#without getting 'just curate your online experience better' in response

[spitblaze]

because i am always always ALWAYS anxious that someone is gonna interpret something i say in bad faith i made that anti-transmasculinity post bc there was a minute or two on tumblr and twitter where trans men were the Embarassing Cringe Queers Du Jour and people were like 'lol trans men dont even face any sort of discrimination outside of garden variety transphobia' which is patently fuckin untrue and im very tired of being called a 'pussy' and a 'whiner' because people do not take me seriously as a man unless its to claim im a predator or violent so. theres that

#spitblaze says things #inb4 'lev you gotta curate your online experience better' DO YOU THINK I DONT TRY!!! #DO YOU THINK I DONT ATTEMPT TO KEEP MYSELF AWAY FROM THE DUMB SHIT PEOPLE SAY ONLINE #DO YOU THINK I DONT HAVE TO CONTINUALLY TELL MYSELF NOT TO THINK ABOUT INTERNET TRANSPHOBIA IN BED AT NIGHT #BECAUSE MY ANXIETY LOVES TO FOCUS ON SHIT LIKE THAT #DO YOU THINK. I HAVE NOT TRIED TO PUT THIS OUT OF MY MIND AND IGNORE IT. #idk why i got so mad about that. its been a while since ive been able to openly complain about shitheads online #without getting 'just curate your online experience better' in response #complaining is cathartic and they're right but like. it feels good to complain esp when its actually bothering me lol #i mean they're absolutely right that i gotta curate better but. adhd/anxiety yannow lol #anyway. in case some weirdo tries to claim im a stupid dumb idiot who knows nothing abt anti-transmasculinity #i tend to forget shit and that post was made at a specific point in time so dont fuckin @ me

[celerydays]

Hi! I have been following you for some time and I notice you draw more and more Sebastian and Ominis doing stuff that makes me... uncomfortable.....

Sebastian and Ominis are best friends, why people are obsessed with drawing them into weird gay stuff? Seriously.... Why can't be friends.... without all Sebinis... Just stop it...

Normally I would delete messages or simply ignore the things that make me feel uncomfortable–

But, you're on anon and this is my ask inbox, so I can only assume you want an actual, public response. So alright. Fine.

Like I said: normally I would just remove odd, uncomfortable, or even outright rude messages without making a whole thing of it. I curate my own online experience and I try my best to live by that rule.

However, I've now gotten multiple unsolicited DMs over the course of a couple of months expressing the exact same sentiment (and nearly word-for-word as this ask, so I highly suspect I already know who you are). I have duly ignored or glossed over them hoping that the person/people would take the hint to simply stop engaging with the same message over and over again. But an anon ask is my last straw, I guess.

So if you are the same person as in my DMs, I'm finally giving you a response (and if you're not the same person – which I highly doubt – then I'm speaking to both of you).

Firstly, I want to say that I am sorry that your worldview is so limited that this is your stance and feelings on gay/queer ship content for Sebastian and Ominis.

Next, I ask that you please:

Don't make your homophobia anyone else's issue but your own. Don't come into DMs/ask inboxes/comments to make your discomfort with the content I create my problem. I don't know what you hoped to accomplish by sending this message but it's unlikely that you'll find the same feelings or sympathy from the person who is actively creating queer/sebinis content.

Curate your own online experience. Once again, do not make your content consumption anyone else's problem but your own. The "unfollow" button is there. Tumblr has a tag filtering system and I try to tag my art and content as accurately as possible. If you do not like something/it makes you uncomfortable, then do not continue to consume it. And if you still decide to stick around for whatever reason, then please keep your thoughts/opinions on this matter to yourself because I can promise that I don't actually care why you would continue to be here and looking at my art if it makes you unhappy.

Widen your worldview and try to reframe your perspective. Consider that Sebastian x Ominis is just as canon as Sebastian x f!MC or Ominis x f!MC. As much as we like to ship our various MCs with the canon characters, MC never actually amounts to canonically being confirmed as anything but being just friends with everyone. Using the "they are just best friends" / "why can't they just be portrayed only as friends" could literally be applied to just about any other non-canon/non-confirmed ship between friends regardless of gender. If even one of them, Ominis or Sebastian, was portrayed as cis female in canon, I would suspect that you would better "understand" why a ship between these two "friends" may exist. Then also consider a cis male MC; it's possible you may suddenly reframe all the interactions between Ominis x m!MC or Sebastian x m!MC in your head to be "totally platonic/friendly". Your issue is certainly not with their canon relationship vs. fandom portrayal (but I think we both know that).

