There is no greater bond than the one between a person and the fictional character they’ve written 50k+ words about

Genuinely don't know what it's called but there's a particular way of violating reality that doesn't work. For example, I am willing to accept an omegaverse university AU of nearly any fandom you care to name (except, for some reason, Sherlock, because I have an inexplicable hatred for unilock). However, a lot of Star Wars university AUs specifically fail on this aspect: they make Anakin an engineering PhD student and Obi-Wan something like literature or classics, and then they make Anakin his TA or GA.

You can't do that. Absolutely not. Anakin is unqualified for that and a university would not do it in any case. A university would literally hire a junior or senior undergraduate workstudy student to do as much of that work as possible first. They would do NOTHING other than do that and make the prof do all his own grading.

Is there a name for "I will accept [wild fantasy premise] but not [ordinary wrong thing]?" Please tell me there's a name for this. Probably someone who studies lit will know? I'm a systems person I don't know from lit theory just like Anakin

I love, love, LOVE it when I can tell a fic author has integrated their specialized knowledge in a fic. I was reading a fic that at some point included the character going to visit an art therapist, and it's so clear that the author is an art therapist themself, and the details included are just immaculate and I love it. I've previously read about a character doing fencing for no other reason than the author clearly wanting to write a sport they understood. A character being given a hyperfixation on bugs just so the author can infodump themselves.

I eat it up every time, it brings such a smile to my face

🪷

Always RB: because there is never enough love. And fanfic love is some of the purest.

Once AGAIN,

(for the billionth time),

there were no Glorious Beforetimes in fandom when everyone agreed to play nice, never criticize anything, never complain about fanworks, never harass other people about what they wrote.

Never.

Fandom was not a halcyonic utopia before TikTokers Kids These Days Puriteens antis The Fire Nation attacked.

"Don't Like, Don't Read" was never the Golden Rule in fandom. Sporking used to be so commonplace that multiple communities were built specifically to do it.

My Immortal wouldn't have the (sub)cultural prominence it does today if hatereading "badfic" and collectively mocking/lampooning it weren't an established part of early internet fandom.

"Mary Sue" was a term originally cooked up specifically to belittle people's female OCs.

There was once, as legend tells it, a woman who stood outside a fanauthor's door at a convention who actively harassed anyone trying to go in because she objected to the content of the work that author was sharing. And iirc, this was before the internet, or before internet fandom was as big as it is now.

There were roving waves of Christian fundamentalists who'd "flame" (harass) any slash (same-sex ships) author, for being "sinful." Some extremely popular archives (this was before AO3), while not directly affiliated with the religious asshats, would nonetheless expect that any slash, of any "spice" level (even G-rated), be labeled as "Adult." And if you didn't abide by those rules, you were not allowed to post there, and in some cases effectively shunned and invisible in the community.

Some of the Christian activist groups were behind Strikethrough, too. You know, the thing that people keep bringing up when they say "remember fannish history"? (BTW, Strikethrough was not the single precipitating incident of the founding of AO3, just to correct that bit of apocrypha while I'm here.)

There were multiple communities on livejournal dedicated solely to bashing specific characters (usually female characters or characters of color). One midsize fandom I was in had two communities for doing this to a single female character of color, one of which was a watchalong group made so they could say awful things about her on an episode by episode basis. And these people would "flame" authors/fics who wrote positively about these characters, often driving them out of fandom for having the "wrong" opinions.

There were ship wars in the Due South fandom so heated that there are still people fighting about it today (mostly one dedicated person sending boilerplate anon hate, but still).

Some of the greatest wanks of yore (MS Scribe, Cassandra Cla[i]re, etc) were based around ship wars, sock puppets created to harass people, and the like.

Fandom has always been like this. The terminology changes, the topics shift, the methods of harming people change, the locations change (from in person to various scattered sites, to social media and beyond), and so on. But there was never a fannish utopia free from bullshit.

Anyone trying to tell you that there was, that says we should follow Five Simple Rules, or that we need to Make Fandom Great Again, is either clueless, was blissfully insulated from bullshit till recently (when AO3 and social media made everyone's activities and work accessible to larger audiences), or is trying to sell you something. Don't buy it.

Our fandom forbearers did NOT suffer through Anne Rice, strikethrough, and other bullshit for fucking ACOTAR and Harry Potter fans to fucking ruin it for all of us by selling fanfiction. I am not losing novel length yaoi epics because some of you don't know how to act in fannish spaces and yes I do blame the booktokification of fanfic but I also blame those of you that treat fandom like content to consume and not a community to engage with.

Seriously people, learn fandom etiquette. It exists, it exists for extremely good reasons, and it's been decades in the making.

You know the saying, 'OSHA regulations are written in blood'? Yeah, that applies to fandom etiquette. We didn't make this shit up to lord it over newcomers, these rules evolved as a form of fucking self-defense and by god we'll die on this hill.

So stop putting other people's fanfictions on KINDLE UNLIMITED!!!

In case you're unaware: that can (and will) get the writer and publisher a Cease & Desist and very possibly a lawsuit. Which they will lose.

Fanfic must be free or else it is breaking copyright — even advertising on a fanfic website is risky.

You do not own the copyright. You do not own the characters. You do not make money off copyrights that are not your own.

