ok, because i just saw a terrible take, i feel compelled to say that there is no "fic market" to "oversaturate" in fandom. good gravy.

i need everyone reading this post to remember that writing is not "content." writing is art. you don't look at a painting of an ocean and say "eh, it's overdone." you look at it and think its beautiful, because it is, and y'all better start treating writing the same fucking way before you lose your favorite authors for good.

Art is not something to be capitalized on. Stop treating it like it is.

— Holly Quinn in Episode 22A of Fansplaining

I’ve never come across a fandom in almost 40 years where this wasn’t true.

I think some people forget that some literature and some media is meant to be deeply uncomfortable and unsettling. It's meant to make you have a very visceral reaction to it. If you genuinely can't handle these stories then you are under no obligation to consume them but acting as if they have no purpose or as if people don't have a right to tell these stories, stories that often relate to the darkest or most disturbing parts of life, then you should do some introspection.

I’ve read some things that deal in sad/dark/actually depressing and disturbing subject matter. I’ve loved them and the points they make without endorsing the events portrayed.

It’s always disappointing to get online and see that the conversation is “X thing shouldn’t exist” on the grounds that it made somebody feel badly. It was meant to make you feel that way and it’s normal that it did - it’s okay that you stop reading it or don’t finish it but I am BEGGING you to consider why it made you uncomfortable and why the author felt the need (if the answer isn’t immediately obvious, as it can be). There isn’t shame in something putting you off so badly that you shelve it.

The sterilization of reality is a detriment to all who exist within it. To censor stories with painful themes is to erase the reality that such stories are based in some horrific truth and works to erase the reality that many people have endured.

This trend or whatever we want to call it has gotten so bad that I listened to an entire lecture from somebody about how awful a book was and how it shouldn’t exist at all, how the author was a terrible person for concocting it and how it hurt people. When I asked what the book was, this person not only could barely recall the name but HAD NEVER READ IT. I bought the book. I read the book. It accomplished its task beautifully and I found it to be a cathartic experience. I also understood how it could make people so uncomfortable and would never judge anybody for setting it down.

It’s okay not to like something and distance yourself from it. Remember that those rules apply only to you, though, because they speak only to your own psyche.

Periodic reminder that one of the many roles of fiction is microdosing on big scary feelings so you build resilience, empathy, understanding, and defense against the real thing.

do y'all wanna see the funniest comment i have seen on a rpf fic

my liege, it's time to kill the cop in your head, especially if you're currently at the devils sacrament......

#me in the god damn rpf tag: there better not be any god damn rpf in here (via @mylittleredgirl)

like its not that serious etc but any time u express frustration or just point out wow people in fandom continuously prioritize men over women Here comes the fucking misogyny hydra

"maybe you should stop complaining and just make the content you want to see" perhaps, the issue at hand, is that the proportion of people who are willing to be invested in female characters and create content centering them is already small compared to the people who will create novel-length backstories for male characters with 5 minutes of screentime, meaning that even if all people involved put in the same amount of effort, the amount of content around men will always be orders of magnitude larger, and perhaps the disproportionate focus on men in the first place may be indicative of some kind of pre-existing bias, one that may, hypothetically speaking, have some name already,

forever now taking my cue from the tumblr user who replied to someone saying you can't ship female characters with "SKILL ISSUE"

Yup. I agree with your tags so much.

one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.

which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:

and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts

holy shit I've never seen this articulated but OP is EXACTLY RIGHT.

LOL

“How would someone be able to not read a fic-” that is actually very easy to do

Was fandom just better before AO3 because fics didn’t come with warnings and tags, so people had to actually be mature about interacting online? About what they interacted with?

It used to be ‘I read something i shouldn’t have’

Now its ‘you wrote something you shouldn’t have’

Side-swipe but bear with me–

Triggering.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

A concept can scare you, offend you, horrify you, disgust you … and not trigger you. A psychological trigger is stimuli that causes an overwhelming physical/emotional reaction (for me, it’s people screaming at their kids– instant panic attack). When it’s bad, it can kick off deep depressions, panic attacks, self-harm episodes.

As adults, it’s our responsibility to know where our triggers are, avoid them where possible, and know how to deal when they happen. Artists cannot account for every single possible trigger in every single person in the world … and they shouldn’t have to. Take responsibility for your own well-being, and accept that consumption of art is done at one’s own risk.

You keep using that

word. I do not think it means

what you think it means.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Also not for nothing but… there’s a comment section that’s open in most AO3 fics. If you are truly concerned a fic may contain one of your specific squicks or triggers that you absolutely cannot read about, you can try asking before reading. If you ask “hey does this contain X?” and the author is still around, they’ll probably answer to the best of their ability. I know I would, and have done in the past. I’ll spoil anything someone wants, if they ask me. My fics don’t have a “does the dog die” page but I’m happy to answer if the metaphorical dog does or does not die if asked. Maybe some authors won’t respond, or won’t tell, but then just don’t read that fic (which you wouldn’t be doing anyway if you didn’t ask… right?).

Authors may not be able to account for every squick or trigger out there up front - and again, it’s not their responsibility to do that anyway when it comes to their leisure time activity - but fandom IS a community and I think most fanfic authors won’t have a problem helping another member of their fandom stay safe if directly and politely asked for help.

