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Weighing in on yet another round of “fan spaces are youth spaces” (aka “go home and knit, old lady” or “You’re old enough to be my/someone’s mom! gross!” )

Consider these thoughts:

There’s a whole set of interests and behaviors that you might become interested in as you grow from child to adolescent to young adult and take greater interest in the wider world.

You might like horses, or dolls.  Or building models.  You might play soccer, or follow baseball every summer and learn about  box scores.   You might follow the college football draft, or love a pop band.  You might deeply admire a rock band and learn to play the guitar.  You might love superheroes and see all their movies.  You might love space opera and collect paperback books.  Maybe you collect trading cards of your favorite team players – or movie moments.  You probably get t-shirts and posters of teams, or media outlets.  You might get deeply into a social or political cause.

Those are all expressions of interest in the world, all with associated social aspects, many with associated creative actions. 

And then you get older.  And here’s the thing about that list.  The things on that list that are “for boys?”   Are also “for men.”   But the things on that list that are “for girls” or “for nerds?” Are only “for children.”  

Adult men wear brightly colored team clothing and paint their faces without shame.   They join fantasy football leagues and hang out online.   They follow Phish (or continuously talk about how they did when that was a thing).  They spend vast sums on tickets to bowl games.   They get excited all over the internet about Geddy Lee’s greatest hits.  They spend long afternoons on the golf course, playing very bad golf.

No one tells them to grow up 

An adult woman who turns a childhood dollhouse into a beautiful scale model of a real Victorian home is “eccentric.”  An adult man who builds a vast HO train layout in his basement is a “train enthusiast.”   An adult woman who displays her favorite Bryer horses is “odd,” an adult man with a shelf of signed baseballs is “a collector” or even “an investor.” 

Adult women making fanart of attractive movie stars is “creepy,’ while adult men decorating their garages with calendar art of scantily-clad very-young women is “just what guys do.”

Interests and hobbies that were feminine and are taken up by men become acceptable.   When The Beatles were greeted with mobs of fainting teen girls, they were a “boy band.”  When young men discovered them, they became Serious Musicians.  

Over and over, across fields of interest, things that girls like are “toys and games and childish” and should be left behind by adults, while things that boys like are “hobbies and sports” that are lifetime pastimes.  And acceptable “hobbies” for adult women?   Most are things that could be coded as household chores, but generations of women have worked to turn into enjoyable pastimes:  knitting, sewing, quilting.  Home decor.  Baking.   Many adult women (myself included) enjoy doing those things in their free time and have elevated them to art forms.  But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re rooted in utility, while “men’s hobbies” are, by and large, rooted in leisure.

Want to make a fic rec post? Grab yourself a header and get to it :)

Suggestions:

bold the title to make it easier to see

link to the fic (chapter 1 for multichaps)

tag the author if you know their tumblr, ask others to tag if you don’t

include the fandom somewhere (especially if you are reccing fics from various fandoms)

why do you recommend it?

if you’ve been trained to to dislike yourself for enjoying anything due to years of being told you’re annoying clap your hands 👏👏👏

if I listed out every particular instance that was met with negativity enough for me to stop feeling comfortable talking about it, this comic would be like 50 panels.

In my case, I’ve missed out on so many experiences because of this. I had given up trying to make people see the things I like aren’t a waste of time. But I’m slowly trying to claim them back.

But, of course, even that doesn’t work.

Yes. We are. We are in fact defending the people who write wholly unrealistic smut that kinks on taboo subjects so people can work out their screwy urges in a controlled, risk-free way! We are in fact defending the people who write pure misery and know it, because they’re feeling god-awful and need OTT catharsis! Defense of screwed up fanfiction as morally neutral is not just about “oh, that good stuff that looks at issues as a Real Thing to bring attention to them”.

No, it’s also the (emotionally aware, tagged, warned for, niche, compartmentalized) fiction that lets everyone pour out the nastiness in their heads where the only people who are likely to see it know what they’re here for.

If there is even one single pedophile who won’t get his rocks off to, or with, an actual, abused child, even just *once*? That is one less child that’s abused. Or one abused child that’s abused less. 

me at 14: wow, protagonists in media my age! how relateable!

Me at 14: oh protagonists that are 17-20-ish, they’re basically adults, right?

Marnie in Halloweentown: I’m thirteen, okay? I’m practically grown up! I’m certainly old enough to make my own choices – right?

Me at 7: Right!

Me at 13: Right! …Well, okay, maybe not practically grown up, but still, right!

Me at 28:

At first, the military wanted to reinforce those areas, because obviously that’s where the ground crews observed the most damage on returning planes. Until Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that this was the damage on the planes that made it home, and the Allies should armor the areas where there are no dots at all, because those are the places where the planes won’t survive when hit. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias, a logic error where you focus on things that survived when you should really be looking at things that didn’t.

Every time a state makes riding a motorcycle without a helmet illegal, the number of ER patients seriously injured in motorcycle accidents skyrockets. Every single time.

