“yeah can i get a 60k with everything on it”

Dear Reddit: AITA for not asking my boyfriend to kill my boss?

by u/10fox10

I know the title sounds a little bit extreme, but hear me out.

Wow! Never been attacked like that.

Okay, so I was sitting here writing (yay, video game hiatus!), and got a little stuck. And then I started thinking about fanfiction, and how it’s often looked down upon. Of course, there’s the obvious reason. It’s primarily written by teenage girls. But even that isn’t enough to make it actually make sense.

Think of all the benefits writing fanfiction gives aspiring authors. Critiques from people who genuinely enjoy what you’re writing about are always better (not nicer), than those from people who just have no interest in what you’re saying. And that’s not always the fault of the author! Not everyone has the same tastes, and you can’t appeal to everyone. But in a classroom setting, your critiques aren’t always, well, useful. Conversations are easily derailed. If your classmates don’t read the genre you wrote in, they might not understand your story. And that completely ignores the fact that, for some reason, in a classroom setting authors try to bring each other down. Not actively, of course (for most). It’s just something that happens. People want to be seen as the best, so they’re harder on others than is necessary. This is true of “writing groups”, too! It’s why you see all sorts of things from published authors warning you that not all criticism is good criticism, and to pick and choose what you think is valid crit. 

That environment can be really destructive. And this is coming from someone who almost always got really good criticism! People judging your work to your face is stressful, it’s embarrassing, and it’s completely unavoidable if you take classes or go to groups.

Now take a look at fanfiction. Criticism is fanfiction is much more honest, from what I’ve noted. It often helps new authors learn how to keep their characters separate, how to portray them accurately. It builds their confidence with views, notes, and praise. They work through the cliché until they find something unique, all the while getting good feedback. 

Fanfiction breeds new authors. Young authors create their own schedules and do their best to stick to them while still going about daily life. They gain confidence in their work. They learn the basics of writing from fellow authors, who create a community that is focused on bringing each other up instead of down. 

So why is the industry so against it? Is it because it’s primarily done by young woman? Do people think they can’t make as much money off a book or series if there’s new content constantly coming out? 

The strangest thing is, fanfiction is good for its topic, too. It introduced me to a number of shows that I then started watching, it got me to buy and read books I’d previously had no interest in. And I’m sure that’s true for many other fanfiction readers, as well. 

So, please, support fanfiction. Give young authors honest critiques about where they’re going write and wrong. Nurture them. Being an author doesn’t have to be a lonely profession. 

Tech Writer Clive Thompson: "The world of fanfiction is the most technologically explosive thing I've ever seen in my life."

wow!

I gain canon knowledge for the specific purpose to deviate from it

It is my primary goal in fandoms to make au’s and deviations in both characters and situations

I take the Canon and use it as tinder to fuel my fanfiction, and by that I mean I write a story that has almost nothing to do with the characters and just use their names and designs and no one has cared so far.

all debates abt the artistic merits of fanfiction fail to recognize the purpose of fic. you don’t write fic to be published or to learn how to construct a narrative although you can use it to develop style. you write it so that your friends will message you “bestie you’re utterly deranged for this one im eating dirt” 

What My Friends Think I Learned From Writing Fanfiction:

What I Actually Learned From Writing Fanfiction:

• Sindarin

Forget the verb formation, I learned Sindarin. I accidentally learned an entire language writing FanFic. I LEARNED an ENTIRE language that NO ONE speaks writing fanfic. 

•Also the entire Metro transit system of NY, a city I have never visited.

And earned myself a Google-cache of things like “How to dispose of a body with lye” and “Which countries have extradition treaties with the US?” Not to mention the ever popular “List of firearms small enough to conceal inside of a corset” and “Time for piranhas to strip a skeleton”. 

“Sir, this person just searched for arsenic, the Orient Express rail line and pre-modern-era lubricants? Wth?”

“Don’t worry Johnson - another fan fiction author.” 