Educate yourself. Go outside and meet and talk to people, I dunno. It is 2024 my dude. I don't even know how you're on Tumblr – the most queer-friendly social media site – with those kind of narrowed views and stigma.

I would like to finish by saying: I don't wish you the best. What I do wish is for you to learn, grow, and be better than this.

And also please stop sending me messages of this nature, because the next ask or DM I get like this, we're moving on to blocking at this point. And if your purpose was to get me to stop, I can tell you that these messages have only fueled the explicit sebinis smut maker in me. 😤

#I'm sorry for anyone who sees this and did not want a rant on their feed today #ask #anon #sebinis #hl

[bloggedanon]

Fuck it, I'm writing an essay on this now.

Words, as I define them:

Proshipping: Supporting and defending all ships, including problematic ones.

Antishipping: Not supporting or defending all ships, because they include problematic ones.

Witch Hunting: 1) Actively seeking out and harassing people for behaviour the witch hunter considers wrong. 2) Actively trying to morally crusade and change people around them to better fit one's own sensibilities.

Romanticizing: To view or interpret something in a positive light. (I'll use this as a blanket term to include fetishizing as well.)

A common theme I see among people who claim to be proshippers (many of which I believe may be antis without them realizing it, more on that later), is that they tend to strawman about the subject of being pedos, rapists, incestuous, etc. in real life, saying that of COURSE they're not any of those awful, illegal things! Often, this gets brought up when a supposed anti doesn't even make a claim about their real-life behaviour. Most of the time, in fact. Considering the illegal nature of sexual misconduct, instances of this behaviour happening in real life are relatively rare. I don't think MOST people go into an online interaction with anyone making the assumption that they're getting into that kind of mojo in real life. To call all proshippers pedophiles, rapists, incestuous, etc. is both patently untrue and terribly unnuanced. Might there be proshippers out there who engage in sexual misconduct? There's probably bound to be SOMEONE out there who matches that description, but anyone like that is an exception to a general rule, for the most part.

Likewise, a common strawman I often see getting tossed in antis' direction is that they don't do the whole "live and let live" deal. People more often than not conflate being anti with actively seeking out proshippers and those shipping up some problematic content, pitchfork in hand, lecturing them on how they're awful people, etc. etc. rather than simply blocking them and moving on. Thing about that, is that that's actually called witch hunting. Much like sexual misconduct in real life, witch hunting is generally frowned upon in polite society (though it's unfortunately gaining traction in recent years with the rise of third-wave keyboard warrioring), and claiming all antis to be witch hunters is just as patently untrue and terribly unnuanced as calling all proshippers enactors of sexual misconduct. Are there witch-hunting antis? Most likely! It'd explain why antishipping and witch-hunting are percieved as being comorbid by proshippers.

This assumption has given rise to anti-antis (a group whose purpose appears to be to witch hunt the "witch hunters," as if that doesn't make them hypocrites), and to a category of people who think that they're proshippers just because they don't harass anyone for ships that they personally dislike or find problematic. That's not proshipping, however: that's just being anti-witch-hunting, which SHOULD be the popular stance! People should curate their internet experience by using tag filtering and the block button liberally rather than going onto people's posts and blogs and whatnot to give them a lecture they never asked for. All antishipping is supposed to encompass is the refusal to condone or support problematic content. That's it.

The fundamental problem with proshipping is that those who support and / or make content for problematic ships and behaviour are romanticizing sexual misconduct. Is that on the same level of commiting real-life sexual misconduct? Of course not. However, when it comes to the brain's chemical response to something as raw and primal as sexual endorphins, it doesn't discriminate between fictitious and real life sources to get its rocks off. It has real power to mess with the reward pathways in your brain if you reenforce that pattern of thinking. Fucking with neurochemicals as powerful as the sexy ones can have unpredictable effects. A guy tried to jerk off while eating vegetables as a way to classically condition himself to enjoy eating them, and all that got him was an awkward boner whenever he entered the produce aisle, rather than any closer to his goal. (To the people who don't think problematic ships or fictional sexual misconduct don't affect anything because they're fictional [the only other major defense proshippers have], they do. Neurochemistry is some real shit, man. Don't feed into those dark urges, it just reenforces that shit.) (Likewise, anyone who isn't about proshipping, maybe don't harass people about it, you're only gonna get people to stubbornly dig their heels in and possibly invite retaliation.)

