This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.
Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.
Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.
Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.
“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.”
A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.
Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.
So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?
(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)
(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)
This.
This.
A quintilian times this.Well put
i wouldn’t enact gruesome revenge on hospitals and doctors for my recent medical nightmare – for starters, they aren’t actually at fault, shit just happens sometimes, no matter how much my subconscious doesn’t want to accept that – but i can sure as hell read ALL the winter soldier medical torture fic. i can get my catharsis through his torment, and ride his rage out of the dark place as he slaughters his tormentors.
that doesn’t make me a person who, in real life, condones bloody vengeance. it doesn’t make my rage at my doctors anything but the reflex of an animal in pain, and it doesn’t mean i would act on it.
it just makes those feelings easier to bear and to work through, having that vicarious experience to carry me for a while.
and yes, that includes noncon – visiting that level of degradation on the character helps with the catharsis. people who don’t understand seem to think i’m cheering on fictional rape like it’s a great thing. no, it’s an awful thing, and that’s why it’s there.
Tag: fandom
writers: how are we gonna top ourselves! we got tons of exciting stuff in store!! at least eleven big bads this season!!!! whos gonna survive who won’t????!! 3 love triangles and 2 quadrangles!!!!
me: I’ll Pay You 5$ To Let The Characters Just Simply Talk To Each Other For Once
#650000 baffled articles: ‘but WHY is fanfiction a THING tho’
FANDOM IS FOR PLEASURE
This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while now, but I think I know why the whole ‘anti’ thing on here never really had a snowball’s chance in hell of ensnaring me, at least not as an adult. Because my approach to fandom and fannish activities is fundamentally different than that of a substantial number of younger people on Tumblr. To them, fandom’s both primary and overriding function is that of an activism space. Whereas either twenty years ago or now, my approach has always been:
Fandom is for pleasure.
I’m not saying that it can’t or shouldn’t also be a space for activism – it often is for me as well. What I’m saying is that my primary motivation when approaching fannish activity isn’t activism in and of itself. It’s being pleased. The two aren’t diametrically opposed. To wit:
- I ship queer ships because that’s what pleases me, that’s what makes me happy;
- I scowl at love triangles and write polyamory instead because I had shoddily-written, eye-rolling-inducing, heteronormative love-triangles shoved down my throat for years and now can’t stand them, whereas poly ships make me grin from ear to ear;
- I read and write about politically powerful, complex, conflicted, morally gray women because I love them and went through a dearth of them in far too many mediums
So on and so forth. You might be wondering why I’m even pointing this out and going ‘both roads lead to the same thing for you, same difference.’ Not exactly – and Tumblr itself is amply showing the difference. By not basing my approach solely on a form of activism, I’m effectively not limiting myself in the kinds of things I read or write or enjoy. Not all my queer ships need be all fluff and sunshine and rainbows and healthiness. Not all my women protagonists need be shining beacons of morality (most aren’t). I’m a lifelong educator when it comes to consent culture, but that doesn’t mean I’m obligated to renounce my ravishment fantasies, either in my head, my reading or when practiced in the consensual, communication-first environment of a kinky relationship.
The difference came into sharp focus for me a few months ago, when a post written against the Prince Lotor/Lance pairing of Voltron went something along the lines of ‘shipping this abusive ship is bad because it’s horrible representation for MLM!’ The bedrock assumption underlying the whole thing was that all fannish activity had a moral duty to exist for the express purpose of validation and good representation. Therefore Lotor/Lance wasn’t seen as something in bad taste, to give an example, but rather as a moral failing. This clashes head-on with my own approach, because I’ll ship healthy, meant-to-aspire to dynamics when they please me – but I also go for messy, broken, terrible ones when they also please me.
For me, the overriding question in fandom isn’t ‘what is the most Perfectly Progressive Thing here so I can focus on that.’ It’s ‘what’s the Thing That Pleases Me Most in here.’ That the progressive things largely end up overlapping with what makes me happy is due to my experiences with marginalization and all its associated shit. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that the non-overlap section also includes other things that do it for me (that cater to my kinks, to my darker preferences when it comes to fiction, etc).
