past me: canon is sacred I must carefully fact-check everything to make sure it is canon-compliant
present me: canon is a box of scraps in a cave I’m gonna tear that shit apart throw away 90% of it and out of the good bits build something absolutely beautiful and amazing
I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality, that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.
Well, we stopped leaving page-long chatty preamble warnings detailing each and every one of these points, for one thing.
Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
2day my linguistics professor asked people to name some ships bc she was talking about morphology & how ship names were an example of blending and the room of 100+ people was completely silent bc who wants to expose themselves?? until this one person was like “umm johnlock” and i heard someone behind me go “oh my god……. i hate this”
Your linguistics professor is a coward if they didn’t lead with a personal low to warm up the room. Start with snupin and work up from there
people who still refer to nerd slapfights as ‘wank’.. u are valid
honestly bring wank back. ‘discourse’ is way too dignified of a word, as if foucault has anything to do with this nonsense
Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it
That thing you wrote that isn’t “good enough” to put up on the AO3. You can put it up there! The AO3 isn’t meant to be The World’s Classiest Showcase. It’s an archive. It exists because most other forms of hosting fannish work eventually degrade or disappear. Accounts get deleted. Websites shut down. The AO3 preserves those things. Ten years from now you’ll be like, “Shit, there was this really great tag essay, but the person changed their Tumblr URL and then Tumblr closed up shop…” (look, even Tumblr will die eventually) and your only hope of finding it will be if the page was cached, or if somebody uploaded it to the AO3.
The AO3 exists to preserve ephemera as much as substantial works. You know how valuable it is for archaeologists to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? The little things, the notes, the headcanons, the notfics, the meta, the back-and-forths, are all important too.
YES YES YES THIS.
Tumblr’s likely to die sooner than you expect, and suddenly – it’s owned by Yahoo. (Anyone remember
del.icio.us, later delicious.com?) Yahoo’s trying really really hard to squeeze money out of tumblr and it’s not working, for all the reasons discussed in synec’s post and because a huge portion of its userbase is 13-18 years old and HAVE NO DIGITAL MONEY so can’t buy things online even if they wanted to.
There is no “worthy to be on AO3.” None. The early fics were often really well-written; it was a high-standards archive – not because “it strove for high standards” but because the only people who knew it existed, who cared about a new multifandom archive, were the ones who’d been around watching archives disappear for years; they were veteran fic writers who wanted a permanent place to share their stories. It took a long time for AO3 to have enough server capacity to allow open invites; in the early days, it was friend-of-a-friend for invite codes. (They wanted more people; they couldn’t handle a flood. So they handed out a few codes at a time)
We even talked about it while setting up the original terms of service – knowing that by saying, our standards are less restrictive than ff.net, less restrictive than LJ, we were going to eventually have HUGE amounts of really bad fic. FF.net got the nickname “pit of voles,” and AO3 was going to outdo that… eventually.
And. We wanted it ALL. All the reader-insert Mary Sue “date with hot dude” fic; all the “quiz to find out which power ranger you would be” fic; all the “band came to my home town and their bus broke down in front of my house and they needed a coffee and…” fic. And later, all the meta: the thinky character analyses; the “who’d be best on a first date” discussions; the “why the new movie sucked rocks and should never have been made because they ruined my favorite sidekick” rants.
ALL. WE WANT IT ALL.
AO3 is not about “the best of fandom;” it’s about “the truth of fandom.” And the truth is, fandom is not comprised of 90% well-written tightly-plotted carefully proofread fic. Fandom is comprised of people who love their favorite shows and books and characters and want to share that love with others.
AO3 are not the fanfic standards police. We’re the ones cheering for the “GLOWING BLUE SKELETON DICKS” tags.
Someday, some fandom archaeologist (and yes, there will be fandom archaeologists, isn’t that awesome?) will sift through the badfic, the quick drabbles, the Mary Sues, and write articles for peer-reviewed journals chronicling the complete collected works of some of the 21st century’s greatest authors and how you can see in THIS self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck the origin of those characterization tactics and flow of prose that make your subsequent masterworks truly shine as beloved classics, and THIS short character drabble gives THAT story arc in your well-known later story an exceptional poignancy and depth if one considers it backstory.
Also that fandom archaeologist’s teenage daughter will think the self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck is the best thing she’s ever read.
