If you wish to take part in any fandom, you need to accept and respect these three laws.
If you aren’t able to do that, then you need to realise that youractions are making fandom unsafe for creators. That youare stifling creativity.
Like vaccination, fandom only works if everyonerespects these rules. Creators need to be free to make their fanart, fanfics and all other content without fear of being harassed or concern-trolled for their creative choices, no matter whether you happen to like that content or not.
The First Law of Fandom
Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)
It is up to you what you see online. It is not anyone else’s place to tell you what you should or should not consume in terms of content; it is not up to anyone else to police the internet so that you do not see things you do not like. At the same time, it is not up to YOU to police fandom to protect yourself or anyone else, real or hypothetical.
There are tools out there to help protect you if you have triggers or squicks. Learn to use them, and to take care of your own mental health. If you are consuming fan-made content and you find that you are disliking it - STOP.
The Second Law of Fandom
Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)
Simply put, this means that everyone likes different things. It’s not up to you to determine what creators are allowed to create. It’s not up to you to police fandom.
If you don’t like something, you can post meta about it or create contrarian content yourself, seek to convert other fans to your way of thinking.
But you have no right to say to any creator “I do not like this, therefore you should not create it. Nobody should like this. It should not exist.”
It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create. That’s censorship.Don’t do it.
The Third Law of Fandom
Ship And Let Ship (SALS)
Much (though not all) fandom is about shipping. There are as many possible ships as there are fans, maybe more. You may have an OTP (One True Pairing), you may have a NOTP, that pairing that makes you want to barf at the very thought of its existence.
It’s not up to you to police ships or to determine what other people are allowed to ship. Just because you find that one particular ship problematic or disgusting, does not mean that other people are not allowed to explore its possibilities in their fanworks.
You are free to create contrarian content, to write meta about why a particular ship is repulsive, to discuss it endlessly on your private blog with like-minded persons.
It is not appropriate to harass creators about their ships, it is not appropriate to demand they do not create any more fanworks about those ships, or that they create fanwork only in a manner that you deem appropriate.
These three laws add up to the following:
You are not paying for fanworks content, and you have no rights to it other than to choose to consume it, or not consume it. If you do choose to consume it, do not then attack the creator if it wasn’t to your taste. That’s the height of bad manners.
Be courteous in fandom. It makes the whole experience better for all of us.
One thing that strikes me as very interesting about the fandom’s perceptions of the Scott and Stiles dynamic is how many people interpret their characters as Scott ignoring Stiles.
I’ve lost track of the number of fics that have Stiles gravitate towards Derek (or Peter, or Lydia, or someone else, but mostly Derek) because he’s getting “sick” of Scott ignoring him. I was honestly surprised and confused when I saw this because to me, it never seemed like Scott was ignoring Stiles, but respecting his silence.
For all his chatter, Stiles is an intensely private person. He does not like to share his problems or talk about his personal life, while Scott not only loves to share but overshares. Maybe it’s not always the healthiest - namely in that there are things Stiles probably should talk about even if he doesn’t want to - but that’s the worst I can say for them. Otherwise, to me their relationship comes across a lot as Scott respecting Stiles’ desire to keep his problems to himself, and Stiles being a good ear for Scott who likes to talk about things as his way of working through problems.
I have never seen Scott be too self-absorbed to notice that Stiles was having problems. The closest is in the first season, when he and Allison switched off their phones to go wander in the woods together…and even then, Scott had no reason to believe that Stiles had something urgent to talk to him about ahead of time, and he was focused on Allison, who really needed some comfort that day. The rest of the times Scott “ignored” Stiles, he was usually in the middle of danger (i.e. hanging up when Stiles called him from the pool because holy shit he was still in the Argent house) or trying to help Stiles more laterally (when Stiles was kidnapped, Scott and Isaac were already preparing to track down Stiles directly before Peter and Derek showed up and basically offered them a way to find Gerard, who was most likely the one to kidnap Stiles in the first place). The only other time Scott has actually missed that Stiles was having problems was in 5A…when someone was actively manipulating both boys away from each other, and putting a lot of effort into it, too.
I really hate how much their friendship or relationship is portrayed as problematic because Scott “ignores” Stiles because most of my own closest friendships have been like this - I kept my problems to myself while providing a listening ear to my friends in need. I hate when people portray Scott as a bad friend because it feels like they’re saying MY friends were bad friends for letting me keep my peace and my silence. I hate the implication that a friendship is invalid if someone prefers their privacy, or handles problems by moving past them instead of obsessing over them.
tl;dr - Scott doesn’t ignore Stiles. Scott respects Stiles’ privacy, and there is a HUGE difference between those two things that I wish more of fandom would try to understand.
I wholeheartedly agree with this! Also, one of Scott’s most obvious characteristics is that he’s trusting. That doesn’t just apply to trusting people on a good/bad basis, but also trusting that people aren’t lying or sugarcoating things. When Stiles tells him that he’s fine or that he can handle things, Scott trusts that he’s being honest. Stiles has always been an “ignore a problem until it goes away person”; Scott recognizes that, trusts that doing things that way is what is good for Stiles, and respects him enough not to push him past his own personal comforts. Scott is a great friend, he cares so much, and he loves Stiles. The way they interact works for them, if it didn’t they wouldn’t be best friends. I think you’re absolutely right, I wish people would explore why their relationship is the way that it is, instead of denouncing them as “not as good friends as they could be”. It baffles me how black and white fandom sees characters, like they absolutely must adhere to a standard of action/reaction or they’re shitty, when real life people have different dynamics and nuances that vary. That’s what makes people interesting and, in fiction, that’s what makes characters interesting. Anywho, yes, fantastic analysis, hella kudos to you.
I honestly wonder if some of the fans have met REAL PEOPLE who are not really as black and white as they make out so many of the characters to be. It makes it hard to talk about the characters honestly because everyone is either “this character is perfect” or “this character is a monster” and there’s nothing in the middle. Admitting to a genuine flaw of a character you like is seen as “switching sides” and just. No. I love this character for everything, including their flaws. But no, it’s either bash or worship, nothing in the middle. :(
The last time I was in a fandom with this much wank was probably the Zutarians vs Kataangs days (and the Harmonian Era before that - good god, I feel old just SAYING that), so it’s been a bit of a shock to come into Teen Wolf after YEARS of accepting and friendly fandoms.
