#fanfiction consumer culture is a most recent problem in fandoms

[nataliescatorccio]

hi becca! i hope you're doing okay! i've been thinking about fandoms and streaming a lot these days and how much more enjoyable watching TV shows was.

do you think streaming killed fandoms and the whole culture(? not sure what to call it) of watching shows? because we used to wait weeks for 1 episode and we could theorise and write fanfic and discuss things etc vs now we get a whole season in one day and if you don't watch it immediately, oh well, get ready to be spoiled. and honestly i hate the way it is now sometimes i just don't want to spend 12 hours straight watching a new season, but i can't possibly blacklist and avoid every single spoilers. i still want to be on the Internet and talk to my friends and not live in fear of when i'm getting spoiled (okay that's a bit of an exaggeration but you know). and of course there are still fanfictions and fanart and beautiful gifs, but everything comes at you all at once. you can't even digest anything. i'm forgetting new shows faster because i watch the whole thing in one sitting and i don't even process a lot of it and i just forget later on. maybe it's just a me thing though... but to me, even if i hated waiting because something ended in a cliffhanger, 1 episode per week was so much better. it kept me excited for next week, i could read theories, discussions, read fanfic about something that was completely different from what happened in the next episode. it was so fun. and i feel like fandoms who were getting their content 1 episode per week live(d) longer? everything is getting cancelled nowadays after like 1 day of streaming and it's hard to find people you can follow who still engage and are present in the fandom...

hi anon! had a busy few days but it's friday now and the weekend and that has definitely brightened my mood- i hope it has yours too!

i completely think that streaming has a lot to answer in the way our consumption of media has changed, and i really do believe that extends to fandom culture too for all the reasons you've highlighted. i made a mini rant on this a couple of years ago and it picked up traction and got a lot of interesting additions on this topic which i really wish i could find now, but to summarise there was a lot of talk about how bingeing and binge culture has been detrimental to fandom spaces because of the rush to consume media and move on to the next big thing. we don't have the time to appreciate media anymore, and most of us feel more dissatisfied with what's produced because we rush through to an ending that that doesn't feel fulfilling simply because we haven't had time to sit with the storyline. no one wants too get to attached to anything because the reign of fandom feels so short lived, either because it's cancelled or because the strains of producing quickly consumable storylines take its toll on everyone working to create the content that they can't sustain the standard expected.

i really miss weekly releases too and some of the most enjoyable series i've watched in the past year have included the last of us and house of the dragon which were released an episode by week, and it was just so nice to be within that fandom space. even though most people knew what was going to happen within these storylines because they're adaptations which meant little speculation, it still brought people together to discuss and digest what they'd watched and also create. creating takes time and often feels exhausting when everything is thrown at you all at once and you're not the fastest person to get your ideas out there, instead weekly releases allowed creators to notice details and curate art around that. i do wonder if in the future the pendulum is going to swing back towards weekly releases because of the level of engagement, and therefore profit that surrounds engagement, that surrounds it. i'd really like it to, because i do think binge culture comes with a lot of problems, and i don't just mean in an online world because the recent strikes have highlighted how the attitude of 'i can consume this and throw it away' is having huge impacts on people's livelihoods

[meiilan]

“Why don’t you continue story XYZ anymore, I really liked it?” - “Did you? Well I didn’t know that.”

Because recently I had this conversation again, I wanted to address it, because honestly it’s quite frustrating for both sides. For those, who don’t know, I do write fanfiction as well, as drawing fanarts. And while I tend to stick more to one shots, I occasionally start writing a series of one-shots, that are related, follow a certain timeline, but could also be read as stand-alones.

The thing is, how many parts for a series there will be rises and falls 100% with my motivation to continue. Even if I don’t haven an inspiration right away, if I feel motivated to continue, I will continue. I have enough experiences in writing regularly, that I can in tight moments, pull inspiration right out of my bum, if necessary. But motivation is not something, I have limitless.

My motivation stems completely from how the audience interacts with my work. And that’s why so many of my series discontinued. I just couldn’t see any interaction between my works and my readers.

“But I left kudos!”

That’s nice, but it’s akin to getting a badge of recognition. The first few feel nice, from then on they kinda loose their worth exponentially, if that is all the author gets. If you only get a badge of recognition, but nobody tells yo, what your being recognized for, it kinda starts feeling hollow, performative even. I’m not saying, stop giving kudos, if that’s what you do. But I’m saying, of you want to get me motivated to continue - and I’m sure this is a feeling shared by many other authors - let me know what you felt, when you read my story.

A kudo in the skala of reader-feelings barely registers as “oh that was nice”.

But, even at the risk of sounding too prideful, I don’t write stories for them to be just “nice” for readers. I want them to be breathtaking, exciting, heart-crushing, exhilarating, hilarious, beautiful! I want my readers to either fall in love with my stories, or hate them with a burning passion and still continuing in hope, the story apologies eventually for crushing their heart so cruelly.

And that’s where comments come in play. Comments are often the only way, an author on the internet truly sees their audience interacting with their works. There are other ways too - fanarts made for fanfics, cosplay even made from fanfics - but they are even rarer and harder to come by. So many authors, me included, thrive on comments. Crave them even, as the only way they can truly experience the feeling of seeing a reader hold your book, and laugh in glee, while reading it.

And it doesn’t even have to be a long comment, either!

Look at this! This is one of the comments, I got on a series, I’m still motivated to write. That smile alone tells me already, that my intention of crushing my readers heart in a good way, succeeded. I saw my reader cry over my work, even if only in a very small way. This is often enough.

Just two sentences, one not even finished and still I fell 100% validated with my work.

It doesn’t need much, really. Not that I don’t appreciate the long comments, either. I do. A lot actually. But it’s just the fact, that I get comments, that I’m striving for. Because a kudo - at the end of the day - is just an emotionally impartial number. But each comment I get, contains the feelings of my readers. And whenever I feel stuck, whenever I struggle and wonder ‘should I stop working on this’, I can go back on the comments and experience the joy of seeing all these emotions again. And that gives me enough of a motivation boost to push through the hard times and carry on.

And to put this into some better perspective, so you don’t think, I expect unfathomable numbers:

This is one of the my stories with the most kudos in total. It was written for a new fandom, I delved in. I had some more story-ideas, but I never felt motivated enough to write for this fandom again.

This is the average kudo-count, I work with. So really, I’m not even a big writer around here. I know exactly, how I planned to continue the story. But this story I last updated on September 2005. Guess why.

These are two stories in an on-going series, that I’m still writing on. And I’M currently working on the third part. Only a 6th of the people, leaving kudos, left me a comment, but that alone is enough to keep me motivated, just for their sake.

So please, if you want your author to continue a series, you really love

Let them know, you do!

[fandom-oracle]

Wait wdym? Do you think fic is bad?

i'm getting canceled tonight i guess.

if you actually did a good a faith interpretation of my post you know it's not really ABOUT fanfiction at all, i actually write fanfiction myself. i'm not sharing here because it's overwhelmingly bad fic that i write exclusively as wish-fulfilment or for self-projection, but at least i'm self-aware about it. i am ALSO one of the people who reads ze Books™️, although most of the academic material i consume are nonfiction, so this whole thing is particularly annoying to me. the crux of the matter is that, if you're a little younger you might've missed it, but this website was a hotbed of scalding takes like 'dante's divine comedy is literally fanfiction', 'something something is literally fanfiction' when the thing in question barely counts as a transformative work and, in fact, it weakens the definition of transformative work in itself to try to apply it to literally anything that exhibits an ounce of intertextuality. plenty of takes that are... true, but require some nuance, focused on the idea of transformative fandom as a place defined by its presence of overwhelmingly female and disproportionately queer (occasionally, though disputedly, nonwhite) content creators and the ways in which transformative fan content could be interpreted as a space of defiance to cisheteropatriarchy in the way it permeates traditional media. a third, less common but still relevant take was the focus on how certain fandoms such as trek and doctor who have a long history of involvement in real-world civil rights issues and progressive politics. so this kind of take has been the dominant view on tumblr and transformative fandom for a good decade now, perhaps longer, and the people with this kind of takes can sometimes be a little... obnoxious. and the majority of people on transformative fandom (regardless of wether or not the fandom is disproportionately composed of nonwhite individuals or not, by sheer virtue of american demographics and this site`s heaily skewed userbase, the majority will still be white) are white, and like any other space dominated by white people, fandom has often been a vehicle for white supremacy. "Stitch Media Mix" talks about this in-depth. the discourse on fandom racism and ways in which transformative fandom as a whole contribute to racialized stereotypes, hierarchies, and deeper problems within online culture has led to a lot of people with grievances with fandom, many of whom are women of color, to develop an entire online identity built around the concept of being "critical of fandom", which is a very weird thing to do with fandom is literally billions of people, not a unified demographic, and that being critical of something can mean a WIDE amount of things; which in turn has led to a lot of people insulating themselves completely from any criticism of fandom as being inherently in bad faith, which a weird thing to do when literally ANY sphere of society should be open to criticism. people taking critiques of media they consume and taking critiques of their own critiques as personal attacks are abound here and make everything worse. so a fairly recent (mid2018ish, definitely post the insanity of reylo discourse but before sarah z blew up in popularity) trend has been that people in these communities isolate more and more and the general discourse has effetively resulted in people with differing takes in fanfiction specifically but fandom as a Whole (which is, again very weird to say because fandom is not 'a Whole' because there's no unifying element to different fandoms) only interacting with each other in hostile ways. and increasingly, in my personal sphere, a lot of people are positioning themselves in the "fandom critical" (AGAIN, WEIRD THING TO SAY, WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN, PLEASE USE WORDS WITH PRECISION) sphere, and I tend to take that "side" myself, but i specifically do not think framing this as a team A or team B thing is useful. this culture war was in the buildup.

last week a post by a user i follow recently became popular. the post itself was a critique that i.. do not necessarily agree with. it was ultimately about the idea of easily-consumable popular media being seen as an acceptable form of exclusive media engagement by people in the "pro-fandom" sphere, and how the insidiousness of this line of thinking has to do with how capitalist media production is designed to spread, and how fandom AS A TREND, not specifically any individuals or any fanworks, can empower capitalism. the post specifically did NOT use the kindest possible words, but that was what they were trying to say. howelljenkins also has really good takes on the subject, albeit from a different angle.

anyway because this is a circular culture war, the result was as follows: 1) a bunch of pro-fandom types refuse to actually make a charitable reading of the post and insist the user in question hates fandom and thinks people under capitalism shouldn't have things that are Fun, and should Only Read Theory and keep sending anon hate to several blogs in the opposing sphere, therefore proving the point that fandom sometimes prevent people from being able to engage critically with things; 2) a bunch of anti-fandom types who defined their entire identity on hating fandom being like "haha look at these cringe people" instead of trying to understand why a demographic overwhelmingly composed of marginalized people would feel strongly to posts that use inflammatory language against an interest of theirs, thereby proving the point that most criticism of fandom is divorced from actual fan content and is vaguely defined. the reason this is a culture war that actually deserves attention (unlike most fandom culture wars, which are just really granular ship wars made into social justice issues for clout) is that, for the most part, both of these groups are mostly people with college degrees, many of whom will contirbute to academia in the coming years. fan studies is a relevant field. these discussions have repercussions in wider media criticism trends, and this is why i can't really stand it or just passively ignoring it the way i do with most other inconsequential discourse. like it's genuinely upsetting seeing almost every single tumblr user, most of whom should know better, patting themselves in the back for their inability to read things in a way that doesn't feed into preexisting cultural hostilities in fan spaces.

