An Inane Five Minutes

I wrote this fic for me but y'all can read it if you want

There’s something about fandom culture that has struck me as odd right from the start, but I needed a while to figure out what exactly it is, and even longer to figure out how I feel about it myself.

While we hardly discuss or question original media with dark themes, fan-made content that falls into this category is shunned and ostracised. Fans who create or consume “dark” or “problematic” fic or art get ridiculed, sneered at, harassed and threatened.

Lust, greed, violence. Betrayal, obsession, madness. All these and more are part of human nature, whether we want to admit it or not. All these have been explored in art, in literature, in science, throughout human history - heck, even most creation myths are so gory and violent they make your hair stand on end.

Canon itself of many fandoms is full of fucked up things. Personally, I’m in snk fandom - a manga that is full of violence and gore. There’s murder, torture, genocide, racism, ethnical cleansing, infanticide and sexual harassment of minors - to only name a few. We take it for what it is. A cruel, messy, terrible universe that moves and touches us.

But if a fanartist or fanfiction writer dares to create something where the characters do less than savoury things - if they, for example, commit murder, have sex with minors, manipulate or abuse each other - y’all go screaming bloody murder about perverts and pedos in the fandom.

I guess I have just reached a point where I’m really, really fed up with it. Consuming dark content, creating dark content is nothing to be ashamed of. There’s twisted alleys and grimy backyards in our minds, and you can either deny and ignore them and let them fester and rot and poison you… or you can address and explore them. Admit that they’re part of you, of what and who you are.

I read darkfic, and I’m done with pretending that I don’t. I’m perfectly aware that the things happening in these fics are neither healthy nor romantic. I read them exactly because they’re not healthy or romantic. I also write darkfic, and I’m done with deleting them from my laptop or leave them to rot in my folders. These fics have become an important means of managing my mental health. Fear, grief, trauma, nightmares. I can purge this all from my soul without hurting a single person. Fictional characters are the puppets of these fantasies I’m entertaining, and you know what’s amazing about fictional characters - you can kill them over and over again, abuse and torture and mutilate them and the next moment they will be standing in all their glory, unharmed and unscathed.

A writer can be a murderer, a rapist, a monster in their head. No matter if they are published and paid, or if they anonymously post their works on AO3 and wattpad. A reader can be a psychopath, a kidnapper, a monster in their head, no matter if they purchase a paperback on Amazon or read fanfiction on AO3 and wattpad.

Stage 1: cute tiny “O”-mouth.

Stage 2: sticky the tongue out real far