Canon ships tend to be easier. For me at least, when a ship is clearly being set up (or is already canon) I have an easier time seeing it as a ship rather than as just friends/colleagues etc. 

Maybe that’s become I’m aro/ace spec. I don’t know. I just know that I like non-canon ships too, but someone usually has to tell me about them before I can see it. Gimme a giant, flashing neon sign pointing to a ship and I’m right there with you - I just don’t tend to see them without them being obvious :)

To grossly oversimplify their point (please go read the essay, it’s so much better), the largest amounts of shipping tend to happen where the real “emotional energy” is in a story, which is to say, where characters are shown sharing meaningful emotional interactions (platonic, romantic or otherwise) that develop their characters and/or help progress their personal arcs/ the main plot.

Canon ships often get a bit of a leg-up in this regard as, in working to set up the ship as ‘endgame’, the story is more likely to devote time/ attention/ framing to showing how the characters parallel/ contrast each other, how they complement each other’s personalities/ skills, the way they might fulfil each others’ emotional needs, and that they either have explicit interest in pursuing that relationship or that it would be beneficial for them to end up in one.

However, there’s also a paradoxically double-edged sword here, because romantic subplots are so widespread that sometimes creators get sloppy and don’t bother to actually put any substantial work into developing the ship in universe because they assume that the audience will assume a ship endgame by default.  See echodrops’ essay and also this video on Romantic Subplots from Overly Sarcastic Productions for discussions of some of the endemic writing problems that these subplots run up against.  Basically though, non-canon ships can end up dominating when the writers wind up putting the main emotional focus on other character dynamics over the ‘endgame ship’ because they’ve assumed the audience is already invested in that.  I’ve actually noticed this happening in a few non-canon ship-fics too; the writer is already invested in the ship so they don’t spend much time drawing out and building the romantic/sexual tension, leading to characters who rapidly fall into infatuated pining/ lusting after each other despite being given little to no conversations or emotional moments to explain their interest (most obvious when it turns up in AUs that can’t springboard directly from canon).

I also want to quickly tag in this post about the idea of ‘compulsory amatonormativity’, i.e. the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal, a universally shared goal, and should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types, which may explain why some people (especially those on the grey/aro/ace spectrum) prefer to support canon ships where the characters are explicitly depicted as romantically/sexually interested in each other, as it lets us handily skip the potential subtext that can start coming out when non-canon shipping rises to the extent that the impact and importance of canonically platonic/familiar relationships (or even just canon friendships with characters outside of the OTP) ends up being downplayed, degraded, demoted or dismissed as inferior/ insignificant/ meaningless/ inherently less valuable purely because they didn’t culminate in romance/sex.

TL:DR

Canon ships may be more popular because they’re more likely to get in-story time dedicated to developing the emotional/ romantic chemistry of the pair (while also avoiding the sometimes-uncomfortable possibility for non-canon ships to accidentally imply that canonically platonic depictions are inherently less meaningful), but can also fall flat if the creator has assumed the audience is automatically on-board and ended up significantly under-developing them relative to side relationships as a result.

Because AO3 is a hosting service. They don’t exist to police the content on their site as long as that content doesn’t breach the Terms of Service.

AO3 has a robust tagging system so that users can either find or avoid content. The site doesn’t moderate the content because the users do. If authors fail to tag or readers fail to pay attention to tags, that moderation slips and people are exposed to content they don’t want to see. 

I love the fact that AO3 puts the power over what I see in my hands. I have control, not some faceless person and certainly not my government. I can see whatever I want to see and avoid whatever I want to avoid and every other user of the site can do the same thing. 

People donate money to pay for web servers. AO3 hosts nearly a terabyte of data. It gets something in the neighbourhood of a billion hits per month. They also donate to pay any contractors who might need to work on the Archive to test security, improve the site infrastructure and other such tasks that volunteers might not have the time or the expertise to do. 

Not only that, but AO3 is only one of the projects who make use of that donation money. It also goes to Fanlore, to the Open Doors project, to Fanhackers, to the Transformative Works and Cultures journal, and to legal advocacy. Did you know that AO3 volunteers have testified before Congress? Is that worth $200K for you?

Any one of those things could cost $200K or more, and the OTW does all of them and more. If you don’t want to donate, you don’t have to. If you hate the site, stay off of it. If you want to avoid fics that have content you dislike then read the fucking tags and don’t click on those fics. 

You’ve heard of lemons and the Citrus Scale? Well, what about KINKTOMATO?

KINKTOMATO is an important concept in fandom. It’s a humourous re-spelling of YKINMKATO - Your Kink Is Not My Kink (And That’s OK). This is the idea that if you don’t like a particular kink or ship etc, that’s fine but you don’t need to attack or shame the people who do. Just leave them alone to enjoy their fics and art in peace and ask that they do the same in return. 

