you can be oblivious

hi, er barbie! hi, er ken!

This user is anti-censorship

This user believes in “don’t like, don’t read”

This user believes in “ship and let ship”

Alex “Okay” Mercer

+ bonus

For this isn’t solely fanfiction, there’s always been (and I think it rises) pressure for characters to be relatable, to be insertable spaces for readers. People love this. They plainly do!

Will you write about relatable characters. Will you not have them do that because people won’t like them. Can people relate to that. Is (character) relatable?

And as a reader I genuinely don’t care, as it’s entertainment, so my main criteria is that characters are interesting. Do they make me curious and make me laugh, okay, we are in (show) business. I do not want to be in there. There be literally dragons in there. I do not want to be with Mr Darcy. I want Elizabeth Bennet to be with Mr Darcy.

But as a writer, it worries me that there’s this big readerly desire I don’t entirely understand. Tumblr tags full of ‘character x reader’ fics. Rising requirement for the relatable in popular media. Other people’s pleasure is my business. (I may sound like a words hooker here. No matter.) Nobody’s wrong to like the flavours of entertainment they like. I just want to understand better.

So that was another reason I wrote Rae and Eric in Long Live Evil - characters who would jump at going into a story, and have ‘me x favourite character’ daydreams. Let’s engage with what makes this appealing and what makes it complicated.

Mind you, I don’t know if I did it right. I don’t know if Rae and Eric themselves are relatable. They are both very idiosyncratic. I do also often think it’s insulting to readers to act as if they relate to fairly blank slates. But what do they relate to? It’s worth asking the question. Is it love for a character? Is it a wish for comfort or romance or adventure? If I can understand the motive maybe I can understand the desire.

I was recently on a writing retreat with lovely writer friends (huge for me, haven’t gone on a big trip with a big group in years because, well… a (totally different) writer friend group fractured after I got cancer) and had such a great and interesting time. But we did have many discussions about relating to protagonists, which ones we related to and why, and how I can’t ‘go in.’ One male writer friend talked about how he is one of his protagonists, and nobody guesses this because she’s a girl. It was fascinating. I reached few conclusions. But talking about writing, like writing, is more about asking interesting questions.

I was at a festival last year and two extremely lovely readers came to me and said they loved Long Live Evil (yay hurray!) and they went to the panel going ‘I wonder what the Long Live Evil writer looks like, will we know which one she is right away’ and then said they knew it was me as soon as they saw me. Which was a lovely thing to say and I was very flattered. But I did wonder if it was about me seeming like Rae, or like the kind of person who would write Long Live Evil. Either way, it’s lovely - if it’s the second, I am that person, and if it’s the first, maybe I did move closer to the readers and writers I wanted to understand by writing it.

langdon now spends time with the king sisters.

it’s not weird to love it and comment and leave kudos because the author will probably still see it someday and it will make them happy.

it’s not weird to like said author’s work so much that you want to go look for other fics from them.

it’s not weird to go through the authors profile and look for other fics from the ships you like (or maybe some that you’ll give a chance because you liked the author) and maybe bookmark them for later.

it’s not weird to read these other fics and like them too and comment on them because you actually like them and you want to let the author know.

it’s not weird to read fanfiction from 5, or 8, or 10 years ago and actually enjoy and engage with it because it’s perfectly normal to relate to something that’s less than a decade old!

let’s stop treating fanfiction like they’re instagram posts that stop being interesting in 24 hours! fanfiction is NOT social media, fanfiction is art!!! and art doesn’t get old in one day, one year, or even a decade!

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No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.