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

The Journal of Fandom Studies

Volume 1, Number 2, 1 October 2013

Augmenting fan/academic dialogue: New directions in fan research by Paul Booth [DePaul University]

Fan studies as a discipline is still in its infancy. But even given this nascence, there have been significant shifts in the ways that it has theorized, studied and investigated fans over the first two and a half decades of research. As scholarship, fan studies has moved away from ethnographic investigations of fans as the main object of study to focus instead on the output of fan discourse as the key mode of examination. At the same time, scholars like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills, both central to the discipline, have opened dialogue about the nature of the fan/academic, often called the ‘aca-fan’. This article uses the lens of aca-fandom to analyse fan answers to interview questions at a large Midwestern Doctor Who convention. Fans were asked about the role that fan studies has played in their life, how they perceive the study of fans and whether fan studies as an academic discipline has an effect on their fandom. The fans’ answers reflect a critical awareness of fandom but a general ignorance of fan studies. This article argues three points to take away from this. First, fan studies needs to refocus attention back onto fans themselves through ethnographic work. Second, the discipline needs to refocus its output less on esoteric academic titles and more on popular venues. Finally, fans and academics should engage in specific dialogue to open up avenues for new fannish and academic exploration.

A case of identity: Role playing, social media and BBC Sherlock by Ann McClellan [Plymouth State University]

Many fans of Sherlock Holmes are now extending their interest in the famous sleuth into the world of social media. In particular, the BBC’s modern adaptation, Sherlock, seems to have grabbed the public’s attention with multiple character role plays on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. It remains unclear, however, whether to categorize these narratives as fan fiction or role play game. This article explores the genre differences between fan fiction and role play game and identifies specific genre characteristics that place social media fan narratives in the role play game category. While adaptation studies and much of fan fiction center on issues of fidelity to the source text, role play scholarship emphasizes recreating the world of the sourcetext. Role playing both expands the boundaries of the original series in that it provides viewers with more—more stories, more character development, more adventure—but it is also limited by the constraints of the original show’s characterization and overall narrative arc. Online role play characters must speak like their source characters, they must interact with other characters from the show in textually appropriate ways, and they must respond to new situations in ways that are consistent with their televisual counterparts. Looking specifically at BBC Sherlock role plays on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, this article explores the ways in which contemporary audiences are using social media to challenge traditional understandings of genre, world building and fandom in order to approach a greater verisimilitude of play.

‘Drinking the Kool-Aid’ of cult TV: Fans, followers, and fringe religions in Strangers with Candy and Veronica Mars by David Scott Diffrient [Colorado State University]

This article explores episodes of the contemporary American television programmes Strangers with Candy (Comedy Central, 1999–2000) and Veronica Mars (UPN/CW, 2004–07) so as to ascertain and discursively frame the complex relationship between cults (or neo-religious organizations) and cult TV. Although different from one another in many respects, these two TV series share an interest in the cliquish formations of high-school life that divide students into warring camps of insiders and outsiders. Moreover, both programmes contain pivotal episodes in which the ritualistic practices of fictional cults are presented ambivalently – as a source of humour yet also as a gateway through which the unconventional female protagonists pass on their way to self-discovery. That journey has extraordinary resonance for fans or ‘followers’ of these programmes. As argued by Jonathan Gray in his recently published work on ‘affect, fantasy, and meaning’, fans and followers are viewers who are ‘most involved in their consumption’. As such, Strangers with Candy and Veronica Mars deserve scrutiny as steadfastly worshipped texts conducive to the kinds of meta-consumptive discourses and practices that might shed light on culturally entrenched attitudes related to neo-religious activities. 

Community clip show: Examining the recursive collaboration between producers and viewers of a postmodern sitcom by Rekha Sharma [Kent State University]

In the new media landscape, exclusive communication within a TV show’s creative team or amongst its fans is no longer sufficient to maintain the continuation of the programme. Instead, a community arises through the collaboration of those behind the scenes and those in front of the screens. By utilizing interactive technologies, showrunners and audiences have redefined notions of media consumption and mass media. An illustrative case is NBC’s postmodern sitcom, Community (Harmon, 2009–). The show features metadiscourse on media production, responds to viewers’ feedback and preferred narratives and shares the creation of meaning with the audience. As a result, the show has developed an ardent following because viewers feel their concerns are directly addressed by the show’s creative team. Further, their contributions challenge the conventional belief that fan interpretations are merely secondary discourse to the primary television text, as Community fans’ works have helped shape the televised narrative. One episode, Season 2’s ‘Paradigms of Human Memory’, deals with the creators’ and viewers’ mutual conceptualization of time and reality encapsulated in the series.

‘I’m not a lawyer but …’: Fan disclaimers and claims against copyright law by Jenny Roth and Monica Flegel [Lakehead University]

Fan fiction has become increasingly widespread, and online discussions between fans about fan fiction and copyright reveal the extent to which fans are both governed by and resist copyright law, as they understand it. As complex agents both within and outside of law, writers and supporters of fan fiction reveal the problems of speaking against law from a position that is regulated by law, a position creative re-producers are forced to occupy in an increasingly copyrighted, patented and trademarked world. So long as those whom the law is meant to regulate see themselves as legitimate shapers of that law, even though they inhabit space outside the formal mechanisms of law or the legal world, the law will not be effective. When fans with little or no legal expertise invoke and interpret copyright, they reveal that copyright does not attend to the complex realities of creative production, nor the very active consumption, engagement with, and re-articulation of cultural artefacts and texts in society to effectively police at the grassroots level.

Continuing The West Wing in 140 characters or less: Improvised simulation on Twitter by Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore and Jonathan Hickman [Birmingham City University]

Sharing some of the findings from a study of fans tweeting as characters from US TV drama The West Wing (NBC, 2000–2006), this article uses data from Twitter observation and fan interviews to examine how participants negotiated the structures of Twitter through this activity. In particular, we consider what implications that negotiation has for the resulting fan text; for how participants perform fandom through this medium; and for how they perceive the value of their fan practice. Through this investigation, the article demonstrates some of the ways in which Twitter facilitates and constrains articulations of audience engagement.

Keywords: Doctor Who; aca-fan; academy; convention; fan; interview; BBC Sherlock; Facebook; Sherlock Holmes; fan production; role play; social media; world building; Strangers with Candy; Veronica Mars; cult TV; cults; fandom; religion; active audiences; interactive media; postmodern sitcom; television fandom; textual poaching; virtual community; authorship and authority; copyright law and legal discourse; fan policing;  fanfiction; law and society; producer/consumer relations; TV drama; Twitter; audiences;  online communities; television.

[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.

[tracing-ao3]

Fanfiction’s Biggest Platform Wasn’t Built in a Day: The History of Archive of Our Own

Hey! What do you know about fandoms and fan works? Chances are that the answer is a lot. People here on Tumblr are rarely strangers to fandom and that’s pretty much what this social media platform is used for. Fandom has become a big part of the human experience, and there are loads of places both online and in person to get excited about the media that interests you. From stan twitter to the Dashcon ball pit, there are plenty of ways we share fan experiences.

Most notably are fan works, the art and stories created by fans to extend, “fix,” or build upon the stories from canon. Arguably the most popular method for sharing fan works, specifically fan fiction, is Archive of Our Own. AO3 is popular now, but it is far from the first of its kind. There is a long history of fandom culture and similar technologies that lead to the creation of this platform. More under the cut since things get a little long.

From Humble Fandom Beginnings

First, we have to acknowledge that the first building block to Archive of Our Own was the existence of fandom itself, which existed in different terms long before there were internet platforms to share it on. A Fanbyte article shares some funny perspectives of where fan culture might have started, and it involves Sherlock Holmes (but not that Sherlock). When the Holmes books were originally being published by Arthur Conan Doyle, readers easily became very invested. So much so that there were angry letters and actual protests when the author killed off the title character, so at least we know today’s Sherlock fans come by it honestly.

It may not have been called fandom back in Doyle’s day, but consumers have been highly dedicated to the media they consume for some time now. However, if a modern fan is unhappy with a decision to kill off a character or any other looked down upon plot decision, there may be a different place for them to turn aside from protests.

What the Fanfiction?

Moving on from the 1800s but still before the rise of the net, the fandom landscape was about to be shifted. Popular sci-fi series Stark Trek had its fair share of dedicated fans. Together a group of fans would help in the movement to popularize fan fiction. A zine called Spockanalia was published in 1968 and was comprised entirely of fan work, responses to the show, and, yes, fan fiction.

Prior to widespread internet access, fic was distributed in similar zines, at conventions, or even passed among students in schools.

