#this is where I go full fandom brain

[worldwithoutmiracles]

love this. I seem to remember in Buffy or Angel, maybe when talking about hell dimensions, they say that there is not just one, but loads of them, and I always figured something similar for heaven dimensions. the Buffyverse in general is kind of frustrating when it comes to religion (after Tara dies and Buffy talks about justice and cosmic rules in vague and frustrating surety; why do crosses do that to vampires though; most of the Powers That Be and especially how they act up in Angel), but the idea that there might be thousands of dimensions a human could stumble into and mistake for a heaven or a hell depending on who they are is a really juicy idea (dimension where everything is shrimp, anyone? definitely hell).

like you said, Buffy remembers that in "heaven" she knew everyone was safe, but... that is definitely false. so I think either 1) Buffy was being lied to and the "heaven" she was in was telling her what she wanted to hear, 2) she felt like everyone was safe/fine because she had fully detached from mortality/reality (like the way an unfeeling god would say life and death are just two states of blah blah blah, like everything will be "fine" because she sees all suffering as small and temporary) or 3) she is, after the fact, adding that idea to her memory, either consciously or unconsciously, to alleviate the guilt that she wasn't thinking about her friends anymore, at all (she is trying to express that she was content and realizes, guiltily, that she should not have been relaxed, even upon death, because she feels so obligated to save people. yikes.) I think all of these ideas are terrifying, especially being presented as heaven, as the most perfect reward Buffy can imagine for herself.

I think it just speaks to how traumatized and tired and kind of numb Buffy is at this point. anything in contrast to Sunnydale was going to feel like heaven to her because she lives in hell. maybe it was just the cessation of pain - after so many years of constant fear and bruises and broken bones, maybe just being nothing at all felt like heaven, and that's what she's trying to express

I really like After Life (and, specifically, that scene of Buffy admitting to Spike she wasn't trapped in a hell dimension that I just reblogged). I think I would probably put it somewhere in my top five episodes of Season 6 (along with Dead Things, Bargaining and [somewhat lower down the list] Tabula Rasa and Doublemeat Palace).

And yet, as I've said before, I really don't like the way that some fans take it as canon that Buffy literally was in heaven (and that, in particular, something like the popular Christian notion of heaven exists in the Buffyverse despite everything else the show has ever said or will say about it; or that Buffy would go there by virtue of being a virtuous person despite her very explicitly not being at all religious ["note to self: religion, freaky" in Season 2, or telling Holden Webster in Season 7 that there was "nothing solid" to suggest God exists].

I really like the metaphorical reading of this part of Season 6, in which The Gift ended with Buffy making an (ultimately unsuccessful) suicide attempt, and in which she resents her friends for not letting her die, and in which she considers her life in Sunnydale to be a (metaphorical) hell which she compares unfavourably to some nebulous feeling of being 'complete' and 'finished' which she experienced after The Gift. But I just don't think the show is better if you start adding things like a literal heaven to the world's lore. something that nobody had ever even suggested as existing before this season. (I kind of loathe the whole concept of The Powers That Be on Angel for much the same reason; it just doesn't feel like it belongs in the setting the show had previously established).

The thing is, I think Buffy's speech in After Life works just as well -- arguably, even better -- if you don't assume she's right about actually being in heaven. I mean, we know she's wrong to have thought that "everyone [she] cared about was all right". We've just watched Bargaining, after all. Not only is everyone in Sunnydale in very real physical danger without a Slayer to protect them, all of Buffy's surviving friends and her kid sister and her Watcher are all manifestly miserable without her. Plus they'd still have had to deal with the Trio and (almost certainly) Willow's growing reliance on magic [even without the big resurrection spell, are you seriously suggesting Willow wouldn't keep using magic more and more if she lived on a Hellmouth with no Slayer?]. And all the money problems Buffy will find out about later would still have been an issue without her coming back to life! Were they going to send the Buffybot to work a second job to pay the bills? Were they going to send Dawn? And that's not even mentioning Angel, or asking about the people Buffy loved who have already died [are they in heaven too?]. I actually think it's more accurate to say that nobody Buffy cares about was all right while she was gone.

But After Life works because, to Buffy, none of that is relevant in the moment. She convinced herself that the people she loved would be better off without her when she jumped in The Gift, and now -- freshly emerged from her own grave, having been cheated by her best friends of her one chance to quit being The Slayer, told that she can't just pass on the impossibly hard task of living in the world to her sister -- of course she's going to keep believing it. Of course she's going to try to believe it for as long as she can. Because the alternative is admitting that she herself is still needed, and that she can't give up on the world just yet. And she really, really doesn't want to have to do that. Arguably she won't do it until Grave at the end of the season.

