So I made a post about comments and reblogs. That post did really well. Or according to me it did. But that’s not why I made the post. I wanted to make a post like that for a long time. To be honest I was afraid people would react really badly to it. That’s part of the reason I made it vague. Many people left wonderful tags and reblogged their opinions. I appreciated each one of them. I loved to see the communities response that and everyone is really positive over it. So thank you for everyone’s thoughts.
I decided to make another post to give more of my thoughts. I wanted to write why I feel like I feel about all of this. Some might agree. Some might disagree. We all have our opinions and that’s wonderful. Feel free to say what’s your opinion if you want to.
I might go into personal stuff here but I’ll try not to go on too much on that. This was inspired by a conversation with my one friend and all of your replies. Here goes:
First off reblogs. I’ll be honest. I get it. It’s so frustrating when people like but don’t reblog. They are the only ones that see it now my project I poured hours upon hours of myself in it won’t be seen by others. Why don’t they reblog? My first reason why I feel like this is I don’t want people to feel pressured to reblog my stuff. Do I get frustrated when I get mostly likes? Heck yeah I do. I sometimes wonder what I did wrong. Is my writing so horrible? I get that self doubt. But I don’t want people to feel pressure. This is all for fun. As some of my friends constantly remind me this isn’t work. It’s all for fun.
My second reason is where I get into personal stuff. If you follow me you might now I have some mental health problems. It became really bad last year. I was in a deep hole and my depression was so bad. I would scroll aimlessly on tumblr. Not even have the energy to reblog stuff. Sometimes I didn’t even know what I scrolled past. Believe it or not but sometimes a like and reblog requires energy. Especially emotional energy. And if you have none it’s hard to be supportive. Yes it can be easy to like and reblog but sometimes you don’t have the energy to do that. Sometimes people might be going through something and they can’t even get to like or reblog something. There might be a reason behind it all.
There can also be other reasons. Like there are lurkers. When I first joined Tumblr I just checked out reblogs whose writing I liked. I didn’t like anything and I didn’t reblog anything. I only checked out tumblr first. I left tumblr for months until finally I followed other tumblrs and liked and reblogged stuff.
Comments. Where to start. I came across fanfiction thanks to my one friend that told me about it. I thought it’s amazing. I would spend hours reading it. But I never commented. Why? I was heck of nervous. Leaving your first comment is terrifying. I only did it after I posted my first fic. I remember being so scared to do it. I was so anxious. Yet I felt like maybe my comment won’t mean anything though I knew I would love comments. But that’s just me right? Or that’s what I thought. I felt like if I want people to comment on my story I need to comment as well. That’s not the reason I comment today though nor the full reason I started to comment. I wanted to show my appreciation. I’m thankful I left a comment and start commenting. But I get why people don’t comment.
Then commenting not on every chapter. At first I felt very weird commenting on every chapter. I felt like such a weirdo. So at first I didn’t then I started only on stories that updated. Later after talking to a friend about it I started commenting on every chapter on completed works too. So I get why people don’t comment on every chapter.
Lastely reading updated works. I really really really want people to support my in-progress works. Sometimes there is that tough chapter and I just need a boost. But what if there’s none? What if you feel like giving up on a story? A comment out of the blue can just inspire you to finish the chapter. People commenting with each and every chapter can encourage you through the difficult chapters. But just like writers gets burned out readers can too. It’s not the same thing but it happens. I know becuase it happened to me. Keeping up with dozens of stories can burn you out. You can feel like you can’t breathe. Some people have reasons why they read completed works only. They can still support your completed works.
I just completed an interview with a researcher looking into why fanwork creators participate in the fandom, and how it affects their writing. And it made me realise that the way I think about my own fics might be different to how other fandom participants (whether writers, readers, or other creators) do.
I put my work into this world with zero expectation and zero entitlement. Zero. I’m not sure if people realise this means I would continue to post my fics even if I got no kudos, no comments, no bookmarks. I would still post fics if I got no feedback whatsoever. I do not post my fics with the expectation that I will receive anything back from the world. I do not post my fics believing I am entitled to comments or even page views.
I post fics because I think, “I wrote this, and I love it, and I will put it somewhere in the hopes someone else will find it and also love it.” I do not expect that person to interact with me in exchange, or give me a comment or a bookmark. I expect nothing, and I believe I am not entitled to anything. Fandom is a deep and roiling ocean, and I just put my message in a bottle and let it fall into the waves.
