Well, no, as a matter of fact, I didn't because I spend a lot of time making new friends, and a lot of my fandom friends are people I hang out with offline.

But the move to ever more human-hostile social media did kill the feeling of community in a lot of niche hobbies for huge numbers of people. Overall access is easier, which is great because people who'd never have found their source of fun find it now, but it also tends to turn a lot of things into the equivalent of a youtube comments section. You know: hostile drive-by randos weighing in on shit they don't understand every two seconds.

I'm perfectly comfortable generalizing that our increasingly shitty platforms have fucked over community repeatedly even if some of us are finding ways to make things work.

I feel like the tags were meant to be kind of a "gotcha". As in, "ha, you lost community, loser, but I'm better at socializing, so suck it!", which is fascinating because 1., that's a lot of insecurity on display and 2., it doesn't really address the issue of how hostile fandom is, offer solutions, or help anyone trying to find less hostile spaces find them. It's very much the vibe of 'fuck you, got mine', which... I'll be honest, I'm glad this person has found community far away from me, because 'fuck you, got mine' is a very middle school attitude and most of us have moved past it.

A reality some people don't want to face is that yes, fandom spaces have gotten more hostile. They have gotten increasingly combative, competitive, and toxic. Fandoms and canons get abandoned quickly, drama and bad faith "critique" get more engagement than actual fandom, and it's very hard to form lasting connections with people. And I get not wanting to think about those things, because it's not a happy thought. I get that going, "well I managed fine" is tempting because it puts the onus onto people to somehow avoid all the toxicity of social media and not on social media, which some people see as above criticism. It's a very easy way of looking at the world in which there are no big problems with social media and everything is fine.

It's just also super inaccurate because as anyone from the LiveJournal era would tell you (and as my sister told me), curated spaces for specific things used to be a lot more common, toxic people got booted out of spaces once the moderators were aware of them, and conversation with others instead of one-off comments used to be more common. Things were never perfect or even great, but they were, in fact, better than they are now.

And as much as "fuck you, got mine" feels good, if you ever lose your community and have to find a new one, all the shitty things you don't want to think of as real problems on social media? They're going to still be there.

Yeah, you have community, dear original tagger. But could you find another one if you had to? Could you do it with the same ease as before?

Giving the benefit of the doubt, I'm guessing I sounded like an Old moaning about how the kids these days don't understaaaand.

(And I do see some people thinking the platforms are the main issue and then describing what it's like to be 20 and in college making friends with all the people in your dorm who also like anime vs. what it's like to try to build new friend groups as a 40-something after moving cities for a job.)

But the fact that I'm having more fun in fandom than ever doesn't change the internet landscape. It's not even a fandom problem: it's a whole internet problem. Google search results are ever more bullshit. Dropshipping and fake reviews have polluted every shopping site. Etsy is full of mass produced garbage instead of handmade things. Everything has an algorithm and no index. Every platform is designed to cause context collapse and shove people who would be happier apart into each other's comments sections. etc. etc.

Fandom is suffering these changes along with every other hobby/subculture/community.

Loungers have created a bingo event for existing works to celebrate International Fanworks Day!!!

We've made 2 cards:

✔ 1 for creators to use for their own works

✔ 1 for fans to rec works by others

To participate, share your card with links to works that match the squares! Be sure to credit the artist/writer (no reposted works 👎) and tag them so they get their love ❤

Creators are fans too! Feel free to fill out both cards!!!

We'll reblog all the positivity on International Fanworks Day (February 15). Please include @the-creative-lounge-blog in the body of your post so it's easy to find.

Anyone is welcome to use these cards, and we will reblog those posts that vibe with above guidelines.

Loungers have created a bingo event for existing works to celebrate International Fanworks Day!!!

We've made 2 cards:

✔ 1 for creators to use for their own works

✔ 1 for fans to rec works by others

To participate, share your card with links to works that match the squares! Be sure to credit the artist/writer (no reposted works 👎) and tag them so they get their love ❤

Creators are fans too! Feel free to fill out both cards!!!

We'll reblog all the positivity on International Fanworks Day (February 15). Please include @the-creative-lounge-blog in the body of your post so it's easy to find.

Anyone is welcome to use these cards, and we will reblog those posts that vibe with above guidelines.

Why Patreon?

Why create a Patreon page?

I created this Patreon page to help me cover the cost of higher-quality works and experiences with my creative works. Specifically, the price of monthly subscriptions to things like Clip Studio Paint, Discord Nitro, Uppbeat, and as I swim further into podcasting waters, I’ll look for a distribution service. As I type this, it’s already cost me almost 20USD to make a new podfic, and I haven’t started recording yet. That cost is strictly subscription fees and my time isn’t factored into the equation at all.

But there are free alternatives. Why not use those?

When you use a free social media site or service, you are neither their client nor their customer. Therefore, you and your shared content will not be treated or respected like one. Further, I don’t want advertisements for people and products that I wouldn’t support attached to my creative works.

If there’s a cost, why do it?

Podfics make fanfiction more accessible. Podcasts make it easier to provide entertainment and information to people.

Some years ago, I was involved in a serious accident. I sustained a brain injury, and the team of medical professionals that treated me likened it to having had a stroke.

The injury affected my vision; I experienced ‘subjective visual tilt,’ which took years to heal. I couldn’t drive, walk far distances, watch television, or read during those long years. Because I wasn’t working during recovery, I couldn’t afford extra things like an Audible subscription. I could not engage in entertainment to help keep my spirits up and remain hopeful, resulting in a very low period of my life.

I know how lucky I am to have healed.

I started my fandom adventure by writing fanfics. The experience helped me to recover my vocabulary and rekindled my creative spirit. I am more thankful for that than I can say.

There are innumerable reasons why people rely on audio works. They could be visually impaired; they could suffer from migraines, they may have dyslexia, or, perhaps, like me, they are waiting to heal. By making podfics and podcasts, fandom is made more inclusive.

In addition, there is a multitude of others that simply enjoy audio works.

Again, podfics make fanfiction more accessible. Podcasts make it easier to provide entertainment and information to people.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your consideration of becoming my patron.

My Patreon Page

I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality,  that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.

Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.

Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.

how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.

What happened with her lawyers.

History became legend. Legend became myth….  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.

One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.

all of this

Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers. 

Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

Fandom history is important.

Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories! 

Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.

It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here. 

“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”

Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)

Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)

Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was ‘no porn’ and another was basically ‘it can’t be gay’ (and for a while ‘no fanfiction posted online’? which??? anyway.)

She relaxed a little as time went on, but still. 

Let’s not forget: the reason AO3 is called ‘Archive of our own’  is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.

That wasn’t even all that long ago…

fandom history class

To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction - just acknowledging that it exists - to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.

Everybody should know that AO3 is just one project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Their mission is much broader than just hosting a (very good) fanfic site. They do all kinds of fandom history archiving and publish an academic journal, but most importantly, they perform legal advocacy to protect the fair use rights of people who make fanfic or fanart.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

I haven’t been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!

whew, i feel old, but that’s mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way. people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. that’s also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote “enemy” fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you. @theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and they’re a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason it’s so great is because they know there’s no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why there’s shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because they’re dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they don’t advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system i’ve ever seen) but they don’t know if you’re dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out. do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus

In case any of my readers wondered why I include "I do not own these characters..." in the notes section.

I'm new to fandom, but even I knew about the dark days of Anne Rice.

Hi. My name is Alien

And I am addicted to Kakashi

Same. Except for the name.