The important part of After Life isn't that Buffy thinks she was in heaven; it's that she's convinced the world around her is hell.

[c4t1l1n4]

You know the brain rot is bad because I just watched Klaus (2019) and my immediate thought was to search AO3 for fics when I was done. Jesper is so whumpable, you don’t understand.

[theshadowrealmitself]

At all times I am thinking about “person surrounded by robots who inexplicably look like them, so no one believes them when they say they’re not a robot”

Currently it’s taking the form of a person (A) stumbling into a part of the galaxy where there’s a line of robots that coincidentally look almost identical to them, and this person gets snatched up by a group who wants them to use that to go undercover against the group’s opposing enemies

Rn really focusing on one of the opposing group’s leaders (B) really liking the “robot” (even if it makes them feel skeevy for liking a robot of all things so much) and when it comes out that A is actually working with B’s enemies, B is still not aware that A is actually an actual person, instead thinking that the group must have reprogrammed A at some point, and they want them back

It’s about to be a very awkward negotiation meeting for A

[girl-bateman]

How does one get assigned as sam coded / dean coded ? Do I need a doctors note ? A psych evaluation perhaps ?

[nunyverse-scribe]

If there’s one thing I noticed in recent times when it comes to fan engagement with art and artists (TV shows, books, movies [franchises], etc.) is that a big factor in the downward spiral in media literacy and critically analyzing what we engage with is that a lot of people… feel sort of obligated to getting defensive for the specific things they like. And they assume any critique or criticism is a form of ill will or malice towards the piece.

Which I think is SUCH a terrible mindset to have when engaging with any piece of art or media, especially in a time where there’s this general push for dumber downed media for the masses to consume and likewise less critical thinking. I notice a pattern where there are people that will give a million disclaimers about how much they love the media they’re about to critique because they know the average fan will dogpile on them and assume it’s someone who doesn’t like the art that’s critiquing it. Or I notice when a subsection of fans of a media start critiquing it, there’s another crowd in the fandom that say “if you don’t like it so much, then why are you watching it 😒” even though that’s not the case, the critiques come from a place of love. That’s not right, it’s not good to have this general consensus that to love something means to ignore or outright accept glaring problems in relation to it.

We as audience members, we as fans of a certain thing, need to be able to be ok with the fact that the shows, movies, books, etc. we enjoy might have some negative elements to it that we HAVE to be critical of. Sometimes the thing we dislike is something as small as a trope we’re tired of seeing. Sometimes the thing we dislike is a LOT bigger, though, such as questionable messaging subconsciously implemented due to the writers’ internalized bias.

And honestly THAT is what matters most to me when it comes to this type of thing.

Because EVERYONE is susceptible to the subliminal propaganda in a piece. You, me, your neighbors, your parents, kids, the elderly, everyone. And even moreso when we choose not to question or challenge the things in the media or art being fed to us.

Why? Because to just accept any glaring problems in (with the example I’m typically using right now in this rant) a specific narrative purely because as a whole you like the story means that you are allowing that narrative—and likewise other narratives you’re bound to consume and internalize—make the decision on your thoughts and the decision on your principles and moral compass.

To combat that you have to do as I stated above: challenge those attributes of the story or art or whatever that are relaying questionable messages. Even if you, generally speaking, really like it.

QUESTION why that creator will depict women, or POC, or disabled ppl, or queer ppl, or another marginalized identity in the certain way that they do. QUESTION why a creator’s art relays a certain commentary on the systems of fascism, or capitalism, or the patriarchy, or police brutality, or any other oppressive system. Especially because this art and these stories we engage with don’t exist in a vacuum: what came before it to lay the foundations was experiences of the creator, what was there alongside its creation was the creator’s personal principles and ideals, and what comes after it is the impact it will leave on minds and ideologies it will spread.

I dunno, I say this because I enjoy critically analyzing the stories and the art that I love. I will watch a TV show or read a book and I will connect with a lot of aspects of it, I will love it, I will recommend it to others. However, I will also have long conversations with fellow fans (usually friends) about the pitfalls, I will take note of certain aspects of the story that were questionable choices, and I will view it with a critical eye. And maybe it’s just because I’m a writer myself, but I feel like being that nuanced and careful with how you view the art that you love, to praise AND critique it, is in itself a form of love or passion for the art.

