#fandom dynamics
I am literally begging people to learn how to participate in fandom through a lens other than shipping
The thing is that people often go to fandom spaces specifically to explore niche fantasies they aren’t getting from non-fannish spaces and real life.
I think people will look at someone’s fandom blog and think “Is this is the only thing you care about in life?? Your world is so small! You’re thinking is so narrow!” when in fact the person has an entire life outside of that particular fandom blog, and the content on their fandom blog only pertains to one specific niche interest.
I love found family stories! I love media with complex non-romantic relationships! I don’t look for these things in fanfiction, because I already get everything I want in that regard from the original fiction and media I consume, and from my real life relationships with actual living breathing friends and family. I read fanfiction specifically looking for the things I have difficulty finding elsewhere. So the scope of fanfiction I read is fairly narrow.
That’s not because I am narrow. It’s because I have a whole life outside of fandom participation.
It is of course frustrating to discover that other people are not in fandom for the same reasons you are. But please don’t assume that someone’s fandom persona represents their entire personality.
If someone is only into fandom for shipping reasons, that’s not a character defect they need to fix. Remember that people have lives outside of fandom, and no one is obligated to be in fandom for the same reasons you are, and want the same things out of fandom that you want.
We are all here for our own reasons.
Well, fuck. I was heavy into fandom many years ago, but got caught up in one of those really brutal fandom conflicts in which a certain fansite decided they would kick the shit out of me. The savaging went on for literally hundreds of posts; I left, traumatised. But today I found myself missing the fun and being bored with the fogies (many beloved) on Facebook. I thought, “Hey, why not go dip into Tumblr and restart the joy?” I’ve been scrolling for about 20 minutes, getting more and more and more anxious, and now I think I need to throw down this phone and go for a run or something. Adrenaline urge to ESCAPE. Don’t know if I can take it; bloody isolating disappointment. Fuck. If you don’t think fandom PTSD is a thing, honey, it is.
ppl talk about blorbo-in-laws but i love having entire media-in-laws. like one of those things that 80% of ur mutuals seem to be into and has huge overlap with your main fandoms yet you never got into so you just absorb vague knowledge from the dashboard.
Just saw a very serious tumblr post refer to adults age 25+ as “older adults.” I am begging you kids to go outside and interact with diverse groups of people. Please. It’s for your own good.
The human lifespan, according to tumblr:
Birth to 17.99999999 years: Child. Doesn’t matter where you fall in that range. You are a helpless, innocent child.
18-approximately 21 years: Adult. Full internet privileges!
21-25 years: Sketchy adult. You can stay, but you’re on thin fucking ice.
25 years to end of life: Senior citizen. Old fart. Washed up has-been with nothing to contribute to society who should never socialize below their age bracket. Also probably a pedophile.
fandom and the criticism paradox: an essay
So there was recently some twitter drama about a thread where people were supposed to post “cancelable” opinions about fanfic. unsurprisingly, someone saw something in that thread that applied to their own fic and then deleted all their fics off AO3.
there was some backlash to this incident in two specific ways that I saw:
(a) criticizing the author for being so sensitive/looking at this thread in the first place
(b) rejecting criticism of fanfiction bc fanfiction is not forprofit
to be clear, I have no particular stake in the fic trope in question being criticized or the author who deleted, they are specific to a fandom I am not in. what this makes me think about more than anything is the uneasy role of fanfiction as an art form. (if you disagree that fanfic is art you can stop reading here, that is my central premise).
I’ve been involved in fandom in one way or another for ~15 years, and I can still recall that in the days of yore on fanfiction.net, people would add “concrit welcome” or “read and CC!” in the notes if they wanted to receive constructive criticism. Actually, when I went back to delete my fanfiction.net account several months ago, I discovered also that I as a 13-year-old was exactly the kind of asshole who GAVE constructive criticism, in a tone that would make me furiously angry if someone left that kind of comment for me on AO3.
I can also recall that as a 13-year-old, I received some dismissive commentary that made me discontinue a fic entirely. It was a terrible fic, it was marauders-era HP fanfic about Sirius Black falling for an OC who was best friends with Lily Evans structured around Beatles lyrics. I shudder to think of it and am thrilled it is lost to the sands of time and internet decay. But when someone left a comment making fun of how unoriginal this concept was, it hurt my feelings and made me move on to a different fandom. (This was literally at least a decade before the two cakes meme).
When I moved over to livejournal, it quickly became clear that this was a safer space to experiment, the worst that would happen there was that a fic would go ignored, not that people would leave condescending criticism. Maybe sometimes someone would message you to point something out, or fix a typo or something, but any sort of criticism was happening in private where I couldn’t see it. Livejournal is where I really started challenging myself to write interesting concepts or experimental styles (all of which I also shudder to think of now).
Fast forward to AO3, and it is entirely impolite and not the done thing to leave any sort of criticism on a piece of fanfiction. What’s more, AO3 is an archive. The author appears far more as an author rather than as a lowly blog runner among many; it’s only when you follow them to tumblr or discord that you get to know the person behind the story, otherwise they appear to you only as an author.
There’s still a much greater familiarity than there is on, say, goodreads. Published authors have access to their goodreads pages, they can see everything you say about their books there and some of them do check, but the comforting distance of a publisher and a for-profit book makes us more okay with that than with an ao3-review that lands directly in the author’s inbox or the snide remark in the bookmark tags that the author will also see. (although I see y'all out there creating goodreads pages for my fanfiction and that….my dudes that’s just weird why are you doing this?)
