sofstyle01

Many people outside the fanfic realm wonder why people are compelled to spend their time writing stories about existing fiction … for no pay and an ostensibly tiny readership. But research suggests something quite different. It turns out that fanfic communities can do a lot of good for writers—especially young, queer ones. Fandoms combine the undeniably awesome power of fiction with the unflaggable support of a community; in fact, science says this heady amalgamation actually make writers happier and better adjusted.

It appears that a large majority of the online fanfic world is young and queer. A 2011 analysis of user profiles on Fanfiction.net found that the average user’s age is around 15, while popular fanfic site Archive of Our Own found in their informal 2013 census (AO3) that the average user’s age is 25. The AO3 census also found that only 38% of respondents identified as heterosexual, and more people identified as genderqueer than as male. (Both analyses have sampling issues that make it difficult to know how well their results capture the fanfic community at large, but they’re the only attempts that have been made to collect stats on who writes fanfic.)

Fanfiction: An Economic Review:

The nation of Fanfiction has a unique economic footprint. As areas of employment, agriculture and manufacture are nearly non-existent, suggesting that even processed goods are readily available in the natural environment. This resource generation seems linked to the placement of naturally occurring dwellings, as little construction exists, and transport jobs are minimal. With so much readily available, social progress is a low priority; computing, engineering and science are all far less active than the rates seen in America, and law and social work are similarly diminished.

The prosperity of the environment creates a surplus of leisure time, which many fill with additional education and training. Nearly a third of the population are employed in colleges as professors or full-time academics, while another quarter work as high-school teachers. Entertainment and the arts are prospering, and food retailers - predominantly small, locally owned artisanal coffeeshops - are commonplace. Non-food retail is largely focussed on luxuries such as flowers, books and pets. However, crime rates have risen in line with increased leisure; while criminal activities are not directly measured in this survey, law enforcement employs around 2.5 times as many people per head of the population as the police force in the United States.

Inspired by this post, I completed a survey of AO3 tags, measuring all non-fandom-specific AU tags that implied the existence of real, modern, legal jobs. Click the graphs to see larger versions.

I bind fanfic and other underground writing into real books.  I am a Guerilla publisher.

In a nutshell, the reasons why:

A demonstrative statement on the validity of “fic” in general (and fanfic within that specifically) as a newborn genre of literature that has really only come into its own in the last 15-20 years.

Disrupting preconceptions about what is valuable and worthy of being in print, much less published in a fine edition.

An act of anti-capitalist resistance. Participation in the traditional gift economy of fandom. Most of my projects are volunteer and gifts.

Preservation of fandom history and works for future generations. These books cannot blip out of existence by puritanical updates to a socmed terms of service. These books are acid-free, archive ready, made to survive for another century.

Demonstration against censorship of fiction. Most of the books contain subject matter some people may find objectionable on various grounds.

In summary, it’s a big Fuck You to power structures that silence people. Also it makes my friends so happy that they cry, so that’s nice too.

My book design is deliberately conservative because I am challenging ideas of what should be inside the book. The more a book looks like something a “real” publishing house would put out, the stronger and more subversive the statement it makes.

I am also doing a lot of research working on replicating the style of books from centuries past, and publishing historical fic set in whatever period, in an embodiment that matches. Colors, typography, even form factor as much as possible. I have done Victorian, Edwardian, Renaissance eras. 

Here are some various process pics. Books pictured:

WAR, CHILDREN by Nonymos (Captain America: Stucky)

AND THEN THERE WERE TWO by NymeriaKing (Star Wars / Kylux)

BLUTRUNST by IncurableNecromantic (Over the Garden Wall)

CHOSEN MAN by Sineala (Eagle of the Ninth)

There’s a newborn resistance (meaning, in the last decade) to printing fanfiction for profit in codex form (a la filing off the serial numbers). There’s an underlying resistance to for-profit fanfiction unrelated to form (recall the backlash to platforms like Kindle World that marketed themselves with potential for for-profit gains through posting fanfiction). Fanfiction is such a gift-based culture (as OP recognizes) that transforming a popular fic for profit can feel like a slap in the face to long-time readers who supported a writer, suggested ideas, and partook in the fic-making process. These mores and forms separate fanfiction from the literary marketplace, to quote Francesca Coppa.