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.” 

it got better…

there’s nothing new under the sun and no medium gives less of a shit about that than fanfiction. maybe bc of its “derivative” nature, fanfiction writers/readers show an unironic, open appreciation for tropes that you’ll never find in mainstream communities. like, a film critic would say “this movie just took the cast of stargate sg1 and put them in the plot of aliens” and the fanfic community would be like “ok where’s the 100k fic op”. i have read approximately 2300 fics of the same two characters falling in love bc there was only one bed and no one has the power to stop me from reading more?? anyway, fanfiction is an absolute paradigm of post-post-modernism and in this essay i will, 

Fanfiction and Tumblr 

do u think omegaverse acknowledges covid-19 and the generation of people who permanently lost their sense of smell like how are they all scenting each other now is the omegaverse economy in shambles

actually pheromone sensing works differently from normal olfaction, since humans in our world don’t have a functioning vomeronasal organ (VNO), we don’t have any data on how covid-19 would affect a functioning VNO in omegaverse AUs

Actually there is evidence that covid probably would affect the VNO and it stands to reason would accordingly impair its function. Briefly:

In conclusion the omegaverse economy IS in shambles.

OP this is very well-written but im still hung up on how you came onstage dressed as a clown only to tear off the costume and reveal yourself as a biologist

For a long, large part of my life, being queer in a media landscape–finding queerness in a media landscape–has meant theft.

I’m a Fandom Old, somehow, these days, older than most and younger than some, in that way that’s grown associated with grumpy crotchetyness and shotguns on porches and back in my day, we had to wade through our Yahoo Groups mailing lists uphill both ways, boring and irrelevant anecdotes from Back In Those Days when homophobia clearly worked differently than it does now, probably because we weren’t trying hard enough. I’ve seen a lot of stories through the years. I’ve read a lot of fanfic. (More days than not, for the past twenty years. I’ve read a lot of fanfic.)

When people my age start groaning and sighing at conversations about representation and queerbaiting, when we roll our eyes and drag all the old war stories out again in the face of AO3 is terrible and Not Good Enough, so often what we say is: you Young Folks Today have no idea how hard, how scary, how limiting it was to be queer anywhere Back In Those Days. Including online, maybe especially online, including in a media landscape that hated us so much more than any one you’ve ever known. And that is true. Always and everywhere, again and again, it’s true, we remember, it’s true.

We don’t talk so much about the joy of it.

Online fan spaces were my very first queer communities, ever. I was thirteen, I was fourteen, I was fifteen–I was a lonely, over-precocious “gifted kid” two years too young for my grade level in an all-girls’ Catholic school in the suburbs–I lived in a world where gay people were a rumor and an insult and a news story about murder. I was straight, of course, obviously, because real people were straight and anyway I was weird enough already–I couldn’t be two things strange, couldn’t be gay too, but–well, I could read the stories. I could feel things about that. I would have those stories to help me, a few years later, when I knew I couldn’t call myself straight any more.

And those stories were theft. There was never any doubt about that. We wrote disclaimers at the top of every fic, with the specter of Anne Rice’s lawyers around every corner. We hid in back-corners of the internet, places you could only find through a link from a link from a link on somebody else’s recs page, being grateful for the tiny single-fandom archives when you found them, grateful for the webrings where they existed. It was theft, all of it, the stories about characters we did not own, the videotaped episodes on your best friend’s VHS player, one single episode pulled off of Limewire over the course of three days.

It was theft, we knew, to even try and find ourselves in these stories to begin with. How many fics did I read in those days about two men who’d always been straight, except for each other, in this one case, when love was stronger than sexual orientation? We stole our characters away from the heterosexual lives they were destined to have. We stole them away from writers and producers and TV networks who work overtime to shower them in Babes of the Week, to pretend that queerness was never even an option. This wasn’t given to us. This wasn’t meant for us. This wasn’t ours to have, ever, ever in the first place. But we took it anyway.

And oh, my friends, it was glorious.

We took it. We stole. And again and again, for years and years and years, we turned that theft into an art. We looked for every opening, every crack in every sidewalk where a little sprout of queerness might grow, and we claimed it for our own and we grew whole gardens. We grew so sly and so skilled with it, learning to spot the hints of oh, this could be slashy in every new show and movie to come our way. Do you see how they left these character dynamics here, unattended on the table? How ripe they are for the pocketing. Here, I’ll help you carry them. We’ll make off with these so-called straight boys, and we only have to look back if somebody sets out another scene we want for our own.

