Thank heaven for fan fiction

Endeavour

3x04 Coda

Endeavour - 5x04 colours

Heyyy people.

free-to-use “the only ship that is bad is censorship” badge

—> “proship & proud” badge

how someone sets their boundaries has absolutely nothing to do with censorship.

censorship is when someone tries to control other people what they can or can’t create and consume.

censorship is not about a random person disabling their own comments section for whatever reason. censorship is not about people blocking other people on social media as their way of setting boundaries and curating their internet experience. censorship is not about disrespecting other people’s boundaries and censorship is not about tolerating it when other people disrespect you or your boundaries.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.