The way I usually describe this split is that it's about people who see fandom as Content™ and part of their media diet vs. people who see fic writing as a hobby.
Fic certainly is part of many people's media diet and often a very major portion of what they use for entertainment, but ye olde fandom was, on average, more focused on fic as an act of writing. Fic is something you do. AO3 exists to protect authors' right to post, first and foremost.
Someone might enjoy the hat I give them as a gift or like my pics of my sweater, but knitting is still primarily my hobby that's about me doing things with my hands, not a way for other people to get hats or nice pictures. When I write fic, it's a hobby that's about me writing, not you reading even if your appreciation as a reader does provide some extra motivation for me to finish shit and post it, both the actual social interactions and just imagining that a fellow shipper will now have something to read.
As fic has gotten ever better known and easier to find online, more people have started to take it for granted and talk about it from an exclusively reader point of view. Some of them are clueless and self-absorbed. Some of them are doing it intentionally to further an agenda.
This isn't entirely new. When I was in HP fandom years ago and adjacent to some really insanely big BNFs, I witnessed a mountain of "I'm just a little guy" posturing. Twenty-five years ago, some corners of fandom were already plagued by readers treating fic writers like youtube stars who had power over them and owed them things. Some of the BNFs cultivated this crap; most did not. But it took a truly insanely massive fandom to have the glut of fic that made that possible. Those fandoms were very rare in the past. They're much less rare now, and the overall hugeness and searchability of AO3 is extremely visible.
It's not just about fandom being more mainstream. It's also about changing social pressures to monetize every single hobby and moment of time. Insert rant about the gig economy here. There's a bit of an age split simply because the younger generations have less hope and more pressure to ruin their hobbies with MLM-ish thinking.
People pulling the "wah, wah, wah, WHITE MEN" shit do not have good intentions.
The biggest factor that lets them get a foot in the door and prevents sensible people from instantly blocking everyone who starts in on this is that AO3 succeeded.
In 2007, the norm was for m/m fans to be treated as second class citizens all over the internet.
In 2026, the norm is for m/m fans to be treated as second class citizens all over the internet aside from AO3 and sometimes Tumblr.
It is possible to exist in a bubble where AO3 looks like big brother in a way that was simply not the case twenty years ago. WWOMB and other multifandom slash archives existed and were certainly pro-m/m, but they were relatively small, not central hubs like FFN. LJ was a welcome respite from the unending "Why can't men just be friends" and worse, but we all know how that turned out. And even then, it was common for a LJ com for such-and-such a fandom to be slash-only or het-only or something. There was a huge split even if slash was starting to win out more and more.
AO3 is the infrastructure of fanfic fandom today and it puts the equality of m/m front and center in the site design itself.
Unfortunately, that also artificially inflates the popularity of m/m on AO3 allowing stupid people who are emotionally 5 to rail against m/m and pretend they're railing against The Man while ignoring what posting on their fandom's main subreddit is like.
I do think AO3-style fandom does bear some blame (aside from the popularity of AO3 itself) for the stupid attitudes.
Meta of days of yore vastly inflated the amount we actually elevate walk-on characters and overstated how genuinely transformative fic tends to be. It's a useful legal argument, but most fic is actually a lot like canon plus some extra kissing and/or punching.
Meta and acafandom coming from the Western side of things also didn't bother to know or care about Asian fandoms for years while also being largely silent on minority characters in US media while also going on and on and on about how extremely accepting and revolutionary and feminist and special fandom was.
I do think women writing erotica at all is still revolutionary even in 2026, but if we can recalibrate our claims to be more reflective of actual fandom, I think it will leave less room for bad actors to sound reasonable. We've basically taken everything that's potentially offputting about middle class white US feminism and added "ew, weebs". So when someone is like "How come you aren't elevating the black characters?" people are left scrambling and come up with incoherent or even blatantly racist explanations. ("Rico just didn't seem like he supported Sonny." HE WHAT NOW?)
The actual answer is that we rarely elevate anyone, and we need to let go of the self-important belief that we do. We just make main characters kiss who didn't in canon, and the number of black leads is small and the number who didn't get shafted by canon is smaller. [Cf. my many rants about filmmaking visual language vs. the script and how some characters "should" be awesome but people subconsciously know they aren't and thus don't get fandomy about them.] The other answer is that people are expecting fandoms to look like HP when they usually look like two years of yuletide fics and then silence.
Fandom is special, but it's special in a far narrower sense than some of the ridiculous paeans we've written over the years, and being able to be honest about that would also help us push back against people weaponizing Bad Archive Stats to pretend that hating their NOTP is activism.
Fandom does often let people from homophobic environments discover a Queer As Norm type of art that they can access even if they don't have a credit card and can't access mainstream entertainment from such-and-such a country.
It was great in the 90s. It remains great now.
Fandom is also pretty willing to latch onto a variety of countries' media and a variety of ethnicities of character, but only if that media is readily available, in certain genres, and neither too good nor too bad, and only if the characters are central ones whose internal emotional life is presented as important by canon. So Thailand can add SE Asia to East Asia in the pantheon of oft-ficced media sources by coming out with some BL series that are decently acted and have okay budgets, but an Afrofuturist film three people saw at a film festival is probably not going to revolutionize AO3 fic stats.
Fandom likes all genders of characters and of ships, but m/m tends to be more popular than f/f in AFAB-heavy spaces, while f/f tends to be more popular than m/m in AMAB-heavy spaces, and we are too misogynist, too misandrist, and absolutely too transphobic about every flavor of transness to handle any kind of reasonable conversation about any of that.
Essentially, there are parts of mainstream culture we never challenged and we still don't. I think that's okay. But pretending we were and are revolutionary on all axes makes it easier to attack us.
We were too up our own butts about our specialness, succeeded too hard at AO3, and are too scared of being called unprogressive to be able to push back against bad actors who treat fic as Content™ and think Susie Q Fic Writer and That Network Head with the Insensitive Tweets are exactly the same.
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