Art for the sake of art; beauty for the joy of beauty. My message in a bottle wasn’t written because I expected a reply. It was written just so I could watch it float along until it left my sight. I believe fandom is not about, “I wrote nice comments, where’s my update?” and, “I wrote a fic, where’s my nice comments?”
Stand on the shore and shout at the sea; it doesn’t care. I owe you nothing, and you owe me nothing, and yet we continue to give each other things. That,to me,is the beauty of fandom.
i don’t think there is a more gratifying compliment than ‘i have read your fic more than once’
Oh yes. May I also submit for your consideration. “I read the fic you wrote for the fandom I’m in and then I came here, to a fandom I am not in, because you are writing fic in it.”
shipping fictional characters together as an adult is actually very fun and i encourage it. it is also one of the worst things you can do to yourself and should not be attempted. it’s very simple really.
pros of shipping fictional characters as an adult: having a more mature and experienced outlook on people and relationships actually opens up a lot of new funny, interesting, and even thoughtful ways of engaging with the concept of fictional people kissing. also, it’s fun.
cons of shipping as an adult: you will inevitably form an extremely niche and personal interpretation of the relationship between your favorite fictional people who you want to smash together like barbie dolls or possibly on-fire waste disposal trucks, and become extremely annoyed by the popular fan interpretations that are bland and formulaic by comparison. but since you are also involved in the deeply cringe activity of getting emotionally invested in a fictional relationship you have no chance of being taken seriously if you complain about it, and therefore no choice but to try to ignore it and make your own content that is liked by 3 of your friends who are the only like-minded people you respect and that one account that likes everything you post anyway
Don’t be a dick in bookmarks, folks. And yes while I made this image, I’m giving free reign. Take it. Spread it far and wide. Because I’m hearing that some readers don’t know that their bookmarks are visible.
Social media has really warped our brains into thinking 50 likes isn’t a lot, but if 50 people were to come up to you and compliment you, you’d probably be overwhelmed
I kind of suck at tagging, so I made this infographic to help make it easier.
Hey, thanks for making this! I’ve never struggled with what to put in tags on my fic, but I’ve never been systematic about it, either–I just kind of put whatever.
The categories seem like a really useful way to think about it–not every fic will necessarily have something for each category, but it’s a good framework for either thinking of things to put, or making sure you don’t skip things that would be good to put.
Image description: Tags are Tricky…a quick and dirty guide
1 Canon How does it relate to canon? Alternative Universe Canon Compliant Canon Divergence Crossover Fix-it-Fic Future Fic Missing Scenes & Codas Pre-canon/Backstory
2 Format Is it something other than a story? 5+1 Things Art Dialogue-Only Epistolary Online & Social Media Podfic Poetry Songfic Texting
3 Tone How does it make you feel? Angst Crack Fluff Humor Hurt/Comfort Smut and PWP Whump
4 Relationship Describe the relationship Platonic Coming Out, Families, Friendship, Siblings Getting Together Amnesia, Body Swap, Childhood Friends, Different First Meeting, Drunken Confessions, Enemies to Lovers, Fake Dating, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Huddling for Warmth, Meet-Cute, Miscommunication, Road Trips, Roommates, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Trapped in Elevator PG-13 Cuddling, First Kiss, Kissing and Making out Sexy Times ABO, Dirty Talk, First Time, Kink, Roleplay, Sex Pollen, Sexting and Phone Sex, Voyeurism Commitment Arranged Marriage, Established Relationship, Honeymoons, Infidelity, Jealousy, Kid Fic, Long Distance Relationship, Pregnancy, Weddings & Proposals
5 Theme What is the theme? Activities and Interests Baking and Cooking, Camping, Celebrations, Crafts and Hobbies, Drinking or Getting High, Fashion, Holidays, Pets, Piercings and Tattoos, Religion, Sports, Theater and Dance, Yoga Adaptions Fairy Tales, Historical, Reality Show, TV/Movie/Book/Adaption Character Driven Anxiety and Mental Health, Introspection, Queer Themes Jobs Artist, Celebrities, Crimes and Suspense, Firefighters, Lifeguards, Media and Journalism, Medical, Military, Musiscians, Pilots, Retails, Royality, Teachers Other worldly Apocalypse, Faries, Ghosts, Magic and Fantasy, Parallel Universe, Sci-fi, Shapeshifters, Superheros, Supernatural, Tentacles, Time Travle, Vampires, Witches, Zombies Places Bookstores & Libaries, Coffee Shops & Restaurants, College, Flower Shops, High School, Summer Camp, Wineries