This zine was probably not the first example of what we think of fan fiction, but it sure did help shift the landscape and make way for the digital versions of platform to come.

Fan Fiction Takes the Web

With the existence of the internet increasing people’s ability to share their content, it’s no surprise fandom found a new place to thrive. Fans were now posting content online, but we were still a long way from the platforms we have now.

Tech savvy fans developed online spaces for their specific fandom or even a certain ship. This became the storage place for fic and true hubs for fandom activity. These designs are a little outdated, but they represent a blueprint for later fic hosting sites.

Images from Vice’s “The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction”

In October of 1998, we see FanFiction.net pop up. This site serves as a true predecessor to AO3. FF.net was one of the first sites dedicated to fanfiction that housed multiple fandoms, not just one specific fandom per message board. This platform received a lot of attention from fans and writers for its unique offerings and ability to read from multiple categories in one place. Despite the popularity of FanFiction.net, the site had its own host of problems that would come to fruition in the coming years.

Censorship and Greed (Come Before the Fall)

FanFiction.net offered a service that fans were looking for, but it was somewhat restrictive in the content it allowed. This included the array of content rating, bans on sexually explicit content, etc. Additionally, there is no fic to be posted by authors who have voiced their criticism of fan fiction.

Casey Fiesler, a professor in information science, also has a fantastic video on the rise and death of various fandom platforms, which discusses some additional predecessors to AO3 and the issues that arose from them.

For example, LiveJournal was being used as a platform for fan content creators to post work and communicate with other fans. This was effective until a change in LiveJournal’s policy affected the type of content allowed on the site, once again banning sexually explicit works. This policy change resulted in over 500 journals being deleted overnight and without warning. Furthermore, some of these accounts didn’t even host fan fic, and instead were accounts from survivors of sexual assault. LiveJournal clearly made some mistakes in this move, and users were pretty unhappy with the treatment.

In 2007 around the same time as LiveJournal’s purge, a new fic platform was breaking into the scene: FanLib. The creators behind FanLib seemed to notice the growing popularity of fan fiction and aimed to turn a profit off of these works. Naturally, the site faced a lot of criticisms and distain from the community.

With the outrage caused in fandom communities, it was time for a change. Controversy surrounding censorship and profit on existing fan work platforms fed directly into the creation of Archive of Our Own.

By the Fans, For the Fans: Archive of Our Own Sheds Restrictions

As much as AO3 was created in direct response to these aforementioned, it also borrows from their structure. It is a place for all multiple fandoms, much like the bold move on FanFiction.net’s part in the 90s.

While AO3 built off the existing technologies of prior fic hosting sites, it also boasted quite a few differences in regards to the content allowed.

Whereas FF.net restricted what authors fan fiction could be posted for and both it and LiveJournal posed restrictions of erotica, AO3 took the opposite approach. Their policy allowed any and all content to be hosted on their cite, as long as the work tagged the necessary archive warnings (including major character death, rape/non-con, etc.).

More recent years have inspired much debate on this concept. Some advocate for further restrictions that would prevent fics featuring incest, pedophilia, and other illegal and disturbing topics. This viewpoint certainly has merit, but these works do nothing to violate Archive policy as long as the content is indicated within the warning and tags. It is also worth considering that user are able to filter through warnings and tags, excluding ones they don’t want to see.

The other side of this argument points to the long history leading up to the Archive’s creation. Indeed, given that AO3 was developed to combat censorship on similar platforms, the lack of restrictions makes far more sense. There are certainly valid points to be voiced on both side of this debate, but looking to the textual predecessors of AO3 makes it clear why such a policy would be in place.

An additionally difference in AO3’s structure lies in the profit. While FanLib met a premature death due to its desire to profit on the back of content creators, AO3 does no such thing. In fact, it is run by nonprofit group Organization for Transformative Works and the site’s work is done by volunteers.

Archive of Our Own builds upon the conventions of fan work sites while adapting them for its own needs.

Borrowing From Other Social Media Practices

The Archive also demonstrates trends that can be seen across social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and here on Tumblr. The hashtag that is used to sort posts and material online is also utilized on AO3, but in a slightly different fashion.

Tagging on other social media is sometimes ineffective when users include different tags to talk about the same concepts (think one user tagging a post “Doctor Who” while another uses “dw”). This makes it difficult for users to find the content they’re looking for.

To improve upon the tagging system used across social media, AO3 uses a method called tag wrangling. This involves volunteers sorting through new tags that are used and linking them to other tags that mean the same thing. As such, a poster can use whatever tag they are most familiar with, and tag wranglers will make sure it shows up under any tag that has the same meaning. Tag wrangling solves the issue that alienates users from finding content and also ensures that the filtering system is as effective as possible.

Fanfiction’s Biggest Platform Wasn’t Built in a Day

It’s clear that AO3 is far from the first of its kind. The widely used platform built upon the existing structures and uses of similar platforms, structures, and communities.

By building with and improving upon these existing formats, Archive of Our Own has created an online space that utilizes existing technologies in a fresh way that attracts users.

Read more here:

Fanbyte, “From Star Trek to Superwholock: A Brief History of Fanfiction”

Vice, “The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction”

Wired, “Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online”

Casey Fiesler, “The Life and Death of Fandom Platforms | LiveJournal, Archive of Our Own (AO3), Tumblr, and ???”

The Mary Sue, “The Bad Faith Attacks on Archive of Our Own Have to End”

Additional images from FanFiction.new and archiveofourown.org

[irinapaleolog]

DISCLAIMER: This article is intended for educational and research purposes only. It has been published to shed light and correct understanding on the escalating issue of hatred of women online. By extension, this article also aims to inform readers on right-leaning and left-leaning internet hive minds and their negative influence on culture, politics, and society.

T/W: This article contains mentions of sexual assault, violence against women, suicide, incest, racism, anti-semitism, sexism

If you’re a woman who is active in an online, women-dominated fandom space, then you’re well aware of everything this article is about to tell you.

You’ve read every death threat.

You’ve gone through the sometimes graphic — but always malicious — anonymous message or tweet explaining every way in which some person you’ll never know would like to harm you.

You may have been banned from a fan forum or had your messages wiped from a Discord channel by a bot or mod who decided that your thoughts and your words as a woman were not allowed around here.

You’ll probably remember all the times your sexual identity, your race, or your religious affiliation was questioned and erased.

You have read every time the latest hive mind online has labeled you a sexist. A racist. An abuse apologist. A school shooter. An inbred. A Nazi. A mental case. Inhuman.

You probably know somebody whose had their information put up on Reddit threads or 4chan forums or alt-right YouTube channels for everybody to see. The aim? To determine if maybe they could find ways to hurt that individual in person or — at the very least — make their life a little harder.

And of course, you know all too well that all the threats, lies, bullying, defamation, doxxing, and dehumanization is driven by the internet’s systemic fear over women enjoying media made for them, on their own terms, and on their own time.

We’ve experienced countless cycles of this outrage, ranging from comic book heroes to k-pop. One of the most recent iterations, however, is driven by a desire to see two fictional space wizards kiss in a galaxy far, far away.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what it’s like to be a fan of “Reylo” in the Star Wars fandom, well, it looks a bit like this:

All of the screenshots, located above, catalog a small sample of the four years of hate sent to “Reylos:” fans who are interested in the canon romantic dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. These fans are predominately women.

And, no, let’s get this out of the way: These hate posts, while directed towards fans of a fictional pairing, have nothing to do with fictional characters. This hate has everything to do with policing and punishing women for collectively enjoying fiction in a way deemed incorrect by various political and social agendas. The end goal is always the same — bully these women until they become silent.

Defining a “Bullying Hive Mind:” The “Alt-Right” vs “Antis”

The ways in which bullying hive minds reach this end goal are dependent on the political alignment of the cyberbully. Either they are pursuing an agenda dictated by alt-right circles or one dictated by factions of the progressive left, both of which gained internet popularity in the early to mid 2010s.

Most people — whether it’s because you’ve kept up with the aftereffects of the 2016 election or because you’ve spent anytime on YouTube as of late — are familiar with the alt-right. This group leans male and is driven mostly by insecurity, overt misogyny, and a sense of ownership over what they think are “male-dominated spaces” being overrun by women. It’s another example of extreme conservative thinking: what was mine should stay mine and anybody who thinks differently than me needs to get out of my way.

Arguably the biggest example of alt-right hate and harassment online is Gamergate, an anti-women bullying campaign that first arose on 4chan. The movement’s aim was to push women out of gaming journalism, game design, and gaming fandom by sending death threats, rape threats, stalking women, and dehumanizing women to their peers.

The event bolstered the anger, insecurity, and sexism of young men into an online hive mind that continues today, most notably in Gamergate’s successor “Comicsgate,” which orchestrated the attempted sabotage of Captain Marvel’s release.

These people are not hard to find. They parade their ideas on Reddit or, increasingly likely, on monetized YouTube channels. Their tactics often include spreading misinformation using false “evidence;” discrediting women’s interests by reducing them to “mental cases;” dogpiling; and doxxing.

In Star Wars fandom, this right-leaning group refers to themselves as “The Fandom Menace.” The group was created by former Comicsgate supporter Ethan Van Sciver, who goes by ComicArtistPro Secrets on YouTube. He frequently uploads videos — clickbait title and all — with common alt-right buzz words like “SJW.”

The Fandom Menace was formed in response to The Last Jedi — a more inclusive, forward-thinking addition to the Star Wars franchise that was inspired by the writings of Robert Bly, a leader in the mythopoetic men’s movement. The focus on feminine power and multiple women with complex character development and speaking roles within the film — in addition to the death of Luke Skywalker — powered this hate group to see Star Wars under Disney as “feminist propaganda.” They were driven by the belief that Disney was attempting to erase men from the Star Wars fan community. This led to several targeted hate campaigns including one that ran actress Kelly Marie Tran off of social media.

Where the alt-right works to monetize their hate through public YouTube channels, left-leaning circles are less well known to the general public. Reactionary left-leaning circles that operate within fandom spaces tend to skew younger (mostly generation-z and late millennial) and are predominantly women. They rose in 2015 with the onset of Tumblr and in response to the changing dynamics within “shipping” fandoms. For the uninitiated, “shippers” are groups of people within fandoms who center their attention around a specific relationship within that fandom (e.g. Rey and Kylo Ren).

