I’ve never thought of myself as a writer, I’ve always been an illustrator. I don’t think I’m very good tbh, I had no training or practice outside my journal (I’ve read a lot of books by my favourite writers about how they write, but never did the exercises). But I’ve been sporadically writing fanfic since childhood because once in a while I desperately needed to read a particular story and no one had written it...so I did. The need to read and make that story was greater than my self-doubt.

How do you explain to somebody outside the Transformers fandom that there is a canon gay robot couple consisting of a really small flash drive who likes recording people in secret and a brain surgeon who’s car-mode looks like a roast turkey?

I. Have a bunch of questions?

chromedome and rewind. they’re cuties

Aww,height difference!

How do you explain the Transformers fandom to anyone outside the Transformers fandom? I’m having a terrible time this week trying to explain to people what I’m reading that’s making me smile like my face will fall off.

voltron being so popular is like. everyone raving about an amazing restaurant and u go there and they just serve plain thin toast and all the happy smiling customers have brought their own jam

I wasn’t sure whether to die of bitter laughter or weep over this post, until I thought:

To me it’s more like the feast in Hook (link for the younguns). You’re into it or you’re not. And ok, some tables keep having food fights that spread to the whole restaurant including the kitchen and it can be tiresome. But dammit I love my rainbow turkey and my purple galraberry jam and if it means I occasionally have to wipe food goo out of my eyes, IT’S WORTH IT.

I saw some #discourse go by about how adults shouldn’t be in fandom writing about younger characters because it’s uncomfortable and gross to younger people to have adults ‘thinking about them’ in romantic/sexual terms.

1, This is not a restriction that any writers in any other venue have to deal with, wtf, or the entire YA genre would be banished; 2, Excuse you, children of Tumblr, no one is thinking about you.

If other people in fandom are older than you, by definition, they have been your age. When fans write about younger characters, we’re not peering through a keyhole at young people now and creeping on them.

We are drawing on our own experiences, thoughts, feelings and memories of what it was like when we were that age.

No one has the right to ask older writers to cut themselves off from their own past just because young’uns don’t want to acknowledge that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, all of them, were also young once. I’m 41, but I remember vividly what it was like to be 14. If I write a high school AU, it’s about my high school experience, even if I were to set it in the present day and decorate it with some (probably comically out of touch) Stuff The Kids Are Into Now. If I write a high school AU with sex, it’s because I remember that too! I’m not thinking about kids today, why would I– I have my own experiences to draw on. And honestly, sometimes there are things about being young that you don’t really understand until you’re much older and have some perspective– and that’s worth writing about.

If someone is genuinely a creeper, you’ll know, because they’ll ask you questions about you. But people who aren’t even directly interacting with you, who are just expressing themselves in fiction, are not a threat to you, and it’s not creepy for them to draw on their own experiences and their own past to write about younger characters.

OMG THIS

What the fuck, do these people not read BOOKS anymore? I'm honestly boggled.

thank you thank you thank you thank you

#if I have to look at Greg Land on my dash so do you

I feel like this tag encapsulates so many of my days spent on scans_daily.

the working title of this was “censor this, bitches“ which I decided was maybe was a little undiplomatic so I decided to give it this massive passive-aggressive title instead

yeah, yeah I know I already reblogged “autobiography” earlier today which is basically about a thousand times more exactly what I want to say than any essay could possibly be BUT then I went and actually read what people are arguing here and you know what

SOOOOOOOO

There are two things that are being collapsed in this argument that we really, really cannot afford to collapse. That is:

Both of these things are true. However, it does not follow from (1) that we need to regulate or restrict the content of the works hosted on the Archive to ensure the content referred to in (2) doesn’t make it onto the Archive. People seem to be taking it for granted that (1) means banning all that stuff in (2), and that’s wrong.

(cw for high-level references to the existence of rape, underage sex, and anti-Semitism; as well as one marginally more specific reference to kinky sex)

Keep reading

“I write with the cognizance that I am both examining canon and being examined”

Thank you, Sam. (Also for the recs for Rex Stout and Shaw. But yes, this is a great post.)

