your media consumption. Be responsible.

If a tag brothers you, block it, filter it ignore it. Learn how to use the filter systems on the sites you consume things on. That is the safest option for you as a consumer.

[cutebutalsostabby]

"People need to stop doing x in y fanfics"

You will take the free, adequately content-warned, non-commercial transformative works you are given, and you will LIKE them. That or use the back button.

[berrycake99]

Gonna have to admit, I love getting 'guest' kudos too, but I always have to think "y'all are so weak"

[cinewhore]

re: fanfic as content…i think that’s why i feel so disconnected from it lol. Everything is fucking content and if you are not mass producing it/staying relevant/appealing to every single person then it’s pointless to engage in the art.

I wish a very die to the word content i hate it and i hate how much the internet has capitalized off this shit. Not everyone wants to be content creators. Some folks just want to make weird art and connect with others.

[fgmetanoia]

why is it that there are ships for which every fanfic absolutely fucking nails the characterisation and other ships for which it doesn't matter how many fics you read, there isn't an author who can get the characterisation right

[sheets-of-your-own]

I refuse to get into the whole pro and anti shipping discourse, the whole thing is stupid

Besides, any real fan knows there’s only one way to clear it

[daughterofscotland]

I think bashing fics can be put into two categories:

"Canonical character had some bad moments and author took those and blew them up like a pool floatie"

“Canonical character sucks and author made them worse”

As long as they are tagged correctly, bash away, there'll always be someone who needs that particular itch scratched.

[frickyesforumweapons]