And I really wish more people understood that? Especially when it comes to art, things aren’t black and white. They are allowed to be good and bad at the same time. Characters are allowed to be likable but also horrible people. And I feel that having this mindset of “I like it therefore I see it as perfect” is a very, VERY dangerous one to harbor.

[ghostlycod]

“I have this scene in my head for my fic that I really love but i don’t feel like writing all of the other stuff to get to it.”

I see this comment like 5 times a day in fic writing spaces lol

a scene that you don’t want to write is a scene you don’t want to read. don’t write stuff you don’t want to read.

me, personally: wait until the scenes that get you to that first initial scene you were excited about are just as interesting as that scene too. it won’t be the first, second, or third thing you think of. if u have a scene you really want to write, write that, and keep writing only those exciting scenes that come to you. eventually you have a million interesting scenes for your fic and they become puzzle pieces for you to arrange and then eventually the strings come together and you realize you really do have an interesting way to get to that original scene, and you’re just as excited to write it, if you haven’t already written it when you were brainstorming other scenes earlier in the writing process that you didn’t even realize could carry your story like that.

[musical-chick-13]

Fuck it, weird-yet-galaxy-brain take is that Love Is War is rom-com Death Note, but not in regard to the ship that everyone thinks, and what I mean by this is that Kaguya and Miyuki are NOT the lighthearted lower-stakes rom-com version of Light and L, they're the lighthearted lower-stakes rom-com version of Near and Mello.

[salamidots]

mhmhm I gave someone a heartknot to someone but now when you go on a date you and the other character hold hands automatically if you're standing close enough/idle and my brain was just like ehhhhhh >:'D

I just mainly wanna see what else the character has to say/unlock and then after idk might undo/break up we'll see

edit: okay the date itself is fine/the character's responses that I picked are really fucking funny/sweet >:'D I just don't like the hand holding thing

[artisticwizard]

I'm too afraid of making an ass of myself online. Uuuugh.

[dailyoyo]

imagine if i stopped posting about jet set radio on here and just started posting in-depth analyses of pokepastas. wouldnt that be fucked up

[gophergal]

What do you think about the lack of importance Edenia have in the last (and probably in the upcoming too) games?

Seriously, it makes me really Sad. Edenia was so important in the first timeline. What the hell happened? Only a few characteres mention this realm in MKX

It sucks. Big time

If you'll note, basically none of the realms matter anymore, aside from Earthrealm and Outworld.

Sure, the Netherrealm exists, but that's pretty much it. Dreamrealm is of dubious canonicity (introduced to explain Freddy Krueger as a guest fighter, then used to explain Tremor's glow up. Given he isn't shown in the storyline and arcade endings aren't canon in that game, I don't feel comfortable saying "yeah. That's important to the story"), and means nothing to the plot.

Chaosrealm and Orderrealm also don't show up despite being neat concepts.

What I'm getting at is that it makes the MK universe feel small. Edenia is only part of the problem, but I think it's a good example. Mortal Kombat feels more focused on nostalgia bait, Realistic Graphics, and more grisly Kombat than being, y'know, Mortal Kombat. None of that is necessarily Bad, but it's making it feel a little generic to me.

Maybe it's my bias and nostalgia, but that's just wrong. I'm not saying they need to bloat the worldbuilding, that would suck too. I'm just saying that they have these fun concepts, could they PLEASE do something with them???

Not to be the "they changed it, and now it sucks" guy, but I really love the original timeline's absurd worldbuilding. That's a major draw for me. Not only is it absurd, but it was constantly rolling and acquiring new and interesting bullshit. To me, that gave it a personality.

The original timeline feels like you took Enter the Dragon, the Matrix, Magic the Gathering, and classic slasher films, mixed it all up, then used it to bread and batter the gameplay. Deepfry that sonuvabitch until golden brown and serve it hot. Its the fried fish and hush puppies of gaming. I wouldn't say that it's Good For Me, but it's fucking delicious.

Its also not widely palatable and, just as Long John Silver's isn't exactly a big name restaurant, MK was kinda in a slump for a while, profit wise.

I think what happened is they cut back the weirder shit in order to make the games more popular. Its a chicken tender now. Not bad, but it's more of a "I'll take it if there's nothing better/nothing else I feel comfy eating" dish. Still not Good For Me, but often dressed up to seem healthier. By which I mean "able to be taken seriously by more people." The worldbuilding is more Serious ™️, so is the Gameplay. Don't get me started on the State Of The art Graphics.

