Fandom advice for newbies!

+ loving the things you love without shame is good actually

+ but also there's no contradiction in criticizing and/or improving on the things you love when they fail you in particular ways

+ it's good to learn from other people with other perspectives about blind spots you may have that prevent you from seeing particular failures

+ play, especially creative and communal play, is one of the great joys of life

+ life should be full of things that you do for the sheer joy of it and not for any "productive" reason

+ joy is compounded when it's shared

+ doing things together is (often) better than doing things alone

+ collaboration is better than competition

+ friendships are built on shared interests

+ art and shared interests can build cross-cultural and cross-generational communities

+ getting to know people who are very different than you--who come from different backgrounds, have different experiences, and see the world in different ways--is another of life's great joys

+ mutuality and reciprocity are the keys to community-building

+ connection with other human beings is the entire point of art

+ specificity, depth, and details create intimacy and good art

+ texts and narratives are created not only by the original writers/creators but by how readers/audiences react to and interpret them

+ there are a multitude of ways to interpret a given text/narrative

+ it's both fun and enriching to discover how other people react to texts/narratives differently than you do

+ gratitude, praise, enthusiasm, and other forms of feedback are the both best the compensations for the time you spend on creation and are the best fuel for more creation

+ infinite diversity in infinite combinations

+ etc.

obviously fandom doesn't always live up to these principles. but it can and often it does, and that's why i don't feel like the ~25 years i've spent in various fandoms was a waste of time. that in fact my fannish participation has enriched my life and made me a better person than i would have been without it.

all of these are in radical opposition to the assumptions that underlie mainstream society (at least in the anglophone world, i don't want to make assumptions about societies i don't live in):

+ everything is markets

+ everything should be optimized

+ everything should be monetized

+ everything should be at scale

+ everything should be shallow and bland enough to appeal to the lowest common denominator so as to reach as many people as possible so as to make as much money as possible

+ anything that doesn't help you accrue money and/or power is a waste of time

+ liking the "right" things will make you seem cool, which will help you accrue social capital or build a personal ~brand~ which you can then use to make money or accrue power

+ competition is the only thing that drives innovation

+ innovation is important because it helps you accrue money and/or power

+ if you aren't being compensated for the time and effort you put into something, you have wasted your time and you are falling behind

+ etc.

i find this worldview absolutely repulsive and at odds with everything i think is good in the world. even things that are fine in moderation and in certain contexts (markets and competition are okay within limited bounds) become cancerous when they are at the bedrock of how you approach life.

every time we take joy in leaving someone else a comment on a fic or a piece of fanart and it makes someonehappy

every time we read a piece of meta from someone who's sharing an insight into something we mutually love

every time we choose to spend time on creating something so that other people can enjoy it for free

every time we make each other laugh or smile or feel better on rough day

every time we learn something we didn't know about the world from someone we might never have had a chance to meet if our mutual love for a thing hadn't brought us together

every time we do any of these things, we are pushing back against those repulsive, predominating assumptions.

i'm not saying that fandom is going to save the world. it isn't. that requires actual political organization, unionizing, creating democratic and power-sharing institutions, educating ourselves ourselves and others, recognizing and working to dismantle hierarchies, building coalitions, finding the courage to admit when we're wrong, finding the courage to give other people second chances when they try to do better, etc.

but i think that practicing reciprocity and fun with other people gives us the energy to do the hard political things. i don't think we're ever going to be able to do those hard political things if we don't have communities (of whatever kind) that remind us what everything is for and that life, as hard as it can be, can also be joyful.

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

And my oldest child has entered online fandom.

Thankfully, my child and I don’t share fandoms (we both prefer it that way), but we did sit down to discuss how to maintain privacy and safety while also being friendly in online interactions. I taught my child about fandom red flags and green flags, from my experiences, and my child has since asked for my advice in terms of my child’s own fandom experiences and how to handle issues and concerns.

All that being said, I was surprised and confused when my child informed me that my child had not been leaving kudos or comments on AO3. Keep in mind, this child would read longfics for days, tell me how great the author’s writing captured the characters, etc.

“Why didn’t you kudos or comment if the fic was so good?” I asked.

While my child explained lack of ability to comment due to fic restrictions (my child has expressed not yet feeling ready to have an AO3 account even though my child is old enough and my husband and I would be fine with it), my child said kudos didn’t matter: “Who cares about one kudos?”

