crabs and lobsters

some of you really aren’t gonna like this, but a creator’s wishes should never dictate what fan content is produced for a piece of media.

in the past, authors like anne rice have tried to limit the production of fanfiction. but at least rice was honest - she thought this infringed on her copywrite. back in the day, this was considered a valid argument to not create any fanfiction at all for her works.

do you understand what i’m saying? while you may sound valiant for placing a creator’s “discomfort” above the fan’s natural proclivities in fandom, really you’re just continuing to advocate for censorship in fan spaces.

and for anyone who is a creator, or who wants to become one - get comfortable with the rules of the internet. there will be erotic content made of your characters, there will be weird AUs made with your characters. there will be strange pairings and headcanons, no matter if you interact religiously with the fans or not. you cannot stop people from connecting with and wanting to be creative with your characters.

A fandom mindset that really needs to come back: Don't Break the Fourth Wall

Make whatever you want, but don't show it to the original creator. Writers legally cannot read fic of their work. It is a perfectly reasonable boundary for actors not to want erotic art of their characters thrust upon them. Don't link copyright holders to fan merch of their IP. And for the love of fuck, stop @ tagging the people who make the thing you're a fan of to validate your headcanons or rebuke someone else's.

And creators? That goes both ways. Block, mute, ignore, set and enforce whatever boundaries on what you don't want to see, but don't for a minute think you can stop a fandom from being a fandom.

addendum: if you know a pro writer's ao3 name, NO YOU DON'T

the more time you spend in fandom spaces the more you realize a lot of drama in those communities is less based around the fact that people in fandom are inherently combative or dramatic and more around the fact that there are like, two or three people who jump from community to community starting shit wherever they go and are responsible for like 60% of all discourse

Are You Getting Queerbaited Or Are You Being Misled By Your Internet Echo Chamber

Is That Really Out Of Character Or Is It Out Of Character According To The Popular Fanon Interpretation Of The Character You Subscribe To

I've seen some rancid fucking takes in various internet dumpsters lately, so allow me to frame this in a way that removes all chatter of algorithms or advertisers or any sort of modern money-grubbing that seems to fry everyone's critical thinking brains to fucking oatmeal lately:

Fanwork is a garden. You do not plant seeds in a garden and then get to watch fruits of your labor sprout by just staring at your rows and doing nothing.

Labor: a key word. There should be nothing passive about fan communities.

You cannot harvest your funky little purple potatoes or your butt-shaped carrots without tilling the rows; watering them; getting dirt in the lines of your palms and the rinds of your fingernails. You must give as much as you are wanting to take from the garden. You can have nothing worth anything at all from that garden besides fallow mud unless you're prepared to do the work to grow it.

Curate the tags you like. Find authors, artists, subsets of larger fandoms, that speak directly to the things you love; the specific characterizations you adore, the dynamics that light you from within. Tell them you love them. They will, most likely, love you too. That's what happens when you give someone a handshake: they hold you back for a moment. It's fucking electric.

Do not deny yourself this.

And I get it, to a certain extent. I'm almost 30 and I think my generation seems to be one of the last that has any sense of organic community-building left in it when it comes to online spaces. It makes me so angry and fucking sad that younger people on the internet don't know how to cultivate their fan communities because they've been raised in spaces optimized for maximizing advertiser dollars and spoon-feeding shit that makes money to consumers accordingly.

But it is not the responsibility of fan spaces like AO3 to conform to "the way things are" now, because the way things are is actively insidious to things like queerness and otherness and anything that isn't neatly-packaged, sexless, sanitized ~content~ that speaks to nothing but the slimmest, most vapid slice of reality.

