i've been posting fanfic since i was fifteen (been writing it a bit longer than that), and the first fandom i ever posted for was the batman fandom, predictably, the batfam fandom, because it was huge at the time and had all the tropes that pulled young people in. characters to get excited about! a plethora of interpersonal relationships to explore! every fanfic i wrote began receiving hundreds of kudos overnight, not because they were great - frankly, they were awful. they had terrible grammar, zero formatting, plot holes, all the makings of a story written by someone really young with zero idea of how the world works. i wrote about feelings. about family. about relationships where nothing goes wrong and everything is fine and fluffy all the time. where conflict was extremely contrived - and easily resolved. i wouldn't touch an idea if it had a sad ending, and i wouldn't dare write something if it was a controversial topic in the fandom. the comments i got then were probably from young people like me, who hadn't read a lot of stories and hence thought mine were amazing. and i'm not being derisive to my younger self here. i love that she actually made the leap and began a hobby that the me of today enjoys so deeply and dearly. but the me of back then was not nearly this well-read or experienced and it showed.

there are a lot of people like me, young people, who started out like this and actually built huge platforms off of their popularity. you see a lot of harry-styles-fanfic-turned-movies or twilight-fanfic-turned-movies today, mainly because of this popularity. young people like reading stories by other young people because they don't have a measure yet of how anything works, so they are far more forgiving of continuity errors and suspend their disbelief more easily - if they have any at all. and casting the widest possible net will always bring in the most people because your fear of being disliked in your fandom keeps you from alienating other fans. from writing things that will alienate other fans.

i started writing batman fanfic on a whim again late last year, and i don't receive nearly as many kudos as i used to on my older account. a part of me did wonder - have i actually gotten worse? do i write badly now? which surprised me because i know how to keep my tenses straight now. i'm better at punctuation (even though i still throw semi-colons and em dashes around at random). i write things that i like reading back. i write sentences that i like. if i had to pick between the fics of then and the fics of now as a true representative of my writing style, i would pick the fics of now.