“It used to be ‘I read something I shouldn’t have’, Now its ‘you wrote something you shouldn’t have’”

I remember when things were like this, the author/creator was really a non-issue. If I stepped on a content landmine, I wasn’t looking to see who made something to engage with them, I was focused on getting out of there. Seeing or reading something upsetting to me was like “I knew there were holes in the woods and I fell into one this time”. It wasn’t personal, and I didn’t even consider it being the author’s specific fault. Whereas now the go to is “I fell into a hole, burn down the whole forest into a dead, bare, charred wasteland so I and no one else can ever fall into a hole again.

This kind of experience was honestly more liberating because I never took the experience personally. The focus was ‘how can I make myself feel better?’ and not some kind of vengeance going ‘how can I make them pay?’

T-shirt that says ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMSLASH RAREPAIRS on the front and I WILL PAIR UP WOMEN YOUVE NEVER HAD A SINGLE THOUGHT ABOUT on the back

SKILL ISSUE!

@racethewind10 these tags are just too true!

I have never read a more excellent article

This is a great take and I would like to adopt “Feelings Yakuza” in English actually, I feel like it conveys the whole thing way more obviously than “anti” (not to mention the muddled meaning of “proshipper”).

To avoid harassment, EA and SEA artists have started pre-emptively blocking users with “proship DNI” or any variation thereof in their profiles as a result of this article and said feelings yakuza are getting pissed that their DNIs are being hard enforced by the other side. How very dare.

I’m screaming with laughter at the actual Japanese term, o-kimochi yakuza. The “o” is an honorific indicator to indicate how prissy and self-important these people are being.

Stop putting DNI on your tags and stop bringing shipping discourse into AO3

AO3 hid the story and asked OP to remove the tag (the fanfic is not even removed) due to the inflammatory tag. That's deserved. AO3 is not a social media for people to fight over ship and chronically online discourse. It's a library. If people keep bringing DNI and discourse into AO3 it'll make the place toxic for writers and reader.

What are you trying to accomplish with putting DNI? Do you think people actually care about DNI? No, it's just making you looking like an asshole doing this

Also AO3 was founded by a Wincest and Thorki shipper. Astolat made AO3 because FF net and other sites keep purging nsfw fanfic. AO3 is literally made for problematique shipper that op don't like.

Then OP doing this? For what? People want to enjoy reading their fanfic not seeing DNI and online discourse on AO3. I hate using the word virtue signaling as it's often used to demean progress but this is what a real virtue signaling looks like 🤦🤦‍♀️

(I bet op wrote more inflammatory tags on their fic other than 'proshitter DNI get a life' because it take a lot to get your story hidden or removed)

Louder for the people in the back.

AO3 IS A PROSHIP SPACE

If you don't want to see pro shipping stuff then don't go into proship spaces.

If only there were some robust system in place to let you tag what your story IS and then a robust search function to allow other people who want your content to find it more easily while not having to interact with content they don't have an interest in.

If only.

You put a book in a library and tried to say some people couldn't have it. That's not how a library works.

AO3 is for all the freaky little weirdos who got kicked out of everywhere else. You don't get to come in and bitch about the wallpaper.

Take your "ewww shipping" fuckshittery and build your own fucking website. You can even use AO3's code if you want.

They make it openly available to anyone. For free. No questions. No qualifiers. No moral superiority wank.

You don't like how AO3 runs shit? Run your own shit.

🔹 Someone else's fiction cannot cause you physical harm.

🔹If someone else's fiction is causing you emotional or psychological harm, or distress, you can put it down and not read/watch it.

🔹Your emotional well-being is not the responsibility of fiction writers.

🔹Someone else's fiction is not about your personal trauma.

🔹When reading or watching fiction, you always have the power. You can always stop. You are never reading fiction without your own consent.

🔹Fiction writers are not responsible for other people's mental health.

🔹The content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of its author.

🔹Just because someone writes about bad things happening, doesn't mean they want those things to happen.

🔹Don't like? Don't read.

You are not the intended audience for everything ever created.

Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol 

a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:

NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.

Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.

YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.

DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.

SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.

As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.

(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)

bring the healthy fun back to fandom!

If ever a time comes when I don’t reblog this when it appears on my dash, assume I’m dead

*smashes reblog button*

had to nab these tags from @ravenvsfox

it’s fine to be in fandom and not particularly want to read or think about the characters you like having sex but you have to acknowledge you’re the minority and it’s not weird for other people to do that. fandom was invented by people who wanted to see kirk and spock fuck. we owe everything to the insanely horny concept of pon farr. that’s the intellectual tradition

i feel like all fandom spaces would improve dramatically if more people learned how to enjoy non-canon ships which were never written as romantic without acting entitled to official validation or throwing a hissy fit over not getting something that they were never promised

like i promise there’s nothing wrong with shipping characters together while accepting that they won’t ever be a canon couple or with choosing to interpret their interactions as romantic while acknowledging that the writers clearly didn’t intend for it to be read that way

fandom having such easy contact with casts and writers and stuff was a mistake

leave them alone lmao fandom isn’t about changing canon, it’s about playing with it like barbies