I was reading through Stiefvater’s blog post about her health struggles, specifically thinking about the mentions of the rather predictable fandom response to the resulting errors in The Raven King, her absences from touring, etc. I was thinking about how fandom– and online culture in general– tends to catastrophize, assume the worst of people but specifically creators. Naturally, that’s if we’re not idolizing our faves. Maybe you can’t have one without the other, I’m not sure.
Even when I agree in principle– for ex, about queerbaiting issues– in the end I disagree when the discussion frequently turns to intent. Some people do talk about queerbaiting regardless of creator intent, but that’s a touchy topic and a difficult balance to strike, isn’t it? If you’re upset, you want to blame someone. And if you see something wrong, the default assumption (even if it’s a reasoning error) is that it’s intentional. No one thinks to imagine the thing that irritates or hurts them is just a largely meaningless accident, let alone a result of totally unrelated personal issues like with Stiefvater. Surely it’s got to be related, people reason. Surely it’s about you.
However, the fact is, 95% of the time, I’m guessing it’s not, in fact, about you, or me, or us (or even them). It’s about the creator(s) and whatever their needs, desires and personal issues are. So yeah, I’m guessing most creators don’t do anything either for or against fandom, most of the time. Is that an ugly truth, or just boring?
Sometimes creators want to keep you in suspense. That does happen. JK Rowling and Moffat, for example, are both fans of playing with fans’ minds in that way. But it’s not personal. It’s a part of the performance, rather. In the case of shocking plot reveals, your shock as the audience is part of the theater of it all. Actually, this kind of audience manipulation is probably as old as stories. I’d imagine Shakespeare must have been a fan of the shocking reveal/reversal where possible. Romeo and Juliet is full of that sort of thing. And that play really plays with the audience, too. I only imagine it was limited by the fact that it wasn’t a long-term serial. Alas.
Anyway, back to the point. Anytime someone assumes the creator(s) are out to get you (or us) just for kicks and/or for some even more nefarious reason, I’d take a step back and indulge in some healthy skepticism. Not that I expect this to happen anytime soon, alas.
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships:3 Possible F/M ships:27 Possible M/M ships:36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS:66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media;femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.
When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.
Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.
If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…
And then we will ship an OT3.
I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.
As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.
In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.
And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.
And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.
When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.
And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.
It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.
They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.
And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.
Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.
You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.
The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.
That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.
“All fictional content is just fine and totally harmless to everyone” is not my actual position; I believe in nuance and social responsibility and that a lot of things are up for debate.
But as long as there are people out there who think it’s OK to harrass and threaten kids for exploring their sexuality in fiction, and as long as the community that just wants to criticize is not actively taking stepsto oust these predatory individuals, they are pushing people who are horrified by the stalking and harrassment to adopt that as a fall-back position.
Or, in other words, matter how not-OK any particular piece of fiction or art might be, it is always more OK than targeted harm to actual human beings, especially vulnerable children. And that’s a hard line.
And as long as that’s happening on as large of a scale as it is right now, anyone who cares about the safety of minors online should be concentrating on cleaning that up, and people who focus on the contents of purely fictional works instead, or put far greater emphasis on these, are at best misguided and at worst trying to take the attention off their own predatory behavior. This focus is a red flag.
I’ll be happy to discuss the potential indirect harms of more and less permissive stances on media content with a community that demonstrates a commitment to fixing their missing stairs, not ignoring that they exist.
Hint: The missing stairs are the ones engaging in harrassment and abuse, not the ones who reblogged a “bad” fanart once.
I agree with the majority of this, however I don’t 100% agree that fiction should be policed at all. But as a librarian I know that my viewpoint is radical and probably problematic for the majority of Tumblr as it is now.
the bottomline:
Stop attacking people for fiction.
Start attacking people who ACTUALLY HARM CHILDREN
JFC it’s not that hard.
To clarify: I don’t believe in policing fiction because I don’t believe in policing.
Ido believe in presenting it with framing information that helps the reader contextualize it: for example, the foreword to Naked Lunch that addresses the matter of its obscenity trial, both the question of why the book was tried and some of the framing arguments that won the case.
I also don’t believe every platform has to be a place for every kind of fiction (and I think that we should all collectively move away from our near-total reliance on massively centralized, commercialized, public platforms like Twitter and Facebook and probably Tumblr, because not everything that should be allowed to exist should be getting flung at your head at 80 mph, jfc.)
I believe that it’s possible to hold the opinion “it’s bad to post untagged, un-warned-for rapefic” while also holding the opinion “abuse and harassment are always wrong, even if the subject has also done something wrong.”
“Everybody agrees we need to shame straight women for reading queer fanfiction, but–”
No. No, we literally do not need to do that. It helps no one, homophobes don’t care, people exploring their sexualities and genders will retreat back into the closet, queer people will be pressured to out themselves, there is no version of this that doesn’t do massive disproportionate splash damage to queer and questioning people, and moreover it hurts literally no one to let straight people read and/or fap to smutty queer fanfic in peace as long as they aren’t shits to actual queer people.
Juststop, for the love of Christ.
More to the point, reading slash was how I learned how to treat actual queer people well. I’d read fic, then I’d read the author’s journal. Since the slash end of fandom was even then heavily queer, the bread and butter “how my life is going” posts often included encounters with homophobia, in person and on the internet.
Between those and the more essay-ish posts, it didn’t take much to figure out what not to do or what to do instead. If my favorite reccer complained about men trying to hit on her when she was out with her girlfriend, clearly I shouldn’t bug male couples who were just holding hands in public—and under no circumstances ask about what they did in bed. If she later posted about how happy it made her for a receptionist to casually ask which wife would be picking up their son, then clearly I should drop assumptions about who did what in a relationship and just ask quite normally if I needed to know something for some practical reason. (Also to use spouse and parent on forms instead of husband and wife, mother and father.)
I can think of many other examples of microaggressions and other prejudiced behavior I learned not to avoid from queer fans, because they were fellow fans and it’s hypocrisy on top of base ingratitude to mistreat the fans whose meta you read, whose comms you haunt, whose stories you relax with, whose recs you rely on to find new authors, whose fests you anticipate.
