Intertextual

The Fanfic Author’s Guide to Metatext (As Used on Ao3) by Eiiri

Because Foz is right and I can provide details: the trends of thought we see in fandom about how shipping the wrong thing is dangerous and destructive almost precisely echo what is taught about sexuality in many Christian churches.

Largely, conservative Christians have been clinging to an old interpretation of Scripture that says sexual desire is destructive and bad, and ignoring all the research that’s come out that says, no, it’s a lot more complicated than that. They frequently try to use scientific studies to prove their point and disguise their Christianity to appeal to a secular audience, but they’re still trying to quell a wealth of research that says:

It’s really normal and healthy for people to think about and desire sex on a regular basis, and a lot of sexual fantasies are about taboo subjects, and people who fantasize about these things frequently don’t want to experience the thing in real life.

Pornography can have positive or negative effects, depending on what it is and how it’s used. It’s not intrinsically good or bad–it can help people find pleasure, explore their desires, or enhance their sexual relationships, or it can lead people to feeling desensitized, dissatisfied, and disconnected.

Although researchers have tried really hard for decades to prove that pornography promotes violent assault, they’ve come up with very little evidence.

(An example of religious influence with a scientific mask: Fight the New Drug actively markets itself as science-led and not religiously affiliated, but its founders all belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the attitudes of which the site consistently supports, and its message and interpretations of data, while nuanced, are still tilted in ways experts in the field find counterfactual)

You see, a lot of Christians reject the research on sex because it goes against their religion as they understand it. In Matthew 5:28, Jesus says, “[A]nyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Traditionally, most Christians have interpreted this to mean that entertaining sexual fantasies and viewing pornography is fundamentally harmful and bad. The Christian view of lust and sexual desire is largely that they are, except in the very particular setting of a monogamous marriage, injurious to the self and to others. This is an attitude that many Christian groups have backed away from, but by no means all.

This means that many Christians view all pornography as fundamentally morally evil, not because of how it is produced, but because it causes its viewers to be lustful in a way that is morally wrong… but they still seek out and view porn anyway; they just feel guilt and self-loathing about it.

One of the Christian efforts I’ve seen gain traction is Protect Young Minds. Its explicitly stated purpose is to teach children to “reject pornography”, because it views sexually explicit media as fundamentally harmful and bad. Its emphasis is on teaching children to close their eyes and turn off the screen if they see any sexually explicit images, ever. There is no plan, anywhere, for when kids become old enough to want to seek out sexual content–because they think that adults should never view porn either–but they don’t emphasize that bit, instead focusing on protecting the children.

For the past 30 years, many Christian groups have been really focusing on teaching their children and teenagers the concept of “emotional purity,” which means not only abstaining from sex outside marriage, but also abstaining from attraction, sexual desire, or romantic feelings. (The only exception: If this is your One True Destined Soulmate You Will Spend The Rest of Your Life With.)  Failure to do this, they teach, will damage and “tarnish” you, and ruin your chances of ever having a successful marriage.

Despite massive evidence that it is these attitudes, and the shame and guilt about sexuality they promote, which damage people and their happiness in relationships, they are still being taught in many, many churches.

So when everything a person is saying lines up with these attitudes, except with the tiny proviso that your One True Destined Soulmate You Will Spend The Rest of Your Life With is now allowed to be the same gender as you if you want?

Yeah. That’s conservative Christian purity culture in a gay hat.

There’s better posts floating about here about how half this site is just fundamentalist, conservative Protestant Christianity wearing a gay hat, but it boils down to this: lack of nuance (indeed, it doesn’t work with nuance) and an us vs them in-group/out-group dichotomy. Fandom, particularly the generation that grew up as fandom was becoming socially acceptable (the last 20 years or so), have grown up in an insular peer group of like-minded individuals, all of whom are its own support system handed legitimacy, not an out-group comprised of people who are doing an otherwise socially unacceptable thing, together (people older than 20 or so years.) I’ve seen people on here mutter unhappily about how they’re scared they’ll have to age out of fandom because the rhetoric they’re surrounded by tells them they can’t be in fandom over age 25, but they still love it, because you should be doing Adulty things by then...I assure you, you’ll need your stress outlets even more than you already do.

Anyway, literary analysis. It isn’t about calling things gross and making absolutist judgment calls and dying on that hill. I guarantee you, try that shit in anything more advanced than high school (they don’t get paid enough for this shit) and you’ll be that asshole sitting there crying about your failing grade and whining about your professor, when really it’s your own damn fault. (Side note: I ran into this a lot with any right wing people who found themselves in college, especially the veterans I’ve known, because their thought process also runs to the tune of making statements and judgment calls based off of preexisting notions when that’s not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the ability to show your logical work in a kind of literary deconstruction of a presented piece the way a mathematical proof might, not to demonstrate how ‘good’ your ability to judge already is.)

