Thoughts on Fanfiction...
The thing I love most about fanfiction is the incredible variety.
There are days when all I want is a nice, fluffy story that feels like a warm hug.
Other times I crave angst! Give me flawed, complex characters with interesting conflicts. Itās okay if it hurts. Go ahead! Punch me right in the feels.
And sometimes I want smut, simple as that. I want to see characters I love allowing themselves to be vulnerable and intimate and sexual. Let them experience pleasure and physical release! Let them communicate their wants and needs and experience the satisfaction of having someone else fulfill them.
The great news is, for every fandom out there, these types of stories exist. Some are sugar sweet and leave you feeling warm and fuzzy inside. Others leave you with a heavy ache in your chest as the characters youāre rooting for come up against impossible obstacles. And others focus on bodies and pleasure and physical intimacy between characters.
The point is that fanfiction is a beautiful outlet we can explore as readers when we want to feel the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences. And for writers, it gives us an opportunity to be creative and imagine new possibilities and scenarios for characters and worlds that mean so much to us.
Right? Maybe? I think so.
And guess what? We all have the freedom to decide what kind of content we want to read, write, support, and engage with. This is why using proper ratings and tags on AO3 or within your tumblr posts is so crucial. It helps readers make educated decisions about the content they want to interact with.
Iām currently working on stories across six different fandoms. And I read stories across many, many more. And with most of them, fanfiction etiquette is not an issue. Authors write, rate, tag, summarize, and then share their work. Readers then read, leave kudos and comments, bookmark, and reblog or promote stories they enjoyed on their own pages. It feels positive and uplifting. And it makes me want to keep actively participating within those communities.
But Iām noticing more and more gatekeeping and judgement in some fandoms that makes me want to disengage completely. If thereās a particular genre/rating/tag/level of intimacy that isnāt your cup of tea, itās entirely possible for you to keep scrolling or to click away and easily find something you will enjoy elsewhere. And if itās not so easy, then the best option is to create the kinds of stories you want to see or promote the authors who are doing the work that you do like.
Tearing down writers who spend their limited spare time creating free content for fandoms they are passionate about seems like such a bizarre and counterproductive thing to do. Iāve seen horrible examples of tumblr users posting scathing reviews of stories they simply didnāt like. Last week, someone went so far as to take the premise of a story they thought was overrated, re-write it themselves, and then share it within the fandom to prove how much better it would have been if they had written it to begin with. And Iāve witnessed more subtle, indirect exchanges that happen in comments and anonymous interactions in Ask Boxes that are just as harmful to writers.
It takes a lot of courage to write. And it takes even more courage to share your writing with the world. This entire post is just a public service announcement to remind you all that there are human beings on the other side of the screens in your hand. And they have feelings. We donāt need to obliterate an author or their work just because we didnāt enjoy it.
Our personal preferences shouldnāt dictate whatās āacceptableā content in a fandom.
Filters are your friend! And I encourage you to use them.
Thatās it. Thatās the post.
blakekathryn
2087
prguitarman
izzy806
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
gracieabrams
