i was born from your desires

okay so i think i found the article op's (and me in my tags) talking about. being exposed to over 40 celsius (120 farenheit or so) for the whole day means youre sweating a LOT (the article says rashid- the farmer at the centre of the text- drinks around 17 liters a Day. humans usually only need 3, so i presume the rest is mostly used for sweat). so much so that the organizm reroutes water from other parts of itself to not die of heatstroke - salivary glands included, which means that 1. they have very little saliva in comparison to a healthy human being 2. what little their bodies DO produce is incredibly acidic, falling to ~5.5 ph from the ideal of 7ph. Teeth dissolve. Quickly. There's a mention of someone losing 8 teeth in two years

im not reading the whole article now (headache -_-), but later on the author of the article says about 30 million people (employed in agriculture) are at risk for extreme dental health problems. 30 million people at risk of not being able to eat solid food. 30 million people at risk of not being able to find work. being able to marry. being able to be part of their community. being able to speak clearly

I know I’m a stuck record about the fact that one of the worst things you can do as a critic or analyst or whatever is invoke a category as an assumed ontological state of which you and your audience share a common understanding without interrogating how + why + to what purpose that category is constructed, but I think it bears repeating when it comes to these apparently endless arguments about the legitimacy, quality, measure of derision etc. that fanfiction merits relative to what gets called ‘real literature,’ as though either of these categories are fixed and discrete states rather than porous boundaries distinguishing the political economy of a prose text. Often, what gets implicitly conveyed in the scaffolding of this discourse is the establishment of a number of predicates for distinguishing category A from category B which fail to hold water upon closer scrutiny. 

(Also, before the bad faith interpretation fandom finds this post, I’m not writing this as a ‘defense’ of fanfiction or making any claims about the legitimacy or value that fanfiction holds relative to works that operate outside of its particular paradigms. I really don’t care about the ‘republished fanfiction’ arguments or Ali Hazelwood or whoever and I think your constant appeals to ‘real literature’ are boring, but I also think that fanfiction tends to be a limited medium and that an engaged and curious reader + writer should try to expand their horizons + critical practices beyond it. I’m just trying to pick at why a lot of what undergirds the articulation of this discourse rests on assumptions that imo shouldn’t be going unchallenged.)

My issue lies with a real determination to defend this category of real literature as describing a body of literature that possesses a particular property which in turn ascribes it a value measure that fanfiction, as a form, lacks, rather than thinking about the sorts of questions that a statement like “Dante’s Inferno isn’t fanfiction” can open up for us as readers and critics. In this discourse, the categories of ‘fanfiction’ and ‘real literature’ come with predetermined value ascriptions – fanfiction is ‘bad,’ ‘real literature’ is ‘good’ (as is conveyed through the qualifier of ‘real,’ ie. attaching a legitimacy that fanfic by implication must therefore lack, and ‘literature,’ an intellectually elevated category that fanfic is, again, shut out of), and the terms of the discourse are to do with arguing whether or not fanfic can be elevated to this (presumed legitimate) category. What you end up with is a distinction between ‘fanfiction’ and ‘literature’ wholly dependent on appeals to quality – the Destiel 300k omegaverse coffee shop AU whatever thing could never be ‘real literature,’ not because of a material distinction between the categories, but because it lacks the nebulous yet innate literary property ascribed to Dante. Besides the fact that this overlooks the subjectivity of ‘quality’ and buys into the assumption that it is an empirically measurable category (a discursive move which is used to defend the interpellation of particular texts into a canonical body), this constructs a predicate wherein one might create fanfiction capable of being transposed into ‘real literature,’ if only they were to write something of the same quality and literary value as the Divine Comedy. 

And like, this isn’t the case, lol. The Divine Comedy isn’t fanfiction, but the claim that it isn’t fanfiction because fanfiction could never achieve its intellectual elevation is philosophically flawed; it introduces the possibility of someone, somewhere writing a fanfiction of equal erudition to the Divine Comedy and thus transcending its ‘bad’ categorisation in favour of a ‘good’ one. If we were to instead approach ‘fanfiction’ and ‘real literature’ as neutral categories – and for the sake of argument, let’s say ‘real literature’ here refers to literature published through a conventional publishing channel, not consciously identifying itself within the ‘fanfiction’ category, and a subject off of which its creator can profit – we can start to take seriously the project of picking at where and why these categories both intersect and diverge, rather than throwing around broad generalisations that reify more of hegemony than they manage to challenge. 

So, what are the terms upon which we distinguish fanfiction from non-fanfiction works of prose? Good-faith interrogation of a few of the conditions upon which this might take place reveals the categories to be more porous than we might assume.

If fanfiction is necessarily derivative, being a reworking of characters/themes/etc from an external source material, then does it follow that the condition of not being derivative makes something ‘not fanfiction’? Is it a work of prose being ‘original’ that distinguishes it from fanfiction, and on the terms of the original discourse, is it originality which merits an intellectually elevated status? If this is the case, what do we do with the great corpus of work which constitutes adaptation, retellings, reimaginings? One might fairly argue that something like the Divine Comedy – or Paradise Lost, or Shakespeare, or, to go earlier, works of epic poetry which borrowed from the mythologies of the time, such as the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid – are beholden to pre- or proto-capitalist economic conditions that lack the concept of intellectual property and which therefore fundamentally alter the relationship between the literary text and its cultural sources, and I’m inclined to agree with that position; but then, where does that leave us when it comes to texts like Wide Sargasso Sea, a 20th-century novel writing within the universe of the nineteenth century’s Jane Eyre? Insofar as ‘real literature’ is a category that exists, WSS certainly belongs to it.