So while I'm not in the business of stepping to people on their own turf about proshipping, if you romanticize squicky shit or support those who do, that's narsty, yo.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. send post

#I may need to edit this later for clarity on account of it being 2:30AM at the time of me finishing this #and my ability to read is slipping from me at this hour #Log says dumb shit on the internet

[theharrowing]

"writing some of the darker themes is always going to evoke some negative feelings and invite controversy, but for those of us who find it cathartic, i think it can be very warm and healing."

wow lol what a playful way to say you like to write about rape, murder and abuse. please seek therapy.

friends, sorry i can’t post content warnings before messages, but you can see what this one deals with. my response doesn’t have such blatant language, but feel free to skip this post if it makes you uncomfortable. 

hello, darling anon! thank you for taking the time to write such a concise, thoughtful message! it always brightens my day to hear from strangers online who clearly have no experience with my actual body of work, nor knowledge of who i am as a person, and who hide behind anonymity and self-righteousness.

funny you should assume that i have not sought therapy, but you may be surprised to find that those from whom i have turned to for counsel have told me the very opposite, and have had some pretty interesting, deep conversations with me about catharsis and nuance.

writing and reading about darker topics is cathartic to some, whether you like it or not. it's fine if you disagree, but you can literally just scroll on without complaining. it's actually free of cost to curate your space in a way that feels safe for you and only engage in content that you feel safe engaging with.

i am reminded of a really thoughtful twitter thread on this topic, and i will post some individual tweets from that thread here, with links to each tweet, starting with this graphic:

(image link)

You do not "own" trauma. Some random stranger is NOT "romanticizing (your) trauma" when they write about or draw fictional characters in a traumatic situation. In many cases, the person is writing about THEIR OWN trauma using fictional characters. It has nothing to do with you. (link)

You're gonna see triggering things online. That's how the internet works. It's like Russian Roulette. Even if you utilize mute and block features, sometimes things still slip through the cracks and you see triggering stuff anyway. It's a risk that comes with using the internet. (link)

So the fact that people are complaining about fanart and fanfic - THINGS THAT ARE USUALLY TAGGED - is infuriating to me. You see that the fanfic has triggering tropes in the tag? Don't read it. You see an art tag that upsets you? Mute the tag so you won't see it on your tl. (link)

The internet is not a true "safe space." There's no way to 100% safety proof the internet to your specific comforts. I'm not saying this to be cruel. I'm just being realistic and practical. You can't blame others because your personal trauma was triggered by a random thing online (link)

If you see triggering content online on accident, that sucks and I'm so sorry that you experienced that. But it is not anyone's fault. People are allowed to post (nearly) anything they want online (especially in fandom spaces when fictional characters are involved)- (link)

It's not your fault either, especially when you take precautions like using muted terms. It's just an accident and the nature of the internet. And getting angry and upset at random strangers isn't going to help anything. (link)

You're allowed to feel discomfort ofc. But this misplaced... entitlement? Anger at others for posting fictional content? That isn't it. That's not the way to deal with that. (link)

It's a waste of energy, first of all. Good luck trying to get people to stop posting things that upset you. It's a lost cause. No matter how much I dislike (certain tropes), this is the World Wide Web that billions of people have access to and people will post that thing anyway- (link)

So it's better to just - as best as you can - let it roll of your shoulders. It is literally impossible to stop people from posting the thing (especially in fandom) so instead, switch your energy to seeking out things that you know appeal to you and bring you good feelings. (link)

You see something triggering? You close the window, take a moment to yourself, start fresh and find something that is more appealing or healing to you. Feeling discomfort or being upset is fine. Trying to go on some crusade to stop it? It's just not practical, I'm sorry. (link)

Being angry about others posting certain fictional content is like being disgusted by seafood and going to a restaurant and getting angry and upset because the diner the table next to you ordered fish. You are at a place that can and does serve fish. (link)

It's not practical to get upset at them about it. You can be annoyed or irritated that now you had to smell fish during your dinner. But you can't be angry at the restaurant or the servers or the other person for doing what they are allowed to do in that space. (link)

Also - you can complain about it, I guess! My issue is y'all need to stop demonizing people who are into darker FICTIONAL themes and who tag their content. You can dislike their crap yeah but stop acting like they're literally Satan and stop blaming them and fiction for abuse. (link)

...i think that sums up, pretty well, my thoughts on the matter. and, again, if you disagree, that is perfectly within your rights. but accusing folks of romanticizing something awful (which is what your message felt like) is...silly. grow up. hide tags, mute words, block me! it's really so easy.

thanks for the message, sweetie! have a great night!

