All this talk about fic and not-so-good-fic and popularity got me thinking about an analogue of sorts: pop music.
I never did pop, but I did sing in a swing cover band, and lemme tell you: it’s nothing special. There’s no improvisation (it’s not like jazz) and you can play with it a bit but generally, we did well at being entertaining. It’s not deep, yeah? It’s happy-making stuff, or sad-making stuff, or ooh, slow-dance making stuff, depending on the song, but there’s no earth-shattering 16 bars of sax solo here or scatting (that wasn’t already written out). Move along.
Sometimes (quite rarely) we participated in a “battle of the bands” and usually we didn’t win anything specific, but we were usually audience choice. Not the technicals or particular band members, but overall? Popular choice. We made people happy. But one time, you know what a judge told us? We were “common denominator music.”
I got kind of mad over that, but she was right.
Fic is like that. Sure, just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s earth shattering literature, but it could mean that it resonates, and despite all the missed notes and the missed steps in choreo and the utter lack of creativity and sometimes subs learning the song 15 minutes before getting on stage, we resonated anyway.
And this of course goes back to the original point: the fic we love, that we wrote specifically for ourselves, is probably not common-denominator fic. There’s really no morals in this post. I mean we will all probably end up with one or two common-denominator fic in our time if we write long enough, but the idea of going out of my way to write one is kind of soul destroying, tbh. Will not recommend.
(Not like singing in a swing cover band wasn’t a blast or anything. Because it was.)
i also think a lot – and by a lot i mean most – of a fic’s popularity has to do with timing and chance.
if you’ll notice when you go to a fandom page and sort by kudos descending, you’ll see all the page 1 fics are usually grouped pretty closely in time. the smaller the fandom, the smaller the range of time usually. the bigger the fandom, the wider.
which is to say, every fandom has an apex of time in which a fic is likely to gain notoriety. you have to join and write for the fandom at a time when its first fics are being widely read. the longer you wait, the harder it is to gain popularity, because people’s interests change and move on to other fandoms.
what also affects it is an author’s user subscription count. the more people who sign on to get notified of anything an author posts, the faster the fic will get traffic, the more enticing it becomes for the tag-hunting readers to pick it up even if it might not be something they’d click on if it didn’t have surprising traffic.
now let’s say one of those tag-hunters happens to have a huge follower count on tumblr, or a rec blog or something, and recs your fic. now it has the opportunity to get into the hands of a new audience, and for that audience to add to the user subscriber base that generates the initial traffic.
right now you could write a 120k epic sterek fic which is objectively one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time. but sterek’s page 1 kudos are all from 2012 – 2014, with one outlier from 2017. the likelihood that you’ll become a page 1 outlier this late in the sterek game is slim, because even if the fandom is huge, sterek shippers have mostly moved on to more active fandoms.
but let’s say tony stark/dr strange (ironstrange?) pics up speed as a ship because of infinity war. if you pounded out a 20k sappy modern au and tossed it on ao3 while other people are sniffing around going “i dug this in IW, i wonder if there’s fic of it yet?” the more people are going to click on it because maybe there are only a handful of one-shots right now and a few things written in russian, and the more likely they are to click on it because they want to see how other people have interpreted the canon angst, or written a fix-it, or what have you.
so i agree with op, popularity has almost nothing to do with quality. i would argue that there are a few basic things you generally need, like a strong conceit and conflict that grows rather than continually deflates, but otherwise, it’s about being at the right place at the right time and growing your “i’m here for anything you write” audience base.
so, to conclude, as a writer you shouldn’t bother writing for popularity. you should write whatever ship you’re into and be prepared for whatever traffic comes your way. as a reader, you should put some effort into giving time and attention to less popular fics, offering promotion and feedback for the ones you like, and subscribing to the writers whose work will lead you into new places.
