#sanepool

Early Grey Tea: The inevitable Zombie Apocalypse is upon us! What’s your plan of action? Step One: get weapons. Step Two: get the fuck away from people…ideal place being forest/mountains because that means food/water/less people to become zombies and honestly what zombie is gonna hike up a damn mountain Step Three: build/steal a nice lil cabin by water with fish 

This is goals

4. texting bi or talk on the phone bi?texting bi

6. earth, air, fire, or water bi?fire!

8. smoking bi or drinking bi?neither im a responsible bi (but ill probably end up a drinking bi)

here’s the art in question!

i can’t guarantee its quality, but i do hope there’s at least something you like about it

oh no what did he do?

http://whitebnf.tumblr.com/post/128746138915/justwantobehere-unimpressed2chainz

oh no youve activated my trap card, ie , “talking about fanfic” 

anyhow logically its cos for a work of writing to be published it has to be run through editors and approved by a publishing company (im talking about mass publishing). so if your writings shit, its unlikely a company will pick it up. if its sort of shit, the editors usually help through it. 

fanfic has no such thing. people beta each other, which is great, but like... anyone has the freedom to post anything. so theres greater variety in quality seeing as there arent necessary quality checkers. hence its easier to realize when fic is bad, as “bad fic” is usually like, 20 times worse than bad published work, and thus more obvious

what op might have also been implying by stating that one must read into published lit for a while before forming an opinion was that bad published lit is often bad not bc of writing technicalities (or at least not overtly) but because of 

plot development

underlying political beliefs

ill address 2 first: the “politics” of a book can emerge way later than in the first few chapters, while the “politics” of fic show up usually pretty early. hence i can read through any number of books before coming upon something super misogynistic while fanfic starts discussing its basis pretty soon 

the explanation for this is kinda complicated, the more i think about it, but the gist is that current fanfic is written and consumed often by teens to adults in their 20s (im speaking for new age fanfic, old age fanfic is another deal entirely), and fanfic is a byproduct of fandom, and fandoms, as of late, have been mostly situated on tumblr, which has been an increasingly larger platform for political education for this age range (especially if youre in any sort of marginalized group). 

so basically authors of current fanfic tend to be vaguely more politically aware wrt their audience. since fanfic is derivative it usually establishes how it deviates or manipulates a canon pretty early on, and that includes the politics. hence if the politics are bad you realize early on and know its badfic

additionally fanfic is kind of the hub for portraying marginalized ids seeing as it lacks the publication factor (so you dont need to pay or get people to approve your ideas which is less likely for when you portray a lot of marginalized ids), and operates on characters people already like so its basically easier to just figure out how friendly the author is to transness, nonstraightness, different races, whatever

as for plot development, i have less of a reason for but it again relates to the idea that fanfic operates on characters that already exist and that there are a lot of established tropes in ff.

in published lit you cant figure out what the plot is going to be at all unless you search it up and spoil yourself, so you have to just trudge through the whole thing and hope you like it. it might take you a while to register if you dont like it!

in fic you already know all the characters and their general personality. plot summaries imply whats going to happen and you usually get to see which pairings are going to be catered to. sometimes you even know the tropes that’ll show up. thats a lot of information to know before going in

so youre more or less guaranteed to like the fic as long as the writing quality and politics are good, bc the plot doesnt have to be perfect, it just has to hit all your guilty pleasures or personal likes (tropes) 

fanfic communities have developed a shitton of jargon around the fact you know what a fic is before getting into it- like, “daisuga sickfic fluff, 20k, canon compliant”. i know the pairing, i know the premise, i know the genre, i know the length, and i know its relation to canon. all thats left is making sure the writing quality and politics hang on, which can be figured out in the first few lines (hence “u just gotta read 3 lines and u know”)

 and since fanfic has so many established tropes, usually you can tell where a fic is going in those first few lines after reading the summary and authors tags. if you dont like the trope, you know to get out quick. w published lit, this happens less often (as cliche tropes in published lit are frowned upon, while actively encouraged in ff)