#writing discourse

It didn't matter if the author took weeks or months or years to update, because they could trust that the readers would still be there. Whereas these days, you have people asking if a fic is "abandoned" if it hasn't been updated in 3 months. There's a general lack of patience from readers who want the next update now, and are more than willing to comment as much on fics. In fact, for some authors, the only comments they get are from readers demanding the next update.

There used to be such a sense of community amongst authors too! Writers used to create "twin AUs" when they shared a faceclaim, they were eager to explore each others' takes on popular characters or even hear their plans for their fics. Although there is still some community to be found, it's few and far between, with a lot of authors preferring to keep to themselves or feel they have to "market" their fics tirelessly to even get interest from readers.

Thanks to my mutual @plumppies for bringing this to my attention

OG Posts Here Here Here and Here by @whimsicallygaydemon

Screenshots for the lazy people

Also more screenshots here please read these ones

My mutual sent me these posts, and after reading every single one of them, I completely understand where they're coming from.

One thing my mutual said that really stuck with me was that people need to stop being vague as fuck whenever discourse like this comes up and actually say what they're mean instead of tiptoeing around the issue.

I agree.

So that's exactly what I'm going to do.

I genuinely do not understand this obsession some people have with writing Michael in these kinds of dynamics.

Before anybody starts twisting my words, this is not about every single age-gap relationship.

If you want to write Michael at 50 with a reader who's 30, that's your business. They're both grown adults. I probably wouldn't even think twice about it.

That is not what people are criticizing.

What people are criticizing, and what I'm criticizing, is when you make the reader 18, 19, 20, or claim she's in her mid-twenties, and then spend the entire fucking story making her act like she's six years old.

Why?

Seriously, what the fuck is the point?

If your character is an adult, why is she written like she doesn't know how to kiss?

Why is she written like she doesn't understand basic affection?

Why does she constantly need everything explained to her?

Why is she so sheltered that she comes across as a little kid instead of an adult woman?

Why is Michael calling her "little girl," "kid," or other infantilizing names throughout the story?

At what point am I supposed to stop seeing that as deliberate?

Because to me, after a certain point, it stops reading like an age-gap romance and starts reading like a relationship where one character is intentionally coded to feel childlike.

And that's exactly what disturbs me.

Before somebody says, "Well, she's actually twenty-four," or "She's twenty-six."

I genuinely don't give a fuck.

Changing the number on the page doesn't magically change the characterization.

If you spend fifty chapters writing an "adult" who talks like a child, reacts like a child, thinks like a child, and gets treated like a child, readers are going to read her as childlike.

That isn't people making shit up.

That's people reading what you literally fucking wrote.

Characterization matters.

Authors choose every single detail.

You choose how your character talks.

You choose what she knows.

You choose what she doesn't know.

You choose how she reacts.

You choose how Michael responds to her.

You choose the nicknames.

You choose the dynamic.

None of that happens by accident.

Writing is a series of conscious decisions.

You don't accidentally write someone who behaves like a child.

You don't accidentally make "little girl" a recurring nickname.

You don't accidentally build an entire romance around one character constantly teaching, guiding, protecting, and talking down to someone you've supposedly written as an adult.

Those are choices.

Readers are responding to those choices.

And that's why I get frustrated whenever people reduce this conversation to, "Oh, so you just hate age gaps."

For the hundredth fucking time, no.

The age gap by itself is not what bothers me.

It's the combination.

It's the age gap.

It's the infantilization.

It's the childlike innocence.

It's the helplessness.

It's the pet names.

It's the reader behaving years younger than she's supposedly written to be.

It's Michael constantly taking on this parental or instructional role while she's written as someone who barely functions as an adult.

It's all of those things together.

And honestly, I think some people have started confusing innocence with childishness, and they're not the same fucking thing.

An adult can be shy.

An adult can be inexperienced.

An adult can be awkward.

An adult can be nervous.

An adult can be a virgin.

None of those things make someone a child.