Note: These are examples, not a definitive list, but I hope the categories are useful" end Image description
oh god it’s that time of the year again, so here are some quick reminders:
The content allowed on AO3 is legal according to American law. This is a sensible place to draw the line when your explicitly stated aim is to have a fanfiction site where the content is not subjected to random purges for obscure reasons
AO3 is run by a non-profit organisation. Nobody is making any money out of this, and when the donation drive goal is exceeded, excess money will go to running the site in the future and fighting potential legal battles for the right to create fanworks
It’s possible to donate to AO3 and various charities etc, stop acting as though every cent donated to AO3 is a cent taken from “people who need it more”
“Fiction affects reality” yes but the fiction that actually has a societal impact is the latest heteronormative, subtly racist, mass marketed drivel from Disney, not that one properly tagged incest PWP fic with 150 hits and 40 kudos on AO3
Man some of y'all need to get a grip on the fact “media affects real life” is about mass media and how it influences how people view the world not that some teenager’s problematic fan fiction is gonna make people think incest is okay. That’s just not how reality works. I think a lot of you are mostly looking for a socially acceptable way to bully people and have convinced yourselves that if someone writes/draws/ships something problematic you have the moral high ground no matter what hateful shit you spew at them.
Some of y'all need to learn “Don’t like, don’t read.”
There’s a lot of things I find distasteful af. Some squicky, some triggery, but I’m the numskull that clicks it. It’s as simple as hitting the Back button and finding something more to my taste.
Lemme put it this way: Tuna makes me gag. I can’t stand the smell, can’t stand the taste… You get the idea.
Solution: I don’t eat tuna. I don’t go up to someone eating a tuna sandwich and start ranting at them. If I ask for a roast beef sandwich and end up with tuna, then yeah, I’m gonna get mad. But never to the point where I’m issuing death threats.
tl;dr: Don’t be a dick. “Don’t like, don’t read” needs to be re-adopted.
Perfect addition
I think OP hit it perfectly on the head: “a lot of you are mostly looking for a socially acceptable way to bully people.”
No one’s coming after murder mystery writers claiming they’re encouraging people to murder. No one pitched a fit after watching Ocean’s 8 because ‘now people are going to think jewel heists are okay!’ No one’s complaining about superhero movies spreading false expectations because ‘people don’t really have magic powers, this is a toxic misrepresentation of science!’
If you’re capable of making a distinction between fiction and reality some of the time but insist on bullying people about it the rest of the time, then your goal is not to protect anyone, but to harass under the guise of self-righteousness. Just admit that to yourselves so we can block you and move on with our lives.
I will forever want justice for every female character who was demonized by fandom because their canon ties to a male character was deemed a threat to a popular slash pairing.
there’s such a peculiar poignancy to saying “I miss [this fictional character]” or “I miss [this work of fiction/media]”
because you could always just pick up the book / rewatch the movie/TV show / re-consume the media again but it’s not quite the same. it’s not just “I miss discovering everything new about them” but also “I miss who I was when they filled my waking hours.” yes we joke about a character/book/movie/TV show living in our head rent-free but when they move out, you feel their absence. they haunt you, or perhaps, you haunt yourself with the memory of what it had been like, because there’s the bittersweet knowledge that you have also changed since you came into contact with this text or this character, that they have changed you with the revelation of some experience or identification or emotional truth, and you now carry them with you wherever you go but you will never be able to fall in love with them again for the first time
some loves are long-enduring but others fade to embers, and there is something particularly heartbreaking about wishing that you could love something again as much as you used to
I wasn’t going to say anything else about this, but it’s going to bug me if I don’t.
So, Neil Gaiman has had his writing published for more than 30 years, and he’s had a blog since 2001.
That’s a LONG-ass time for all of your mistakes and stray thoughts and other shit that your younger, less-enlightened self believed to be there for anyone to look up.
