Fandoms Explained

This blog is unapologetically pro AO3.

This doesn't apply to content creators who make nonfiction content, like a lot of YouTubers. Their content is their product; the people themselves are not a part of that. Making let's play videos on YouTube is not consent to ship people. Doing so can strain relationships between content creators and make things weird between otherwise good friends.

With roleplay where people are playing characters who aren't explicitly themselves, this is fully fictional content and the same agreement applies as above. When it's something like, say, the Dream SMP, where the characters are largely very similar to the people playing them, it's a little different. By declaring them a separate character from themselves, content creators are making the same agreement - but if it's not a sure thing, err on the side of caution, and if they declare boundaries, you stop. You can write c!Ranboo and c!Tubbo in fanfiction as being in a relationship and raising a child together, because that's canon. You shouldn't draw Ranboo and Tubbo cuddling, because Ranboo has said he doesn't know if he's okay with it. It's on a more case by case basis.

SAD-ist is the fanartist in the mcyt community. She’s getting her own fucking Youtooz. And she’s choosing to make an animatic of a fanfiction - one of the best-written ones I’ve ever seen, and one entirely devoid of ships and most of the tropes fanfics are known for. A lot of people, ccs especially, have a very biased view of fanfiction as a concept (which I mostly see from how Tommy and Tubbo make fun of and express discomfort with it, but I heard about Quackity’s stream where he read poorly written Wattpad fics in front of a live audience…oof), mostly due to lack of exposure - even the members of the Dream Team who are comfortable with it largely focus on NSFW and ship fics when they discuss it.

Fanfiction doesn’t get as much respect as fanart does nowadays when it comes to ccs and fandoms alike - but if people see SAD-ist’s animatic, if they read the fic it’s based on? It could change the attitude toward fanfiction entirely in a lot of circles, and not just among the mcyt fandom - as big as this fandom is, those people are going to take what they learn about fanfiction in this fandom and spread it to others. The entire atmosphere surrounding the perception of fanfiction both in and outside fandom circles could be enormous, all because of this one animatic.

i think i’m veering away from the original topic here so just fyi, i’m not calling sadist a brand or anything, i think it’s wonderful she’s making something for passerine and as long as the author doesn’t mind, if passerine heralds changing perspectives on fanfic, that’s wonderful. but as someone who’s read fanfic since my tweens, when it was the most mortifying thing you could admit to, the normalization kind of feels like.. being dragged into the light. what happens when Nike makes an ao3 account to appeal to gen z? that’s an extreme example but that’s kind of what worries me. idk.

Fanfiction really is just a new sort of folk tradition - capitalism put all these barriers on making stories and some ladies who liked Star Trek in the 60s just looked at that and said “no thank you, we’re making this thing ours now,” and the internet makes that so much easier than it used to be when participation in fandoms was relegated to being on a mailing list or in-person meetups. If brands started getting involved in fanfiction, started sucking the soul out of it, then it wouldn’t be fanfiction anymore - and people would move on, start over somewhere else.

No. Just NO.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

It isn’t meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be. 

It isn’t meant to be educational unless you create it to be. 

Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. 

And you know, there are people who have it even worse than me? Religious OCD often focuses on achieving complete moral purity. P-OCD features fears of secretly being a pedophile. Postpartum depression features intrusive, frightening thoughts that sometimes drive new parents to suicide because of the stigma of having those thoughts. There are stories of people actually being investigated by child protective services because they shared their fears with an ignorant health professional who believed thought=action. Many abuse survivors with PTSD live in terror of becoming abusers themselves, and any errant negative thought that floats across their brain can frighten them into thinking they’re becoming monsters.

Perpetuating the idea that thoughts=actions makes it hard for people struggling with intrusive thoughts to reach out for help dealing with them. That makes mentally ill people live in unnecessary misery. It isolates them. Sometimes it even kills them.

Accepting and exploring bad thoughts is actually the basis of exposure and response prevention therapy for OCD. It’s literally part of the treatment for the illness. Discouraging that act, portraying it as evil, can be detrimental to recovery.