You can absolutely write an innocent adult woman without making her feel like she's in elementary school.

Those are two completely different things.

Somewhere along the way, people started writing "innocent women" as if they have no agency, no understanding of the world, no emotional maturity, and no ability to function independently.

I hate that trope.

Not just in Michael Jackson fanfiction.

In fiction in general.

Then there's Michael himself.

This is the part that genuinely pisses me off.

Whether you believe he was innocent or guilty is not even the point I'm making.

The point is that accusations involving children followed Michael Jackson for decades.

Those accusations completely changed how the public viewed him.

They became one of the defining parts of his legacy.

So why the fuck would you willingly write him into dynamics that resemble the exact kind of allegations that dominated his life?

Out of every romance trope that exists…

Out of every possible relationship dynamic…

Out of every story you could tell…

Why choose one where the other character is written to feel as childlike as possible?

I genuinely don't understand it.

To me, it feels incredibly disrespectful.

If you love Michael as much as you say you do, I don't understand why this is the version of him you'd want to romanticize.

Another thing I've been thinking about is how this affects the fandom.

People already stereotype Michael Jackson fans enough as it is.

Then stories like this get shared around, people outside the fandom see them, and suddenly everyone is asking what the fuck is wrong with MJ fans.

Whether that's fair or unfair doesn't change the fact that it happens.

Public writing shapes how communities are perceived.

That's just reality.

I've also seen people say that multiple readers relate to these stories.

Okay.

I'm not saying they don't.

But people relating to something doesn't automatically make it immune from criticism.

People relate to toxic relationships.

People relate to unhealthy family dynamics.

People relate to all kinds of things in fiction.

That doesn't suddenly mean nobody is allowed to question how those things are portrayed.

"People relate to it" isn't some magical conversation ender.

It doesn't erase why other readers are uncomfortable.

Another thing I keep seeing is people acting like criticism is somehow the same thing as censorship.

It isn't.

Nobody is stopping you from writing.

Nobody is deleting your blog.

Nobody is reporting your account simply because they disagree with you.

People are reading something that was posted publicly and giving their opinion on it publicly.

That's literally how the internet works.

If people can tell you your fic is amazing, then people can also tell you they think your fic is creepy.

Those two things go hand in hand.

Something else I want to make clear is this.

I'm not sitting here saying I know anything about these authors as people.

I don't.

I have absolutely no idea who they are outside of what they choose to publish online.

What I am saying is that the fictional dynamics themselves make me deeply uncomfortable because they repeatedly lean into traits and interactions that make the younger character feel childlike.

When I read stories that combine an extreme age gap with repeated infantilization, that's going to evoke predatory dynamics for me, regardless of what disclaimer is attached at the top.

That's my reaction to the writing.

It's not an accusation about the author's real life.

It's my response to the fictional dynamic they've chosen to create.

At the end of the day, I read Michael Jackson fanfiction because I love seeing different interpretations of him.

I love fluff.

I love romance.

I love domestic stories.

I love family AUs.

I love stories that let him be happy in ways he didn't always get to be.

What I don't love is opening a fic and ending up wondering what the actual fuck I'm reading because the relationship feels less like two adults falling in love and more like one adult being paired with someone who's been written to feel like a child.

Call me judgmental.

Call me sensitive.

I honestly don't give a fuck.

If your version of an adult has to be written like a child for the relationship to work, I'm going to think it's weird every single time.

No disclaimer is going to change that.

No "she's actually twenty-four" is going to change that.

And no amount of telling me "it's just fiction" is going to make me stop criticizing a fictional dynamic that I personally find disturbing.

Another thing I haven't really seen people talk about is how this trope honestly does a huge disservice to adult women.

Why is innocence constantly written as incompetence?

Why does being shy suddenly mean you don't know how to function?

Why does being inexperienced suddenly mean you have the emotional maturity of a child?

Adult women can be awkward.

Adult women can be virgins.

Adult women can be nervous.

Adult women can be soft-spoken.

Adult women can be sheltered.