“The author cares. And, if the author for some reason doesn’t care, I know you care about doing the right thing. I think expressing appreciation for other people’s fanwork is the right thing to do. What do you think?”

My child went back and kudosed all stories read to that point.

when i was a tween who first found fandom in the late 90s/early 2000s, people didn't explicitly teach me how to interact with fandom. i lurked for a solid year before i signed up for my own account on the forum i'd found. (i can still remember how the adrenaline coursed through me as i signed up for my own account--i felt tingy and more than a little ill!)

by that time, i had a very good sense of social norms there. i still made a few mistakes, and the more established members smacked me down in a matter-of-fact but not unkind way. but i'd learned by watching. hell, by the time i started actively participating, i knew all the inside jokes!

as op mentioned, i don't think that people lurk anymore, and my theory is that the rise of social media/web 2.0 created a different approach to web communities.

today, every site is presumed to be for every person. the entire point of the really big social media sites is that everyone is on them. (this is one of the things i hate about them btw because it results in context collapse. i do not want to talk to my third-grade teacher, my favorite cousin, complete strangers, and my fandom friends in the same voice, but that's another issue).

whereas in web 1.0, the internet was riddled with niche sites/communities. you had to go out and find your place (and sometimes it took a while!). once you found it, you were invested in becoming a part of that specific community, so you did the research (lurking) to find out how people interacted, what all the unspoken norms were. by the time you picked your handle and made your account, you just knew stuff.

i'm sure this was not true of everyone, but it was true of far more people at the time. people looked before they leapt.

there are many, many reasons that i think that fandom has suffered from the web 2.0 environment. the fact that creators/writers/actors and fans are all on the same sites using the same tags for general publicity and for fannish nonsense is a huge problem. the way that sites are so big that people feel that their contributions (as with kudos above) don't matter is a direct result of the way social media undermines community and makes everything a performance of whatever your late-capitalist brand is. the fast pace of those sites makes people think that interacting with older posts is a bad idea. the lack of filters of the kind that we had on livejournal where you could determine who saw what or even just the way that forums often made you join before you could see content created walls within which communities could grow (think frost and walls making good neighbors).

i know we can't go back to the assumptions that operated before social media. we have to explore other options. i love when people make psas here telling people about fandom norms and history! i think it's the best thing! and maybe at this point that is the only way to handle it.

tumblr and ao3 are very weird sites in that they straddle the web 1.0 and web 2.0 kinds of internet.

from web 1.0 they get the lack of algorithms, the way you have to make choices about what you see, chronological arrangements, and (on ao3) lack of ads, etc. tumblr has a slightly slower pace than most social media; ao3 has a much slower one.

from web 2.0, though, you get scale, centralization (which is both ao3's greatest strength and greatest weakness), and the fact that it takes little effort to locate these sites--anyone, no matter their level of investment in fandom, can just stumble on them.

so you end up having a lot of people who are not actually fannishly inclined (aren't invested in a gift economy, don't really understand that fandom is supposed to be fun, don't really get the creative urge etc.) interacting with people who are fannishly inclined, and it causes some really problems. especially with younger people whose experience of the internet is as a venue to signify and perform certain kinds of morality/coolness/trendiness that are at odds with what fandom has always been about. basically: you have a bunch of normies clashing with a bunch of nerds. (obviously the normie/nerd divide is a spectrum and not a binary, so i'm overstating, but still.)

when you have people who are coming to fandom from different angles--some people who are coming to it as a provider of content just like all other media in their lives, especially elsewhere online; some people who are coming to it as a participatory hobby wherein we build community around shared affection for [thing]--there's going to be lots of clashes and weirdness.

i kind of think that fans need to go back to create set-apart spaces for fandom to happen. note that i am NOT talking about gatekeeping. everyone who treats others with respect would be welcome. but just having fenced-off areas that are explicitly for certain kinds of fandom interactions. where we can basically have our party away from the normies, but other nerds who are younger or just getting in touch with their nerdiness can find us.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

Edit: Yes, this also works on mobile!

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

On the subject of AI, I have a confession to make: I use it. Not to write for me, but to help me check for inconsistencies, to brainstorm ideas, to write outlines, to give me a couple of lines when I've been stuck for hours, to be my beta reader, if you will. Generative AI is bad? Yes, but it also a useful tool if one isn't lazy. I don't ask: write me a story. I go with my story and ask: help me with continuity. Look, this paragraph is clunky, how do I make it better? The demonization of generative AI is fair, but to be honest, I also understand people who use it. Maybe they're afraid of writing themselves, maybe they're insecure and don't trust their prose. Maybe they have brilliannt ideas but they need help to make them become fics.