In online spaces, this reactionary, left-leaning group is better known as “antis.” This name was given to this group after they became known for demonizing, demoralizing, and/or dehumanizing any individual in a shipping fandom who they deemed to be promoting “problematic” content through the fiction they consumed.

Anti harassment campaigns follow a consistent pattern where genuine concerns about real-world injustice are misinterpreted and applied to fictional properties in an attempt to create a 1:1 comparison and exert power over another (often marginalized) group. They start by leveraging performative accusations around real world issues such as sexism, racism, homophobia, sexual assault, and gendered violence against fictional characters deemed by the group to be representative of these problems. The guilt-by-association of these characters is then applied to the people who like these characters, and a general warning is issued: “stop supporting them, or else.”

When this accusation is ignored, it is then weaponized into bullying campaigns that aim to belittle and discredit women through dangerously shallow and irrational pearl clutching. The motivations and levels of participation in these harassment campaigns vary, but they tend to move from one large fandom to the next, focusing on whatever pop culture character will award them the most clout.

As one of the biggest current pop culture “ships,” Reylos have drawn the antis’ ire on both Twitter and Tumblr since the ship’s inception in 2015. The following accusations have been leveled against fans of these characters since 2015. These accusations include:

That Reylos support real life abuse by wanting a romantic pairing between two characters who begin as enemies in an epic myth.

That Reylos are racists because they support a romantic pairing between two white characters.

That Reylos are sexist because Reylos write sexually explicit fanfiction between the “pure” heroine and the “bad guy.”

The importance of these causes and people’s ability to engage with them in good faith is recklessly diminished by blaming valid, real life concerns on women who are enjoying a fictional pair of characters from a film series. It disregards the fact that the women shipping these characters are not a homogeneous group in either their identity or their background. It erases the abuse that some shippers have experienced first-hand — -abuse they should not be forced to out on the internet in order for their shipping to be seen as socially acceptable.

When the Left Leans Right

Launching targeted harassment at any group of women celebrating an enemies-to-lovers ship won’t gain antis clout among their peers. As mentioned previously, Reylo is specifically targeted because it’s arguably the biggest ship in one of the biggest franchises in the world. This means that while Emma Watson said that the enemies-to-lovers dynamic in Beauty and the Beast is about “inclusion and love,” that classic Disney film is old and it’s been done. There is no longer a large, activated community around it, and, as such, there is little incentive to bully the women who enjoy it.

Once antis do decide to bully a ship, however, one of the main accusations leveled at followers of enemies-to-lovers ships is that what they are supporting is “dangerous” to society. To antis, symbolism and subtext in fiction are bypassed in favor of literal and often severe interpretations of a story’s greater meaning. This means that, theoretical little girls and grown women who are unable to separate fiction from reality are put at risk of harming themselves and others because of what they see in fiction.

The irony of this is that a group of mainly women confidently trying to convince other women that they must be protected from complicated romantic dynamics in fairytales is taken from a page in the American conservative playbook that is still used today. For decades, American conservatives have used popular media to scapegoat real issues in society that are easier to pass off as a consequence of the media our society consumes rather than what our society actually teaches and perpetuates.

For example: In 1948, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham began to publish magazine articles and books that claimed that comic books led to juvenile delinquency. While he had no scientific evidence, his writings caused a societal outcry that led to an investigative Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Here, conservative politicians demonized comic book writers and the comic book industry, declaring that “this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding its children, through comic books, a concentrated diet of crime, horror, and violence.”

The subcommittee eventually lead to the Comic Codes Authority — a comics industry created code that put restrictions on the art their creators could produce. The code stifled the industry for almost a decade.

Around the time the subcommittee’s investigation was coming to a close in 1955, the pearl clutching continued on television in a special news report entitled “Confidential File: Horror Comic Books!”

More propaganda video than actual news report, the narrator speaks over several young boys alone in the woods reading comic books. The narrator states:

“When I was a boy and hung with the gang we did a lot of things, we roasted potatoes, we went on expeditions, we tipped over garbage cans now and then, we wrote nasty remarks about the teacher on the sidewalk, but we never spent an afternoon sitting around like this, reading.

What a wonderful thing this would be if they were reading something worth while, something that would stimulate their desires to build and to grow. But they’re not reading anything constructive…they’re reading stories devoted to adultery, to sexual perversion, to horror, to the most despicable of crimes…

One of the wonderfully appealing things about children is that they haven’t yet come to the age where reality and unreality are divorced. The emotional impact of something they read in a comic book may be much the same as a real life situation they would witness.”

The news report goes on to show young boys stabbing trees with a knife and almost killing their friend with a rock after reading horror comic books.

This same outlandish, conservative mindset is what we see today in left-leaning anti culture. The difference now, however, is that these ideals are being regurgitated and repackaged for young girls as each generation of women gains more power within a patriarchal society.

For girls, the preoccupation is not around whether or not they will commit violence, but rather, who they will have sex with and how they will be treated as they grow within a historically male-dominated culture. The idea that women will get themselves into toxic, abusive relationships because they consume hyperbolic myths and fairytales instead of the real consequences of imposter syndrome, insecurity, and the restriction of women to explore their worth in society is no different than what conservatives said about boys in 1950s America. They asserted that boys would become violent psychopaths because they consumed multi-colored panels depicting fictional, exaggerated violence instead of the real life wars our countries waged, fear mongering on the news, or the pro-gun culture surrounding them daily. Both thought processes are damaging to the growth of our societal beliefs.

In fact, the fear and discomfort of women exploring sex within their own spaces is something that is threatening to groups on both the left and the right.

John Boyega’s New Years Eve Tweet: What Caused It and Why Did it Blow Up?

All of the screenshots above were taken within 4 days following a blow up on Twitter involving Star Wars actor John Boyega, a few sock puppets, and whole load of serial anti and alt-right accounts.

If you’ve been on Twitter this year, chances are you have noticed John Boyega trending. The 27-year old actor (best known for his portrayal as Resistance hero Finn in the Star Wars sequel trilogy) gained traction on Twitter New Year’s Eve when he posted a tweet of characters Rey and Kylo Ren fighting (as they do in a movie entitled, well, Star Wars) with the caption “Star Wars Romance.”

To anybody who had never touched fandom Twitter, the tweet appears harmless enough. However, the tweet was successful in doing exactly what it intended and exactly what lurking hate accounts who successfully orchestrated the bullying barrage wanted the tweet to do. It galvanized a hoard of antis and alt-right trolls and their following to — by their own admission — bully Reylos.

This particular incident began with Twitter user @crogman, a sock puppetnow going by the name of @solo_sebes. The sock puppet account appeared on Twitter in mid December 2019 and quickly entrenched itself in a community of Reylos by retweeting and posting Reylo-positive tweets and joining in on post The Rise of Skywalker discourse. The account was also quick to energize antis of the Rey/Kylo dynamic.

Now that the sock puppet is embedded deeply enough into the Reylo community that somebody within that community would see controversy on their timeline between @crogman and Boyega, @crogman tweeted at the Star Wars actor, “bro you’re extremely disgusting and gross also fucking disrespectful…you cannot be this jealous of adam driver dude as a black woman im fucking ashamed that someone like you represented us in star wars.”

The comment was included with a screenshot of John Boyega on Instagram writing “@heyfabrice it’s not about who she kisses but who eventually lays the pipe. You are a genius.”

Boyega’s Instagram comment was in response to a fan suggesting that Rey (played by Daisy Ridley in The Rise of Skywalker) was now available after her canon romantic partner, Ben Solo (played by Adam Driver) died saving her life.

Boyega’s comments upset some fans on Instagram who found that his comments suggested that a woman’s worth in romantic relationships — fictional or not — was a prize to be won by the man who gets to have sex with her first.

The sock puppet account inflamed a situation that would likely have stayed on Instagram. While antis correctly identified that the account was fake and was indeed blackfishing, antis incorrectly claimed that the account was created by Reylos to justify a group of white women attacking Boyega on social media. Instead, the account was clearly a plant meant to goad the actor into directing hate at Reylos.

This is proven by the fact that the account under its new username attempted to instigate hate towards Boyega’s co-star Daisy Ridley in the comments of Reylos’ posts shortly after New Year’s Eve.

Additionally, @crogman was not the only account never associated with the Reylo community that was used to inflame the situation with Boyega. User @FaberLima1 tweeted at Boyega under @crogman’s tweet writing “you are paying mico and only worsening your image. Better stop (and erase while you have time).”

Boyega responded to this tweet with several laugh emojis.

The account @FaberLima1 at the time of this screenshot has 6 followers and no tweets past December 25th. Like @crogman, the account posts Reylo-positive posts utilizing popular hashtags within the fandom including #BenSoloDeservesBetter, a hashtag created by fans of Ben Solo to express their dissatisfaction with his character’s ending.

Also like @crogman, the account was created in July 2019 yet has tweets only traceable in December, signifying that the account has been nuked perhaps multiple times.

Shortly after @crogman’s tweet to Boyega, antis began to push common anti-Reylo accusations. This included accounts who had never actively bullied Reylos. For example, user @sxidey posted several tweets accusing Reylos of “sexualizing Rey,” “harassing John”, and giving “money to the military.”

The latter accusation is a common left-leaning talking point against Reylos who support Adam Driver (a former marine). This particular comment was a reference to a Gofundme started by Ben Solo fans on Reddit. The Gofundme is raising money for Driver’s charity, Arts in the Armed Forces.

The account, however, had only had one recent mention of Reylo two days earlier on December 28th. The account itself is also new, joining in October 2019.

It’s possible that the account is simply a new anti account on Twitter. Regardless, the listing of anti accusations against Reylos almost at the exact time of @crogman’s post reveals the motive of inciting hatred against members of the Reylo community.

Another account, @itsjoey56138220, was also inflaming the situation early on underneath @crogman’s tweet with accusations that Reylos were racist.

