#i follow a fair amount of fanartists and writers too esp if i like their work while i scroll through the tags

[beacon-lamp]

"follow 300 mcytblrs" please send help i follow 3.5k people and at least 500 are mcyt because i remember clearing it out from 4k to 3k mid 2020

holy shit anon what.  hahaha though to be fair, i really Only use this tumblr for mcytblr and i scroll through the tags more than anything.

[saizoswifey]

Hello, I hope you're doing well, wifey. I have a question that's been bothering me if you don't mind answering! What's your take on the practice of taking commissions for fanfiction? I've seen people get aggressive enough to threaten to report any fanfic writers who advertise/take commissions. And while I'm aware it goes against the ToS for many companies (but then so does creating fanwork under copyright law smh) I also feel like it's a very slippery slope, seeing how the majority of our fanartists widely rely on fanart commissions alone to support themselves and I feel singling out and judging fanfic authors with far more derision is very hypocritical.

I would really like to hear your thoughts on this, if you do decide to answer. Thank you!

Hello, anon! I am doing well, hope you are too! 

First of all, people get weirdly aggressive when they see fanfic writers opening commissions and I can not, for the life of me, reason as to why this is. Other than the fact that they think writing is a ‘lesser’ craft (compared to digital/traditional art in fandom). Which is bullshit. 

And if you are someone who subscribes for an artist's patreon, has ever paid for an art icon of your favorite character, likes and reblogs fan art etc etc and you attack a writer for opening up commissions you should really take a good look in the mirror. 

I not only think it's acceptable for a writer to take commissions, I actually encourage it. For a few reasons. 

You deserve to be paid for your hard work. Writing is difficult and takes a lot of time. Time you could be spending doing other things. If you are at a point where you’re taking requests often and rearranging your day, losing sleep, in order to fulfill them--it’s time to get paid for your work. 

Taking commissions will make your writing better. If you plan on taking your writing into the professional field at any point, commission work will help you see what it’s like to work with deadlines and crunches as well as taking someone else’s concepts and creating something with it. Even if you don’t plan to move into the professional field, these are all still great skills to have. It can also shed light on areas you’re weak in so you can work on them. Whether that’s certain tropes or genres, or whether your time management needs work. Commissions will help show you things you didn’t even know about your own writing. 

All fanworks are technically against copyright, yes. But fanfiction for the most part does have a safety blanket of ‘fair use’ which allows us to create works with characters as long as it’s transformative and not using any direct quotes from source material etc. The reason why so many people are still creating fanworks is that most of these companies really don’t give a shit. These big statements are an umbrella to cover their ass. They don’t care about someone writing fanfic commissions here and there. They don’t care about someone doing 12 $5 art icons of the characters for some followers. 

What they DO care about is someone making thousands selling a line of sweaters with the characters, or someone plagiarizing the work and putting it out as their own, or selling a book that’s a word for word a copy of the game/media. Stuff like that. They know they can’t stop every single person from creating, and I don’t think they want to. What they want to protect themselves against are people abusing the system.

Here is a take you can read originally here that I really think will help people understand what I mean:

“Think of it like this: You're having a wedding and you hire a band. You pay them to turn up and play your favorite songs because it's YOUR wedding and you want to hear the songs YOU love.

That band isn't breaking the law by playing covers. Nobody's going to refuse to go and see Ed Sheeran because you can just individually pay a cover artist to play Ed Sheeran songs instead.

And it's the same thing with individual commissions for fanfic. Intellectual property laws are there to stop plagiarists from co-opting the income streams of original content creators. For this to have any kind of impact on that creator, it needs to be widespread and easily distributed. Getting paid to write a fanfic for someone else's personal enjoyment doesn't impact the original author's income stream in the slightest.”

If you are hesitant in any way that a particular game or company may not allow you to do a commission, email them. I’ve done it and most of the time they say they don’t care, esp if it is a person-to-person exchange for PERSONAL use and you’re not ripping off the media and trying to sell an ebook out of it or something. Or they may say sure that’s fine as long as the profits are under X$ amount.