I’ve already touched on why ‘quality’ is an insufficient yardstick for distinguishing the categories, but it’s worth touching on this adjacent question of intellectual depth and merit which people will often appeal to; fanfiction is, in this imaginary, necessarily frivolous, concerned with ‘shipping,’ wholly in the interest of fulfilling certain emotional needs of the reader (needs that are often treated as immature and insufficiently ‘critical’), and therefore shut out of this arena wherein it might actually meet with and develop/challenge the themes of its source material. To me, it reads as something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; because fanfiction by nature is wholly about wish fulfilment, there’s no possibility of it ever accomplishing anything of intellectual worth, and is therefore not to be met with on a critical terrain. Except that this presents a very narrow view of what the form can do, and there certainly exists fanfiction with as much discursive depth to it as any given published work of original prose. There also exists fanfiction which is shallow (which, imo, who cares – it’s a space for amateur prose writers to flex their prose muscle, it’s fine for it to be shallow lol it’s a process of building a skill – but the point is, it exists), bigoted, thoughtless, etc. – but so too does there exist a whole wealth of ‘real’ ‘literature’ with those same attributes. Again, a rubric that relies on appeals to intellectual merit is not a useful means of distinction.

My point is that the fanfiction vs ‘real literature’ debate relies on a number of ascribed properties that do not inherently make a work of prose belong to one category or the other. Building off of all of this, my proposition is that distinguishing fanfiction from non-fanfiction works – and treating these categories as value-neutral rather than good/bad markers – requires describing their political economy. If we pretend for a second that fanfiction hosting websites like AO3 or FF.net existed in 1966, what meaningful difference would it make for Jean Rhys to have published Wide Sargasso Sea as an independent novel, rather than posting it on one of those sites as a piece of Jane Eyre fanfiction? Surely the answer to this lies not in the content of a text (WSS could plausibly be labelled ‘fanfiction’ and presented as such in fanfiction-based format without changing a single word of its actual body of text) but in the material conditions of production and distribution, and how that affects the assumptions we bring with us when we approach it; assumptions that cover questions of quality, authority, depth, the extent to which our criticisms might be fair or unfair. ‘What constitutes fanfiction?’ is a question that is pretty much impossible to answer with anything other than ‘The author said that it was fanfiction, and presented it in a fanfiction-appropriate format.’

Both fanfiction and so-termed ‘real literature’ are contingent categories; the former relies on the existence of IP from which it can derive its status as ‘fan’-fiction, ie. fiction created within the context of one’s being a ‘fan,’ and the latter relies on an intellectual hierarchy and normative site of literary production through which that which has literary value and merit is delineated. Both of these are conditions of capitalism; if we abolish IP, we couldn’t reasonably categorise ‘fan’-fiction as distinct from other derivative works, and if we abolish meritocratic practices of literary production, we cannot assemble a corpus of texts which are metaphysically elevated and therefore meaningfully distinguished as ‘real’ fiction.

Any further qualifier is changeable; the forms have trends and paradigms (fanfiction, due to there being essentially no access barriers to participation and being very much an ‘amateur’ practice, will often be of ‘worse’ quality; fanfiction is limited by its tethering to a source material; the tropes, narrative shapes, expected outcomes, etc. of both forms are as defined by this method of categorisation as they might be by genre or style or anything else, and so on), but none of these qualities are fundamental to the form in question. I think when back-and-forthing about fanfiction and its literary value and its relationship to formally published literature, it’s worth bearing in mind that what we describe when we talk about these categories is divergent sets of material relations with associated paradigms rather than fixed prediscursive states, and trying to establish one form as inherently more meritorious than another reifies the conditions under which those forms are naturalised in the first place. 

It’s very important you slay both of these demons as soon as you hit 30.

Even blaming the parents doesn’t give the full picture. The amount of time and care a child needs is incompatible with capitalism’s requirements of 40 hour a week labor. One or both parents are going to be overworked at home and at their job. This incentivizes more neglectful parenting styles.

sans was a special case because people preferred his original design (short and not conventionally attractive) however the “refusal to engage with any other character” was very much still there like look at all of the AUs that were made specifically because of him.

the amount of mischaracterisation a character has to go through in order to truly count as a sexyman (and there’s about 20 sexymen proper) would cause most people to have a brain aneurysm like it sucks so bad.

times have drastically changed since the onceler, and the range of characters people hype up is far more diverse than it once was. the time period in which a character was most popular (between 2012 - 2018) is the most fundamental part in making them a sexyman.

this is why any sexyman poll made after the one that killed queen lizzy is completely null to me. 90% of the characters in them are just regular fan favourites like get this common real life dude out of there. if you could talk about liking a character with a coworker and not get viciously made fun of by them then that character is not a sexyman like that’s the full truth of the matter.

(this is also why anime boys like reigen and komaeda often count. hate for anything anime-based outside of the internet was especially egregious before 2020)