We (readers) often understand codex books as bought or borrowed, tying codices to the literary marketplace. How do you get books? You buy them, or borrow them from a library (woohoo!), or skirt the cost by trying to download them illegally or legally from the web (which also skirts the form…is an ebook a codex? A different conversation).  Much of book history is steeped in understanding the production economy of books, i.e. one element of the literary marketplace. The oft-repeated line is that book making is laborious, expensive, and driven by profit, uninterested in romantic notions of ‘books are art!’ Anyways, that’s how a Euro-centric approach to book production sees it. 

So: if fanfiction is resistant to the literary marketplace, it follows that fanfiction is resistant to codices (in its current, most popular iteration, I’m excluding zines here, because those pose their own complications to understandings of book history). To turn around and say, ‘hey, I print fanfiction in codex form, I gift those codices, I do this as an act of anti-capitalist resistance, I do this to preserve and to disrupt, and I’m thinking critically about the form of the codex as reflective of its content’ spins all of these notions of their heads. Fanfiction already challenges so many understandings of book history: it is not materially expensive and it is more often than not made out of passion and exploration than for profit. It positions itself in opposition to The Book. OP has taken The Book, loaded it with all of the disruptive qualities of fanfiction, and now reformed the codex as antithetical to the literary marketplace via fanfiction. 

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed

1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites

1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere

1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites

1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites

2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites

2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again

2001 - Tripod Massacre

2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN

2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks

2002 - FFN bans porn

2002 - FFN bans RPF

2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes

2004 - FFN bans script format

2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic

2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded

2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again

2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes

2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal

2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids

2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it

2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites

2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted

2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted

2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly

2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity

2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic

2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN

2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence

2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org

2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn

2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic

2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content

2014 - Quizilla shuts down

2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors

2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids

2014 - Viddler deletes vids

2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

2016 - y!Gallery deleted

2016 - Elfwood goes offline

2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic

2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama

2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad

2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs

2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban

2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning

2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.

Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.

Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.

Fans grudge reported each other.

Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

and the results were:

it’s all fanfiction

which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic

idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick

One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. <3

I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.

and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?

we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?

One thing that we do know is that written English has gotten less formal over the past few centuries, and in particular that the word “the” has gotten much less frequent over time.

In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone! 

In the three years I’ve been reading fan fiction, and then writing it, fan fic feels more real. Even as I turn back to reading novels, I’m finding my favorite authors got their start fandom. The words jump off the page, the descriptions create more visual images, and the language and characters are real.

Sources: https://twitter.com/myangryuniverse/status/1297616494176735234 https://twitter.com/_dankou/status/1298187651728715778

Additionally from that, “ Even down to what form of English you use” - yes!! This!! I was basically expected from a young age in fandom to learn American English and change the way I spoke and if there was something I didn’t understand, I was ridiculed for it. And if I spoke in British English at any point, I was, again, met with ridicule - especially if I used slang that’s common among the working class (which the UK has a huge classism problem).

I could go on forever about the other things I’ve experienced in this way but honestly I’d rather not come across as “woe is me” or anything. Especially as when this topic is talked about, Americans want to believe it’s just a “Europeans wanting to be special” thing and not an international problem where non-Western people have spoken up about this exact problem, too.

But yeah, even though these are things that happen in general being on social media in general while being non-American, it pours over into fandom and what’s expected of you in that regard. And while American and European issues tend to share some overlap, there is no one-size-fits-all experience which people just don’t want to acknowledge.

I think understanding that complex issues don’t always have a black and white answer to it is scary for people to accept (especially as oftentimes situations that should have a black and white answer tend to get treated as though it’s a grey area when they’re not), but alas.

I’m sick of seeing anime fics where people can’t afford to go to the doctor. Sick of reading fics where a high school in Korea somehow magically operates like an american public school. Sick of having tags flooded with Christmas fics every December where non Christian people in asian countries are celebrating a traditional christmas.

WHAT IS NORMAL FOR YOU IS NOT ALWAYS NORMAL FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD.

Yet for some reason that is the norm and it is what everyone does and how everyone writes and it is accepted by one and all on the internet because according to the internet the american way is the right way and everything else is not.

If I were to write fics about non Indian characters in countries outside of India and incorporate my culture in them it would be a crime. People would leave comment after comment going “um actually this is how things work” and others may even send me hate tell me I’m stupid and I shouldn’t write and so on and so forth. Yet, the fact that fandom is so Anglo centric and has almost entirely whitewashed and westernized non white and non american works and characters is “just how things are.”