Its all done this way for profit reasons. I don't doubt that folks on the team are still passionate about the games, but you can't forget that NRS is owned by a bigger company than Midway was. There's more executive meddling, so we see less of the more niche worldbuilding elements like Edenia

[bistaxx]

Honestly, knowing this event is (presumably) ending on my birthday is already the best gift I could ever get

[burningcomputerpersona]

person: *shows even the slightest hint of interest in music that I enjoy*

me: ah yes a new victim muhahahaha

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Lurkers really are great, tho

I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.

Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.

The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.

Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.

I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available. 

I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.

I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.

So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.

But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.

I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.

Should we gatekeep fandom?

I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--

A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.

That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.

See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.

So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.

The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.

And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”

Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.

Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.

And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.

However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community. 

I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.

And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company? 

And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)

But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.

Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.

Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.

Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists. 

While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:

[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom 

OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]

-

“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.

I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.

It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits. 

So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.

And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.

So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.

Think of it like a garden gate

When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.

The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people. 

Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it. 

Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.

My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.

But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.

I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.

Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.

And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.

Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.

There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.

[gaywineauntsstuff]

Sometimes I feel like us as the bat family fandom forget how starry eyed people get about Nightwing canonically.

Because with the exception of early era Tim most of the Batkids are like. lol that’s my loser older brother or some variation of yeah…he’s some guy I guess? He helps me with homework?

And Nightwing is the canonically a center of multiversal light.

When Heroes meet Nightwing they do the vigorous handshake and the “it’s an honor to meet you sir, I have heard so much about you oh my god”

There are so many character where they are literally shown giggling and kicking their feet whenever Nightwing talks to them.

Even the people who don’t have the celebrity level worship of him respect the hell out of him and call him as soon as they need help.

From raven to Starfire to Superman to Superboy to all or the flashes there is so much respect and awe given to this one dude.

And it is deserved

But imagine you are Damian Wayne and you’ve been working with what 90% of the people you’ve met (all bats) have been calling an embarrassment to your father’s legacy.

Your mother hates him and your Grandfather doesn’t feel that strongly about him.

The red hood calls him an embarrassment and a coward and he couldn’t even keep Red Robin from running away.

Your father tells him that he never should have been Batman

And you’ve worked with him and you know what you think everyone is full of shit about him and you and him the new Batman and Robin are the best no matter what anyone says.

And fuck it the fact he keeps going in a suit that everyone tells him he’s not good enough for is scratching something in your brain that you’re refusing to acknowledge because why would you feel that way? You are the circus freak have nothing in common (shut up)

And then you meet the justice league and all the extended teams.

And people are falling over themselves to listen to a word out of your brothers, your Batman’s mouth. They wait for a nod or headshake and dictate decades worth of planning on it.

Both Drake and Todd’s hero teams ask him for advice with or without their designated bats presence.

The man of steel asks for child rearing advice and wonder woman cracks a joke about a spar

Newer heroes whisper about him in the halls

He’s literally your favorite hero’s favorite hero

And it’s breaking Damian’s Brain

Because well… he kinda gets slapped around in Gotham. He’s the butt of half the jokes the other Batkids make and Dick just smiles and takes it.

The rogues have a bounty on nightwings ass and he gets leered at by goons, rogues, civilians and anti-hero’s alike and he doesn’t say anything.

He lets oracle crack jokes about a pretty face and having to do everything herself

Let’s Jason run the alley despite the fact that apparently he knows how to take it back

Apparently he’s had 12 people tailing Drake since Paris and despite being the man Ra’s Al Ghul calls detective has yet to notice. (Because you can’t tell me Dick was just magically at the right place to catch Tim falling to his death on coincidence)

And necessary to peace talks because he’s the best they have at deescalation

Like imagine you are a child who was raised to believe power is this obvious, all consuming thing. That the ones who control the board are visibly larger than life figures who fought their way to the top and cling to power by even the thinnest hangnail if they had to.

People who ignore simpler morals or an overall greater goal or good

And then you’re taken in by the man who whispers the correct answers into the larger than life figures ear.

Like I feel like that would have such an impact because Dick didn’t take power from anyone to reach his goals, it’s why his siblings don’t really defer to him unless in crisis.

Dick didn’t take power, no people just looked at him and decided he was the best option to give it to.

Everyone basically looked at this kid and went, yeah you’re the future of all heroism.

And if that dude can’t even get Bruce Wayne’s respect what chance does Damian Wayne have

[dfnkt]

Wait when did gore come back on tumblr I started my gore blog when I was like 12 back in the day before everything got nuked fuck yeah