The disconnect, I think, comes from the fact that for me (and other older people who’ve also done a lot of hands-on activism work out in meat-space) fandom has always been a place to temporarily break away from how bleak and fucking exhausting activism can get – to relax and unwind and just lose ourselves for a while, when our IRL projects seem to just be spinning their wheels in the mud. Fandoms that are nothing but activism spaces, where everything must be sanitized and pre-approved and healthy and Pure are a nightmare for me specifically because it would mean I’d have to live my life primarily as an activist 24/7, until I’m completely burnt out.
However, a lot of young people on here haven’t done any on-the-ground activism work – their first meeting with activism was on the Internet and in fandoms and the only place where they could stretch their legs as activists was fandom. Therefore, they take this one step farther and naturally view fandom as primarily a place for activism. I don’t even have to describe how horribly that clashes with what I described above – you can see it at work on Tumblr every day, in the myriad of posts going ‘how dare you ship this?!’ or ‘how dare you get off on that?!?!’ or ‘how dare you support this kink!’
This is why it’s so difficult for a lot of people of my age to find any common-ground with antis. Our starting points are radically different and even when we have more in common than different in regard to fannish preference, we’ll still never see eye to eye, because whole sections of this place have taught themselves that it’s a supposedly horrid thing to approach fandom from any angle that’s not based on a very strict, narrow sort of morality.
So much this.
And a lot of the rhetoric doesn’t help, because the rhetoric is full of shit like “well people who ARE [marginalized identity] don’t get to take breaks from this!”
Except that, like. For JUST a personal example: as a queer, disabled, neuroatypical, mentally ill woman? I am most often here to get away from having to deal with being all of those things. (And sometimes, sure, that does in fact mean writing about people who do not share any of my identity markers because then I get to stop thinking about this shit.)
I want to read a trashy shippy piece of fiction without having to think about the realities or the underlying power dynamics or whatever the fuck, and sometimes that means just … ignoring them for a while. Among other things.
So no, you cannot make that assumption and you cannot make that blanket statement. Often we are here to try and take a break from dealing with that shit. It’s not simple.
Take creators stepping in and dismissing fan theories and interpretations of their works with a grain of salt. This is a lesson I learned early, from Anne “my vampires aren’t gay and also I might sue you” Rice.
During the peak of my Vampire Chronicles love, I – at that time, a very petty fifteen-year-old – set out to underline every single really queer moment in the whole series. Spite aside, I quickly realized that in a series where the protagonist runs away to Paris with clearly his violinist boyfriend, and convinces his next super angsty obviously boyfriend to MAKE A VAMPIRE CHILD WITH HIM to keep said angsty boyfriend from leaving, this was easier said than done.
I mean, she’s not fully wrong – Lestat’s not gay, he’s very bisexual. Louis and Nicki are both hella gay, though.
Anyway, I’ve meandered. The point is – creators can say wildly inaccurate things about their works sometimes. Anne Rice went Christian and didn’t want her books to be SUPER FUCKING QUEER anymore. Creators’ views on what they’ve made can change over the years. You never fucking know.
Sometimes I just want to wave my English major wand over fandom and cover everyone in “the author is dead” pixie dust. Because…it doesn’t matter??? The second they put their creation out into the world, they forfeited the right to be the sole authority on its interpretation.
One of the most important things anyone ever told me, as both a writer and a reader, was when my AP English teacher said to me, “Your thesis statement can be whatever you want it to be. You can tell me that King Lear is gay and in love with Kent, and divvying up his kingdom between his daughters is his way of divesting himself of the role of heterosexual fatherhood he’s been forced into. I don’t care what you say – you just need to show me how the text supports it.”
Creators put things in their work that they didn’t consciously intend to. Creators intend things in their work that don’t come through in the text. Once it leaves their hands, it’s yours now.