okay friends, as ready player one comes into the crosshairs of cultural mockery (as it deserves), I would like to take a moment to speak about a very important thing:
ready player one is not bad fanfiction
I know this seems like a relatively minor point! like, really, who cares? but not being fanfiction is actually critical to ready player one. not only is it not fanfiction, but it’s actually the polar opposite of fanfiction. it is the anti-fanfiction. not being fanfiction is integral to its existence
so, some background! in case you don’t know, ready player one is the story of A Dude who lives in a crapsack world. I actually think the first third or so of the book is pretty decent? yes, there’s an overload of “look at how large my nerd penis is,” but the worldbuilding is kind of interesting and author ernest cline does a decent job of setting up the ways in which the world is shitty and how an online virtual world has become both an haven for and crutch to society
because that is the big thing here: there is an immersive online world called the oasis, and it is big and people spend a lot of time there because the world is garbage
the creator of this online world is another dude, who died and left a treasure hunt within the game, and whoever finds the treasure will get his vast fortune and all his assets. it’s a fine setup, and it allows the author to make his hobby as important to his fictional world as it is to him, because there is only one way to find this treasure: you must know The Most about eighties nerd shit
what this means is that ready player one is the epitome of curatorial fandom: fandom that is expressed by having encyclopedic knowledge of canon, of how things were made and what promotion was done for them and, well, facts. ready player one is concerned with putting pop culture on a pedestal and appreciating at how flawless it is
and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, if you’re into it! but I cannot stress enough how much ready player one cares about the canon and defining what the canon is and what belongs to it. there is an actual argument between our protagonist and his friend about whether or not the movie ladyhawke is “canon,” by which they mean, “did the dude who created this treasure hunt like ladyhawke?” our protagonist likes it, therefore he wants it to be canon. it’s not enough for him to just like the movie, his enjoyment must be validated and elevated by this dude he idolizes. and (spoilers) in the end it is, so, like, good for you, bro
ready player one is proudly, aggressively, and oppressively non-transformative. that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. one of the single most baffling things things the protagonist enjoys, at least to me, is when, as part of the treasure hunt, he must reenact a movie. that’s it. that’s the whole thing. he is put into matthew broderick’s place in the movie war games, and he must do everything matthew broderick did in the movie at the same time and in the same way matthew broderick did it. he gets bonus points for nailing the same intonation and doing the same movements as broderick, and if he messes up lines or misses cues, he loses lives and, eventually, the game
now, I don’t know about you, but I am genuinely struggling to think of anything as boring as doing every single thing that the protagonist did in my favorite movie or tv show, exactly as it they did it, aside from maybe the parts where I get to kiss a hot person. and I say this as someone who really enjoys rewatching my favorite shows and replaying my favorite games! but, like, if you’re going to put me in a fully immersive recreation of my favorite world where I am playing my favorite character, I am absolutely going to be making some fanfic shit come to life there. I’ve already seen the movie, I don’t need to live it when I could go off book and make the decisions I always wanted to make, or try to see if I can make everyone bisexual and get them into a big orgy or something. like, the possibilities are endless here, right? they should be!
from what I can tell, it has never occurred to ernest cline that people might actually want to change their favorite media, or even that they could be interested in anything that isn’t on the page or screen. which, again, not everyone does fandom like that! but after the protagonist finishes his war games reenactment, he says that as soon as people find out about this marvelous “put yourself in your favorite movie and do it exactly the same way it happens on screen or else you lose” technology, it becomes wildly popular and I’m still just kind of like, is that really what people want? is that the dream?
so, yeah. when I say it’s important to emphasize that ready player one is not fanfic, this is what I’m talking about. ready player one is horrified by the idea of transforming works. ready player one cares about canon and only canon. ready player one does, admittedly, have scenes that look like a big cool crossover, because everyone shows up to a fight in their own favorite mecha, so you have, like, mecha-godzilla fighting the giant robot from the Japanese spider-man show, but it’s just window dressing. there’s no depth to it. these are literally skins, outfits that the characters put on
compare this to, say, kingdom hearts, which is actually licensed crossover fanfiction. in kingdom hearts, sora (nomura tetsuya’s original character, do not steal) meets up with donald duck and goofy and travels through various disney worlds on a ship crewed by chip and dale, the rescue rangers, having wacky adventures and trying to save both his best friend and mickey mouse from the darkness
(god, how did that game get made)
on his quest, sora interacts with various characters from disney and square enix properties, all of whom are retain their personalities and appear as (essentially) themselves. it matters that simba is simba and cloud is cloud; they’re supposed to be those characters, or alternate but recognizable versions of those characters. this is what professionally licensed crossover fanfiction looks like, and I’m not saying it’s what ready player one should have been, but it’s a simple way to highlight how uninterested ready player one is in thinking about characterization. the only reason it matters that a dude is in mecha-godzilla is that he has the powers of mecha-godzilla in combat. it’s the ultimate “who would win” fantasy because it’s focused entirely on power levels. would superman beat goku, but without any consideration as to why they were fighting in the first place or what they as characters bring to the mix
and the reason I think this is important to talk about is that many male nerds HATE ready player one, and they don’t get to fucking put that on us. fanfiction is a female-dominated and largely stigmatized part of fandom, and I am not fucking letting the internet decide that the problem with ready player one is that it’s bad fanfic. ready player one would be an infinitely deeper, richer, and more interesting text if cline put any thought into transforming the works he reveres, instead of just describing what happens in them in loving detail
so you don’t get to blame fanfic for this one, nerds. this is peak curatorial culture. he’s one of you
just moving along like everyone else 