In short, for me as a straight woman, being a good fan meant learning how to treat queer people right. IRL nobody I knew was out. In fandom, so many people were out that they could and did complain about homophobic mistreatment.
honestly tho that scene in the incredibles where mr. incredible sees the names of all the old super heroes that used to be his friends / that he knew from Back in the Day and how every one of them has been killed by syndrome is such a chilling scene for so many reasons
like for one, everyone he knew is dead at this point and has been killed on the same island he’s at now and two, its heartbreaking bc that means that almost every hero wanted to try out being a hero again despite the laws against it and wanted to try and help someone out and relive their glory days, only to be straight up murdered like fuck that scene is just so fuckin intense
I think the core of that scene for me is, when you’re insane like me and you go through it frame by frame, you can work out that Gazerbeam defeated the omnidroid twice - the only super we have enough information to confirm did so. I always wondered about his body in the cave, how and why he got the password… But it makes sense. This thing goes haywire, gets an upgrade, and goes haywire again? He must have been hella suspicious! So he does what any good superhero would do - tries to get to the bottom of what’s really happening on Nomanisan Island. During the process he’s clearly caught and wounded but has just enough time to get himself somewhere he can leave a final message, just praying that the next super to come along will find it and break the cycle. Gazerbeam is my hero.
Incredibles 2 has a lot to live up to
All of this and…
I’m just realizing that the name is No Man Is An Island???? As in, everyone needs someone to depend on and connect with, no one is ever completely alone or should act all on their own.
Also Gazerbeam probably has X-ray vision–so he not only survived long enough to defeat the Omnidroid, he had the ability to see Syndrome entering the password.
Holy guacamole! I should pay more attention, I don’t think I got any of that stuff!
does anyone think about the fact that now mr. incredibles has to live w/ the fact that all his friends getting killed by syndrome could have been avoided if he had just been nicer to syndrome from the beginning
^I was thinking that from the beginning reading this and was shocked it went through so many comments before anyone pointed that out.
Syndrome waited until his machine was almost ready to go before asking Bob to come to Nomanisan. He also was surprised to find out that he was married to “Elastigirl”, which means he likely built his list and went through everyone else before finally deciding it was time to kill Bob.
Also, Syndrome literally didn’t find Bob until the start of the movie. He found Frozone and was stalking him. If Lucius hadn’t hung out with Bob, then Frozone was going to be the next one lured. There’s literally a scene of Mirage realizing that the guy in the car with her target is Mr. Incredible. He wasn’t going through the list, he was stalking and finding every former Super he could, luring them to the island, and then killing them, for the sake of improving his robot. Finding Bob was just a happy accident, and Syndromes obsession with him meant that upon finding a bot that could beat Bob, he figured he’d hit perfection and was ready.
and like, let’s be real here in the intro Buddy was crossing the line the second he showed up, Mr. Incredible mentioned he’d been very nice to Buddy, via signing a ridiculous amount of autographs and doing pictures and stuff, and that he was not going to risk a childs life as a sidekick (albeit in less words). Buddy literally showed up by breaking into his car, and then stalked him all evening until he was arrested. That’s disturbingly obsessive behavior, there’s no amount of niceness that would stop Syndrome, it was an impossible situation. No amount of nice was going to appease Syndrome, the second he faced any sort of rejection from Mr. Incredible he was going to lose it and go supervillain. After his arrest he should have gotten put into therapy, but yknow, set in like. the 50′s. so it makes sense he fell through the cracks when the cracks were a goddamn canyon. Don’t victim blame Mr. Incredible.
reblogging for the last comment because blaming mr incredible for the deaths of his comrades is honestly such a weird take and i dislike how it’s framed as “fact” when it’s not. it’s syndrome’s fault and syndrome’s fault alone. full stop. he murdered them because he was selfish, entitled, and obsessed with mr incredible to a fanatical degree.
You know what’s really great
In the beginning when Mr. Incredible says, “Go home, Buddy. I work alone.” He’s holding up Bomb Voyage
In Syndrome’s flashback, he’s looking down on him, no bad guy in sight
Do with that info what you will
oh
damn
This is such good analysis, but it’s also worth mentioning the difference between these two scenes which, supposedly depict the same thing. In the first, Bob is clearly busy, trying to keep his eyes on Bomb Voyage (a fantastic supervillain name!!!), so he is distractedly telling Buddy that he is busy and that he doesn’t need help. The lighting is realistic, and although he is CLEARLY fed up with dealing with this obsessive and toxic fan, he keeps an even tone and doesn’t snap at him.
In the flashback, it’s a different scenario completely!! The lighting is all focused on Bob as if he’s under a spotlight and it is only the two of them. Bob’s pose here is also ridiculously condescending. He has his hands on his hips like a superhero and is looking down at Buddy with contempt and scorn. In addition, when he turns to leave, he dismissively waves his hand as if saying “Get out of here.”
It’s also interesting to note Buddy’s position here. His arms are extended either in worship or as an expression of all he has to offer in this relationship. He sees himself as a victim because he thinks he gave all of himself to Mr Incredible, just got him to reject him.
It’s also amazing to me how much Buddy’s suit is a reflection of himself. Everything from the black and white color scheme representing his black and white way of thinking, to the huge S because here only thinks of himself.
Bob’s suit, however, is blue. In addition to being associated with a calming and rational thought process, I think it’s also to represent that he’s on the side of the police. He’s not here for his own glory, he’s essentially working as an extension of the police force
Also, let’s not forget when Bob is catching Bomb Voyage and trying to keep Buddy from yeeting himself towards almost certain death, he’s on his way to his own wedding.
That makes two things abundantly clear:
Bob doesn’t have an aversion to working with other people. Remember when he runs into Elastigirl earlier in the day? She reminds him not to “forget”, and he promises he won’t. They were standing over a thief they ended up accidentally nabbing together, or so we thought. They bantered back and forth about working alone, yet they nabbed that thief so seamlessly, you’d think they’d done it before. Then you find out later, Elastigirl is the woman at the altar. Making it clear that they had to have worked together, very frequently, enough to end up trusting each other to the point that they revealed their secret identities and had a romantic relationship outside of Super work, culminating in literally marrying each other. Bob is more than fine with a partner because he marriedhis.