Who TF is putting fanfic on Kindle Unlimited??

Don't list it on fucking Goodreads either ffs.

I love it when my creativity spurs other creativity. literally no better feeling as an artist than when someone looks at something you’ve made and goes “I saw this and liked it so much I could do nothing more with myself than turn it into drive for my own creativity” like that’s really what creativity is huh!! an instrument to further human expression and community and connection 

On being an older fangirl

I was probably 10 years old when I first conceived of what was, looking back, fanfiction. Me and my best friend would lie in bed together on sleepovers and I'd make up stories about what happened after the end of our favorite book, "The Westing Game." She'd ask me for more stories, and I'd tell her more, inventing them as I went along. "Then what?" she'd say.

I was 14 when I went to my first convention. I had discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was 1987, and my youth pastor was a huge Trekkie. He took me to a one-day crappy Creation con, but it was amazing to me. I met Nichelle Nichols. My dad showed me the Trek movies. He and I watched TNG together.

When I went to college in 1991, my dad used to videotape TNG episodes onto VHS tapes and mail them to me, so I could keep watching (I didn't have TV in my dorm room).

By the time I was a senior, we had Trek watching parties in the dorm lounge, where the TV had cable. Star Trek: Voyager had started up, and I wrote a column about it for the college newspaper. I joined a mailing list about it, with people in it that I still know today.

I got my first computer that could go online in 1995. I was on newsgroups. I discovered Doctor Who. I went to Trek conventions where we still passed around fanzines containing fic and art and smutty K/S fan creations.

Then it was Harry Potter. Then there were websites. Then there was Geocities, where we could all make our own little spots. We organized them into webrings. We talked on newsgroups and mailing lists. There were fanfic archives. Then there was fanfiction.net.

Then...there was LiveJournal. And we could interact in entirely new ways. We could form communities, and debate things, and fight over canon, and get into ship wars. On LiveJournal, I met my best friend of 22 years. I was in her wedding. She's my sister of the heart (which is what she calls me).

Then there was Tumblr. And Twitter. And now there's Discord. But it's all the same.

I am the same.

I am still that little girl who made up fanfiction in her head to entertain her best friend. I am still the one who was amazed to find communities on the internet - which was so new, so raw, so uncommodified - where others like me could meet. I found there people to meet in real life.

I am still that twentysomething going to her first major convention, being told that someone loved my fic, being asked about my writing process.

I am still that thirtysomething watching something I wrote blow up. Seeing friends from other fandoms find me in new ones, finding them there, too. Forgetting which fandom I know someone from, because I've known them for twenty years.

I still know some of the people who created those early websites, those mailing lists, those archives. I still meet people in new fandoms who say "Oh, I read your fic in [fandom] fifteen years ago!" There's no feeling quite like having someone remember something you wrote for that long. Or meeting someone whose fic meant a lot to YOU, or who you talked with on rec.arts.drwho.creative in 1997.

Aging in fandom is a gift. Being middle-aged in fandom is a joy. Having people who still read what I write and ask "Then what?" is a blessing.

It breaks my heart that so many people see it as something to be ashamed of, when it is one of my life's greatest gifts.

🪷

fanfic writers will consume a whole ass franchise and be like "that was fun, now i will proceed to do it better"

Fanfic authors at canon:

ppl seem to do this thing in fandoms where theyll take a character whos inherently kind and trusting of people and then they make the fanon version of them ignorant or innocent to certain things by default and i dont like it

what about the characters who know the dangers of loving and trusting but do it anyway out of strength? what about the ones that know more than anyone about what heartbreak people can cause, and love quickly and wholly because they dont want anyone to feel unloved and discarded ever again? what about them?

outsiders and boring normal people and fandom newbies always think that buckwild kinky porn fanfiction is the strangest fandom hobby but they are wrong.

the strangest fandom hobby is plotty fanfiction, the kind that requires research, because engaging in this hobby makes no goddamned sense.

it doesn’t even give anybody masturbation material, which is at least a logical and admirable goal that contributes to the betterment of society, or at least society’s solitary orgasms.

in other news i hope the cia spyware monitoring my internet usage understands that i’m googling information about smuggling drugs in thailand because i want the details to be right in a single paragraph in a 10,000 word story about a gay mafia guys.

this post has been making the rounds again and i just want to state for the record that it is a fucking delight to read in the tags all the random things people research for their fanfic and art. fandom, i love you. i love you with your flood maps and medical procedures and tentacle biology and historical fashion and traditional handcrafts and conlangs and urban geography and literally everything else. i am completely sincere about this. the enthusiasm with which people embrace detailed, deep, and often obscure research, just because they want to get it right, because they want to create something rich and interesting, it makes me feel better about the world. i adore it.

one of my favorite stupid things to do in fanfic is to throw two characters together who literally never interact. and then give them an entire, fleshed-out relationship dynamic that exists nowhere but my own head. yes they’ve literally never spoken. yes their relationship is important to me. hope this helps.

so this one has breached containment a bit but like, in a fun way. i love reading the tags and having no idea who you’re talking about but reveling in our shared experience of silly fanfics. or, sometimes, KNOWING who you’re talking about and going “dang that is niche love that”. please continue to tag this with every fictional character dynamic that never happened that you’ve gotten invested in I love them. also please continue calling out your friends I love that too