Unlike @sxidey, this account has a history of inciting hate against Reylos with outlandish conspiracy theories including one theory that Reylos were created by the alt right who caused “ex Twilight bitches” to make the ship popular. The account has also claimed that Reylos are racist because Reylo shippers want a “whites only romance.”

Boyega, in response to users including two sock puppet accounts with no association to Reylo — and encouraged by anti accounts sewing seeds of hatred across Twitter — finally took to his own Twitter account to tweet:

The tweet, which currently sits at over 190k likes, caused tens of thousands of hateful, targeted tweets towards a group of fans made up predominantly of women and girls. It also resulted in several hate videos by alt-right YouTubers totaling hundreds of thousands of views, several hacked accounts, and the suicide baiting of a teenage girl.

The New Years Incident By The Numbers: How Boyega’s Tweet Set Off The Left and Alt-Right

Following Boyega’s tweet, reactionary users on both left and alt-right Twitter felt further emboldened to hate on a group of women they had been discrediting, dehumanizing, and sending death threats to for years. For myself, the event presented an opportunity, albeit an unfortunate one, to track these groups’ behaviors and quantify them. Ultimately, I had the goal to break down how these incidents are organized to hate on women, whether for purposes of clout or their desire to purge women from fandom spaces.

For this analysis, I took a sample of tweets that contained the word “Reylo” (the search pull also included its plural form “Reylos”) from December 31, 2019 (the day of Boyega’s tweet) to January 3, 2020. After cleaning the accounts to the best of my ability of “pro-Reylo” tweets, I was left with 25,012 tweets that contained negative and neutral comments about Reylos and the Reylo dynamic. I sifted manually through about 7k of these tweets to find key themes, which I verified utilizing a text mining analysis of the tweets.

I emerged being able to quantify the following key themes:

Hate, Trolling, Cyberbullying

Abuse, Toxicity

Racism

Sex, Sexualized, Objectification

Mental, Psychotic, Unhinged

“Hate” received the most individual tweets at ~2.2k tweets and received ~31.4 likes per tweet on average. Tweets containing themes “abuse” and “racism” received a slightly higher avg like count at 38.7 avg likes and 35.4 avg likes, respectively. These themes, along with tweets dealing with “sex” were all mentioned over 1k times.

What this suggests is that a smaller number of accounts with a wider reach were posting more substantive tweets with a focused agenda, while tweets containing “hate’ keywords were more likely to be lobbed out by anyone, including accounts with very little reach.

Tweets mentioning the theme of Reylo fans being “mental” cases had less tweets at 602 total tweets. This theme was pushed strongly by the alt-right circles involved as opposed to leftist circles, which dominated the conversation on Twitter. While this analysis does not focus on the alt-right’s reaction on YouTube, Twitter was used as a place to spread YouTube reactions created by notable Fandom Menace members.

Keyword Group: Hate

The “hate” keyword group quantified tweets containing any mention of trolling, cyberbullying, or hate towards Reylos. The fact that “hate” reveals itself as a top keyword provides further evidence that this event was viewed as implicit approval to bully a group of fans consisting predominantly of women. Anybody involved in sending Reylos hate were, by their own admission, the bullies and were cheering John on for “trolling” women and “putting [women] in their place.”

“Reading Reylo hate to cheer myself up”

“I don’t like Finn’s character either, but I love how John is putting Reylos in their place.”

“Seeing John Boyega troll the Reylos is the greatest way to end 2019”

The clear agenda to send hate towards a group of women and teenage girls was further validated by the fact that the incident was received positively by all sides of the political spectrum, from “progressive” antis to members of the alt-right. The members included the Fandom Menace and alt-right leader and Pizzagate supporter Jack Posobiec.

Both groups took advantage of the situation utilizing the same tactics they typically employ. The alt-right took to YouTube and Twitter to discredit women among their followers by using buzz-words such as “SJW” and “Twilight.” “Twilight” — which was mentioned 103 times in association with “Reylo” between 12/31/2019 and 1/3/2020 — is often used to describe any piece of media enjoyed predominantly by women.

The goal is to degrade women’s interests among their peers by pushing the narrative that Reylos are silly girls consistently preoccupied with the same trivial, valueless media.

Examples of tweets from the alt right include the following:

“John Boyega ripped the Reylo’s a new asshole. You haven’t seen this many acne riddled fatty Tumblr Girls lose their shit since Twilight ended.”

“My thesis: Reylos and most of these Neo Star Wars fans are just ex Twilight fans and self hating beta male cucks who attached themselves to the franchise like parasites. Next they will glom onto whatever film series is hot and continue their rot.”

“StarWars was so great before Disney. Now its plagued by psychotic Reylo fans, Tumblr freaks, representation-screeching SJWs, radical feminism activists, ex-Twilight fans, &wine-guzzling Disney-fan mothers caked Karen. &these are the people they’re now targeting for their fandom.”

On the other side of the spectrum, long-time anti accounts spearheaded the harassment of Reylo shippers, leveraging Boyega’s tweet to bombard Reylo shippers with hate messages. This included viral tweets from accounts with a history of anti behavior across multiple fandoms, along with multiple tweets from accounts with history of targeting Reylos.

For example, Twitter user @Iovestour tweeted, “oscar isaac going off about disney’s blatant homophobia & john boyega telling reylos to fuck themselves all within two weeks i love men men are my friends.” This tweet has more than 48k likes. You’ll be hard pressed, however, to find any tweets by the account past November 2019, even though the account has been active since March 2018.

All tweets made under the account’s former name “blinkapologist” have been deleted — a trait uncharacteristic of your normal Twitter user just looking to share their opinions and maybe curate the news. Past tweets (to which blinksapologists’ tweets and replies have been deleted) reveal a pattern of anti behavior including a history of going after individuals supporting fictional characters the anti finds problematic, utilizing extremist parallels to real-life events.

A reply to @Iovestour in June 2019 reveals the user had allegedly called victims of the Holocaust Nazi supporters. The accusation appears to have been said to supporters of Marvel character Wanda Maximoff.

Along with antis with history across multiple fandoms inciting hatred against Reylos, this event also revealed itself as a targeted harassment campaign due to the frequency in which some accounts tweeted at or about Reylos.

Boyega’s tweet caused some anti accounts within this sample to tweet over 50 times about Reylos in the span of 4 days including sadgeorgelucas1, who tweeted about Reylos ~100 times, drhorotiwtzfine, who tweeted about Reylos ~75 times, and saltandrockets, who tweeted about Reylos ~65 times.

This is not abnormal. Several of these top accounts were also consistently bullying Reylos. The accounts highlighted in red in the chart below are anti-Reylo accounts that were also included as mentioning Reylo frequently between December 31, 2019 to January 3, 2020. This includes once again drhorowitzfine, who has mentioned Reylo negatively ~1,150 times between 2017 to 2019. Other top anti accounts include winniethepoe1, who tweeted about Reylo ~320 times from 2018 to 2019 and ~25 times during Boyega’s New Year’s Eve incident.

Of course no harassment campaign can be waged without finding ways to make the people being bullied look like they were worth being bullied. One of the two main “arguments” thrown against Reylos included the predictable anti accusation of Rey and Kylo’s “abusive” relationship poisoning the mind’s of women and girls. Since Reylo shippers had made the decision to create transformative works and discuss a fictional romance found to be impure by the antis, Reylos could now be cyberbullied in real life for their morally reprehensible decisions.

Reylo is also referred to as “abusive” because some still try to stretch the narrative that Rey and Kylo’s relationship is incestual, and therefore Reylo’s are promoting incest.

The idea that the relationship is incestual goes back to a 2016 fan clash over who Rey’s parents were. Many fans wanted Rey to be a Skywalker or a Solo, which would make her related to Kylo Ren, the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo. The event involved Reylos being frequently lobbed with accusations of incest, and they were at one point banned from discussing Rey and Kylo’s dynamic on a popular Star Wars forum, Jedi Council Forums.

Another common theme was that Reylos were “toxic.” This theme was mostly fed by alt-right circles and originated with a post by Fandom Menace supporter Dataracer117, who has a history of harassing Reylos.

Dataracer117 has a history of voicing his contempt for Disney and their “radical feminist propaganda.” This is most notably seen in his involvement in Comicgate’s attack on Captain Marvel. This included digging up screenshots by fans of Captain Marvel who spoke out against the sexism being aimed against the film, accusing all the accounts of being “Captain Marvel bots.”

Like the Captain Marvel incident, Dataracer117 posted a tweet with screencaps that Reylos were allegedly sending death threats to JJ around the time of Boyega’s tweet. Despite Dataracer117’s history attempting to devalue women in fandom communities and despite the screencaps being debunked by the Reylo community, the screencaps gained traction around Twitter, YouTube, and in media publications including Buzzfeed. They were further used to create the narrative that Reylos are “unhinged.”

This narrative inflamed alt-right accounts, and they began to frequently frame Reylos as mental cases. Discrediting women is nothing new (in fact you can easily read about it in this essay on Western puritanical conditioning against women in the 17th century), and is to be expected from a community who dedicates their time to driving women away from their online spaces.

The second accusation that was used to fuel harassment against Reylos was the claim that Reylos were racist against Boyega. They claimed that Reylos’ harassment of the actor led women to be upset with Boyega over his Instagram comment. This led to harassment on his Twitter — which remember, was started by a sock puppet account not associated with the Reylo community.

While racism is a prevalent concern that needs to be addressed within all fandom communities-and questions over inherent privilege due to one’s community are something to be examined-no support was given to back up these particular claims about the Reylo community during this incident.

This is not to say, however, that isolated incidents have not occurred outside of this specific accusation within the Reylo fandom, as they would within any large and global group of people. However, these incidents are statistically insignificant to the population of people who discuss Reylo positively on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (which, according to the sample number of accounts who have discussed Reylo between 2015 to 2019, can be quantified at over 40k individuals. The true number is dependent on how many accounts — currently almost 70k — discuss Reylo negatively within the sample).

This particular accusation of racism has several layers to it and I would like to break them down separately.