Here is some fandom “oral history” for you guys

Inspired by some posts I saw today: 

When I joined fandom in 1995, we had usenet, which was pre-world-wide-web, but was basically a nonthreaded messageboard. Usenet and email lists were the only way we had of distributing fanfic digitally at the time, and I hung out on both, but both were split up by fandom – you had two usenet groups for X-Files, a mailing list for Due South, et cetera. By the time I went to college three years later, the web existed for most of us and was accessible, so we also had archives, but all of the archives had started out as ways of storing fanfic posted to usenet (Gossamer, an extensive x-files archive, is an example). 

You could also put up a personal archive at geocities or tripod or angelfire, which were the precursors to “build it yourself” sites like Wordpress and Squarespace, in that you had to hand-code all your html or build it in programs like DreamWeaver. Once you had put up a fansite, you could join a “web ring” which was a bit like a friendslist only there was no post aggregator – you had to visit each site of the ring in turn in order to see your friends’ sites. Web rings were really more so that once you found ONE fansite in a fandom, you could go to all the rest as well. They weren’t for the webrings’ actual members. And unless you were super fancy at coding, people would have to email you if they wanted to leave feedback. 

So when I went to college in 1998 and essentially dropped out of fandom (because college), the closest thing to AO3 that existed was a single-fandom archive where you could only get your fic uploaded by contacting the owner of the archive and asking to add it, or being contacted by them to see if they could (Gossamer actually was an exception, it auto-archived any fic posted to alt.tv.x-files.creative).

It was much more likely you’d just have a fanpage you owned and maintained, and you’d post fanfic there, and then you’d send out an email announcement to your readers. Using a mailing list that you probably kept stored in a text file because contact lists in email wasn’t really a thing yet. 

In 2003, five years later, I came back to fandom because I started re-reading the Discworld books and wrote a bit of fanfic for them, and I googled “where to post discworld fanfic” because I just didn’t know anymore.

(Things that also didn’t exist when I left fandom: Google, in any meaningful sense. We used Dogpile or Altavista or Yahoo.)

I had thought I was going to have to build a fanpage and then find a mailing list or a messageboard to post to in order to get the word out, but what I found was fanfiction.net.

Now, FFN is a pit, don’t get me wrong. But in 2003 it was also revolutionary, one of the only archives of its kind and certainly the only one with any significant population of fans. AO3 didn’t exist. Neither did Dreamwidth or Tumblr. LiveJournal was invite-only. I got a LiveJournal account by begging an invite code off someone who left nice comments for me on FFN. And in 2003, in particular, it took a long time to realize FFN was a difficult, terrible place; back then the “no adult material” was basically a show-rule nobody followed, and if you were in a civil fandom like Discworld was (and continues to be) it was quite a pleasant place. 

AO3 was a leap forward. The user interface is so much better and it’s a smooth-functioning site which allows for adult material, easy tag searching, custom skins, and fast downloading. But I have fond memories of FFN, because when it first appeared, it was the only one of its kind, and a multifandom archive was pivotal in bringing fandoms together in a way nothing else up to that point had been. Before FFN and LiveJournal, multifandom gatherings were almost exclusively contained to conventions and meetups, which were expensive, tough to get to, impossible for kids to attend without alerting their parents to their fannish ways, and tended to be exclusive of – well, from what I’ve heard, any fan who wasn’t a middle-aged white male or spouse thereof. Panfandom mailing lists didn’t really exist; I think we would have seen them as weird, because to our minds we didn’t really have anything in common. We were fans of X; why would we hang out with fans of Y? Fannish culture did exist in the macro sense but a lot of us weren’t conscious of it, even when we moved from one fandom to another. 

I guess what I want to say is that the history of where we are today doesn’t begin with FFN or LJ or any of the other early-millennium hellsites, obviously. But in the history of fandom they are one spot that the big obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey would show up. And I thought it might be interesting for kids who came into fandom with AO3 already established would like to hear about the earlier days. 

My first mailing list (and my second) was multi-fandom. Shoutout to the Yaoi/Slash mailing list! I never knew fanfic even existed until my friend showed me some awesome stuff by Talya Firedancer in Gundam Wing, and then I was off and running. Yaoi/slash was its own fandom back then; were there so few of us that we could all fit on a mailing list, or was it a case of ‘my eyes are opened to all these new romances that could be happening on my favourite shows but won’t ever get on network’?

There was a lot more original fic floating around too; that’s what I miss most, that air of living in a perpetual writing workshop where people had both fan fic and orig fic percolating and we could sample and discuss all of it. Things are easier to find now, but they’re also much more specialised, and not as interactive. Sometimes for nostalgia’s sake I scroll way back to the early days of my Yahoo mailbox; I think this is why I still use it more than Gmail.