The other is that, Bob is trying to protect Helen. She may be more than capable of handling herself, as she flirtatiously reminds Bob on the rooftop just hours before their nuptials. But the one thing that’s priceless to the Supers are their secret identities. With Syndrome following Bob begging to partner with him, it puts Helen in danger. A fanatical fan like that can end up possessive, meaning once Syndrome discovers her, could see her as a direct threat stealing “his” position working with Bob. And because he obviously has a knack for following people undetected (he was right on Bob’s heels all over a huge metropolitan city for literal hours), he could very well stalk Helen, discover her secret identity and expose her in order to eliminate her, putting her directly in danger. Bob isn’t an idiot, he knows working with this kid doesn’t just put this child in danger, but also his own wife and their identities. It’s better to say he works alone and let this kid down as gently as possible, hoping to finally shake him off for good so he can work in safety and peace.
Which leads me to my next point. Blaming Bob for all his friends getting killed is buying directly into Syndrome’s revisionist history of Bob “rejecting” him. Remember, if Syndrome hadn’t shown up to Mr. Incredible busting Bomb Voyage, none of the ensuing chaos with the bomb on the rocket boots getting dropped on the train tracks and blowing them up, causing Bob to lose Bomb Voyage, then forced to stop a speeding train, resulting in the passengers getting injured, the attempted suicide being thwarted which injured the guy, and everybody suing Bob for it, ultimately culminating in the Super’s fall from public grace and forced retirement. All of those consequences are because Syndrome refused to listen to Bob and meddled in dangerous affairs, making everything indescribably worse. If he had never showed up, none of the above would have happened and Supers would have never been forced into retirement, meaning none of Bob’s friends would have been lured from said retirement by Mirage and Syndrome’s private contract offers which resulted in their deaths.
this post got SO much longer AND better
Not sure if this matters by now but
A couple of things:
- The reason Syndrome found all the other supers first (including Frozone) was because Bob kept getting fired from his jobs, forcing the government to wipe his existence from multiple companies and forcing his family to move each time that happened. He unintentionally saved his family by forcing them to relocate so often.
- Two of the biggest differences between the two versions of “go home, Buddy” is the focus, and length. In Mr Incredible’s version, “Go Home, Buddy” is a midpoint, a random event that just happened to stick because it was weirdly specific, and it was right before the important parts. The attempted suicide, train crash, and wedding are much more important because those were more important to Mr Incredible (since the first two ended the superhero movement, and the last was his wedding). Buddy, on the other hand, only flashes back to “Go home, Buddy”. Which is weird because Buddy almost died later that night from a bomb on his cape, and he almost killed dozens of people on a train by dropping a bomb on them, and because of that, he was indirectly responsible for the death of supers. All three of those things should be much more important to Buddy, but it’s a sign of his psychosis that the one thing he remembers is not Mr Incredible saving his life, or his life being in danger, but instead Mr Incredible rejecting him. Buddy was unstable, and an extremely unreliable narrator who edited out massive chunks of his own story to better justify his hero syndrome.
- Also, on a more sobering note, some have brought up how Incredibles 2 seems a step down from Incredibles 1, and while that’s arguable, there’s some related bits in there I’d like to mention. You know how there were a slew of superhero’s in the movie for when they made superhero-ing legal again?
Notice anything funny about that lineup? Anything at all? Okay, here’s a hint then. How many of these heroes were working before heroes got banned? How many of these new heroes are from Mr Incredible’s era?
Answer: None.
Frozone, Elastigirl, and Mr Incredible are the only ones who were active before the ban, or more specifically, were left from those active before the ban.
Think about it, Elastigirl was on the news basically continuously, there was a UN declaration on supers, any super left who had even been five degrees of separation away from Elastigirl back in their heyday would’ve come up to talk to her and her movement. But when Elastigirl was brought in to meet other supers, she didn’t know any of them.
And it’s not like she and Bob were loners who never interacted with anyone, look at their wedding day, it’s packed to the gills with capes (and possibly some secret identities too):
So…what happened?
Syndrome happened. This isn’t just some serial killer picking people at random, Syndrome systematically wiped out an entire community of people, arguably, an entire generation of supers, since Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack seem to be the only kid-supers in existence.
That’s why Elastigirl is so emotional when she’s introduced to these new supers, she thought her people, barring her family and Frozone, were wiped out by Syndrome. And in a way…they were.
Nobody’s left from her era of superheroics. None of her old friends survived. It’s just her, Bob, and Frozone left out of what was once a thriving, vibrant community. All those bright lights snuffed out because some kid couldn’t handle being rejected but his hero.
- Honestly, this allegory kind of brings to mind the AIDS crisis and the gay community. A “syndrome” almost specifically targeting a subset of the population with a flair for dramatic outfits and superheroics, picking off members one by one until the population is decimated. The members of the community have to intervene themselves to slow/stop this “syndrome” because the government, which was supposed to protect them, is unaware of, or is blatantly ignoring the crisis until it starts hurting the “normal” community. Because of this “syndrome” there’s just this gap in this community, where an entire generation is just…missing…with the few survivors having to counsel the new, untouched generation, and helping them achieve widespread support and acceptance they could only dream of.
- Side note: I just realized something. Take a look at Syndrome’s kill list:
And take a look at that wedding shot again.
Anyone look familiar?
If it’s to hard to tell, at least four of the people Syndrome killed were at Bob’s wedding.
Mr Incredible wasn’t watching supers getting killed, he was watching his friends getting killed. People he trusted enough to share his secret identity with people he trusted enough to share his wife’s secret identity with. Hell, our poor boy Gazerbeam got a front row seat with Edna and their NSA agent that’s usually reserved for family only.
And that’s bad enough, but something else occurred to me, Bob and Helen clearly haven’t been keeping in close contact with their superheroic friends, Bob asks Frozone if he’s been keeping in contact with Gazerbeam, implying they haven’t talked in a while.
Additionally, Bob’s life, and the superhero community’s life, went tits up basically immediately after his wedding night. So if there was any point for them to stop talking with other supers, it’d be then.
