I like how fanfiction culture decided to drop all pretense about self-insert oc characters hooking up with canon characters and just leaned into “character x reader” stories. These were just non-existent in my early FF days, we’re talking 15+ years ago, and they’re everywhere now. I appreciate it, chase your bliss dears
GOD I WISH I HAD THAT SPINE OF STEEL
WHY DID YOU LEAVE OUT THE BEST PART, THIS IS A LEGEND
boy, it really is coincidental and not suspicious that 90% of fandom crusades against “fetishization” and “bad/abusive ships” are focused entirely on gay ships. I especially love how a het ship actually has to have some element of “problematic content” to it to be considered bad (Reylo), but gay ships can be branded bad just by virtue of people liking them (Victor/Yuuri). I’m sure all of this is entirely incidental. 🙂
gently lays on this post in agreement
it’s also really weird and inexplicable that the best way to address dehumanizing portrayals of queer people in the media is to publicly shame women for their sexual interests and expression
Wow, it sure is weird how we shame the people who are doing the thing that’s the issue, which in this case is women fetishizing gay men.
Last I checked, we shame straight men for festishizing lesbians and and no one cares about that (except the fragile men who can’t handle being told to stop fetishizing women’s sexuality). This is the same thing.
1. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: fandom – where women and LGBT people, who are not paid for this and thus have no tangible financial interest in pushing the genre in a certain direction, write romantic porn stories about fake not-real characters that they adore and empathize with – is not on any level comparable to the mainstream porn industry (in which lesbians are routinely fetishized), in which real, breathing, alive, R E A L women’s labour and sexuality is exploited by a billion-dollar industry in which there has been an increasing demand for brutal, violent performance (that happens to, once again, real people). This is not an “apples and oranges” situation, I shouldn’t HAVE to explain why they’re different because they are self-evidently not the same thing.
I’m astounded that people in fandom can make this comparison over and over again, both directly and obliquely. On one hand, I am glad that there are so many people who don’t know much about the current state of the porn industry because that shit KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT. On the other hand, the fact that anyone can compare the exploitation, abuse and fetishization of real life people to the act of SHIPPING anime men with each other displays a shocking lack of perspective.
The thing with “fetishization” in fandom is that no one can seem to agree what it is. Is fetishization stuff like ‘Killing Stalking’? Or is wanting Stucky to be canon? Or is it cute PoeFinn fanart? Is it simply the act of thinking that a gay pairing is cute and romantic and wanting to draw art and read fic of it instead of being interested in its success for Important Purely Political Representation Purposes. I have seen all of these things lumped together or equated, resulting in a culture of hyper-scrutiny that targets m/m and f/f pairings and the people who ship them disproportionately over minor shit that wouldn’t make anyone BLINK in a het pairing.
The reason the portrayal of lesbians in porn, and LGBT people in the mainstream media matters so much is because those portrayals have the ability to reinforce toxic cultural norms on a massive scale, and often work with the specific intent to do exactly that (because these things are produced by privileged people who have power in the dominant culture and financial incentive to do so).
Fandom is not a corporate mechanism with a corporate agenda, or even with any real cultural cache. It’s a grassroots, self-selected sub-culture made up primarily of people who are disenfranchised by mainstream culture on one or more axis. Fandom can be a reflection of those cultural norms, yes, and it’s good to think about that and talk about that, but it’s also a reaction (slash fandom is not as dominated by straight women as you’ve been told). I’ve not seen one piece of compelling evidence or study that says gay fanfic has had a cumulative negative effect on the way culture views gay people. Feminists and academics rail against lesbian porn because it has had an observable effect on the way men view women and because of that, it has begun to bleed out into non-pornographic mainstream culture.
2. And you know what: no, I DON’T see everyone agreeing that men should be shamed for their online conduct the same way women are. Everyone “agrees” on this, but no one actually does anything about it. Why are there so many campaigns to run m/m and f/f pairings into the ground for not being “healthy” enough, or for being too “appealing to fujoshis”, but no one ever goes after the 4chan bros posting macro-dick rape shit and lolicon into the tags of female characters I like? Why is there no mass movement to get people educated on the abuses in the porn industry and organize to help create and bolster more ethical porn?
Instead, it’s just people in fandom bullying each other over pairings as usual, and a not-so-subtle push to put gay fic back underground where it “belongs”.
Just the fact that you see a lot of lesbian and bisexual women who prefer writing slash fic involving male characters goes to show that the motivations going into these stories have less to do with raw sexual appeal and more to do with escaping the psychological and social minefield that comes with women writing about their own bodies/pleasures/relationships. I would even go as far as to say that the constant pressure for women to expose and perform their sexuality for others (regardless of their orientation) is a big part of what makes the idea of writing sexual stories about women an inherently fraught and uncomfortable experience for many women. Writing stories with characters not of our own gender (and thereby, completely inaccessible to straight men) relieves some of that pressure. Make of that what you want (I have mixed feelings about it, myself), but it’s certainly not the same motivations that go into straight men creating lesbian porn—which, as far as I can tell, extend no further than wanting to watch attractive women in sexual situations without the ‘competition’ of another man in the picture, or wanting to avoid homophobic panic from watching porn that includes male bodies. Whatever criticisms one can make about how women write slash fiction, the argument that it’s the mirror equivalent of men and lesbian porn is inaccurate and harmful.