“But Reylos Read Explicit Fanfiction”

The first part of this is that the nature of Boyega’s Instagram comments allowed antis and alt-right circles to attack Reylos on NSFW fanfiction and fanart written and drawn for and by women. It also allowed antis to draw more criticism around the ways in which Reylos analyzed The Last Jedi, a film with many allusions to the writings of psychoanalytics including Sigmund Freud.

After the release of The Last Jedi, the Reylo community, who had written long form meta analysis on the Star Wars saga since 2015, wrote lengthy metas about the symbolism in the film. Much of this symbolism was reflective of Rey’s sexual awakening throughout her journey in the movie.

Antis took issue with this and saw this as “sexualizing” Rey’s character. They asserted that women exploring sexuality through the lens of a fem-gaze narrative written for women was appalling, degrading, and out of line.

For anti and alt-right circles, the Reylo community’s openness to discussing sex in Star Wars through meta, fanfiction, and fanart by women (and generally for women) meant that Reylos could not take offense to Boyega’s questionable comment that suggested to some of his fans that Rey was a sexual prize to be won. The narrative antis spun was wholly unable — and unwilling — to separate women discussing sex in their own communities as different from men offering their sexual “jokes.”

This justification for bullying Reylos felt eerily similar to “she was wearing that, she asked for it.” It’s a highly socialized sexist line of reasoning women deal with daily and one that was readily accepted in this incident.

2. “But Reylos Ship Rey With The White Character”

Since 2015, Reylos have been accused of racism on the grounds that Reylos did not prefer Rey to be in a romantic relationship with the black male protagonist. This claim is presented without any evidence to back up the accusation.

Furthermore, the people who ship Rey and Finn (known as “Finnrey”) have done little to celebrate this pairing and act as a fan community. In fact, they have consistently acted more like a group that seeks to find ways to activate hate against Reylos instead of create content for their ship.

The two data visualizations below show every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Reylo” between 2015 to 2019 vs every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Finnrey” between 2015 to 2019. The gray in these charts represent the number of accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. The purple represents the overlap — that is the accounts who have tweeted at least once about the other ship.

The first observation is that the number of users discussing “Finnrey” is small in comparison to the number of accounts discussing “Reylo.” Finnrey was mentioned by 7,780 accounts while Reylo was mentioned by 69,484 accounts.

As mentioned, gray = accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. Purple = accounts who have tweeted about at least one other ship. So, in this case, out of the ~7.8k accounts that tweeted about Finnrey, ~60% of accounts mentioned “Reylo” at least once (4,665 accounts total). This number represents only ~7% of accounts who have ever talked about Reylo.

This data is supported by other statistics comparing the two ships. For example, on fanfiction website Archive of Our Own, the fic tag for Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren has ~16k fics. There are another 12k fics in the tag for Rey/Kylo Ren. The fic tag for Finn/Rey has under 2k fics.

3. “Reylos Have Bullied John Since 2015”

The most damaging false claim to come out New Year’s Eve was that Reylos had been attacking Boyega (and other Star Wars actors) with racist tweets since 2015.

It is very true that the actor has received heinous racist attacks. Most notably, the actor was attacked on social media following a #BoycottEpisodeVII hashtag that was started by two 4chan trolls in an attempt to get racist Star Wars fans to take the bait. It is well known that this hashtag was the work of racist alt-right accounts.

Since the hashtag, other attacks have been levied on Boyega. One of these attacks included a surge of outcries against him by The Fandom Menace, after a tweet posted in June 2018 stated: “If you don’t like Star Wars or the characters understand that there are decisions makers and harassing the actors/actresses will do nothing. You’re not entitled to politeness when your approach is rude. Even if you paid for a ticket!”

The Fandom Menace took the opportunity to bring their anger over Boyega’s comments to Twitter and YouTube, much like Comicsgate did when Brie Larson spoke in favor of diversity.

Reylos, however, are now being blamed for these attacks without any supporting evidence. They are also being blamed for the harassment of Kelly Marie Tran. The actress was bullied off of social media by alt-right trolls on her Instagram page, along with antis who saw her character kissing Finn as “sexual assault.”

You will not find any evidence linking the Reylos back to the targeted harassment of any Star Wars actors over the years. Predictably, however, you will find that the people who used this accusation to their advantage admitted that their own motive was bullying.

For example, Twitter user @notlipglosse tweeted “the way this man waited until he got his last star wars check so he could freely make fun of the racist stans who have bene harassing him since 2015 %@&@*!?!?!?” This tweet (at the time of the screencap) gained ~92.2k likes. A tweet posted on December 19th, however, reads “the way we’ve been bullying Reylo stans and calling them delusional and they won…,” further supports the data that this incident was about inciting hatred towards a group of fans predominately made up of women.

Another example is from user @irisckp. Shortly after Boyega’s tweet, the user tweeted “NOT THIS REYLO AND HER MUTUALS ACTING LIKE JOHN BOYEGA HAS BROUGHT SOME TYPE OF OPPRESSION WHEN HE WAS RACIALLY ABUSED BY REYLO’S FOR YEARS. HE HAD EVERY RIGHT.” Again this tweet was presented without evidence that Reylos had “racially abused” Boyega.

The tweet is referring to a livestream from a young woman in the Reylo community who candidly expressed discomfort over the false accusations and bullying. The livestream was taken by antis and used to further bully the young woman.

This bullying eventually descended into suicide baiting that resulted in the woman’s account being deleted. However, this did not stop antis from pushing the woman to kill herself. It also did not stop them from telling the teenager’s father, who had gotten involved in combating the harassment, to “live tweet your reaction when you find your daughters lifeless body dangling from her rooms ceiling fan.”

After @iriscpk’s initial tweet, the user admitted that they had “never seen Star Wars” (like a portion of antis bullying Reylos that night) and that “Reylo” is used as an umbrella term for their unsupported accusations of racism against Boyega.

The tweets again reveal that viral tweets making accusations against Reylos had no merit, and were not based in any evidence they had seen with their own eyes. These users were looking to be involved in the latest conversation despite the lack of evidence or knowledge and despite the real harm being done to the community the tweet targeted.

This supports the hive mind behavior behind this cyberbullying attack. There was no concern for any person hurt. There was no concern for the misinformation that was being spread. And there was no concern for the very real issue of racism in online spaces.

This was only ever about a group of women getting hurt and, hopefully, getting off the internet altogether.

Why This Matters and What This Means for Art and Society in The Digital Age

If you have gotten this far and you find this article absurd, you should. This much vitriolic hatred, ugliness, and anger over women analyzing and creating media for a romantic pairing in a Hollywood blockbuster is, to put it mildly, overblown. Unfortunately, it’s the reality. And it’s a reality that has even deeper repercussions if not addressed.

I wrote this article not only in a hope to correct the misinformation against a group of women in the Star Wars fandom, but also to address a larger issue of what it means when these hate campaigns are so readily accepted by the general public, by journalists, and by other fans.

The internet will continue to evolve as it already has. It will evolve into an ecosystem that will touch every single moment of our lives. It is a future that will be as brilliant as it will be terrifying and when we are so willing to demonize a group of women with no evidence but a tweet with a lot of likes, it shows that we are not prepared.

We are living in an age where art is being dictated to what a few executives read online, or what a data analyst may write up in a report. We have seen how Disney has made a movie based off of fan service easily found in Reddit threads. We have seen Paramount shift the schedule of an entire film to redesign a character after apparent outrage. We have seen Disney remove James Gunn from a major movie project following a targeted alt-right campaign to get him removed. And we have seen this with Warner Brothers choosing to green light their films using AI.

This pattern is concerning in part because we are willing to create art via algorithm. But, it’s also concerning because, unless these algorithms are properly coded and taught overtime to understand hive mind mentality, the machines that churn social listening data will be regurgitating intelligence corrupted by organized and hateful groups. These groups aim to restrict freedom of speech, diversity, and meaning in our art for the sake of political agendas laking any evidence, any substance, or any valuable goal.

I also wrote this article because it is not only our art that is at risk, but the ways in which we communicate as human beings online. The ability to see individuals — namely women — as inhuman or as less than with no second thought is something we should all understand is a problem. We have a deep inability to question what we see on our Facebook feeds, our Twitter timelines, or in our Instagram photos . We also live in an age where entire governments are being overturned by algorithms and social media ads. We are quick to blame Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and YouTube for this, and yes, while, those platforms have a responsibility of their own, we need to realize that it is our responsibility as well to always question what we see and search for evidence if it is not provided to us.

This example of bullying women in an online community is not necessarily synonymous with political elections, but it still presents yet another moment where people are failing to believe hard evidence over buzz words, sensationalized headlines, and clear, often spelled out agendas.

Until we learn not to react to everything we see, and listen to the people around us who come with facts, this type of behavior will continue, this type of behavior will get worse, and this type of behavior will impact us politically, socially, and culturally as we become more and more integrated as a digital society.

On January 10th, John Boyega posted a video to his Instagram account showing himself mocking tweets by women in the Reylo community. He did not blur out the names. These women were specifically targeted. The event created ~50k tweets continuing to bully women. Media outlets including Forbes, IGN, Cinemablend, Esquire, and The Wrap picked up the story. They all applauded the video.

In response, Reylos trended #reylolove — stories about how women in the community had positively impacted their lives.

They also created a charity event for anti-cyberbullying charity Cybersmile, which you can donate to here.

[joannalannister]

hey lady joanna, i'm not sure if it was u or someone else who posted this, but Ive found a pie chart of the asoiaf characters that r most popular in fan fic, and sansa was number one (and i think arya was a close 2nd?? cant remember properly). Do you know why this is? I've been reading a bit of fanfic recently, and ive also found that sansa seems to be the most shipped, and written about character.

Why do people write any fanfiction, about any character? 