So what does that mean?
It means, in all likelihood that when Mr Incredible looked at that list of dead friends and superheroes, he realized with growing horror that, his wedding?
The happiest point of his life?
That was the last time Mr Incredible saw his friends alive.
Also like to point out that in the scene where he’s seeing all of his friend’s and their identities exposed and that they’ve been killed, he IMMEDIATELY in shock and horror realizes that elastagirl could be a target and SEARCHES her super identity. The relief on his face when he sees that she’s unknown is honestly so raw. Incredibles, both of them, are just absolutely stunning films.
#but in all seriousness THIS is the kind of media analysis I feel is the best#and also the BIGGEST casualty of the shift to ‘New-Fandom’
not to throw myself into discourse or anything but fandom went downhill the moment fans began holding up fandom content to mainstream content standards
Elaborate pls.
Shipping is no longer about “hey I think these characters have an interesting dynamic and I want to explore what they would be like together”, it’s “but it needs to be canon, it needs to be healthy, it needs to be representation”
Headcanons are no longer personal opinions but “you are wrong and always have been wrong”, “you are DIRECTLY going against canon with this and here’s a list of reasons why this is so!”
Do I even need to bring up the “fiction = reality” argument here that’s currently so prevalent in fandom circles that, sure, definitely has some truth in it when you’re considering a piece of mainstream media which is going to reach millions of people, but not so much when you’re applying it to a fanfiction with 100 views tops
There are certain things fans want to see in their mainstream content, and that’s okay! I do that too! Diversity is a necessity in media and it’s wonderful that the mainstream media is finally taking steps to rectify that, no matter how small. Fans can now openly communicate with content creators on social media and get them to confirm all manner of headcanons, and that’s good too!
Except some fans have run with this and started using it against fandom, and suddenly you’ve ended up with fans terrified to put forth their own content because it doesn’t fit into the requirements they’re requesting from the mainstream.
One of the best examples to illustrate this recent shift that I can think of is (oh god here we go I’m not even in this fandom) Reylo. If it were to become canon in the films? Sure, feel free to criticise the creators behind the decision all you want! However, exploring the potential such a relationship could have in a fanfiction no-one’s going to read exceptother people interested in the same idea doesn’t open it up to this same criticism.
tl;dr: through wanting to transform the canon, fans are forgetting how to transform the canon for themselves into their own fanworks and this is leading to fans criticising each other on the same level with which they criticise mainstream media without considering the history & small nature of fandom and the intention of fans in their production of content
I agree with what you’re saying, but I do want to point out that sometimes those fanfics with only 100 views end up getting more views and becoming mainstream media (namely, 50 shades of grey).
I agree with everything else you said - I don’t think that what’s mainstream should dictate what’s in fandom, but when stories get big (and just before becoming mainstream), should they still be excluded from criticism?
This is a good point, but allow me to use 50 Shades of Grey as an example since you’ve brought it up:
50 Shades of Grey, in its original form as Twilight fanfiction, was fanfiction written for fandom consumption and published in a fandom space.
EL James, in deciding to publish it, took that fanfiction out of the fandom space and opened it up to full public consumption.
And in turning that fanfic into a published novel, in removing it from its fandom space and placing it in a literature space, EL James shouldhave done her research, or at least sought out critical opinions which influenced the novel’s transition from a fanfic written entirely to amuse herself to a published work.
Does this mean we should be criticising fanfictions which gain popularity in fandom in case the authors decide to do as EL James did and publish it as an original work??
In my opinion, no.
Fanfictions published in fandom spaces are written freely, given freely. We have no way of judging whyan author felt the need to write their fanfics and fanfiction authors do not need to justify themselves even if they do (to use 50 Shades again) write fucked up dynamics in a romantic way, or haven’t done any research on a topic central to their work such as BDSM, etc. If, however, you choose to edit your fanfiction into an original work, it no longer exists in a fandom space and you should be aware of that.
Those popular fanfictions? Remain excluded from criticism because they still exist in a fandom space. If you find aspects of a popular fanfiction to be harmful or worthy of criticism in some way, there’s the back button, or even better, a blank word page to begin writing your own fanfic.
Just as a reference, these two posts are written by fanfiction loving gay cis men, who have a lot of great first-hand knowledge of the kinds of sex that two people with penises have! They are (used to be?) really well known, but I know a lot of younger folks may be writing fic and have never come across them!
Minotaur A well known classic, incredibly informative website with tons of information. Rather dated at this point with regards to the cultural descriptions, but the mechanics are spot on!
Gay Sex is All Wrong in Fanfic More recently written (2014), and addresses a lot of misconceptions that tend to pop up in mlm fic written by afab people!
Enjoy!
Rest In Peace, Minotaur. (He passed away over a decade ago.) he taught many fandomgoers so much via his website, & I’m glad to know his site is still an available resource (even if the terminology is no longer up to date.)
I haven’t been on tumblr too much for quite a while for a variety of reasons, and I can’t promise that’s going to change (I’m … very ADHD …) I hope that my blog gives you some food for thought.
That said, I want to reiterate a couple of my blogging principles for your consideration:
First and foremost, I use the word ‘anti’ all over this blog - both in old posts and new. When I first started this blog in 2016, its meaning was understood by my audience. However, the meaning of ‘anti’ has become murky and controversial over the years, so let me define it here:
‘Anti’ is short for ‘anti-shipper’ or ‘anti-[ship]’.
Anti-shippers are people in (mainly English-speaking) fandoms who:
demand sexual purity and Americentric morality in fictional content, particularly ‘ships’ (short for ‘[usually romantic or sexual] relationships’), from fans participating in fan discussion and creating fanworks on social media sites,
where the sexual purity and Americentric morality of any given fictional work is frequently subjective and/or openly contradictory.
Crucially,they enforce their demands via:
violent and bigoted rhetoric
targeted harassment
noise mobs/dogpiling
violations of privacy
threats of physical (and occasionally sexual) violence
threats to income
property destruction, and
(occasionally) physical assault.
Antis named themselves ‘antis’ back in 2015-2016. They don’t like the label so much now (though they still frequently use it) because of their violent reputation.