#not so lovely anon #fanfic discourse? i guess? #we can talk more about this is you want to #but as a survivor i might get defensive #you've got mail 💌

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[withered-rose-unbreakable-lotus]

You know what I get it when people can’t separate the art from the artist, but attacking people for liking something is stupid. Especially when somebody listens, reads or watches sth without looking too much into symbolisms, representation etc.

For example, I can’t fathom how Chris Brown still has a career but I don’t go around attacking people who like his music. See I can tell his songs are good, I just refuse to support sb who’s been abusive to a woman in any shape or form. And don’t come to me with the excuse “people make mistakes, he’s probably changed“ etc, I get it, even Rihanna could have forgiven him, but I’ve hated him from the day what he did came to light and refuse to change that. It depends on the person.

So yeah if people who like sth you hate trigger you, unfollow, block or whatever. You can’t force people shut up about what they like cause it affects you. The internet is not only about you, and I say that as a person who gets easily affected by many things and had to learn it the hard way. You are the one responsible for curating your experience online, so protect yourself without attacking others. Cause at the end of the day, it doesn’t make you any better from the medium, or artist anyway, that hurt you with their context or behavior.

[losthomunculus]

Online Safety Relevant to the Current State of the Internet

On twitter I made a tweet about how online safety lessons in school can be very out of touch but that the advice of people who are familiar with the current internet shouldn't be disregarded. So here's my informal collection of online safety tips

Sources: unrestricted internet access since elementary school (not recommended), being a formerly involuntarily home bound person for several years that amassed way too much online experience

This could possibly hold upsetting reminders to people who had bad experiences online including mentions of grooming and emotional manipulation so please proceed with caution!

Information Sharing

Make an online pseudonym for public profiles and websites.

Don’t feel like you have to list everything about you for the world to see.

Sometimes it’s not a question of “can this information be used to locate and identify me irl?”, but simply “do I want this information publicly available and linked to my online persona?”

Unlike offline, being online leaves a constant trail of who you were accessible at all times. People are constantly growing and changing. Try to limit the information you share so you can ditch that trail and start over if need be.

Sharing information with people you make friends with and trust is a judgement call on your part, but always be on the safe side and be protective of your information.

Start as cautious as possible with online safety. Any risks or judgement calls can come later when you are 1. aware of the risks, 2. ready to address them if they occur, and 3. have gathered plenty of information instead of doing something blindly and hoping for the best.

Do not share your triggers publicly, they can very easily be used against you. Instead use websites with a large amount of filtering options to curate your online experience. If you are going to share them, only do it privately with people you trust.

Importance of Boundaries

It doesn’t matter how mature you are, don’t enter age limited spaces you don’t qualify for. It’s disrespectful to the boundaries of the people who made that space. Boundaries like this exist for the comfort of both sides involved.

Just because you can “handle it” doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Desensitization is not something to brag about.

Venting or making r18 posts as a minor on a public account is VERY dangerous. Intense emotional vulnerability is something manipulators will look for as a way to get to you. The same with sexual jokes to develop your comfort talking about those topics casually and eventually escalating the situation. If you are going to talk about such things please keep that in private conversations with people you trust in your age group.

Note the difference between public and private online space. Tweeting something on a public account is not the same as having a conversation in the cafeteria with your friends.

If an adult tries talking to you about r18, run the other way. Doesn’t matter how cool you are, it says something weird about THEM if they’re willing to talk to a minor about that stuff.

If someone( like 3+ years, honestly depends on how old you are) older than you wouldn't be comfortable saying what they're saying to you in front of other people (like a teacher or guardian), that's suspicious as hell. Run in the other direction.

The younger you are, the more age gaps matter. There's a bigger difference in development between a 13 year old and a 17 year old than there is between a 20 year old and a 24 year old. It helps to try to contextualize it with real people instead of numbers. Instead of thinking "oh just 4 years? that's not that weird" consider "oh. that would be like a freshman (13/14) dating a senior (17/18). yikes."