It is your responsibility to tend the garden you want to grow. Take that responsibility for your own experience. You're an adult on the internet. Buck up and act like it.

fandom wide mandate that everyone has to re-watch the source material in steady intervals to minimize intense fandomization of tropes and characterizations that happens when people go without new source material for too long

#like renewing a license to practice every few years

my quality of life has improved tenfold ever since i was introduced to breezewiki, a site that exists solely to remove the bloat from fandom.com wikis. no more ads, quizzes, random autoplaying videos, popups, recommended pages from other sites, or discord server member lists. just the wiki. these things are finally readable again

BreezeWiki is SOOOO good! they even have an instruction manual on their site for adding an extension to your browser that will automatically redirect you to the BreezeWiki version of any Fandom link you happen to visit, which has been an absolute game-changer for me. i've literally already forgotten what regular Fandom pages looked like, it's beautiful.

i just discovered today that they ALSO have a function (if you install the auto-redirect extension) that will usually stop you to let you know if a Fandom wiki you're visiting has a non-Fandom alternative you can visit instead. for example i was trying to look up a Zelda thing today and was greeted with this message:

so yeah, love the work they're doing over there! can't recommend BreezeWiki enough. i wish an inevitable and humiliating death to Fandom and i'm very grateful for intrepid heroes like these folks.

there's a particular kind of person I've encountered in about every fan space I've ever been in where they very clearly actively hate the source material they're fixated on but don't realize it and thus think every other fan who does like the source material is doing something wrong. I don't think a "fuck canon" attitude is an inherently wrong way to do transformative fandom, I think it's perfectly normal to get creative inspiration from something you don't like, but the key is being able to recognize when you're doing it and not get mad when other people do actually like the original thing. like when I hear people say "well of course I love [x], I just have strong criticisms with the protagonist, the secondary characters, the antagonist, the plot progression, the execution of themes, the core message, and the artistry" what I'm hearing aren't criticisms, they're that person being fundamentally opposed to the project of the thing they're fixating on and mistaking it for being a failed version of a project they would have liked better. again, I don't think it's a bad thing to do fandom for a work you don't like, I respect the fixer upper attitude, but sometimes there are coherent works that were executed exactly how they were meant to be that you simply don't vibe with and that doesn't make the original work wrong.

sometimes fandom seems to struggle with the concept that...people can be kind/"good people" in some situations and very very not kind/not "good people" in others.

I feel like there's this urge to either write off the positive behavior as "fake" or to find a way to ignore/explain away/write out the negative behavior. and I personally find this really really irritating in both directions, actually

I've definitely noticed this, where a lot of fandom folks like to have characters neatly sorted into "good" and "bad" boxes and will toss out any evidence that complicates that tidy categorization -- if a character is deemed "good", then any unkind behavior is justified or handwaved. If a character is "bad", then even their good parts are demeaned and treated as a front or ignored completed.

A whole lotta fandom hates dialectic morality, and it's personally really frustrating for me, both in terms of how flattened a lot of characterization ends up being as a result, and how utterly divorced this is from the reality of human beings being contradictory and messy.

like, the most compelling ships for me always stem out of one thing: the characters have a profound, ongoing effect on each other’s senses of selves. when they are apart, the characters’ actions are still affected by each other. the way they approach the world changes because of the other. 

which is this deeply Austenian view of ideal romantic relationships as mechanisms by which we come to know ourselves better and become better versions of ourselves. good romance, for me, is always tied in with a sense of self-actualization, and the way in which a beloved partner allows a person to know themselves better.

underappreciated aspect of goncharov is its utility as a descriptor for any still-parseable fandom content whose source material you're completely unfamiliar with. you know what I'm talking about. meme about characters you've never heard of from a show you've never seen, but you're still nodding like you're so right op they would totally say that. art that goes hard but might as well be a portrait of someone's dentist for all you know. your blorbos twice removed. it's all goncharov, to me.

“This is goncharov to me” = “I don’t know any of these people”

my husband isn't on tumblr but he saw this post and made this for me

I actually haven’t been doing a lot of discourse reblogging, but I also know and have talked to ex-antis about the whole phenomenon and what it was like inside it, and I’ve picked up a few ideas about what’s actually going on.

First, these are people expressing genuine pain. It’s just usually not pain directly caused by whatever they’re reacting to, it’s pain and sometimes serious trauma, and lashing out at anything that reminds them of it helps them feel in control. In addition, these groups actively discourage actual healing, because healing becomes seen as a capitulation to the oppressive dynamics of the rest of society. If you don’t stay hurt and angry, you’re no longer reacting appropriately to the oppression you face. And anything that hurts you by touching on your trauma is an act of oppression in and of itself. And because the group is “doing something about it” by fighting back against the causes of that pain, it’s the only safe place in the entire world.