This blog is heavily focused on what anti-shipping is, why anti-shippers exist and act the way they do, and the damage anti-shipping does to online fandom communities via thoughtful, reasoned analysis of anti-shipping rhetoric and sociology. The goal is to honestly look past the surfeit of anti-shipping violence and understand why its arguments and methodology have genuine appeal to many fandomgoers without judging those fandomgoers.
There are certainly anti-shippers who spout violent rhetoric because they’re remorselessly abusive, but I doubt that the majority of anti-shippers fit that description.
On the contrary: I believe there are sociological reasons anti-shipper communities are so prevalent in fandom today, and I believe people become anti-shippers for valid, personal reasons. For instance, I believe that the structure of modern social media has fundamentally changed the structure of fandom and how fans communicate. It’s harder to avoid content you don’t want to see, for instance. Has this encouraged the growth of anti-ship communities? I believe it’s a likely factor - one of many.
There is also plenty of evidence that anti-shipping communities tend to be insular and internally abusive. Members are expected to ‘cut off’ anyone who does not share their views on how fandom should conduct itself, and members who leave the community are demeaned, smeared, and targeted for harassment. This makes it exceedingly difficult for anyone who became involved in anti-shipping to escape it.
Furthermore:English-speaking (particularly American) fandom is heavily influenced by the same underlying societal factors that have brought us right-wing-based rising authoritarianism / anti-progressive bigotry / open white patriarchal supremacy today: things like white fascism (which started in the USA), Manifest Destiny, European/American Imperialism, Christian Fundamentalism / Puritanism, the post-Vietnam antigovernmental white supremacist movement, the AIDS genocide/crisis, backlash to the Civil Rights Movement, and backlash against gay and trans rights.
Although most of fandom - including anti-shippers - are themselves targets of right-wing hatred, Puritanical / Imperial / racist / anti-queer / misogynist / transphobic arguments frequently make up the basic elements of the rhetoric anti-shippers use to justify their violent abuse of shippers.
Many of these puritanical/imperial/racist/misogynist/anti-queer/transphobic talking points were dressed up in progressive language before anti-shippers started employing them by faux-progressive groups such as TERFs/SWERFs/radfem enablers, truscum, and exclusionists.
Anti-shippers are not typically aware of this, and may fall anywhere in their conscious desire to gatekeep marginalized communities for real people. (And pro-shippers such as myself are not immune to using right-wing arguments, either.*)
Because of all these factors, I believe it is crucial to understand anti-shipping rather than simply dismiss it anti communities as weird fandom phenomena made up entirely of bullies and jerks. I also believe it’s crucial to understand not only anti-ship rhetoric, but also to identify its origins.
The haters aren’t going away, and we aren’t going to shame them into stopping. But if we understand and dismantle their arguments, we can limit their influence more effectively and - most importantly - maybe provide an escape rope out of an abusive anti-ship community for those who need one.
Thanks for being here.
(*Pro-shippers - people that argue it’s okay to ship or portray whatever you want in fiction, even if it’s a harmful or illegal dynamic IRL - tend to fall prey to ‘free speech’/’anti-censorship’ rhetoric as employed by intolerant right-wingers.
Because right-wingers use obfuscating language, distinguishing between ‘I want to be allowed to incite IRL violence’ & ‘I want to be allowed to explore dangerous relationship dynamics in fiction without regard to RL morality’ can be weirdly difficult at first blush. But if you loudly advocate for a group that right-wingers want to incite violence against, they’re usually quick to expose themselves. ;) )
I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?
Supernatural
Doctor Who (Steven Moffat specifically)
Sherlock (Steven Moffat specifically)
Actually Steven Moffat is basically just this sentiment given human form.
A version of this happened with The Magicians, tbh. Though instead of expectation: men, reality: women it was expectation: smug nihilists, reality: mentally ill queer folks.
Arguably Game of Thrones.
If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.
In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.
They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.
And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.
It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.
Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.
And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.
OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.
The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.
Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”
Stargate atlantis! Huge gateway fandom, show canceled to make room for another one that was supposed to target the 18-25 male range. All bc they realized the audience for atlantis was mainly ~30 year old women. In the end the whole series went under when the new show flopped.
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why - it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
This is such an awesome conversation, but I think there’s even another layer here that makes ‘fic’ its own genre. And it is the plot.
Everyone who’s experienced in reading fic has their little ‘trope plots’ we are willing to read or even prefer in order to spend time with our favorite characters. We know how it’s gonna end and we genuinely don’t care, because the character is the whole point of why we’re reading. And that is unique. That’s just not how mainstream media publication does things.
But there are also hundreds of thousands of fics people might call ‘plot driven’ and they have wonderful, intricate plots that thrill their readers.
But they’re not at all ‘plot driven’ in the same way as other mainstream genres.
The thing about ‘plot’ in fic is that it tends to ebb and flow naturally. There’s not the same high speed, race to the finish you’d get from a good action movie. There’s no stop and start of side plots you get in TV genre shows. The best fic plot slides from big event to restful evening to frantic activity to shared meals and squabbles and back, and it gives equal time and attention and detail to each of these things.
Like@earlgreytea68 said, “There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.”
Fic plot moves at a pace similar to the life of whatever character it’s about. Not the other way around. There’s a fundamental difference in prioritization in fic.
I think this only adds to the case of ‘fic’ as its own, distinctive genre. Stylistic choices of writing that would never work in traditional, mainstream fiction novels work for novel-length fic. Fic adventures spend as much time fleshing out the little moments between romances and friendships as they do on that plot twist. The sleepy campground conversations are as important to the plot as the kidnapped princess, because that’s how the characters are going to grow together by the end of the story. It’s not a grace note, it’s not a side episode or an addition or a mention - it’s integral and equal.
That’s just accepted as fact by fic writers and readers. It’s expected without any particular mention. And it gives a very unique flavor and pace to fic that makes a lot of mainstream stories feel like stale, off-brand wonderbread. They are missing something regular fic readers take for granted (and it isn’t just the representational differences, because we all know that’s a whole different conversation). There’s a fundamental difference in how ‘fic’ is written, detailed, and paced that is built on its foundations as a ‘character driven’ genre.