Be just as wary of people your own age talking about things that make you uncomfortable. Just like irl, sometimes you’ll meet people your age that are hurtful.

Friends complain to each other and talk about their issues, that alone is fine. But when people are doing it without permission, draw a line. When people are making it feel like you’re responsible for maintaining their mental health, you need to draw a line. When it starts to effect your mental health, PLEASE DRAW A LINE! I know it feels like your responsibility sometimes, but it’s not. You cannot be there for others if you’re not taking care of yourself first and foremost.

Don’t be afraid to block people. Even for petty reasons. It’s good to block people. Don’t force yourself to see stuff you don’t want to see.

Being Constantly Online

The 24 hour news cycle is not a good thing to follow 24/7. Taking social responsibility is a good thing, but your brain is NOT built to worry about every issue in the world at once. One strategy I use for staying sane is I try to only check the news once a day, and if something needs more attention to set aside an amount of time I’m going to focus on it before I need to take time to step back.

Touch grass. Not literally, unless you can in which case I highly suggest it, sometimes it’s just good to lay in a field. What I mean is you need to dedicate a good portion of your time to being offline (sleep does not count). What your offline time looks like is going to differ depending on your level of ability, but even if you are house bound it’s important to build some hobbies that don’t rely on the internet. Talking to people offline is also a good goal if possible, even just to your housemates.

Social etiquette greatly differs online and offline and sometimes the reminder that were all just Some People gets lost behind the numbers and the fabricated personas. Keep in mind the difference in how information is shared without forgetting that the fact we are all people remains the same.

Be generous with your etiquette. You will avoid a lot of stress if you conduct yourself with the same politeness you would have in an offline interaction. Master the art of "minding your own business" for your own sake.

Arguments and Competition

As soon as you can, you need to internalize the fact that leaving an argument is not losing.

It is inevitable you will be exposed to many people who disagree with you. Some people only want to argue to rile you up. Sometimes that’s not their intention, but it’s what they’re doing. You do not have to remain in conversation with people, especially if they’re not interested in actually coming to an understanding. Even if they are interested, sometimes they just suck!! Leave!! You can leave!!

On that note, sometimes you are going to get valid criticism and it’s going to hurt. That is part of learning. If someone says you messed up and did something hurtful, take a second to step back from your defensiveness and consider: intent ≠ effect. Apologize, repair what you can, and move forward with the ability to do better in the future. You’re going to mess up every once in awhile, it’s inevitable.

To summarize the past two points: don't waste your time on unnecessary hostility but don't close yourself into an echo chamber either. Debates should be about learning.

Sometimes people are not going to like you. This happens offline too but people tend to be a lot more blunt online. Sometimes people dislike you for no reason or for really petty reasons. That’s not your problem, move on.

Don’t actively seek out people you don’t like or who don’t like you to argue with. Whether or not your side is the “right side” doesn’t matter, it’s going to cause you so much unnecessary stress. Feel free to keep posting your opinions on your own profile but don’t seek out unnecessary conflict.

This is a different type of competition than previously mentioned, but be aware of the danger of comparing yourself to other people. Especially if you’re a creative or student, DO NOT GET SWEPT UP IN THE GRIND CULTURE. It’s more subtle in some places than others, but anytime you see the notion that you should be working yourself to the bone be VERY critical. Also be critical of any online cultures (such as gaming and art communities) that brag about unhealthy habits or act like it’s ~part of the culture~ (ex: all nighters, not taking breaks, getting hurt. Any activity that neglects health to work toward a goal).

Not just grind culture, any community of subculture that shares anti recovery sentiments is a huge red flag. Even if they're joking, it's not worth the risk of internalizing those statements.

Everyone’s social media presence is to some degree doctored because it’s a purposefully selected collection of what they allow you to see. It’s fine to like the persona you see being displayed, but never forget that it is not reflective of the entire person. Everyone online is JUST SOME PERSON. Do not forget that and start holding yourself to a standard you can’t even see every side of.

By posting online you are opening yourself to criticism. Whether or not it’s justified can vary, but either way it’s going to happen. Mute stuff, go private, disable comments, etc if you need to.

Misc Tidbits

these are technically just general info that is also good for offline but I have seen things that make me think people online need the extra reminder.