We were thieves, all of us, and that was fine and that was fair, because to exist as queer in the world was theft to begin with. Stolen time, stolen moments–grand larceny of the institution of marriage, breaking and entering to rob my mother’s hopes for grandchildren. Every shoplifted glance at the wrong person in the locker room (and it didn’t matter if we never peeked, never dared, they called us out on it anyway). Every character in every fic whose queerness became a crime against this ex-wife, that new love interest. Every time we dared steal ourselves away from the good straight partners we didn’t want to date.

And: we built ourselves a den, we thieves, wallpapered in stolen images and filled to the brim with all the words we’d written ourselves. We built ourselves a home, and we filled it with joy. Every vid and art and fic, every ship, every squee. Over and over, every straight boy protagonist who abandoned all womankind for just this one exception with his straight boy protagonist partner found gay orgasms and true love at the end.

Over and over, we said: this isn’t ours, this isn’t meant to be ours, you did not give this to us–but we are taking it anyway. We will burglarize you for building blocks and build ourselves a palace. These stories and this place in the world is not for us, but we exist, and you can’t stop us. It’s ours now, full of color and noise, a thousand peoples’ ideas mosaic'ed together in celebration. We made this, and it will never be just yours again. You won’t ever truly get it back, no matter how many lawyers you send, not completely. We keep what we steal.

.

Things shifted over time, of course. That’s good. That’s to be celebrated. Nobody should have to steal to survive. It should not be a crime, should not feel like a crime, to find yourself and your space in the world.

There were always content creators who could slip a little wink in when they laid out their wares, oh what’s this over here, silly me leaving this unattended where anybody could grab it, of course there might be more over by the side door if you come around the alleyway (but if anybody asks, you didn’t get this from ME). We all watched Xena marry Gabrielle, in body language and between the lines. We sat around and traded theories and rumors about whether the people writing Due South knew what they were doing when they sent their buddy cops off into the frozen north alone together at the end of the show, if they’d done it on purpose, if they knew. But over the years, slowly, thankfully, the winks became less sly.

A teenage boy put his hand on another teenage boy’s hand and said, you move me, and they kissed on network TV, in a prime-time show, on FOX, and the world didn’t burn down. Here and there, where they wanted to, where they could without getting caught by their bosses and managers, content creators stopped subtly nudging people around the back door and started saying, “Here. This is on offer here too, on purpose. You get to have this, too.”

And of course, of course that came with a whole host of problems too. Slide around to the back door but you didn’t get this from me turned into it’s an item on our special menu, totally legit, you’ve just got to ask because the boss throws a fit if we put it out front. Shopkeepers and content creators started advertising on the sly, come buy your fix here!, hiding the fine print that says you still have to take what you’ve purchased home and rebuild it with your semi-legal IKEA hacks. Maybe they’ll consider listing that Destiel or Sterek as a full-service menu item next year. Is that Crowley/Aziraphale the real thing or is it lite?

And those problems are real and the conversations are worth having, and it’s absolutely fair to be frustrated that you can’t find the ship you want on sale in anything like your color and size in a vast media landscape packed full of discount hetships and fast-fashion m/f. It’s fair to be angry. It’s fair to be frustrated. Queerbait is a word that exists for a reason.

There’s a part of me that hurts, though, every time the topic comes up. It’s a confusing, bad-mannered part of me, but it’s still very real. And it’s not because I’m fawning for crumbs, trying to be the Good, Non-Threatening Gay. It’s not that I’m scared and traumatized by the thought of what might happen if we dare raise our voices and ask for attention. (Well. Not mostly. I’ll always remember being quiet and scared and fifteen, but it’s been a long two decades since then. I know how to ask for a hell of a lot more now.)

It’s because I remember that cozy, plush-wallpapered den of joyful thieves. I remember you keep what you steal.