And all of the callouts I see are like “Bad Take from a blog post ten years ago”, “something written 30 years ago”, “Adaptation of an older work is Problematic”
We’ve gotten to a point where people acknowledge that if everyone is white/straight/cis/etc, it looks really weird and isn’t reflective of reality. And a lot of people are acknowledging that and trying to do better.
Adding diverse characters to a work that didn’t have them before, or didn’t have as many, because it was written DECADES AGO is tricky. There are cases where you can go “Huh, in retrospect, with what I know now, this part was not awesome“ and change it, and there are cases where that doesn’t work so well. It’s also kind of difficult when most of the characters are assholes and do really shitty things, or a lot of them die - and both of those tend to be true for a lot of Neil’s writing.
(It’s been a long-ass time since I read the book, but Shadow is one of the only characters I can think of in American Gods who isn’t a complete raging selfish asshole, because Neil’s deities are Like That, and I saw a complaint that he’s too passive. Which. He’s the normal dude who gets drawn into this world of gods and visions and Belief.)
If Neil didn’t care, he would have, for example, greenlit that Anansi Boys adaptation that they wanted to do where everyone’s white, and gotten a bunch of money for it.
Is he wrong about some stuff? Probably! He’s a 58-year-old British guy. There’s some shit about race in America that I daresay he doesn’t get, even having lived here for as long as he has. (The UK has racism, but some of it looks different than it does here.)
There’s other shit he doesn’t get because it was viewed differently when he was younger. There’s probably shit you won’t understand when you’re 58, because things were looked at differently when you were younger, but that’s okay as long as you don’t stop trying.
But I think his heart’s in the right place, and I think he tends to apologize when he says shitty things.
I guarantee that you are doing SOMETHING or hold SOME belief right now, this minute, that people in 15 or 20 or 30 years would point at and tell you is Problematic and Bad. Since you, the person reading this, are statistically unlikely to get stupid-levels-of-famous, it’s unlikely that people at that point will be digging up your old blog posts because you had a Bad Take a decade previously. (Or maybe by then we’ll just have moved past this purity culture shit. That would be nice, though I’m not banking on it.)
Guess what? Nobody is perfect, and you’re not perfect either. Trying to set yourself up as “Obviously *I* would never do a Problematic thing”? That’s how you prevent yourself from growing, because it means that when you inevitably do make a mistake, you either won’t acknowledge it and therefore learn from it OR you’ll break yourself with the realization that you did Something Bad.
Repeated attempts to Cancel him just feel very … look, I didn’t see nearly this level of Discourse about, like, George RR Martin during the 8 fucking years that people wouldn’t shut up about Game of Thrones. (And, from what I know of him, GRRM doesn’t really give a fuck about representation and stuff.) Or various other older white dudes who had a work get popular.
It seems odd and counter-productive for there to be so much more of this shit for someone who has historically been an ally and is at least TRYING, even if some of those have been missteps.
A lot of the recent “Neil Gaiman is a racist” and “Neil Gaiman is a transphobe” and “Neil Gaiman is Problematic, Actually” stuff seems to, curiously, stem from and being spread by the exact same people who are pissy about queer rep in Good Omens not being “gay enough” and … look I’ve written stuff on why that’s bullshit, and so have a lot of other people.
I understand why people have issues with some of his work. And if those issues are enough that you can’t read/watch/consume his work, that’s fine! That is understandable! You are allowed to not read or watch or whatever anything that you’re not comfortable with. You don’t have to like it!
But “This thing that this person created years or decades ago means that this person is Bad and Problematic and you shouldn’t like them either, and if you like them - even acknowledging their flaws - you are also a Bad Person” is a thought process that just needs to fucking die.
you don’t have to accept an entire fandom to enjoy it. fandom can be your 3 friends and a corn chip and honestly that’s gonna make you much happier in the long run.
Had an anon (of course it was an anon) come into my asks last night with big sealioning vibes.
If you don’t know, “sealioning” is when someone comes up to you “just asking questions” when, in fact, you have not agreed to talk to them, don’t want to talk to them, and don’t owe them any sort of conversation. The goal of the sealion is to trick you into answering so they can keep jumping up your ass as they continue to disagree.
They don’t want a conversation. They just want the opportunity to show you that they’re smarter than you. If you disprove any of their points, they’ll claim they weren’t talking about THAT.
The term comes from this fantastic comic from Wondermark:
Beware the sealion. They’re really fucking annoying.
Time is finite. It’s your choice whom you give yours to.