But there are a bunch of problems with that, one of which is that it’s obviously a cult dynamic that demands groupthink. If you disagree that something is harmful, you’ve turned yourself into an Unsafe Person who has to be cast out to preserve the safety of the group. Another is that rejection of healing: these groups actually help keep their members in a heightened state of trauma rather than encouraging any kind of healing. Those two dynamics make them acutely damaging to the people in them.

From the outside, though, the biggest problem is actually that, because anything that hurts them is an act of oppression and must be resisted as such, these groups are utterly incapable of acknowledging competing needs. Competing needs are a thorn in the side of anti-oppression work in general, in my experience, because they mean that no one space or work can be safe for all people. This is also why it’s impossible to create a work that everyone will acknowledge as Certified Not Oppressive. Different people in need different things from representation, and there’s always going to be someone out there who looks at your wish fulfillment character and sees a reproduction of oppressive dynamics or tropes in exactly the parts you love most.

But when you get multiple groups of traumatized people, all of whom are desperate to find work that speaks to them, and those groups themselves have competing needs and a culture that valorizes going on the attack when a work doesn’t meet those needs, you end up with the kind of perfect storm we’ve been seeing for the last several years, because every work can offend someone. And then, on top of that, you get a bunch of “allies” whose received wisdom is that the best way to help is to amplify the voice of whoever is expressing the most pain at the moment, even when the needs of that person are directly in opposition to the one the previous round.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion from this, or a solution. Just a conviction that it is worth remembering that lots of these antis are behaving in ways that are sincere, but that sincerity doesn’t mean they’re correct. It’s not fair to yourself or to the community to treat the expressions of pain as more legitimate or more important than the people who were hoping for exactly what you wrote. (Obviously there are exceptions, but an awful lot of fandom fights these days are about topics like the validity of darkfic or whether it’s more racist for Finn or Poe to top, and those are pure competing needs problems.)

Yup.

the thing about cracking open a long-established popular ship tag on ao3 is that it allows you to be extraordinarily picky, and i think it must be the closest thing i will ever experience to being filthy rich. i scroll along at super speed like no today i am only interested in fics with this precise range of words and one of these three tags. only authors i’ve heard of, please. hmm, i suppose i could consider an unknown quantity given its apparent popularity with the people, but… no, no, this summary doesn’t do it for me. no particular reason, it’s just… eh, i don’t need to explain myself. bring me 50 more like this for me to choose from and we’ll see.

someone just lamented that their new pairing has only 5000 works ("where's the rest of them?") which is approximately the size of the pairing i was celebrating in the original post, and it really threw into relief that it's impossible for us to even conceptualize the extravagance of a true scrooge mcduck fandom if we've never been in one. i am a reasonably well-off dentist who takes her family to cancun once a year.

state of the union update at 45k. my unscientific analysis reports a fairly even breakdown between:

bonus shout out to:

I love the phrase "I love them your honor" re: Blorbos because it both reveals so much about the relationship between you and your Blorbo, and yet raises so many unanswered questions like:

Why are we standing before a judge? Is it a civil case or criminal trial? Parking violation ticket? Whose hearing is it, yours or Blorbo's? Both? Are you a character (ha) witness for the defense, or co-defendant? What have they been charged with? Or what have YOU done in their honor, and why - or are the accusations completely meritless? Are they hitting YOU with a restraining order? Are you arguing for visitation rights? What kind of charge are we talking about here, misdemeanor or felony? Are they/you a repeat offender? How likely are you to be found guilty or innocent? Is there a jury? Are we even IN a formal courtroom setting or are we just bugging a random off-duty judge about our feelings?

Why must we adhere to an outdated and barbaric for-profit penal code that does nothing to rehabilitate, but rather punish and enforce an unjust -

Well, you get the picture.

I love this phrase, your honor.

Whenever I say it, I imagine myself as the young bride, desperate but dry-eyed, begging for mercy as her husband is sentenced for crimes he probably definitely committed but looked very sexy doing, and beneath her abject plea is an implicit threat: Heaven help you if you try to take them from me. Very Geordie/Devil’s Backbone/Inkpot Gods, yknow?

I love them, your honor.

....This. This is good.