To me, this is very much connected to my last ask where I was talking about how we don't have enough mentors in fandom to support the influx of people entering it.

All of the things that you're asking AI to do used to be done by a beta reader (or more than one!). A fandom friend (or even a random stranger who volunteered) would read through your work and help you with those issues.

Betas are amazing. They can help with grammar and spelling. They can regionalize language. They can provide sensitivity reading if they're from a marginalized community that you're writing about and aren't a member of. They can track canon, help with research, even just be a sounding board to discuss ideas with.

And sometimes, they're just a cheer reader - someone reading your story and telling you how awesome it is because they love it just as much as you do.

I understand turning to AI if you 1) don't know beta readers exist or 2) don't know how to obtain one. The need for that kind of support doesn't go away just because you can't access it.

But for anyone out there who needs this kind of help and wants to avoid Gen AI, you can write a post on your blog, add it to an author's note, check out resources like @needabeta or - if the time of year is right and you have the funds - place a bid on beta reading services during @fandomtrumpshate

Beta readers are often involved in fandom events like big bangs and exchanges, and if anyone is looking to host such an event, it's a great way to get people involved who aren't writers or artists but would love to help out.

I definitely recommend searching a beta reader within the fandom you're writing for rather than someone who knows nothing about it.

And when you don't immediately get a response, ask again. This comes from a person (me) who is now two and a half years into dating the girl who replied to my 'I need a beta reader' post that I was debating to reblog that day.

Sometimes I wonder where our lives would be if I hadn't reblogged it or if she had skipped past the post.

Fandom is a community of people with shared interests. It's supposed to make it easier for us to become friends, hang out and talk for hours.

Not a single AI tool in the world is capable of giving (fandom) writers/artists/creators what they actually need.

one of the great joys of fandom is being involved in someone else's creative process. whether it's through betaing, just chatting about ideas, making an insightful comment on their fic, etc., it is so fun for both people involved when a creator has someone else to "yes and" with or to have "omg!!!" reactions or to say "i'm not sure that works, let's workshop that."

one of the main reasons that many people write fanfic even though we're not getting paid and it takes time that could be spent on other things is that the process of writing in community is so rewarding and fun. imo the most obvious way that it can be rewarding and fun is through comments once you've posted something. but having someone hold your hand while you create something is a close second. (and i'm sure for some people it's number one!)

i have made some of the best friends of my life through creating together. i've had some of the most fun i've ever had in fandom getting high on mutual love for a fandom/character/ship/whatever through betaing or being betaed.

don't rob yourself or someone else of that experience by using a soulless, carbon-burning plagiarization machine to do something that a person would love to do.

that said, i know that, especially if you're new to fandom, it can be difficult to know where to start in finding someone who will beta for you.

here are a few ways to go about it:

put out a post in the tag of whatever your fandom/ship/whatever is asking if anyone is willing to beta. ask people to reblog it if you feel comfortable doing it. if it doesn't work the first time, try again a few weeks later--timing may have made people miss it.

after you've made a few friends in fandom, ask them to beta for you.

leave some really good comments on the fic of a writer you admire. build a rapport. once you have, ask if they ever beta for anyone. if they say yes, ask if they will be willing to beta for you.

look at the author's notes on fics you like. see if the writer mentions their beta. if they do, after leaving a good comment on their fic, ask if their beta is ever open to betaing for other people.

as long as you aren't entitled about how you ask, it is okay to ask outright if someone will beta for you. but don't do it out of the blue on someone's fic if you haven't also commented on that fic! that's just rude!

after you've complimented the writer, ask if they ever beta. something like: "i loved this fic so much for these reasons: [reasons]. your writing is so great! do you ever beta?"

if they confirm that they do, follow up with: "do you have the time/energy/interest in betaing something for me?" protip: it helps if you tell them how long it is, what the pairing is or if it's gen, that sort of thing. some people might have the capacity to beta for a 2k word fic of their otp but not for a plotty, multichapter fic.

the worst that can happen is that they say no, and i promise that 98% of people who say no will say it in a kind way. people are not going to be offended that you asked. they're going to be flattered, even if they don't want to or can't say yes right now. and even if they say no, they might have a suggestion of someone else to ask!