I Dont Know What I’m Doing~~

OMG did he meet him at the museum?

it is...not that big of a deal as people seem to think it is. for several reasons.

dnp have ALWAYS been reading fanfic. like. they have talked about it for years. they have publically written their own. they have always supported it and enjoyed it. this is nothing new.

every fic they talked about was written at least 9 years ago, some even longer, and the authors who wrote those fics are no longer active. one is even an orphan account. i strongly suspect this was on purpose, as when you type those search terms most of them are not the first result that pops up, so no current fanfic authors were affected. also none of them were even rated explicit.

ao3 has a mechanism if you don't want them to see it - you can lock it to non-users! or orphan your work! or post it as anonymous! while i generally agree that dnp are good about understanding phandom space vs public space, anything you post publicly on the internet has a chance of getting to them.

they didn't even read them! they read the descriptions and said nice things.

a big thing i'm seeing is that people are scared that rpf haters will attack them, and uh, if you're an rpf hater, you're in the wrong fandom. dnp LOVE it. they are proudly waving their rpf winning tumblr flag and have been promoting phanworks since the beginning. if dnp don't have a problem with it, haters have no ground to stand on.

Like. I was joking around about them being on ao3 and looking at fanfic, but... I don't think I'd actually care? If they poked light-hearted fun at my fics, I'd laugh, if they read it, I'd be honored, whether they liked it or not, I'd have my fun with it. But now their entire comment section is a war zone of people debating whether or not they should be allowed showing 1-3 fanfic summaries in their videos - not even the fics, just some summaries - and I already know they'll never ever do it again in order to respect fandom spaces, which is fine. It's sweet of them to care.

I'm just so tired of the stigma. "Fanfic authors might get harassed" yeah but that's- that's partially because we're so determined to hide it away from the world that even creators who speak exclusively positively about the RPF created about them aren't allowed to acknowledge it as an *artform*. Like. We won't ever get rid of the "it's all ridiculous/it's all smut/it's all invasive and disrespectful" stigma by simply... never speaking about it.

They can show phanart of phan tentacle hentai without anyone batting an eye, but the second they read a fanfic summary, it's war.