It's called a Trash Can not a Trash Can't

EVEN PARENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBLE READING/VIEWING BEHAVIOR. NOT filter everything ahead of time for their kid.

When my kiddo was 5, his pediatrician was asking him the usual Well Child Visit questions (“What are your favorite foods? What do you do to get your body moving? Do you know what to do if you get lost in a public place?” Etc.) and she asked, “What do you do if you see something on TV that scares or upsets you?”

I piped up like, “Oh, he doesn’t watch TV without one of us in the room,” which was true at the time and is still largely true now. She said, “Yes, but that won’t always be the case, so make sure you’re talking to him about what to do if he sees something that upsets him.”

So we started talking to him about that, and the answer is simple: “Turn it off or leave the room, and talk to someone you trust about what you saw and what you’re feeling.”

The answer is NOT “Ask your parents to make sure you never see anything upsetting again,” because that’s just not possible — and ultimately that would be doing the kid a disservice, since sooner or later he’s going to be out in the world where we can’t control what he watches or reads. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to make sure he’s watching/reading age-appropriate stuff, it just means that’s not the only safeguard he has — and that’s a good thing.

So yes, content creators aren’t your parents and aren’t responsible for making sure you never see anything you don’t like — but also, your own parents should have taught you what to do when that happens. So if they didn’t, take it from me, your internet mom:

Turn it off.

Walk away.

Talk to someone you trust about how you’re feeling.

And through all this exploration of himself, through all the healing he’s had to do around everything he’s been through, Stiles has become his safe place. They both know that he was Stiles’s bisexual awakening, but Stiles is blissfully and disgustingly in love with Derek’s uncle now, and he knows Derek’s sexual history and how much he’s been objectified and he doesn’t even jokingly flirt with Derek anymore.

What Stiles does do, once Derek lets him know it’s okay, is shower Derek with insane amounts of platonic physical affection. Because he knows that werewolves need physical touch, and that Derek hasn’t had enough of it since he lost his family. Derek confessed to him once that he thinks one of the reasons he had sex when he wasn’t all that into it was just for the chance to be physically close to someone, and now it’s like Stiles has made it his mission to make sure Derek never feels that way again.

So it’s not unusual for Peter to go hunting for Stiles and find him curled around Derek in his bed, or on their favorite chair on the porch. (It’s not even that big of a chair, Peter’s not sure how two grown men comfortably fit in there, but neither of them seem to want to move)

Derek’s always grumbling when he’s trying to cook because Stiles will drape himself over his shoulder and try to see what he’s doing and offer unhelpful advice.

Sometimes they’ll be having a movie night and Stiles will sit between Peter and Derek and hold both their hands. “Stiles, this is weird,” Derek tells him the first time he does it. “Well it shouldn’t be,” Stiles says, as if that settles it. And Derek leans back so he can meet Peter’s eye, and Peter just gives him a look that says “you know he does whatever he wants,” so Derek sighs and lets Stiles be a weirdo. He’ll never admit that it feels kind of nice.

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

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I put together a relatively short survey (about two dozen questions, mostly multiple choice, all optional) to get some data on what fic lengths and completion statuses readers on AO3 prefer or avoid. If I get enough answers to have a good sample size, it should give us some insight into how people search and read on the archive.

If you find this interesting, feel free to share it with AO3 users elsewhere or post it to other platforms. I'd like to get a good crossection of readers that isn't biased by platform, if at all possible.

The survey is just for fun/curiosity, and isn't associated with any university, company, or other entity. It's just me asking you this stuff here :)