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.
I’ve been around for a really long time in various fandoms, and no one ever writes this stuff down. I’ll start. Please add to the list. We can’t expect people to follow “rules” they don’t know exist.
if you like something, reblog it. Help the artist get their work out there in front of more people. Share the joy that it brought you.
if you want more of it, support it. This can be via commissions, reblogs, recommending the artist to other people, shouting in the tags, or sending the artist asks/messages.
if you hate it, keep scrolling. Keep the hate in a message window with a friend, not in the artist’s notes.
if you want to use it, ask permission. Artwork is beautiful and you want to show it off. But please ask the artist before you throw it into your header or your icon.
if you use it, give credit. And not just a post where you say “Do you like my new icon? X made it!”. Put it in your blog description, that way when someone rolls around your blog three months from now, they also know where your icon/header came from.
Fanfic
if you like something, reblog it. Help the author get their work out there in front of more people. Share the joy that it brought you.
if you want more of it, support it. Kudos are fine, but if you want more of the thing you like, you should comment. Subscribe to the story or the author. Send them a message about how much you like what they wrote.
if you read it, kudos it. Or give it a thumbs up. And this is just if you managed to get all the way to the end. If you finished the story and you actually liked it? Comment and reblog.
don’t demand content. Be patient. Stories take time. You can encourage without being demanding. Show your love for what’s there without telling them to post more often.
be gentle with criticism. Some people want it and some people run away from it. If you don’t know what type of person the author is, it’s best not to go there. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.”
Fandom
ship and let ship. You love your ship and other people love theirs. No one needs to “win” when we’re all going to end up in tears anyway.
if you hate it, stay out of the tag. This has two meanings: 1) don’t deliberately put hateful commentary in a tag and 2) if you hate a tag, don’t go and read through that tag just to make yourself angry
if someone makes you something, appreciate it. Read and comment the fic. Like and reblog the artwork. Pimp it out and tell them how much you loved it. It’s a gift, treat it like one.
if it’s a gift, put some effort into it. You signed up for that exchange three months ago and now it’s a week before you have to send the gift and you don’t have the time or the inclination to do the thing. Well too bad. Someone out there has been working hard in your gift, so you should do the same for them.
none of us are “better” than anyone else. We’re all trash for our particular show/film/book/ship/artist/what-have-you. My fave is no better than yours and yours is no better than mine.
actors are not their characters. They are people. Treat them like people.
Some of y’all don’t want fandom to be fun at all you want it to be like some kind of gd AP Lit class where all we do is have pointed debates over the most Correct interpretation of media like NO get fucked I will project onto my favorite character and write whatever shitty nonsense fic for whatever illogical pairing I want die mad about it
a few weeks back i looked up the source of “we deserve a soft epilogue, my love” because it’s such a lovely, evocative line and i wanted to know the name of the poet who wrote it and it was. from captain america fanfiction.
“in whatever manner it comes to be, love is never wrong, especially between one who has so much of it to give, and one so desperately in need of it” is from a naruto fanfic we’re living in a web of lies
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.
I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.
Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.
woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time
Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?
I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.
The world may never know…
Maybe it’s something mathematical?
I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.
It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.
(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)
“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).
It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.
So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.
100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.
Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.
I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.
Most of the characters used like this have their genesis in the pre www internet tbh
Fandoms don’t die when their source material ends. Far from it. A fandom is what you make of it, and most fandoms don’t fully come into their own until long, long after their source canon has first been published, or released in theaters—or stops airing on television. If my years in fandom have taught me anything, it’s that you need to build the fandom you want. Keep on creating. Keep on connecting. That’s what fandom always has been. The fandom you love dies if you stop. The source of official content might stop, and sometimes it’s just time for that to happen. Pick up where it leaves off. Find new ways of parsing, reshaping, and transforming what already exists. Feel what you need to feel, but don’t stop if letting go isn’t what you want. Among many other things, I’m devoted to asingle novel that was published 28 years ago. We occasionally get, say, a radio or television adaptation, but those several hundred precious pages are all the canon we have. The rest of what fills a fandom that has lasted nearly 30 years, glorious and constant and endlessly surprising? Is us.
A post just crossed my dash that put the worst taste in my mouth. I don’t want to reblog it, but I do want to address the contents because I think the subject is super important.
The post basically boiled down to: fanfic writers are thin-skinned babies “these days” because no one can take constructive criticism. In “my day” we all sent page-long critiques like the dedicated heroes we were! It made us better writers! Moreover, if I didn’t like something, I told the writer all about it! It was my job!