There is a gap a mile wide between commentary that goes like this:

“X is gross and disgusting and you can’t do that. Because you’ve done this thing, you are not acceptable.”

And something like this:

“The appearance of X theme in this work suggests a strong bias towards Y in the author. I find their work repulsive and refuse to read any more of it.”

Hell, you don’t have to just suggest. You can make statements about an author or their work though that really only sticks in any really reliable sense when you have the background on a known author to say that they actually are, for instance, a white supremacist (the movie Birth of a Nation anyone?), but, this doesn’t work so well with the relative anonymity of the internet (and I think that lack of context encourages such kneejerk responses because you’re flinging shit at a blank wall and they can’t, in some cases would be better advised not to, fight back; I’ve seen other posts discussing the changing networks of how fandom itself operates, where it used to be much more of a communal thing and not a vast, anonymous audience like what Tumblr gives you). Passing judgement and moving on to action--bullying them off the internet--has stopped being an evaluation and become a response.

It will, however, stick much more readily, if you have a whole group of people who are otherwise completely isolated from any other known context but are sociated amongst each other. You can say damn near anything you like about a group of people about whom everybody else knows nothing but which trusts you, pass yourself off as an expert, and sound like you know what you’re talking about.

That’s where the whole...teenager thing comes in. Teenagers aren’t stupid, they’re not evil, they’re not even wrong all the time. 

What they are is unlearned, and that’s just something that comes with age and experience (not to say that older people are, as a hard and fast rule, always right all the time. Fuck that noise). Some kids are wise. Some adults die never having been wise.

That being said, most kids don’t get nuance for shit to start with, just because of how old they are, and environment counts too. Nuance is often dependent upon experience. They’ve got zero experience with conflicting (but equal) norms because they’ve been at home with mom and dad, who have one norm, or a part of their external group, in the way fandom is. It’s also probably not insignificant that there has been a rise in this kind of absolutist thinking on all sides after 9/11; if you were born in 2008, the first year of Obama’s Presidency, you’ll probably be 13 this year. All you’ve ever fucking seen on TV is a lot of polemic garbage and people making more and more extreme absolutist judgments about the other side, while being uncooperative and unwilling to compromise because compromise itself is seen as a betrayal of the faith. 

like, if a food critic goes to a restaurant and their only review is ‘this food sucked!’ that’s definitely a criticism but they’re not actually being a good food critic. they need to provide more of an analysis of why they didn’t like what they just consumed. and, ideally, food critics have much more to say than criticisms!

ENTROPY

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans resort to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

Neocities 

Mastodon

Ao3

So yeah, I try to keep it well within the RaM rating but god knows how much Tumblunder will tolerate that.

Here’s my Twitter handle in case I get lost: https://twitter.com/docricksmith

And if I’m really lost these are bound to get updated: https://www.redbubble.com/people/docrick, http://ko-fi.com/triplesugarthreat, https://triplesugarthreat.weebly.com

This is your reminder that Fanlore exists. It’s a wiki of fandom history run by OTW, which is the parent organization of AO3.

Here are some examples of important tumblr posts that have pages to chronicle the discussion:

The Three Generations of Fanfic

History of Slash (2018 essay)

I don’t understand how anyone can take AO3 for granted

I searched my name at Fanlore this week

That last one is too meta not to link to! :D

Anyway, these wiki entries can give you an idea of what documentation of a tumblr post and its responses might look like. We’ll never document every single little thing, and we wouldn’t want to, but we can make a record of major conversations and schools of thought so that fans who come after us know how people were feeling on tumblr back in the day.

Fanlore uses the same wiki markup as Wikipedia et al.

Fanlore has a “Plural Point of View” policy: treat it like oral history where you want to document all sides of a controversy rather than Wikipedia’s attempt at ‘One Universal Truth’. (But feel free to correct factual errors.)

Fanlore is about any fandom history, so minute details of canon don’t belong on there, but minute details of meta, fanworks exchanges, any zine ever, any significant online fic, tropes in fanworks, etc. do.

Since tumblr is getting harder and harder to search, even aside from deletions, now is a great time to document important tumblr posts on Fanlore or add information from tumblr posts to existing articles.

Right now, Fanlore is an amazing resource on pre-internet “Media Fandom”, old print zines, the LJ era, and a lot of slash fandom history.

But it’s only as good and varied as its editors.

In my experience, it could use a lot of help in the realm of anime/manga fandom, including BL fandom, fandom not in English and/or outside of the English-speaking world, fandom on places like Quizilla or Wattpad, femslash fandom, etc. If your area of fandom is not represented, it’s only because the current editors don’t know enough!

You are welcome! We need you!