And it isn’t only action/adventure/mystery plots that have this difference in fic. Those ‘everybody’s human in today’s world’ AUs, those ‘friends to lovers’ slow burn stories have it too. They have a plot, but it’s the life - the grocery shopping, the dumb fights and sudden inescapable emotional blows, those moments of joy with that person you click with, managing work and family and seasons - that’s the whole plot on its own.
And that’s almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t really experienced fic as a genre, who’s used to traditional person A and person B work together/overcome differences/bond to accomplish X. In fic accomplishing X might be the beginning or the middle, not the end result of the story, and A & B continue to exist separate from X entirely. X is only relevant because of how it relates to A & B, not the other way around.
Fic is absolutely its own genre and it has a lot to do with plot. I’ve been calling this ‘organic plot’ in my head for months, because I knew something felt different about writing this way, how long fic plot ebbs and grows seemingly on its own sometimes. ‘Dual plot’ could be another option, maybe, though the character plot and life experience plots aren’t really separate. Inverted plot? Hm. I’m sure a good term will develop over time.
OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THIS.
I was always fond of saying, about my own fics, that my plots show up about two-thirds of the way through, because it takes me that long to figure out where I’m going, and then I would lol about it, because, ha, wouldn’t it be great if I organized it better.
And now I read this and I’m like, WAIT. YES. THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENING. IT’S BEEN HAPPENING ALL ALONG. I NEVER REALIZED IT. The idea that the primary importance is the throughline of the characters, and that’s what we’re following, and the plot is what’s dangling off the side of their story, that is SO IMPORTANT. You’re right, that usually we’re told as writers to construct stories from the plot outward. “Here are the beats your plot needs to hit, here’s the rising action to the climax to the falling action, now make sure your Character A makes this realization by Point X in order to get your plot into shape for Point Y to click in.” It’s *such* a plot-centric way to write and I am *terrible* at it. And I’ve always said, whenever I sit down to “outline” a story, like, How do you this? How do you know where the characters are going until they tell you where they’re going???
But it’s not that I’m “bad” at this, which is what I’ve always thought, it’s just that I’m coming at it from the opposite angle. I can’t plan the plot before the characters because I’m sticking close to the characters, and the traditional “plot” is secondary to whatever’s going to happen to them. And that’s not a wrong way of writing, it’s just a different way of writing. And it’s wrong of me to be thinking that my stories don’t get a “point” until they’re almost over. THEY’VE HAD THE POINT ALL ALONG. What happens when they’re almost over is that the characters come to where they’ve been going, and then the traditional “plot” is what helps shape the ending. The traditional “plot” becomes, to me, like that epilogue scene after the biggest explosion in an action movie, where you’re told the characters are going to be okay. I spend the entire movie telling you the characters are going to be okay, and then my epilogue scene is tacked on “oh, p.s., also they saved the day.”
There is so much here that I want to say I don’t even know where to begin. @earlgreytea68 you’re not alone. Hit me up. I’ve studied plot and structure forever. Fics are pure, uncut, internal-motivation-drives-everything storytelling and they are so very different from the monomyth that drives most commercial fiction these days that they almost have to exist in a liminal space like fan fiction. I could go on…
LET’S BE FRIENDS.
Hahaha, this is my week to just want to be Tumblr friends with everyone, all the FOB people, all the fluff people, all the fandom anthropology people, LET’S ALL BE FRIENDS.
<3 <3 <3
@earlgreytea68and@glitterandrocketfuel and OP and everyone else who contributed - this is beautiful, and I’m saving it to read and consider again later. probably with a glass of wine or something. <3
What I think not a lot of people have realised is that you are supposed to not like the guys. It’s the whole purpose of this study, proving that women are better suited to create a society than men.
That’s why they are the control case: they are the counterargument, they are there to prove the theory that Gretchen is proposing, which is that if you take off men, society will be better.
If they had been more balanced, more cooperative, less “I’m the boss, you do what I say”, if they had been as good as the girls the entire study would have crumbled. Which is exactly why Gretchen chose the subjects that she chose, with the issues that both groups have. And it is also why it’s portrayed on the screen as it is, with the audience not rooting for the boys.
Respectfully, I could not disagree more. Gretchen choosing Seth as her male operative despite his clear, unresolved trauma & clear, violent tendencies was her way of skewing the experiment to prove the point she wanted to make.
But her point is wrong. Making sweeping, negative assertions about an entire gender is sexism. Refusing to see the potential of an individual because of their gender based on the notion that one reigns supreme over the other *is exactly what men have done to women for centuries and continue to do today.*
As a viewer who gets to spend all this time with these characters, you’re supposed to recognize that everyone is flawed. Some people make progress, others regress. Some people cope better than others in certain situations. There are hidden battles everyone is fighting that can make or break them as they deal with challenges. I rooted deeply for some of the boys, hated others, just like I rooted deeply for some of the girls and hated others.
The goal of feminism is equality. Whatever Gretchen’s going for is a toxic perversion of that idea.
Alright, as you may or may not be aware, there’s a rabid Izzy-hater in the Our Flag Means Death fandom who’s been sending harassing asks on anon to Izzy fans. (Remember: you can block anons who send you anon asks, but you can’t do it if you respond to the ask.)
Anyway, I want to encourage my fellow Izzy fans not to get sucked into the mindset of “if you like a bad character, you’re a bad person” that I’ve seen in other fandoms. I don’t want this one individual’s vile harassment to lead to Izzy fans feeling like they have to be defensive and have to excuse and justify Izzy’s worst behavior in order to be “allowed” to like him.
First of all, you just don’t. Second of all, Izzy isn’t a poor little meow meow who’s done nothing wrong. But third and most important of all, doing that won’t stop you from being targeted by this troll. Seriously, I write or reblog about Izzy’s flaws regularly, and I still got targeted.
So let Izzy be the awful little blorbo that he is. Love him or love to hate him or be fascinated by him without feeling you have to defend that. Block the anon if they target you. And may all your headcanons become true in season 2.
the thing about being in a fandom for a long time is you inevitably develop very intense opinions about things you know objectively are absolutely meaningless but nonetheless make you want to gnaw through drywall like a feral cat and there’s just nothing you can do about that
One of my professors figured out I like Star Trek and told me he used to be a huge trekkie back in the day. He brought me this zine to look at that he got when he was 13 at a convention! It was pretty cool, just had episode synopses and definitions for a lot of the stuff in the show. It was like pre-internet memory alpha. The little illustration were so amazing!