“Oh,” you might say if you’re guilty of this, “I don’t mean people like you with bad thoughts, I mean people who write bad thoughts!” Cool. Doesn’t fucking matter. People like me hear and internalize it. People who have these illnesses and don’t yet recognize that hear and internalize it; they may never get help because of it. You can’t lob a bomb at your enemy and un-kill all the bystanders caught in the blast. Not how that works.

By metatext I mean like tagging, summary, and authors notes (especially initial authors notes at the beginning of a fic). The means by which we communicate to our readers what they’re getting into.

Because we kind of all have to learn it by osmosis and there are conventions but nobody’s really taught them at the start, so there’s inconsistencies and misunderstandings or people just not knowing things through no fault of their own.

This ends up breeding frustration and confusion and in the worst cases resentment, hurt, and aggression.

I’m severely tempted to make such a handbook and get it circulating.

Go here for the PDF, or here to view the whole document as a tumblr post.

I recommend the PDF.

There are a lot of things that bother me about purity culture, but I think the most disturbing is that it clouds the very definition of consent, and then teaches this confusing version (you must consent to deep dives into your trauma and how it affects you for the benefit of strangers who have already decided you’re a bad person, and not consenting to that automatically makes you an abuser, also no one can consent to reading or thinking about disturbing content ever because thinking about it means you want it irl) to young, vulnerable, and often traumatized individuals, thus making it harder to understand their trauma and easier for them to ignore the real warning signs of abuse (like demanding that you agree with the abuser otherwise you’re literally the worst and most harmful person ever) because it teaches that abusers only come in one type, and that all abusers are “nasty shippers”.

They suck because they came to a fic knowing full well that it was full of all kinds of potentially triggering shit (because it was TAGGED) AND that the person writing the fic knew all that shit was problematic and that some things that are wrong IRL might not be explicitly criticised in the text (acknowledging that has as a precondition knowing those things are wrong IRL), and they still came to the author and wanted to be made to feel more comfortable about the content of the fic.

‘I know this says DD:DNE but will all the wrongs be righted in the end?’

‘I know this says DD:DNE but will all the people who do bad things be punished?’

‘I know this says DD:DNE but you still shouldn’t be writing this.’

These are all ways of saying ‘I saw that this fic contained a dead dove, and the author advised me it was not for eating, but I want to put it in my mouth anyway. I feel like you should make that a safe and hygienic thing for me to do. Will you?’ and the answer is ‘NO. IT’S NOT FOR FUCKING EATING.’

And if you can only conceive of fics as being for eating (where eating is whatever ‘pure’ form of reading the reader prefers) then not only should you only consume fics that are for eating, but you don’t have a right to know what the author is doing with the fic that isn’t eating.

It might be baffling to you. Much as it is baffling that someone would put a dead dove in a freezer. But they labelled it, and they told you not to eat it, and as eating is all you want to do, you should have left it alone and found something else.

You’re not entitled to a detailed exploration of an author’s trauma and expert psychological analysis about how and why people with certain traumas gravitate towards certain kinds of fiction to help them deal.

Nor are you entitled to know about the weird-but-harmless things that somehow get turned around inside people and become fetish fuel. Or why some things that for most people become nightmare fuel became fetish fuel for others. There are a tonne of thoughtful posts out there about why this happens, but they don’t have to be able to articulate any of that. Know why?

Because they fuckin’ told you it was gonna be weird, fucked up shit and that their exploration of that shit doesn’t entail condoning of that shit. They told you when they tagged it as ‘Dead Dove: Do Not Eat’ and they are as entitled to explore that stuff without judgement as you are not to read that stuff. You’re the one who isn’t respecting boundaries when you step into their comments and ask them to make something not intended for you safe for you.

You are, actually, the one violating them, and entering their space to make it unsafe.

“What about REAL monster girls??? Not just weird humans?? like real huge MONSTERS?? With giant sharp claws and big sharp teeth?? Where are those???”

and then turn around and say a website that doesnt pay the writers they make their traction and money off of is a saint that would do no wrong.

im just saying. ao3 gets their money

those writers dont. lmao.