honestly the harry potter fandom is so wild like we’ve all collectively refused to accept cursed child as canon but some college kids tell us hufflepuffs are particularly good finders and we don’t even question it
I didn’t truly get the whole “death of the author” paradigm until I watched the harry potter fandom collectively divorce JKR
the deeper i get into fandom the weirder it is to me that Whedon-style nerdboys ever managed to convince people that the True Fans™ are the people who memorize shit and lord their knowledge over other people. like ok you know the exact dimensions of Batman’s cave penny. sure. but did you survive the HP ship wars? do you know how to customize your Ao3 search to filter out all the creepy and/or poorly tagged shit in the massive fandoms? have you ever gotten in a fight over SuperWhoLock? would you last more than ten seconds on _coal or FFA? have you felt the burning pain in your fingers as you scramble to bang out just a hundred more words before the exchange deadline comes down? can you do research to make your in-universe artifacts accurate? can you vid? can you edit .gifs? can you sew costumes and do makeup? like yeah ok you love Jace Beleren enough to know his backstory and all his stats but i’m sorry did you personally stitch what looks like over two hundred eyelets onto your stockings so you could cosplay Liliana Vess? fake geek girls my ass. get back to me when you can do something with the worlds you love other than memorize them.
get back to me when you can do something with the worlds you love other than memorize them.
I felt like OP’s tags had to be included here, because it’s not memorizing lore that makes someone’s involvement in fandom bad, it’s specifically using it to gatekeep others’ fandom experiences.
There’s no wrong way to be a fan! Which means it’s not cool to tell people they’re not being a fan the right way.
it is responsible, and the mark of a good audience, to critique problematic elements in the media we consume. For example, I love gothic lit – but a lot of it is incredibly sexist and racist. I can acknowledge that these elements are a problem and objectionable while still enjoying the piece for a multitude of other reasons. I can also say to myself “if I ever want to write my own gothic lit, here are some elements I should avoid.” Or, if I do want to tackle the issues of racism and sexism in my future gothic lit, then I can say “I will avoid writing in a way which implicitly or explicitly condones racism or sexism, while still emulating the praiseworthy elements of gothic lit.”
In essence, the fundamentals of intersectional media critique is this: “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators.” By rethinking these elements, I don’t mean utterly doing away with them, but rethinking how we approach them and how we read them.
We enter purity culture when our statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and we should rethink them in future media, both as audiences and as creators,” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media].” The implication here is that, if one wants to be a good person, one should avoid [x media], because to do otherwise is to either implicitly or explicitly condone everything in [x media]. This type of attitude towards media is very common in conservative religious circles.
It moves fully into censorship when the statement moves from “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore anyone who consumes or creates [x media] is condoning everything about [x media]” and becomes “these elements of [x media] are problematic and therefore nobody can consume or create [x media] for any reason.” Those who break this rule are seen as evil and shunned. This type of attitude toward media is very common in fundamentalist circles.
A culture of censorship is the natural outcome of purity culture, because purity culture by its very nature seeks purity until even the whisper of objectionable content, in any context, is suppressed.
I would wager a guess that many people who are against anti culture are familiar with either these toxic conservative or fundamentalist attitudes towards media, and we are alarmed by their striking similarity with antis’ attitudes towards media. It is most certainly why I am against anti culture.
honestly though.. I complain about fandom a great deal I think, and obviously there are elements of it that could be much, much better! but fandom as a whole – fandom as a unit – is one of the most incredible things ever.
there’s fic. there’s people who analyze a character’s motivations and voice and inner workings to the point that they can write that character, and write them well, and explore them beyond the boundaries of the canon, the everlasting questions of “what if?” or “why that?” or “what happened then?”
and there’s podfic, there’s people who see fic and say “there are people who can’t read this, or don’t have time to, and I should make it available to them”, and then they make their own audiobook.
there’s fan-art, there’s edits, there’s people creating visual representations of works people love. fan-art that makes people cry, or laugh, fan-art that depicts characters attaining the happiness that they don’t get to achieve, or that depicts them in a way that aligns them with part of a group that the author didn’t think to include.
and there’s people who write meta, who write brilliant, thought-provoking analysis for fun, people who change the way everyone else thinks about the characters. there’s people who look up relevant facts and do the necessary historical research. there’s people who contribute with their knowledge of a certain language, a specific historical period, anything relevant that furthers the understandings of others.
and there are people that they do it for. people who comment, people who ask questions, people who keysmash in the tags, people who leave asks on a bad day, and anyone can be that, and fandom can’t function without these people,
and that’s what fandom does, it functions as a unit. and that on its own is amazing.