“escaping the psychological and social minefield that comes with women writing about their own bodies/pleasures/relationships”
I think about this concept a lot and this is one of the better ways I have seen it expressed.
The experience of fandom, especially in the age of the internet, is one of binge reading: most new fans, upon discovering fanfic, gobble it down. The first story you read is usually an eyebrow raiser; shocking, maybe a bit embarrassing. “What is this craziness? Do people really do this? I don’t think I like it. Are they all like this? Let me just look at one more …” And then the next thing you know, it’s four in the morning, it’s three days later, it’s ten years on. You are at your friend’s house, and the floor around you is covered with zines. You are on the internet, and you haven’t showered in days. Your browser history is a dreadful embarrassment. You’ve read roughly forty-five thousand stories, some of them amazing, many of them terrible, and you now have all sorts of opinions about tropes and genres. You have developed a particular taste in fanworks. You really like femslash, or hurt/comfort, or cavefic, or long, plotty gen. But I guarantee you this: no matter what you like, and no matter how much there is of it–there isn’t enough of it.
And so some readers (and some of you) will start to write. You’ll write the thing you want to read, because how hard can it be? You can do better than that story you read last night. And that other story you read was okay–except, you know what would have been really good? You know what would have been great? This. This is gonna be great.
– Francesca Coppa, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (ix-x)
i wish more people spread around the quote from a 1998 yoshiyuki tomino interview where he talks about how boys who only build gunpla are fake gundam fans and the true original fans were girls who write fanfiction
I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.
Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.
The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.
Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.
Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.
Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.
By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.
There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.
1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.
2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.
3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.
So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.
this is great!
It also complies with the “killer theory”. I don’t remember exact names, but people in online games are generally divided into four groups:
– explorers research game opportunities, they don’t mind playing alone, usually don’t hurt others, but sometimes they can exploit game weaknesses
– achievers play to win, to gain points, popularity. They need both explorers who know all perks, and socializers – as their followers and support
– socializers – they play because their friends are all here, they like to be together, they are usually most of the players, they can be easily led astray
– killers – for some reasons they come to hurt others, be it hurtful remarks in the chats or disturbing behavior
A tiny amount of killers is manageable and even profitable. (All four types are important). Killers raise stakes for the achievers, give socializers something to talk about in their groups and give explorers incentives to invent something new.
Angered explorers are the top predators here – but they must be seriously offended, and since they play on the outskirts of the game, killers rarely fight them. Killers usually go for the weakest (socializers) or most noticeable (achievers).
But if the game, by its design, somehow attracts to much killers, who scare socializers, leave achievers without their rewards and – by choking the environment – make it boring for the explorers (what I gonna explore here? ten kinds of dick-related-nicknames? Pff!) – they effectively kill the game.
This is awesome. In fandom terms, I think whether a fandom tends to be, in general, a pretty decent place to be with a small tire fire here or there, or one big flaming dumpster fire, probably has a lot to do with who the 1% in that fandom are. If you’re unlucky enough to be in a fandom where a couple of the tire-fire people are the ones who run the exchanges, or the most influential shippers of your particular small pairing, or the big BNF, you are screwed. Even though the vast majority of the fandom undoubtedly still consists of sane and decent people, it’s going to be really hard to avoid the 1%, and they’ll actively drive people out.
On the other hand, some of my best times in fandom have been in calm, sane corners of fandoms that I knew had raging dumpster fires going elsewhere, but I never had to deal with them because my part of the fandom was quite nice.
Large fandoms are a mixed blessing that way … more and bigger tire fires (and more visible to outsiders), but also, with more people and more ships, it’s easier to find cozy little pockets of sanity in which to nest.
oh man, this got so many notes that I missed this- thanks my dude!! I feel honored to have made it onto Fanlore, haha.
That storyline cuts pretty close to the id, you know? And it’s just one of a large number of similarly… charged storylines (soul bonds, every fuck-or-die scenario ever written…) that you see very very often in fanfic, and from time to time in profic as well.
And the profic? Almost uniformly sucks.
Because pro writers either have some shame, and relegate the purest, most cracklicious iterations of those stories to drawerfic that their workshop buddies will never see, or else they’re shameless. But they usually have to be shameless alone– and so their versions are written so solitarily that they don’t have any voice of restraint, to pull them back from the Event Horizon of the Id Vortex when it starts warping their story mechanics.
But in fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material– not all of it, and not for everyone, but. A lot of it is, and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (At least in matters of content. Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.)
And so we’ve got all these shameless fantasies being thrown out into the fannish ether, being read and discussed, and the next thing you know, we’ve got genres. We’ve got narrative traditions. We have enough volume and history for these things to develop a whole critical vocabulary.
We have a toolbox for writing this sort of thing really, really well, for making these 3 A.M. fantasies work as story and work as literature without having to draw back from the Id Vortex to do it.
a friend was asking, in light of me promoting@iddyiddybangbang about the use of the word “id”. This post really helped fandom define the term for itself.
I used to be such an uptight miserable jackass that I *hated* this concept for a while (even while I was writing werewolf porn, idk). NOT ANY MORE.
If you have a passing familiarity with who Jack Harkness is and that Star Trek exists, you’ll be able to follow this one. Aka, Horta Bangs A Who.
Says Ellen of her inspiration: “… this started when I thought of how Naraht was totally Jack’s type except for being a large acid-secreting rock with no recognizable genitals.
“And then I thought, this is Jack. He’s not going to let a little thing like that stop him :-D.”
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
just moving along like everyone else 