Every single time–every time–when a story I love sets a couple of characters out on a low, unguarded table, perfectly placed to be pilfered on the sly and taken home and smushed together like a couple of dolls, my very first thought is always, always joy. Always, that instinct says, yay! Says, this is ours now. As soon as I go home and crawl into that pillow-fort den, my instincts say, I will surely find people already at work combing through spoils and finding new ways to combine them, new ways to make them our own. I know there’s fic for that. I’ve already seen fic for that, and I wasn’t really interested last time, but the new store display’s got my brain churning, and I can’t wait to see what the crew back at the hideout does with this.

Every time, that’s where my brain goes. And oh, when I realize the display’s put out on purpose, that somebody snuck in a legitimate special menu item, when the proprietor gives me the nod and wink and says, you don’t have to come around the side, I know it’s not much but here–there is so much joy and relief and hope in me from that! Oh, what we can make with these beautiful building blocks. Oh what a story we can craft from the pieces. Oh, the things we can cobble together. Look at that, this one’s a little skimpy on parts but we can supplement it, this one’s got a whole outline we can fill in however we want. This one technically comes semi-preassembled, and that’s boring as shit and a pain to take back apart, but that’s fine, we’ll manage. We’re artists and thieves. I bet someone’s pulling out the AU saw to cut it to pieces already.

And then I get back to our den, which has moved addresses a dozen times over the years and mostly hangs out on Tumblr now (and the roof leaks and the landlord’s sketchy as fuck but at least they don’t charge rent, and we’ve made worse places our own). And I show up, ready for joy–ready for a dozen other people who saw that low-hanging fruit on that unguarded table, who got the nod and wink about the special menu item, who’re ready to get so excited about this newest haul. Did you see what we picked up? The theft was so easy, practically begging to be stolen. The last owner was an idiot with no idea what to do with it. The last owner knew exactly what it could become, bless their heart, under a craftsman with more time on their hands, so they looked away on purpose at just the right time to let me take it home. I show up every time ready for our space, the place that fed me on joy and self-confidence when I was fifteen and starving. The place that taught me, yes, we are thieves, because it is RIGHT to take what we need, and the beautiful things we create are their own justification. We are thieves, and that’s wonderful, because nothing is handed to us and that means we get to build our own palaces. We get to keep everything we steal.

I go home, and even knowing the world is different, my instincts and heart are waiting for that. And I walk in the door, and I look at my dash, and I glance over at twitter, and–

And people are angry, again. Angry at the slim pickings from the hidden special menu. So, so tired and angry, at once again having to steal.

And they’re right to be! Sometimes (often, maybe) I think they’re angry at the wrong people–more angry with the shopkeeper who offers the bite-sized sampler platter of side characters or sneaks their queer content in on the special menu than the ones who don’t include it at all. But it’s not wrong to be mad that Disney’s once again advertising their First Gay Character only to find out it’s a tiny sprinkle of a one-line extra on an otherwise straight sundae. It’s not wrong to be furious at the world because you’ve spent your whole life needing to be a thief to survive. It’s far from wrong. I’m angry about it too.

But this was my den of thieves, my chop shop, my makerspace. Growing up in fandom, I learned to pick the locks on stories and crack the safes of subtext at the very same time I learned to create. They were the same thing, the same art. We are thieves, my heart says, we are thieves, and that’s what makes us better than the people we steal from. We deconstruct every time we create. We build better things out of the pieces.

And people are angry that the pre-fab materials are too hard to find, the pickings too slim, the items on sale too limited? Yes, of course they are, of course they should be–but my heart. Oh, my heart. Every single time, just a little bit, it breaks.

Of course the stories are terrible (they have always been terrible). Of course they are, but we are thieves. We steal the best parts and cobble them back together and what we make is better than it was before. The craftsman’s eye that cases a story for weak points, for blank spaces, for anywhere we can fit a crowbar and pry apart this casing–that’s skill and art and joy. Of course we shouldn’t have to, of course we shouldn’t have to, but I still love it. I still want it, crave it. I still thrill every time I see it, a story with hairline cracks that we can work open with clever hands to let the queer in.

That used to be cause for celebration, around here. I ask him to go back to the ruins of Aeor with me, two men together alone on an expedition in the frozen north, it feels like a gift. And I understand why some people take it as an insult. I understand not good enough. I understand how something can feel like a few drops of water to someone dying of thirst, like a slap in the face. If it was so easy to sneak it hidden onto the special menu, to place it on the unguarded side table for someone else to run off to, why not let it sit out front and center in the first place? I know it’s frustrating. It should be. We should fight. We should always fight. I know why.