It’s really not rational, so let’s start with that 🙂
People have different reasons for what they do, so there is no one singular answer. Some people use bookmarks as a “to read” this. Some of them use bookmarks as a “recommendations” list. Some use them to keep track of fics in other ways.
Making a bookmark private could be because it’s smut and the reader doesn’t want other people to know they read smut. Or it could be because they haven’t read the fic yet so they don’t want it out there that they will. Or it could be because they describe fics in order to be able to find them later and they don’t want anyone to read the spoilers they included.
I’ll pass it off to the readers to give other reasons for private bookmarks, but know that someone talking shit is probably not the reason.
It’s odd to me that our default assumption seems to be that people would make their bookmarks public. Like, to the extent that keeping them private requires some kind of explanation. Personally, I might expect the default assumption go the other way: that most people would want to keep their list of fics they’d like to find again just for their own reference, and that people who make their bookmarks public are doing curatorial work above and beyond what’s expected.
I mean, I say this as someone who shares a lot online about what I’m reading. I liveblog my pleasure reading, and I also write up more formal recommendations of both published books and fic. But all of this is very conscious mediation. It’s much different, and in ways less transparent, than publishing lists of things I’m reading, or lists of things I’d like for whatever reason to be able to find again, with no comment or explanation. Which is not to say that some people don’t want to do this or that it’s not valuable! I enjoy browsing the public bookmarks (or home bookshelves) of people whose taste I like, too. But why do we expect this behavior, or service, as a standard part of fic-reading?
I’ve actually been thinking about issues like this a lot this past week, ever since I saw a Tumblr screen-shot of a tweet by Roxane Gay, which was “liked” by Hillary Clinton. (This is presumably in reference to the disparaging reactions to Gay’s previous tweet at DC Comics, offering to write their Batgirl movie, although there might be other or different context I’m not aware of):
[For those who can’t see this image, Gay’s tweet says “A lot of men I will never know are deeply invested in my career. I am touched.” The image then shows the check mark which means that Clinton “liked” the tweet.]
My first reaction to this was, like most people’s, amusement: certainly if anyone understands the investment of unknown sexists in one’s career, it’s Clinton. But then I had a further reaction, which was one of total exhaustion. Imagine living so much in the public eye that you can’t “like” something on Twitter without people screenshotting your “like” and circulating it to hundreds of thousands of comments on social media. This isn’t a tweet Clinton wrote herself, or even someone else’s tweet that she decided to retweet. All she did was click a “like” button, possibly in a moment of passing amusement and camaraderie.
[Edit: apparently the check-mark is actually a more reblog-like marker of endorsement on Clinton’s part, SORRY Y’ALL, I DON’T TWEET. A more germane example might be the furore over JK Rowling “liking,” and then publicly disavowing her “like” of, a transphobic tweet recently. I’m less in sympathy with Rowling’s politics, which I think are well-meaning but shallow and kind of cowardly; but this still highlights a reason that someone in the public eye might be well-advised to compose their public online record more carefully, and with more context.]
I’m not particularly shedding tears for Hillary Clinton’s lost privacy. Pretty much everything about her life demonstrates that she chooses emphatically to live in the public eye, and she has faced many worse dragons than screenshots of a “like” on a wryly anti-sexist tweet. She no doubt knew the likely repercussions of “liking” that tweet, and did it as a show of solidarity for Gay. But what I’m reacting to here is the assumption that we all, by default, owe each other a transparent record of what we do online, and that if we choose privacy over transparency, that choice requires an explanation.
Maybe this assumption is just realistic, I don’t know. I know it’s unwise to assume anything you do online will definitely remain secret. But there’s a difference between accepting the possibility that one’s browser history might maliciously be leaked to one’s employer, and accepting the mandate of absolute transparency to all people one interacts with online. This is an inexact metaphor, but to me it bears certain similarities to closing the blinds before you undress: sure, some people might choose not to do it, and sure, there are voyeurs out there who will try to get an eyeful even if you do close them, but that doesn’t mean that the decision to close them itself is weird or in need of justification.