Have you ever learned, like, a SINGLE THING about the legality of fanfiction?

You mean that ultra-lean, fast-loading site with maybe the world’s best data sorting and tagging that is open source so you can set up your own archive if you wanna try to run something that big without ever asking for money or if you wanna try to make it prettier or something?

It’s not a matter of “Oh, without that dastardly AO3, fanfic authors would be free to make money off of other people’s intellectual property″ and framing it that way is disingenuous.

The way copyright law and Fair Use work right now - the way legal precedent stands in the US, at this time - the only thing stopping Disney from swooping in and suing someone for writing Steve/Bucky fanfiction is that nobody is making any money off of it.

Is it fair that it works like that? Possibly not, but that’s not actually the argument at hand! That’s the way that copyright law works right now. And before AO3, anyone who wrote or hosted fanfic online was in danger of randomly getting a C&D one day - and most people don’t have the money or resources to fight that.

It happened. A lot.

I don’t know how you could spend any time at all in fandom and not know these things about AO3. Or miss the fact that they show EXACTLY where every dollar that comes in from their fundraisers goes to.

AO3′s backend is… 

Listen. I work for a $600 million a year company serving DNS and domain names to literally everyone who isn’t shopping at GoDaddy. I help run the most successful MVNO in the US. I don’t want to say I wouldn’t even know where to start to build AO3, but I know exactly where I would stop. And that’s at the tags. Everything else, sure, I could build in a week. DBs, backups, a fuck ton of caching, monitoring and alerting. Give me another couple of weeks and I’d build some basic self healing so I dont have to get up in the night when something as big as AO3 breaks. 

The fucking moment you tell me you want me to index hundreds of millions of tags, I’m fucking out. We do something similar with domain name recommendations and let me tell you that fucking POS system breaks monthly and it is a goddamn nightmare to fix. You would have to pay me, a single person, what AO3 asks for its entire goddamn operation every year. As far as I know their tech people consist of a sysadmin, a DBA and a few front end folk, all of whom are volunteers. 

Which means that $130,000 is all being spent on tech. The fact that that number is below seven figures means they are doing it with all open-source software, zero support contracts and probably hardware that fell off the back of a Supermicro van. And no, they’re not in The Cloud because this shit would cost them an arm and a leg there. I checked. Indexing hundred of millions of tag fuckarightouttahere.

“what about the poor little white kids just trying to have fun?” what about the poor little kids of color made to feel unsafe and unwelcome in a space that was supposed to be fun?

“why can’t poc just make their own redesigns and we can keep these ones” why cant you realize that your actions have consequences and that you should maybe try to not enforce racist stereotypes??

like ofc its ideal to have VARIETY among both villains AND protagonists, its when your characters look like this

that the issue arises

Projecting yourself onto a fictional character and using that as a vehicle for self-exploration is fantastic.

Okay. What literary criticism IS, is like taking a mechanical clock apart to see all the gears and learn how it fits together and approach your next clock with more knowledge of what makes it tick.

now this one kinda makes me sad because tommy mentioned he reads through the vod comments since they’re the most important to him :/

i feel like the character arc he set up for c!tommy not only makes sense but is incredibly emotionally fulfilling (especially for victims of abuse). seeing it dumbed down to “tommy betrayed techno” and then badmouthed forEVER just seems... sad

This is actually the perfect response, I think. Or as good as we can get, anyway.

I'm a big advocate for blocking and ignoring negativity in fandom, but sometimes you can't block and ignore people because their hate is not for you, it's directed at someone else, and that's still upsetting. So what can you do in this case? It's hard to ignore that sort of thing when it keeps piling up like that, so the best thing you can do is try to dilute it.

It is always worth it to post a positive comment on ccs' work. We mostly say this about fanfiction and fanart, here on tumblr, but it remains true for original content, especially those who are particularly well-known - they'll probably be getting more hate. So go post your multiple paragraph analysis post, your dumb little meme, your incoherent excitement. They do read it. Your comment might just make their day, you never know.