So I have just learned something life changing from your AP English teacher via tumblr osmosis that I failed to grasp during my entire high school stay, including my own AP English.
every story is told to a different person and to every person it is a different story. and that’s not just okay, it’s wonderful.
hey, can i do a little zen sidestep on this one –
as an author, i do not embrace ‘death of the author’, because when i write i’m deliberately trying to convey the actual specific story i’m writing; whether i communicate it well enough for you to hear it the same as i said it is up to my skill, our cultural similarity, and so forth, but the damn thing does exist, for crying out loud. i’m not an infinite number of monkeys.
also, in this as in so many areas of life: don’t tell me what i fuckin’ said.
and yet. and yet, my darlings. sometimes when the author fails to convey themselves as they wanted to, the message you recieve in error is waaaaay cooler than what they wanted to say.
there are two messages here, the one sent and the one percieved, like a starfield image distorted between the stars and the radio telescope – it’s nonsensical to say those stars don’t exist just because your telescope didn’t image them, but it’s also nonsensical to say that the data you recieved isn’t just as real – and, if you happened to discover a really cool gravitational lensing event, tons better.
the death of the author is based on an illusion, that only one end of that transmission is real.
ask yourself instead: can fandom be better than canon?
and the answer to that, i believe, is: well, duh.
whether it’s permissible, or even desirable, to squirt an egotistical hack with a squirt gun and tell them ‘no’ in a firm voice, is less clear-cut.
Shout out to writers invested in rarepairs!!!
Shout out to writers dedicating time and effort to writing long ass rarepair fics that will only get maybe 50 views on AO3!!!
Shout out to writers who post their fics in the rarepair tag on Tumblr and are the only ones in the tag/get little to no notes on their content!!!
You’re all amazing and your writing is wonderful and I love you lots and lots!!!
Me when writing fanfiction sometimes: I will take a hammer and fix the canon.
the mark of the broken
Kids for the love of god stop putting depreciating little notes in your summaries on ao3.
- if u tell someone something is,bad nine times out of ten, they’re going to believe you without looking at it
- not to say “do as i say not as i do” but if you wouldn’t put up with behavior like what you’re doing to yourself if someone did it to your friend THINK REAL HARD ABOUT IT
- YOU LISTEN TO ME. ITS NOT “AN AU NOBODY ASKED FOR”, ITS “I HAD A GREAT IDEA FOR AN ORIGINAL AU (or take on an AU lmao Shakespeare wasn’t original either) SO I WROTE IT.” HAPPY UNBIRTHDAY SOMEONE WHO IS HAVING A SHITTY DAY AND LOVES DOG GROOMER AUs. YOU JUST MADE THEIR DAY.
Vodka Auntie out OH PS if your mom is shitty or otherwise unavailable on Sunday for mothers day come hang out in my ask box
- “I couldn’t think of a summary” JUST COPY THE FIRST COUPLE LINES OF YOUR FIC INTO THE SUMMARY BOX AND YOU’RE DONE. IT’S MAGIC.
- “Don’t read this” keep it on your harddrive until you’re brave enough to own your work, or post it anon.
- “Just another ___ AU” look, it’s fanfic, everything is variations on a theme. Your variation is as legitimate as anyone else’s.
- “Please don’t hate me!!” just repeat six important words to yourself when this insecurity pops up: fuck you if you don’t like me.
How Long is this Fic Really?: A Guide
Word count in the HP Series:
Sorcerer’s Stones: 76,944
Chamber of Secrets: 85,141
Prisoner of Azkaban: 107,253
Goblet of Fire: 190,637
Order of the Phoenix: 257,045
Half-Blood Prince: 168,923
Deathly Hallows: 198,227Word count in the LOTR Series:
The Hobbit: 95,022
Fellowship of the Ring: 177,227
Two Towers: 143,436
Return of the King: 134,462This changed me
I’ve read/ am reading fic that are upwards to 150,000 – 200,000. You’re telling me that authors that write for fun are writing a full-length book for the fun of it? They have earned my respect 10 fold.
A friendly reminder.
Adding on to this by reminding everyone to leave feedback on fics. Seriously, y’all, fic writers put their heart, soul, blood, sweat, tears, and time into their writing. The least that you could do is let them know you enjoyed their works.
rnph:
tumblr is pretty cool because no matter what you choose to blog about (whether it be jokes, a fandom, fashion, or something else) someone out there will always explicitly hate you for it with mad intensity
just moving along like everyone else 