We write because we love it. We write because we must. I think a huge part of what makes fan fiction so singularly special is that there is no ambition in it, only passion. [x]

We all wrestle with feelings and we can recognize them in stories when we see them. We don’t need for them to be sanctioned. It doesn’t matter what the writer intended, or what the artists intended. […] One of the most radical things I tell myself about the media I consume is: fuck canon. [x]

More often than not, people write fanfiction to explore ideas that are harder to explore on their own. Themes of sexuality, queer characters, and other problems of young people that most mainstream stories barely glimpse at are laid out in full force. Are all fanfictions hugely creative stories that need to be told? Not necessarily. In fact, probably not. By their very nature they are ancillary. But if these are stories our young people are telling, and en masse as well, critics should learn to be less dismissive of them. Because the stories we tell as children lay the cornerstones of the stories we tell as adults. No matter how grammar-less and outlandish they may be. [x]

What is scary about transformative fandom is that it’s a place where young women love their media without reservation, and where they can make stories for themselves. That’s why as a culture we’ve decided that transformative fandom is weird and gross and morally wrong, and that’s why all the articles in the world explaining that transformative fandom is a totally legitimate way to interact with a text aren’t really making a dent in the never-ending stream of repulsed investigations of fandom. Because fandom is the province of young women and, culturally, we find young women terrifying. [x]

Sometimes Canon is Broken and I Need to Fix It. Anyone who is a fan of … well, anything, knows that there are certain moments when you’re reading along or watching a series or movie when you stop and shout, “Wait! What?” (one word: midiclorians) Sometimes when that’s happened I feel the desire to “fix” canon by writing my own version of “the truth” (known as ‘head canon’ or, if it gets widely accepted, ‘fanon,’ which is an abbreviated word for ‘fan canon.’) Also, people like myself write fanfic because the story they’re involved in is, on some level, really important to them. Characters become more than just fiction and what happens to them becomes very personal. The world becomes very real, and you start to want to explore every single nook and cranny, especially where you sense an inconsistency—something that makes you want to fill in the gaps. So, there are big and little “fixes” that call to fan writers. [x]

And why do people read fanfiction?

But every so often I find a fanfic I can’t keep my eyes off.  It might capture the feeling of the original source, or attack the premise from an interesting and new point of view.  I get to see my favorite characters come back to life through the power of words.  The puppeteer might be different, but, in the best fics, anyway, my beloved puppets are back and better than ever. [x]

Fanfiction is born of love, from both the writers and the readers. And the Stark sisters are widely loved. People naturally want more of these girls’ stories, to visit them again, to hear their voices again, to recapture whatever resonated with them the first time around. 

Regarding Sansa in particular … well, we haven’t had a book published with a Sansa pov in it since AFFC was published in 2005. 

(I do not count snippets from the still unpublished TWOW.) 

(2005 was a loooong time ago. I had a flip phone in 2005.) 

People want more content with Sansa so they’re making it themselves. 

Also, a lot of fanfiction is about shipping, and Sansa is very shippable. One of the central questions of Sansa’s narrative is who she will marry, from the very beginning of AGOT. GRRM teases so many possibilities for a potential partner for Sansa (some more likely than others), and people latch on to these various possibilities and generate a lot of fic for the things they love. Great fandom debates rage around who Sansa will ultimately be married to (assuming she marries) at the end of the series. Most (most!) people want Sansa to be happy in the end, but everyone (everyone!!) has different ideas about what (or who) would make Sansa happy.

And sometimes people don’t care about the endgame, they just want to explore vibrant alternate universes, since the ASOIAF canon has come to a standstill. For example, what would have happened to Sansa if Robert had never come to Winterfell? Personally I don’t particularly like alternate universes (most of the time), but lots of other people do, and they like exploring them in fic. 

And sometimes fanfiction isn’t even about the roads not taken in canon, it’s about the roads GRRM would never take, because LBR, he’s an old Baby Boomer. Fanfiction offers stories that aren’t necessarily heteronormative. 

Sansa is a fandom bicycle. She resonates with a lot of people. Sansa’s own story parallels the meta**-narrative disillusionment of the reader, but instead of a bitter awakening, it’s a hopeful one, because ASOIAF is a story about hope despite the darkness. (If you want to read more about this topic, @poorquentyn and @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly have spoken about this at length.)

**I don’t mean “meta” the way fandom uses this word to mean “literary criticism & analysis”. I mean “meta” in terms of being self-referential, or from a perspective above the work itself. GRRM is writing a fantasy story, but his fantasy story is about fantasy (the genre). 

So this resonance, this ~reader avatar~ quality - it makes people want to explore the world with Sansa even more, and so they write fic. 

You might want to pose this question to someone who writes a lot of Sansa fic tho, to get a better answer, because I don’t write a lot of Sansa fic. (I’ve written some, but not very much, and not often.) I typically like … darker … themes in the fanfiction I write. One of the fanfic stories I’ve been telling to myself (and only myself) for over twenty years would have the Purity Police up in arms. I’m so glad tumblr didn’t exist when I was a child cuz y’all would’ve fucked me up. This website isn’t healthy. 

[quetzalpapalotl]

No, no. It definitively is. Ok, to be fair this is all based on my own observations. Like there has always been some Usamerican-centrism and general anglo-centrism in anime fandom, and you would see that in things like, characters in fanfiction not having school on saturdays, the grades and whatnot. But also anime used to be less mainstream, and people who got into it would innevitably get interested in Japanese culture, especially if you were deep into it because learning some basic information about the culture would be necessary to understand the works. Of course this would also lead to problems like "You just don't get Japanese culture like I do" and we all know the stereotype of obnoxious weaboos. But still, there was always some understanding that this was content from another culture, or at least more than it was now. But anime is much more mainstream now, being into anime is not some niche nerd thing, more people are watching it and less people are inclined to see it as a part of their identity, so they aren't investing so much time into anime As A Medium and the culture that creates it. And this is also happening while internet discourse over media and purity culture take on a new form. So now you have all these people coming in to watch anime and udging it entirely based on anglo values and standards, the same way they would any anglo show. An example would be that I've seen queerbaiting throw in a lot for a lot of pretty boy anime, but queerbaiting is very much an anglo term. To give a brief summary, yes, pretty boy anime gets in a lot of ship tease to attract fangirls, but is an understanding that these ships will never be canon (and that's nice because you can then throw ship tease for different ships with the same boys to cater to as many tastes as possible), fangirls don't actually expect any explicit romance because is not labeled as BL. Unlike queerbaiting which is about marketing maybes to queer people and never acting on them. I could also go on a rant about how Japanese people tend to view the gap between fiction and reality wider than Anglos. And also, as a Mexican this is really annoying because as more media is foreign, I'm used to understand this is about other cultures. But Anglos don't seem to really get this because they are used to most media they consumed being produced in their countries, so they just think of they standars as normal and default. And again, as anime is more mainstream now, they look at it as merely another thing to. I mean, not that these weren't things that happened before, but it does seem to have increased in recent years.

Is it just me, or is the english-speaking anime fandom in its current state kind of weird to any of you? Lake, I get that none of us speak Japanese, but like wow the Anglocentrism really pops out sometimes.

[mmbookreviews]

What This Tumblr Is For

Hello there, fellow readers of m/m novels. I’ve been reading a lot lately, and many of my favorite authors have let me down at the same time that some RL friends have roundly criticized my faves while reccing dreadful books that no one with sense or eyes could possibly like. ;D All of this inspires me to finally make a blog of honest reviews.

Why this blog: As we all know, the m/m book landscape is littered with self-published and small press books with a dubious grasp of English, no grasp at all of punctuation, bizarre plots that stop in the middle, and improbable anatomy. Most Goodreads reviews sound like they were written by the author’s friends. Most sites that let you search for m/m content make it hard to search for both m/m and some other genre, or they only recommend the same five most popular books, or they don’t clearly explain what genre something is. At the same time, my standards are not high, and I often just want something trope-y to read that I haven’t already reread fifty times.

Long ago, I used to read movie reviews in our local paper. They were always bullshit, but they were written by the same idiot with bad taste, and the flavor of their dislike always told me exactly what I would like about a movie. The things that bother me may not be the things that bother you, but having reviews from the same source with the same taste is invaluable. Hence this blog.

Below is some tl;dr about what types of books I’ll be reviewing.

I welcome recs and sufficiently entertaining anti-recs. Let me know if there’s a classic or a turkey I should review.

What is “m/m”: The most concise definition of “m/m” is:

Kind of like slash fanfic, but original.

These books sound like slash because they are intended as romance novels or because they are sff with gay relationships written by women or by people coming out of slash fandom. The audience that consumes these books is mostly women. Men do write in this field, but they are less successful--which is a source of misogynist rhetoric, butthurt whining, and people lying about their identities.

I’m making this distinction because Tumblr sometimes has trouble with it in ways that attack women but that also belittle and ignore gay men’s history and the history of queer literature, gay and otherwise.

“M/M” books primarily come from small contemporary presses like Riptide or are self-published ebooks. These are usually explicitly marketed as gay romance novels, even in the case of long series of detective stories where the primary couple has resolved their relationship problems a book or two into the series. Some are marketed as other genres (mystery novels, thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, horror) but still feature a gay protagonist who falls in love.

Older books that fall into this genre are things like Swordspoint: i.e. genre fiction with major gay romances, written by women, most of them former slash fanfiction writers, and consumed by other women with the same tastes and background. I know a couple of queer guys for whom woobie yaoi cliche Vanyel Ashkevron was a lifesaver back when he was the first positive portrayal of a gay man you were likely to run across by accident in a Middle America bookstore, but overall, Mercedes Lackey’s gay characters have been part of a slash fanfic type tradition more than a gay literature type tradition.

What is Gay Lit (and gay genre fiction): Gay literature used to mostly come from gay presses and was written by cis gay men for an audience of cis gay men. Things have diversified in recent years.

Typical themes have been the trauma of being in the closet, coming out stories, and slice of life depictions of the gay community in a particular place and time. Typically, these books are more political and less happy than current m/m romance. The big focus is a gay identity, not the progression of a specific romantic relationship. Many of them are also trying to be Serious Literature, and as such have a different style of prose from genre fiction. (It can be florid or wannabe Hemingway, but it’s all trying for a more overt authorial Voice, while genre fiction typically tries to keep the prose out of the way of the plot. It’s a different aesthetic and you know it when you see it.)