At the same time, though, the fanfiction author did not invent being sensitive about negative feedback. Authors being butthurt about bad reviews has been around for about as long as books. And I get why! Writing is personal. You put a lot of yourself into each word, and having it be rejected, or even mildly criticized, is uncomfortable and unpleasant. There’s something to be said for the fact that it’s a lot easier to leave negative feedback than positive. It’s much easier to pinpoint what you don’t like about something than to praise specific things you liked - I actually think ao3 comments are a great practice arena for giving praise and valuing what’s done well, a thing I know I don’t do enough irl.
So we can say that one arena which separates the fanfiction author from the published author is the directness with which criticism is received. Critical comments go straight from one user to another. In most cases when I’ve received them, they have been anonymous, probably because the user knows they’re breaking fandom norms. Sure, criticism is hurtful for published authors as well, but they have two benefits: one, they are spoken ABOUT and not TO. And two, which leads me to the second point, at least they’re getting paid.
The other big issue people raise is that fanfic authors aren’t being paid; they are contributing their fanworks out of love, often in spare time as students or while working full-time. Fanfiction is not a commodity, you aren’t buying a service and as such you have no right, as a reader, to complain.
This is not a point I can or want to argue; fanfiction is a labor of love and to see the work someone put in and decide to tear them down over not being great at dialogue or whatever is just a dick move.
But.
The thing that gets to me, the white-hot burning core of this argument to me, is that it can’t be absolute. And this is where I run up against the central issue of debates about anything substantive on twitter or tumblr, and also why this post is so fricking long - these points are made briefly and succinctly and when you do that it sounds like you’re making an absolute statement about whether fanfic should be criticized at all, ever, and I don’t think that works.
See, I happen to think a thread asking for “cancellable fanfic takes” is an easy way to stir shit - it’s bound to step on some toes and if you’re posting in that thread, you’re going to have to be okay with stepping on toes.
However, I also think that people should be allowed to have opinions on fanfic tropes in general without authors taking it personally immediately. Like, here, let me out myself: I don’t like high school AUs. At all. Don’t read ‘em. Sometimes I filter them out on AO3 because I don’t want to see them!
What a hot take. If some seminal author of high school AUs in any of my fandoms happens to see this, I sure hope they don’t take this as a personal affront and delete their fic, because I’m talking about the trope in general and I have not even read their fics because like I said - I don’t like this trope! And I happen to think I should be allowed to say that without being criticized for criticizing!
I even, and this is where I’m being controversial, think I should be allowed to go on at great length about why and in what ways I dislike this trope (I think it often destroys adult characters’ agency and I also think most high school AUs are wildly OOC). This is not personal towards writers of this trope in my opinion. I do understand why someone might take it personally and/or disagree, and if they do, it’s my responsibility to be clear that I’m not saying this to be hurtful but to express my own issues with the trope, but I still think I can say this on my personal blog in my corner of the internet.
So why is it important that I can lay out my issues with high school AUs? Well, because a lot of the time, the criticism of fandom tropes in general that get the kind of “authors are doing this for free how dare you express criticism” response is not innocuous, it’s criticism of fandom tropes that further racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia etc. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this particular case, where a fandom trend for this specific fandom was being talked about in general and an author took it personally, is being used to restate and enforce “no criticism in fandom spaces”.
Like…no, fanfic authors are not being paid. Yes, this is a labor of love and doesn’t deserve to be treated like published work, lacking both the time and attention from an editor. But at the same time, if you put something out there into the world and let people read it, they can think whatever they want about it, and if they think you are hurting people with it, that should be something they can say. One last anecdote to exemplify this point: A few months ago, I clicked on a fic featuring what was, to me, very clearly a situation of dubious if not entirely lacking consent. The fic was not tagged as such at all. I found it pretty upsetting that the fic did not acknowledge the consent situation at all, and left a comment asking for a dubcon tag. In order to do so, I felt like I had to praise a fic that had upset me wildly so the author wouldn’t be hurt by me asking for a tag, and afterwards, I was annoyed at myself for basically grovelling in order to get an appropriate tag I could filter for.
Fanfiction is populated by people who love art so much they want to make more of it, they want to think about it and meta and create. Of course fans think about the art created in their own spaces, and of course they have takes about it!
But I think that when we are discussing the role of criticism in fandom spaces, we must crucially differentiate between
Personal, individually-given criticism
- Criticism of craft, i.e. solicited, friendly and clear suggestions to improve pacing, dialogue, whatever
- Criticism as abuse, i.e. unsolicited and abusive critical commentary
- Meta-criticism, i.e. commentary on tagging/fandom norms (which can easily also be abuse
General criticism
- Criticism of craft, i.e. criticism of fandom trends like the way anal sex is often written in ways not at all like it’s practiced irl
- Criticism of norms, i.e. criticism of structural oppression being recreated in popular story beats
- Criticism of tropes, i.e. “why I personally don’t like high school AUs” (this can blend easily with criticism of norms)
Why is criticism of norms not part of individually-given criticism? Well, because fandom keeps showing over and over that when racism within a fandom is called out, it ends up with the people doing the calling out being harrassed and threatened and the people creating racist content portraying themselves as victims because “you don’t criticize fanfiction”.
And that’s why I think we need to talk about fandom’s uncomfortable relationship to criticism.