(Tangentially, this also brings up interesting questions of expectations of “authenticity” in online spaces. Say I used my AO3 bookmarks as a list, not of my favorite fics, but of, say, stories I found troubling in one way or another. One might suppose I was working on an article about my relationship to some particular trope, and wanted to collect some fics for help cataloguing my own reactions. Say I kept my bookmarks public but didn’t explain this strategy to anyone. Would people familiar with my taste, who sought out my public bookmarks, be justified in feeling misled by me? Would they be justified in asking me to explain the discrepancy? Who “owns” the public bookmarks space, and what does the bookmarker owe the people who may seek it out?)
this was a fascinating read – thanks for the addition!
If I haven’t already outed myself as a “fandom old” with the title, I’m about to right now: There was a point within the last 10 years when femslash was such a minority and so frequently dismissed by het and boyslash fans alike that ship wars within F/F fandom were actually rare. Likewise, femslash’s demographic was unique. It was mostly populated by queer women, whereas both M/M and M/F were populated by predominantly straight women.
As a result of the dynamics mentioned above, you had a lot of overlap between femslash ships, even within fandoms for a single show. People got along, and often multishipped, because 1) OMG more than two girls?? 2) social media hadn’t become the haven for trollish behavior that it is today, and 3) there was minimal investment in seeing their readings of the text reflected onscreen.
… fandom as the indefinite mass of people who gather around a piece of
media to share their enjoyment of it? Tell stories about it? Spin legends out of it?
That fandom’s real strength has always been its ability to not care
about whether or not the establishment thinks it’s legitimate; to give
the middle finger to canonicity.
(this post is mostly an expansion on the twitter thread i did a while back, which addressed this question: why is fanfiction often blamed for harming young people in fandom? (please also read the spinoff additions to the end of the thread, which start here.)
this post deliberately does not address whether or not fandom should have particular social expectations/obligations. I think these ethical questions are complicated and require nuanced address, particularly because of how social media works these days. rather, this is my offered explanation for why fanworks are the chosen scapegoat for the cumulative harm of systemic social problems.)
Note this post is US-centric because the scapegoating of fanworks seems to come primarily from Americans in English-speaking fandom spaces.
I think that because fanworks have long been slapped with warnings of dark content (abuse, noncon/dubcon, etc) it’s difficult for me to believe they directly play a major part in setting young people up for abusive situations irl … for the most part. It’s less the fanworks themselves and more the environment in which fanworks have been presented over the last 5-8 years.
In my opinion, the sad irony is that fanworks only have the potential to cause direct harm by causing people to believe their contents are models for safe sex/relationships/etc because of the expectation that fandom is a space for education.
fanworks have been around for ages, but currently they are:
in a post 9/11 social environment where the unknown/unfamiliar is feared, critical thinking is discouraged, safety is prioritized over freedom, and censorship is treated as protection,
(but information is available in unchecked quantities that outstrips the individual’s ability to process it);
available in a viral-sharing environment featuring nigh-infinite freedom/no moderating authority and on a highly-networked, easily-searched internet;
where young people are often more expert at navigation than their guardians, and thus easily able to access content that isn’t age-appropriate/safe for them
(but being young people, they often think they’re ready for that content);
furthermore, content that is not only inappropriate for their age/maturity, but also on topics that they will never/have never received a proper, thorough education on
(because schools have their hands tied by religiously-motivated regulations and guardians have abdicated responsibility for sex ed and lack acceptance for non-straight/non-cis identities);
targeted marketing has encouraged and exacerbated existing stratification by income, age, gender, and sexual orientation; and
increasing social awareness is constantly creating tension between social tradition and social advancement, putting incredible stress on anyone who represents ‘advancement’.
On that last point, my thread and this post are particularly concerned with (perceived) women, who are burdened by both traditional and ‘progressive’ social roles:*
women are traditionally seen as child caretakers, educators, and burdened with upholding social morality as the heart of homemaking. all perceived women have to deal with this social expectation.
as agents of social advancement, those perceived as women are still burdened with educating the ignorant and being ‘good examples’, as their mistakes will be magnified as evidence that tradition is better.
*these problems are SUPER magnified by being non-white. (and I didn’t even get into the sexual expectations.)