KINKTOMATO is the “you do you” of fandom. It’s the “whatever floats your boat” of leaving other people alone. It’s an easy and judgement-free way of hoping that your fellow fans enjoy their content as much as you enjoy yours and understanding that different folks like different strokes. 

nobody really enjoys practicing this type of self-discipline. it is sincerely unpleasant to encounter kinks you are repulsed/squicked by. there have been times when i was lax in reading through the tags or when i assumed a tag represented one kind of take on a thing but no actually it was another, way less appealing one, and it’s not a fun time to get that particular cold glass of water thrown onto your soul.

There are a ton of different ways to swear, so I think it’s reasonable to try to figure out a way that works for both you and your characters. I can’t imagine using “oh my gosh” except as some kind of ironic folksy reference, but I also don’t use “Jesus Christ” because, to be honest, that doesn’t feel like it gets much of my frustration out. 

You could try mapping out your own list of mild/medium/strong swear words and see how that works out. It could look something like this:

Mild swear words: Damn, crap, eesh, frick, bullshit, dick, prick

Medium swear words: shit, piss, ass, bitch, bastard

Strong swear words: fuck, cock, cunt, pussy

Personally, I see “oh my god” as mild and “Jesus Christ” as maybe medium? One way to better get the feeling across is to describe the character’s mood and demeanor when they use whatever word you choose. I use made up swear words a lot, and it’s really just the tone of my voice and my facial expression that get that feeling across. 

How would the rest of you approach this kind of problem?

a) for some reason, my brain doesn’t mind as much if they use Goddess instead of God. I don’t know why. XD granted many of my fandoms that I’m in go with this approach so easier to dodge that bullet.

b) pick a replacement and *stick to it* and use it often enough that the readers will pick up what it’s “replacing.” I will admit this is easier for me to do if I’m allowed to worldbuild a little bit, but I used this approach in some of my original works. for example, in that fic they don’t have deities that they worship, but they *do* place really high emphasis on the weapons they use to defend themselves. so they say things like “oh my blade” all the time. it sounds dumb at first, because us writers are self-conscious, but the more you use it an reinforce that it’s A Thing ™ then the reader will pick up what it’s “replacing.” 

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

[Sorry folks. This got long.]

Hi blog! Pi here with another audio/podcast/whatever question. Uh, this one is from anonymous.

I just deleted 15 works off of AO3. No one seems to care about any of my fics in any of my fandoms, so I’ve decided that from now on my writing will be for me only. I deleted and not orphaned because I do want to finish them, I just don’t want to be stuck waiting for validation that will never come, from modern fans that think commenting is rude somehow. I miss old fandom. People used to care about fic and authors.

First of all, I’m sorry to hear that you’re feeling that way, anon. That’s never a good feeling, when you put something out there and you don’t hear anything back. It’s-it’s really hard and discouraging, and I’m glad that you’re doing something that is going to work for you. I’m glad that you have figured out that, in order to write, you just need to not put it out there. And that’s totally fair.

Writing and posting are separate things and if posting is making you unhappy, then I think, y’know, this is probably the better way to go for you.

Where I might disagree, um, is this idea that quote-unquote “modern fans” think commenting is rude or that old fandom cared more about fic and more about authors.

Um. I mean. I’ve been in fandom with greater or lesser degrees of activity on my part, um, for twenty-ish years? Um. I was never really a big, popular writer until uh-my most recent fandom. But, y’know, I read things here and there, I commented here and there, I gave likes etc. Um.

I know that people talk about how commenting has changed or people don’t comment anymore, but I really think that it depends on what fandom you’re in. So, my most recent fandom is also the most active and supportive fandom that I’ve ever been in. Um. “Small but active,” as they say in-in my group. Um. And so it might not be, like, fandom as a whole that’s changed. It might be the fandoms that you’re currently in.

I talk about this a lot that, uh, different fandoms have different cultures or different ways of interacting. And so it might be that the-the particular places that you’re sharing your fic, um, whether that be AO3 or fanfiction.net or whatever, um, and the people who are reading it are not what you’re used to from your previous experiences – whether that is fanfiction.net, whether it’s livejournal or dreamwidth or um, y'know, fanzines etc., like, there’s a-a long history and I-I won’t presume to know where in the history of-of fan writing that-that you come in.

Um. I hope that someday you-you give posting another chance. Um. For you to realize that-that, y'know, people do appreciate the-the time and the effort that-that you put into your-your writing and the-the creativity that you have to share, but um, I suppose I-I just hope that in the future, you’ll be able to find a fandom that’s a better fit for you.

To me, in some ways fandoms are kind of like relationships - and that doesn’t have to be romantic, it can be platonic um, friendship, etc. But you have to put something into it but you also have to get something back in order to be satisfied. And if it’s not working for you, it’s okay to break up. It is. And-and maybe it’s because of the other people in your fandom. Maybe it’s because of uh, the-the creators of the content that you’re a fan of. Uh, or it could be completely external. But if you’re unhappy, step one: take care of yourself, to try to find that happiness again.

i was a little lost at first but i quickly got the hang of what was going on in this universe and i am just completely obsessed now. i’m really trying not to consume it too quickly but i’m already on chapter 15 and will probably listen from the start immediately after i finish it.

Sherlock?

JOHNLOCK??