But my heart, oh, my heart. My heart only knows what it’s been taught. My heart sees, this thing right here, the proprietor left it there for you with a nod and a wink because they Get It. It’s not put together yet, but it’s better that way anyway. It’s so full of pieces to pull apart and reassemble. I bet they’ve got a whole mosaic wall going up at home already. We can bring it home and make it OURS, more than it was ever theirs, forget half of what it came from and grow a new garden in what remains.

And I go home to find anger, and my heart breaks instead.

I’m not american, and my english wasnt always great, so Back In The Day i’d have to wait for shows and movies to be dubbed to spanish and then distributed to my country before i could watch them, and also dubbing used to take months at best, especially with “low priority” stuff like cartoons. Not like now, when people watch Castiel say “i love you”, and just a week later Dean replied “y yo a ti”.

I bring this up because, by the time i started watching Legend of Korra, many people around the world already knew how it ended.

Back then i was not on tumblr yet. Not on ao3 either. Instead i spent my days reading in fanfiction.net and browsing Deviantart for hours. I’d seen gay pairings by then. I’d read about Ash Ketchum dating Gary, Clint Barton dating Coulson, i’d seen fanart of Batgirl kissing Poison Ivy.

I didnt really interact with any real people online beyond reading their fics, and even then i managed to hear about Korrasami.

But i figured it was like all the other pairings. They were really great friends, and the fandom took them and ran. Still, it made me curious.

I was in my late teens and thinking i was too old for cartoons, but all the talk of Korrasami got me curious. So i started watching, and many times as i saw them interact i thought “ah yes, i see it. I see why people have made them a couple.”

And then i got to the finale.

Even with all i’d already heard about it, even watching the whole series with Korrasami in mind before Asami was even introduced, i was still surprised. “Wait, what? It actually happened? Like, for real it actually happened? It wasnt just the fans and artists and writers that made it happen, it was real???”

We’ve come so far in just a few years, but i remember.

every day i am percieved™️

There is a reason for this though!

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I’m glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love–the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail. The fact that you find joy in the process of reading (or listening!) to stories–that is what matters.

MERTHUR WEEK 2021 day seven: free day [merthur + @dear-ao3 tags, part 1]

My favorite comments under the Signs You Read Too Much Fanfic video by coleydoesthing on YouTube

i can feel the book from my bedside table judge me as i open yet another ao3 tab

something I think we all know about fanfic, but don’t talk about because it would hurt writers feelings is that some fics are like fast food. I mean this as a compliment. I don’t always want to sit down for a six course meal that will be a flavor experience. Sometimes I just wanna dip some fries in a frosty. Sometimes I want something homecooked and delicious and super niche, but super comforting. Sometimes I want to eat an entire dark chocolate cheesecake in one sitting even though I know Its gonna make me sick. Just. holy crap, y’all. Sometimes I don’t even want fast food, I just want to eat an entire bag of chips. and yeah, I’m ashamed of myself afterwards, but at the time it was exactly what I wanted. So, no, we’re never going to say to our fanfic writers that we consider their writing to be the equivalent of a midnight run to taco bell - and we shouldn’t, feelings would be hurt by that. But writers, please, please, please, remember this. You don’t need to create a six course meal if you don’t want to. You don’t have to make something complex and homemade if you don’t want to. You don’t even have to finish cooking it - because someone will be thrilled that you brought a bowl of cookie dough and a spoon, because they cannot even consider sitting down and having a proper meal right now. It’s okay writers, whatever you decided to make. Someone was happy to have it. You gave them what they needed. You made them happy. You did good.

If someone told me one of my fics was like driving thru Maccas cos it was a shit day and all they wanted was a coke, I’d laugh hysterically and then tell them how much I laughed and that I love them.

Yes! I want people to tell me something I write is like getting a milkshake on terrible day.

Now I’m wondering what the fanfic equivalent of cookie dough and a spoon would be. *LOL*