As an isolated space, fandom – with majority women and/or afab participation – did a pretty good job of shaking off the social expectation that perceived women are educators and caretakers. but when fandom gained visibility by the move to tumblr and Google trawling tumblr content/content going viral + all the social factors above, the ‘(perceived) women as educators’ expectation came back on fandom, and with additional exacerbation:
in a culture focused on purity and prioritizing safety over freedom, disgust & feelings of shame both act like a moral compass & a safety warning. fandom’s judgement-free attitude about nsfw/kinky/horrible-irl content looks like a community of people who condone all these things as ‘safe’, if that’s how you’ve been taught to view the world.
Basically: if the people who are writing/creating this stuff are treating it as nothing to be ashamed of, it must not be dangerous. right?
Combined with the not-unusual adolescent belief that you’re ready for literally anything and know more than most adults, it’s a recipe for disaster.
fanworks often echo aspects of the source material, including aspects that are not healthy: canon romanticization of abusive relationship dynamics, for instance. Fanworks that share canon’s unhealthy features can become a form of reinforcement/seen as tacit approval of existing messages in mass media for fans who don’t have outside education to protect them.
in fact, fanworks are often (deliberately or not) ‘in dialogue’ with the existence of these kinds of harmful cliches. it’s important to view fanworks as what they frequently are: individual reactions/remixes/retakes on things in mass media and real life, created by victims/potential victims of the harm those things can cause. (viral sharing sites often separate these works from this context.)
on fandom tumblr in particular, people are consuming a cominbation of fanworks, fantasies about fictional characters that may or may not be nsfw, educational posts about safe sex / queer/lgbt history / sexual orientiations / gender identity / being a good ally / intersectionalism, and the importance of minority representation in mass media. conflating fanworks with good representation & educational content seems a natural consequence.
within fandom spaces, the expectation is that fans are enlightened on social justice issues. as victims of marginalization, or at least people who are constantly exposed to education on marginalization, we obviously know better than creators of mass media. This contributes to the attitude that fan content should be ‘better’.
Ironically, the content warnings, lack of fan culture shame, and the creators being vulnerable to negative responses together contribute to making fanworks/fan creators unusually visible examples of ‘corrupting’ content to point at and condemn.
between terrible education, a reactionary and conservative background radiation to English-speaking internet culture thanks to the US being a mess, and the fact most people are blind to social constructs that have formed their whole worldview, fanworks are getting a really bad rap.
altogether: fanworks are treated as being on par with mass media, social expectations, and culture norms in terms of the harm they can cause, even though they have comparatively little visibility and are usually created by marginalized people with little relative influence. They are reactions to mass media, social expectations, and culture norms rather than the cause of them.
however, because fanworks are easy to access without supervision, open about the content being potentially harmful, and produced by people who should ‘know better’ or are perceived as caretakers/educators, fanworks get blamed for the cumulative effect of culture/mass media/social norms. And unfortunately, because young people have formed expectations that fanworks will educate them due to those same social norms, the possibility that people will treat fanworks as models for social behavior or comprehensive guidelines to material they lack education on is increased.
–
I can’t hope to propose a comprehensive solution in this post. Taken altogether, fandom is really the tip of a large iceberg of systemic problems: sexist expectations, lack of outside education, and a reactionary cultural environment are the underlying issues.
Anything fandom can do on its own will amount to little more than a band-aid. Antis will never wipe out potentially harmful fanworks, and all the declarations by fandom members that they abdicate responsibility for educating young fandom people won’t make society less expectant of us.
the only things I know we have to do in the long run is keep fighting for real sex ed, keep warning for and flagging adult-oriented fan content, and do our best to respect each other’s taste and comfort levels. (and it would be a lie to say that I expect any of it to be easy.)
Oh. Hey. That’s another thing about ageism in fandom-
How many of you have looked around at the fic and art being created by your fellow fans and looked at your own and winced, wondering how all of these other people could be so GOOD AT IT, and whether or not you should just give up now ‘cause you “clearly” don’t have the same talent as they do?
Chances are, if you’re a teenager, the works you are looking at were created by someone six to fifteen years older than you. They probably fell into fandom at about your age, and the works they produced at that time probably looked a lot like the ones you’re making now. They aren’t naturally more talented than you- they’ve just been working at their craft for far longer.
KEEP THE PEN IN YOUR HAND. You can be as good, or better, than ANYONE you see out there. I promise you, anyone you’re a fan of had a point in their life where their work was far less impressive than yours. You just need time, and practice.