Every time I see one of those posts where people wonder what Harry Potter would have been like if Sirius hadn’t gone to Azkaban and had raised him instead, I smile a little, like I have a wonderful secret. 

The other day I heard someone say they really NEEDED a fic where Draco got into Hufflepuff. Like, needed it SO BAD.

Me: :D

Happy Fanfic Authors’ Appreciation Day!

I hear it’s Fanfic Authors’ Appreciation Day, so to my fellow writers, I salute you! 

And to all the readers, thank you for being delightful and giving us an audience to play for! 

Happy Fanfic Authors’ Appreciation Day!

Thank you authors, for blowing my mind and changing my mind. For stories that flawlessly fit right into existing canon, and stories that take a hard left into outer space; for meticulously researched stories and the crackiest crackfic that ever cracked me up. For intense smut that left me reeling and needing a cigarette (and I don’t smoke!), and the sweetest fluff, and the most G-rated gen. For characters who are suddenly the opposite gender, or animals, or robots, or aliens, and still perfectly in character anyway. For strange new worlds and familiar, well-loved ones.

May you have loads of kudos, good comments, and bookmarks that are actually recs and not someone complaining about your awesome story.

copperbadge, thank you for all your wonderful fic but especially for Stealing Harry, Exclusive, and Exquisite.

Hannibal avoiding Will Graham in season 3

Gonna go out on a limb here and guess that Loki, under various pen names, is responsible for at least seventy-odd percent of the Cap/Iron Man fic out there.

and at least 30% of the Thorki,...

Friendly reminder that evangelion happens THIS year

everyone get your high waisted pants ready

My body is ready.

also lol at all the comic book “elitists” crawling out from under the floorboards to hiss at the film trilogy fans

I’ve been reading the comics since forever. I read The Dark Knight Returns when I was eight (and ok, it may have scarred me for life, but I…

I like you, you’re sane. XD A rare thing on here!

I have never read the comics and I have no problem with those who have—it’s just laughable when someone who has read them gets grouchy about the influx of new movie fans, because really? THEY ARE ENTIRELY SEPARATE ENTITIES that just share some common characters/world-building elements. It’s the same with people who get nasty about book-to-movie adaptations. They’re different and what you don’t like, ignore! Not hard. If anything, be happy there are new people joining your fandom: more money means more stuff produced for it!

I do get really mad when people try to invalidate new fans’ opinions by writing them off as “horny fangirls/boys.” Fffffuuuuccckkk you, I can be seriously interested in the drama and politics and still want Bane to do an erotic striptease for me

actually that would probably be really scary but I’d still watch

I -have- heard strange things about DC comics—are they just really terrible or something?

(and thankya kindly, ma’am, I’m partial to it myself XD )

I think a few things contribute to my sanity as a comic book fan: I'm female and a POC (and so have had to face certain problematic issues in the text that might not ping with the white male readers; I didn't mean to imply that merely being a WOC made me a better fan), the comics themselves have been rebooted so many times the timelines no longer make sense, and I read and write fanfic. (SO YES to your ENTIRELY SEPARATE ENTITIES statement. It's an AU, people!!!) 

Seriously, when it comes to DC, what is canon? It changes from year to year. For the answer to your 'just how crazy is it?' question, see: Zero Hour, Infinite/Final/We Really Mean It This Time Crisis, RIP Batman, Battle for the Cowl, The New 52. 

I went into the Marvel movies knowing a lot less canon, except for the X-Men. I found out about the other stuff later. Some canon nods actually slowed down the Avengers for me: the Helicarrier, Steve and Tony's fraught but weirdly close relationship, Skrulls. (Although I was glad I'd at least read part of the Infinity Gauntlet series before the reveal at the end.)

If I really wanted to pick a 'canon' I wanted to 'protect', it would be the animated series(es). But they started from the Tim Burton movies too. And if I were that attached to preserving canon, Terry McGinnis would not be my favourite. (In comics, it's Tim Drake.)

Re. your other point, I would probably be more enthused and less terrified if Bane did an erotic striptease for someone in the story. Multiple answers permitted :D

Peoples of Tolkien

This is pretty much the most awesome fanart ever drawn. I would print it out in full color and give it to any newcomer to the series, because they are bound to get overwhelmed by all the names. This can help them so much. :)