Hey guys. Okay, so, a few weeks ago one of my coworkers asked me this question. And it has been bothering me ever since.
Y’see, there’s this problem about explaining fanfiction, or fandom for that matter, to people who have never been a part of this culture. And, no, I don’t think that culture is too grandiose a term. The problem is everyone wants to rationalize fanfiction, justify its existence. Anyone who is not a part of fandom, literally any fandom, wants you to explain why you use your time this way, why you create this way, and why you feel entitled to do so. People struggle over basic things like creation existing outside of monetary gain or copyright, but even that’s not the intrinsic thing outside people don’t understand.
I spent minutes trying to explain to my coworkers why as they pestered me with the same series of comments we’ve all been called to answer a hundred times before, “Why do you do that?” “But it’s not yours!””Who don’t you write your own work?” “That character wouldn’t do that!” etc, etc. And between trauma flashbacks to 2004 when I was 12 years old and we had the wars of What Is And Is Not In Character, I realized what the problem is: fanfiction is for fun.
That’s it, plain and simple. I do it because it’s fun. You do it too! You draw or write or read or make or remix or whatever! You participate because it’s fun! That’s really all there is to it. And you and I don’t ask for more reason than that. But I was talking to outsiders.
And here I should explain that I work in a college. I was talking to academics. Hell, I am an academic, I teach college English. And English professors, god help me, English professors are the absolute WORST at justifying fanfiction. You get two flavors of English professor when it comes to fandom: 1) that’s stealing or 2) that’s deconstruction. If the first, fuck you, I don’t have time for your precious proprietary sensibilities, learn what derivative means and then tell me if your near-and-dears are so goddamn original. If the second, I love ya, pal, and I know you’re trying, but you do too much. You do too much.
For all of us in fandom, we understand that for every meta-critique, every genderqueer retelling, every better rewriting of a poorly articulated story, there are fifty hackneyed, hand-on-the-crotch, author-kink-specific “adult content” fics (Just in case tumblr got any ideas about censoring this post). And THAT’S NOT A BAD THING!
If you haven’t yet, you will meet people who will go out of their way to defend fanfiction’s literary qualities, but they Bowdlerize it! Sanitize! Clean! Purify. Intentional or not, and sometimes it is definitely intentional, many people feel that in order to justify and defend fanfiction, they must eliminate the porn, forego the smut, ignore the self-indulgent, half-crazed teenage lust that is the life’s blood of fanfiction. And that is some hypocritical, restrictive horseshit. Never mind the fan that chooses to throw the first stone, but what a fundamental misrepresentation on behalf of the authority!
One of my favorite professors of all time offered fanfiction as an assignment option in every one of her classes. But she always did this with this fundamental misunderstanding of what fanfiction is and what it is for. Yes it CAN be incredible critical thought. Yes it CAN be a literary revolution. Yes, yes, yes. But it is not only this. And it always made me cringe to listen to her sing fanfiction’s praises without embracing all of the gutter trash that is my heritage, my home. I am by no means saying that fanfiction should not do all the meta-analysis and social critique that it can, will, and does do. But that is not all that fanficiton is nor should it be. Fanfiction is also the 18th coffeeshop AU you’ve read for the same ship. Fanfiction is also the soulmates AU for your rarepair. It’s the LOTR crossover. It’s the character death fic that serves no purpose but to make you sad. And it’s the OOC crack nightmare that you wrote at 4 am when you were 13 and don’t share with anyone, but it gave you joy to write. I will never defend fanfic without defending these also.
And this is what my coworkers struggled with when I tried to explain. They could not accept this simple fact that fanfiction exists, primarily, for joy. And I would not treat fanfiction as high art existing only to hold a mirror up to media. Absolutely fuck that ivory tower bullshit. And they could not wrap their heads around enjoying this.
One of them understood why I might write fic, but did not understand why I might want to read another’s. For this I can only cite his ego as the reason he would perhaps not like to read from someone else’s imagination. Another insisted that I ought to write my own work, rather than manipulate someone else’s characters. And this was someone who espoused death of the author and freedom from censorship! But still I could not convince her why it would be fun to play around in someone else’s sandbox. And the answer I gave at the time was not what I wanted it to be. I played it off as cowardice, fear of judgment about my own work. And, to be fair, that is one of the reasons I balk at original fiction, but again, fanfiction needs no justification! It is NOT second best! It is a full and legitimate art form in its own right, requiring new and different skills every bit as nuanced and delicate and time-consuming to acquire as those for any other kind of writing. Social acceptance does not make a creation good. Nor does profit or being studied by institutions. These things are accolades and easily recognized to mean value, but they themselves are not what make a creation good. You already know what does that.
And this is why it is so terribly hard to explain why fanfiction? You may as well ask why art?
For that type of audience, I always lead with Holmes: “Well, you know, like Holmes pastiche? Haven’t you ever tried your hand at one?”
That’s usually all it takes.
If they want to fight about canonicity or IC/OOC, I start “Lancelot was a Gary Stu added by sexists. Guinevere would never!” wank.
I have never met an academic who was able to resist both of these lures.
Throw in some Robin Hood and some “Who topped?” Classical wank, and you have a complete portrait of fandom that even the haughtiest intellectual can grasp. Yes, fandom is about fun, and a lot of people asking dumb questions are just determined not to get it because it offends their sensibilities in some stupid way. The “but I can enjoy cooking without being a chef” or “I like karaoke but don’t want to be a singer” argument sometimes works to counter the “But why not profit?” angle. But, overall, I find that the most successful strategy is bringing up the few canons they almost certainly consume fanfic of and have probably wanted to write fanfic of–regular “I love Sherlock Holmes sooooooo much” fanfic, not some Paradise Lost meta stuff.
My general answer to ‘why fanfiction’is ‘;if it’s good enough for @seananmcguireand@neil-gaiman, it’s good enough for me’ because I’m not an academic.