And remember, we love this stuff for the same reasons you love this stuff.
That’s why we’re here.
Exactly this.
The shit I wrote at age 15 was terrible, but I was enthused so I kept at it. And kept at it. And now I seem to have forgotten to stop.
Anyway: Keep writing. Get yourself a good beta and a good cheerleader. These can be both, but a good beta will make you be a *better* writer. If your writing doesn’t improve after six months, if they never point out any errors or things that need to be fixed at all and you’re still not happy with your writing, keep your cheerleader and find a better beta to match.
This. I cannot stress the importance of having a good beta. Even if you’re well past your teenage years, even if you’re been writing for a decade or more… having a second pair of eyes look at something before you post it can be the difference between someone reading and reccing your story, and hitting the back button because it hurts too much to make it past the first paragraph.
(Because yeah – in a lot of cases, I will totally “nope” out of a poorly edited story. Sorry.)
ALL OF THIS. So many of the people who go “wow, I can’t believe you’re still in fandom at your age, you clearly have no life” fail to realize that probably a lot of their favorite fics/fanart are created by people who are 30, 40, even 50+. People who have been doing this for years, plus have life experience to put into their work that teens or even 22-year-olds just don’t have yet. And have been actively working to improve over the years.
Yes, this! I’m in my mid-30s. I started writing when I was about nine years old, first wrote fanfic when I was 14, and have been in fandom continuously since I was 20. That is a lot of practice (and I look forward to getting decades more! :D)
Some of my favorite content creators have been in fandom since the 1970s and are still creating work. I’ve been in fandom since 1998 and refuse to stop, because fandom changed my life.
I started writing at 11, folks. None of it is on the web, nor gonna be. But you know, I put the first fanfics I wrote in my 20s out there and they’re still out there because they were the best I could do at the time. If you want to write it, write it. And if no one else likes it, as long as you do, at least one person does! TL;DR If you’re having fun, keep doing it!
[W]hy do people who are heavily invested in low prestige taste communities, WHICH I ALSO AM, so often feel a thing I used to feel and no longer feel… Maybe I’m crap if my taste is crap, how can I make a recommendation? What’s wrong with me that I love this low prestige work so much?…
“It’s not just fanfic and it’s not just boyband fan communities that have this. The sentimental novel had this. The novel itself in the early 18th century, just prose fiction about realistic people in general, had this. Several different kinds of music communities had this. I suspect that certain kinds of artmaking right now where the art is not in English, where it’s connected to an immigrant community, have this, although I don’t know because almost all my art consumption is Anglophone. And writing that we would now call porn, from the 60s and 70s, Samuel Delany’s good about this and he wrote some of this, had this a lot.
“The common thread here is that these were genres and kinds of writing or kinds of music that were sexually explicit, or addressed to a subordinated social group and that social group’s concern, or both. So identifying yourself and trying to make public your taste in any of these things including early 18th century novels or gay porn in the early 70s was saying, “I’m a member of this out-group and its concerns are my concerns and that’s why I care about this genre,” or it was saying “I really wanna talk about sexy things in public.” And so if explaining your taste and describing your aesthetic criteria requires you to do either of those things, then you’re gonna say “maybe I shouldn’t do this, maybe it reflects badly on me if I do this.”
“… the answer to that is if you really love something and it means a lot to you and you have the kind of personal security where you’re not gonna be fired or kicked off your insurance or kicked out of your house for explaining, or damage people you’re close to, by explaining why you like it, fucking go for it!
“… it’s important that someone do this. Because it’s important that works of art that people have labored over, that have given so much pleasure and emotional support to people, it’s important that those works of art be acknowledged as works of art and it’s important that somebody fucking do this.
EVERYONE SHOULD GO LISTEN TO FANSPLAINING, and especially this episode, which is part one of their interview with Harvard poetry professor and comics fangirl Stephanie Burt. This is an abridged part of the last section that literally made me cry on my walk because it was the best explanation for why I have fandom/fic shame that I’ve ever heard. @fansplaining, thank you so much for for all you guys do. (And thanks to Stephanie Burt for her amazing words!)
Question of Smoke 