None of those things make them children.

I hate how often fiction, not just Michael Jackson fanfiction, equates femininity and innocence with childishness. It's honestly insulting. Adult women don't suddenly stop being adults because they're inexperienced, and I wish more writers understood that.

Here's a question I genuinely keep asking myself.

If you rewrote the exact same story but made the reader act like an emotionally mature twenty-five-year-old woman, would the romance still work?

Would people still enjoy reading it?

Would the chemistry still be there?

Or is the appeal tied to the fact that she's written to be dependent, helpless, and childlike?

Because if changing her into an actual adult completely changes the dynamic, then I think that's worth thinking about.

And also

I said what the fuck I said.

I'm so disgusted i could keep talking but i cant make this too long

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thank you for your time!

❝ nothing anyone can write—no matter how shockingly disgusting or how morally messed up—is ever wrong as long as it’s fiction. ❞

there is a PLETHORA of other talented writers on here for the mj fandom who aren’t exploiting the black community and who aren’t using michael as a shield for their bigotry

People are allowed to voice their opinions on their own blogs. When someone posts, "I hate coming across incest/fauxest, it’s gross," or "I'm sick of all the [blahblah]!" why are you getting so mad and defensive? People are allowed to judge, and people are allowed to have different opinions—just like you do. You choose to write/interactive with these topics, but the moment someone blogs their thoughts, you accuse them of being immature/childish, boring (whatever that means), or being a puritan 😭 It’s so ignorant.

Yes, rape is terrible and horrifying. Incest is disgusting. Writing about sa or pedophilia for the sake of getting off is sick. The infantilized reader kink/fetish—I could go on. It’s called taboo and dark for a reason. Y'all need to get comfortable with the fact that people are going to call it disgusting or weird—because it is. It isn't sweet, sexy, or appealing to most.

Every other post on my feed(s) lately is "how to spot AI writing," and they all list the same tells of em dashes, inversions like "it's not x, it's y," specific phrasing, god forbid a girl uses the word quiet. And, truly, I get it; nobody wants to support people gaming the system with generated slop or passing off something a machine wrote as their own craft. But I think this witch-hunt is actively corroding the writing community, and the general public along with it. Exhibit A: My friends who haven't cracked a novel since sophomore year English and whose entire written output is Slack messages and birthday captions are now telling me, a writer who grew up getting her prose torn apart at the dinner table by a copywriter and a screenwriter, that I need to drop em dashes from my work because it "sounds like AI." Like, that's where we're at.

And now, I've started catching myself going through drafts I wrote with my own hands and brain, scanning for anything that might get flagged by the mob. It's like I'm changing things not because the revision is better, but because I'm afraid it'll get flagged as generated content by some stranger on the internet who read one infographic about AI tells, which is a bit terrifying when you think about it. My last sentence literally used an inversion structure, and my brain immediately went, 'change it, they won't like that.'

Recently, I've had to stop and go, wait, I'm now making my writing worse on purpose. I'm abandoning my own voice, and frankly flattening the hell out of it, because I'm scared of an accusation on something I know I wrote myself. And in my opinion, that type of mentality is precisely how we lose good, if not great, aspiring authors and poets.

Again, I want to be crystal clear in saying I'm not writing this in hopes of making a case for AI in creative writing/art. But it feels like this is turning into another paper straw 'save the turtles' situation, where we shove all the responsibility onto individuals, especially ones who aren't famous or making money from their work, and tell them to police every sentence instead of just writing. Meanwhile, we could be building community and letting the actual slop reveal itself and fall to the wayside the way bad writing always has.

I guess my point is, if every human writer starts contorting their voice to dodge the same list of "AI tells," we all end up sounding the same anyway, which is the exact thing we were trying to avoid. (for reference, I wanted to end that last sentence with a rhetorical question, but I figured that's probably on the list too. And now I'm being snarky, which means it's time to wrap this up).

I don't know, maybe this is more of a rant than a question, but either way, curious if others are feeling the same way/how you're navigating.