By the 90s, there was more of a sense of solidarity between different queer identities, and the same presses might be publishing the works of trans authors and putting gay and lesbian literature together. However, it would be a mistake to think that gay lit throughout its history has been about “mlm” since much of it was actively hostile to bisexual men or ignored both them and trans gay men. I don’t like the term ‘mlm’, and I don’t like tumblr’s use of it to push an “I’m not like the other slash fans” agenda.

Books from 90s and pre-90s gay presses that had strong genre plots and a central romance with a happy ending often prove to be slash zine fic by female authors with the character names changed. Today, the same authors wouldn’t bother with this kind of gay press: they’d go straight to an erotica/romance press or self-publish. (Though, obviously, their ability to get published by gay presses shows that there’s overlap in tastes. I assume those presses thought that gay men would also enjoy these stories. There are certainly gay men who now turn to m/m romance novels to satisfy tastes gay presses aren’t catering to.)

Gay mystery novels by men have been and still are more common than gay sff/horror/paranormal by men. A prototypical 90s/00s example would be about an “everyman” in the person of a jerkass twink who spends all day at the gym, whining about how he isn’t physically perfect enough to steal his rich friend’s hot model boyfriend. He would still manage to have casual sex with half of the other characters but end up alone for the sequel where he’d do it all again. There’s a 99% chance this sort of book will be set in Provincetown or some other real world gay mecca and at least a 50% chance that every single female character is a shrieking harpy.

These books are clearly intended for an audience of cis gay men embedded in a particular kind of contemporary US cis gay men’s culture. They also feature much more casual sex and cheating and way less serious emotion than m/m romance novel readers typically enjoy. A m/m historical might have a loving description of absinthe use, but a contemporary m/m rarely has a banal and realistic description of poppers and gay clubs. The mystery plots aren’t bad in gay mystery novels from gay presses, but I often find the characters unlikable and the sex and romance unsatisfying. The last time I saw this category of book seriously recced to slash fans was before ebook publishing took off. Back then, you bought what paperbacks you could and hoped there was something enjoyable in there.

The bottom line is: If you want books that treat queer identities realistically, politically, and/or depressingly, there are plenty. They’re not marketed as romance novels and they don’t come from the same presses or authors as romance novels. Genre fiction by and for gay men also exists. A lot of it isn’t appealing to a typical slash fan or m/m reader.

I wish that the parts of tumblr with a yen for these genres would seek them out instead of being upset that slash fanfiction or m/m paranormal romance novels fail to scratch the same itch. Or if all of the above fail to satisfy, I at least wish people wouldn’t blame it on the existence of female readers of m/m.

I might review a few pieces of gay lit or a few gay mystery novels if I happen to reread them or if they’re awful in a funny way or they have an unusually strong romance, but I find most of this stuff irrelevant to "m/m” as a contemporary marketing category.

What else I’ll review: Anything I think is relevant to a m/m reader, pretty much, whether that’s the occasional m/m/f book I run across or a m/f or f/f side story to a major m/m series or some particularly good piece of nonfiction a m/m series used as research material.

[britneybroniesbeliebers2017]

In some ways, the Dream Daddy fandom feeds very much into the ideas presented within Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. It is slightly different from previous media, designed with the purpose of being different, specifically playing into the mass’s requests for LGBTQ representation. Like this, it may well fade into the mass of early 21st century works striving to achieve difference with questionable success.

However, as I disagree with the general concepts presented in the thesis-less, source-less, evidence-less ramblings of a fascist-era cynic, I’d like to also stress the numerous ways in which Dream Daddy does not align with the ideas of Adorno and Horkheimer, through the organization of the four take-away ideas presented in class.

-Richard

Firstly, in expansion of the previous concession and answering the idea that “Everything is the same, always,” I would respond that there are only so many stories to be told. While Vladimir Propp suggested there are 32 core stories, repeated over and over again in slight variation, I would argue that the number of stories we select as “distinct” is arbitrary. There are any number of events which can happen in the universe to any number of characters with any number of traits and characteristics, and the sequence of these events happening to these characters in different numbers and orders creates the infinite spectrum of every possible story. Propp is welcome to choose 32 of these stories as archetypes to represent large portions of the spectrum, or truly any number, and it’s possible to argue that number as representative of the rest of the infinite spectrum (I, personally, would argue that an infinite set would be the only appropriate representative number: 1. things happen, then nothing happens, 2. things happen, then nothing happens, then more things happen, then nothing happens, and so on, for an infinite number of “then things happen, then nothing happens,” units, taking into account the general opinion that lack (nothing happens) alone would not constitute a story, and that every story ends, creating a period of lack of story after it; however, that is going more deeply into the philosophy of what constitutes a “story” than is really appropriate for this Tumblr post about Dream Daddy).

So, yes, it could be said that everything fed to consumers of mass media is the same; it could just as easily be said that all media that ever could exist is the same, all based on those same sets of events and characteristics in those orders. These are the limits of the world in which we live. If one has a problem with consuming the same basic stories over and over again, I fear the day when they realize reality and their life in it is just a story, as derivative and meaningless as absolutely everything else. With that in mind, that each life is just one story on a spectrum of all possible stories, it’s really no wonder that humanity decided to recognize stories as distinct concepts and organize cultures around them, granting them meaning, significance, and beauty.

Dream Daddy in its various plotlines is a customization of stories which have been told and retold since the beginning of time. Fans know this; they know it when they spend their $15 on the game, they know it when they piece together fan theories to complicate the plot and make it more emotionally significant, and they know it when they write alternate universe fanfiction so unique it might as well be its own story, yet just as ultimately derivative as the original work. They continue to ascribe significance to it willingly, because it is entertainment, and to assign significance and meaning to it regardless of how similar it is to everything else in some way brings significance and meaning to our own lives. If not, it is at very least a distraction from the meaninglessness of one’s own life. At the end of the day, the masses of consumers are just attempting to live their lives until they die, and whether or not they enjoy what is produced for them to enjoy by some nameless, faceless, media-controlling entity (or, in the case of Dream Daddy, Game Grumps, a small YouTube/online entertainment company) is hardly something to complain about.

Secondly, the concept that works of media are created on a massive scale with differences merely imagined ignores what lies at the basis of Dream Daddy’s creation: forward progressive movement. The main difference of Dream Daddy from other forms of media is its gender, sexual, racial, and physical diversity. It was created outside of the main sphere of media creation (that is, not by any major company or production studio) to attend to needs not being met by other forms of media. It’s hardly the only example: in recent years, independent artists from game designers to web comic artists to fiction writers have been upping their diversity game. Does this eventually all blur, especially when it pulls forth more diverse mainstream media as major cultural sources work to keep their patrons interested? Perhaps. However, it also indicates that consumers (a) have some control over the media they are consuming and the direction of its themes, and (b) specific differences are being selected with intention and purpose. The general themes that consumers are non-individual sheep simply absorbing cheap media and convincing themselves they desire it rather than establishing their own likes and dislikes within media and advocating for stories they can appreciate and relate to on an individual level is not only condescending, it fails to acknowledge the broader causality of fandom.

An additional aspect of that causality appears in fandom itself, including in the Dream Daddy fandom, and centers around fan creation. Fanfiction on the whole is perhaps one of the best examples of formulated, repetitive works with invented differences, as the same few pairings and plots are repeated in different settings ad nauseum. However, each of those recreations did not simply appeal for mindless consumption; they collectively indicate that individuals within the fandom felt that there was more artistry (a different theme, a different mood, a different perspective or irony or beautiful means of expression) to be had that did not exist in any work created thus far. As the same core work is experienced over and over, and consumers create difference, they themselves are turning consumerist crap into something unique and beautiful. This is just called interpretation; it’s the basis of appreciation of art, and one of the most valuable and characteristic aspects of individuality. Finding difference in the same basic works is not a symptom of an ignorant, complacent society; it’s the proof that humans think, change, and care.  

The fact that the Dream Daddy fandom is what I’m referring to as a “flash” fandom, formulating and disintegrating within a matter of months rather than the years of activity many video game fandoms enjoy, is even further evidence that people do not simply drink up that which is shoved in front of them. Dream Daddy does not provide a lot of base canon content, only about a day of gameplay’s worth, with much of that being repetitive. The fans played the game, interpreted it thoroughly, created art from it, and moved on, unsatisfied with their limited capacity to interpret and interact. Thus, the differentiation is entirely constructed, but by no means are the consumers mindless enough to construct it from nothing, or accept whatever is bestowed upon them without question.

Thirdly, the culture industry does not construct desires within consumers. Consumers have desires and have been fulfilling those desires with their own and each others’ stories for millenia. The cultural industry just profits off fulfilling desires which were already there, for reasons previously discussed in the first objection. People had the desire for Dream Daddy, and a subunit of the cultural fulfilled it, because it would not make any sense for anyone involved not to. The fulfillment of these desires certainly inspires further desire, just in the previously discussed manners in which fans want to create increasingly progressive media of appropriate length and quality.   

Finally, the concept that the only way out of this cycle is through it doesn’t entirely make sense within whatever universe is invented within the paper, and makes even less in reality. Even assuming that we were under the thumb of this mass media god, the idea of exploding out of this cycle is too vague to be considered a genuine plan. In truth, there are several ways to avoid the cycles of mass media production and consumption, including (a) enjoying art produced not for profit and (b) enjoying art produced before current cultural constructions, such as ancient plays and poetry.

However, if the problem is not with this concept of a pop culture version of The Man, and instead with repetitive media, I would repeat the previous thought that all stories can be interpreted as deeply similar. To avoid current story constructions would mean going outside the realm of the enjoyable into the realm of the uncomfortably abstract (and, most likely, meaningless). This would, in its own way, be different for difference’s sake. These are the limitations of storytelling; these are the limitations of our very perceptions. To demand content producers to explode out of the spectrum of storytelling is to claim dissatisfaction with all of reality. It’s a valid enough argument to make, but blaming pop culture for one’s existential crises is just inappropriate.

I apologize that we are all trapped in this unsatisfactory reality with its unsatisfactory cultural constructions, but while we’re here, we might as well appreciate gay indie games for what they are: opportunities to live slightly better version of our own lives for one digital day until we turn off our computers and reenter our own meaningless story lives.