Hold up, what?
I’ve been posting fanfic online since 1998. Twenty years. Pre-archives. And “in my day” we had betas if we wanted/needed/asked for them (whose critiques didn’t have an audience). We said “concrit welcome” if we actually wanted constructive criticism. We did not show up unannounced to point out a work’s flaws because that is rude. Look, I am an editor. People pay me real money to edit things for them. I would rather cut off my own fingers than burst into someone’s comments and start “critiquing” their work without being asked first.
Here’s something that needs to be addressed: fanfiction is real writing, yes, but it is, by its nature as something that isn’t monetized, a hobby. As in, a thing people do for fun. A thing that hopefully brings both authors and readers joy! The story an author posts is a gift; how dare anyone rip a gift apart in front of the gift-giver and all the other party attendees? How entitled and ungrateful can you be? Fandom is not a frigging battleground where authors learn to harden themselves for war. It’s a hobby. Done out of love and enthusiasm.
Yes, some fanfiction writers (certainly not all!!) aspire to be original fiction writers. They may use fanfiction as a training ground. They may want or benefit from constructive criticism. Still, they have to ask. They have to start the conversation. I know (think?) it’s harder to find betas these days, but it’s always worth asking around if real critique is what you want. Put “concrit welcome and even begged for” in the author’s notes and hope someone takes you up on it.
Some fanfiction writers with original fiction aspirations still don’t want criticism about their fic. Fic may be their fun-writing outlet. It may be about instant gratification (and there’s nothing wrong with that; we’re not in the business of denying ourselves pleasure out of some moral superiority here. It’s fandom). It may be the place where they post to get around their fears of showing things to others. It may be the place they take risks they wouldn’t in their original work because the stakes are lower. When you work on your original writing all day, every day—often putting that work through far more vigorous and exhausting paces than fanfic sees—the last thing you want is someone showing up during your time off to point out a frigging comma splice or shift in POV.
The point is unless someone asks for critique, you don’t know what’s going on with them. Maybe fic is the only fun thing they have in their lives. Maybe they’re writing in a different language. Maybe they are 14. Or 82. Maybe they’ve never written fiction of any kind before and this is their baby step forward. Maybe fic is just escapism. Maybe they are depressed or anxious as hell and criticism is going to push them over an edge. Fandom belongs to everyone. Not just people deemed “good” or “perfect” or “permitted” or “thick-skinned.” People don’t need to be saved from grammar mistakes or poor turns of phrase or even plotholes so wide a semi could drive through them. Authors sure as hell don’t need to be told when a reader just doesn’t like something. There is no fandom police force in charge of perfection. If critique is so important to you, advertise your willingness to beta. If you do not like a story or think it’s “bad” hit the freaking back button.
Unsolicited criticism is not helpful. Maybe you just catch someone off-guard and startle them. At worst, you may totally shatter someone’s self-esteem while they are partaking in a hobby they 100% do for fun—and not in pursuit of some unattainable perfection.
Don’t ruin a stranger’s day or week or hobby because you “know better” and somehow think you need to prove it. You don’t.
Honestly, you don’t corner people coming off the stage at karaoke night to shout your criticisms of their performance for the whole bar to hear. You don’t run up to people playing a pick-up game of basketball in the park to yell your opinions on what’s wrong with their performance. You don’t go up to the stitch ‘n bitch circle at the coffee shop to tell someone that everything they’re doing is wrong. There is no reason to do that to fic writers, either.
I used to belong to the other camp but these days find myself firmly in this one. In a writing class I took, a workshop leader once told us about the golden rule of critiquing, and contrary to what the golden rule usually is, for critiquing it basically boils down to “do NOT do unto others as you want them to do unto you.” Or, alternatively, “just because you have a tolerance for super heavy critique and want that from others doesn’t mean everyone else does too.” It was eye-opening for me–especially as I was probably more used to heavy critique than the rest of my class at that point–and has always stuck with me.
I also think there’s something to be said for giving feedback specifically about what worked for you in a story.
I once took a different writing class where we only gave a full “critique” in the sense of what worked and what didn’t for the very last submission–for the first few months we gave what the class referred to as “feedback” instead, which was basically talking only about what WORKED for you, to encourage the author and also to help them find the energy of the piece. It sounded strange to me at first, but definitely improved my writing–and also felt great–and I would 100% recommend!
(Also, if anyone is looking for a middle ground to help authors improve without risking making people feel bad–try this! Giving specific positive feedback about people’s work has helped me find friends and betas, and has led to me betaing for people too!)
Question of Smoke 