Learn what cults are, how they recruit, and what they do to their members. I'm not kidding. This is particularly relevant at the moment because of current societal unrest and widespread loneliness. No one is immune to cult propaganda, and not every cult is based on pre established religion or family. Many exist ONLINE and are able to manipulate people without ever meeting face to face. (learn more: Loneliness as a Pandemic: The Dangers of Online Cult

Familiarize yourself with the concept of pseudoscience. Please familiarize yourself with the concept of pseudoscience and then learn how to identify pseudoscience. (learn more: Karl Popper, Science, & Pseudoscience: Crash Course Philosophy #8)

Q. How do I know if a source is reliable?

Final Thoughts

It's important people of ALL ages learn these lessons, because the internet is constantly changing and we are all vulnerable when in the presence of other people.

Be cautious and stay safe

[silvysartfulness]

I've gotten a whole bunch of new followers since I started making The Untamed content about a year ago, and I think it may be a good time to introduce myself and this blog to the newcomers.

Hi! ♥

I'm glad you find this chaotic mess entertaining enough to want to stick around!

That said, if you don't feel comfortable with who I am and/or what I post, just unfollow at any time, no explanations needed.

I'm Silvy, I'm a Fandom Old, 40+, and have been involved in online fandom since the late 90ies.

I'm neurodivergent, Aspie/ADHD and some spare change. I hyperfocus on things, and love to analyze fictional characters and tropes, especially things to do with the messiness and complexities of human nature and emotion. At the moment, as should be obvious, I live in the The Untamed universe, especially the Yi City corner. (You don't get emotions much messier and more complex than that!)

I have always been fascinated by ”villains” - the people who don't act like others do, who are different, and who hurt people, sometimes without meaning to. (Sometimes very much meaning to.)

I love redemption arcs. I've grown to realize there's a this recent phenomenon happening online where people claim certain fictional characters don't ”deserve” them. I think that's utter bullshit, and an extremely negative and destructive mindset to have. People should always have the chance to change and do better. Everyone makes mistakes. Some worse than others. But while no one ”deserves” forgiveness, unless it's freely given, everyone should have the chance to change, move on and be better.

I have always been fascinated by fiction as a medium to explore the messiness of humanity. Of how people hurt each other and heal each other and grow either way. The mess of who people end up loving, or hating, or - bittersweetly - both at once. In my opinion, that is the very purpose of fiction – the mirror held up to explore our own humanity, without suffering any of the negative consequences of reality. Yes, that includes the really problematic stuff. Yes, all the problematic stuff. Fiction is not reality.

I have 100% understanding for people who don't want to watch or read certain things – don't self-harm by engaging with content and creators that makes you angry and upset! I also have 0% patience with people demanding others conform to their particular standards of purity. It's everyone's responsibility to curate their own online experience. Haters will be blocked.

I'm queer (no, queer is not a slur.) Non-straight, asexual, married to another woman for 6 years now. I'd say a majority of my best friends are trans or otherwise non-cis. If you’re cis and find trans/non-binary/intersex/non-gender conforming etc people strange and frightening, by all means – stick around! I reblog quite a lot of trans-positive content. Maybe it'll offer insights! Any TERF-rhethoric will be blocked and shut down on sight, though. This is a safe space.

I'm Swedish. Socialism works. Just saying. 👍

These are simple facts – if any of the above is a dealbreaker, just click unfollow and everyone will probably be happier in the long run. :)

The less problematic stuff: I'm a professional illustrator, though currently on more or less permanent sick leave. Despite sometimes crippling social anxiety, I also ended up teaching art classes - Life Drawing and Concept Art - at the local university, and was often told I was one of their most popular and well-liked guest teachers. I'm self-taught as a writer, though I am a sponge when it comes to prose and language, so for any skills I have picked up over the years, I can only thank those whose works I have read throughout my life.

I like trying my hand at most creative crafts; painting, woodcarving, glasspainting, pewter pouring, looking to try out resins soon maybe..? I take tons upon tons of pictures. If you know me better, you have probably been exposed to my random ”Look at pretty thing X I saw today!” photo-assault. (It's a love language. ♥)

I used to study archaeology at university for years, before sidling over into a creative career as a museum-illustrator, and then onward to other projects from there. It's amazing what a 100.000+ year view on humanity will do for your sense of perspective! People are people. People have always been people. We are all one people - and diversity in culture, ethnicity and language is one of the most beautiful arts of our human race. Our differences and samenesses always to be equally celebrated. (Now if we could only get better at looking back and learn from previous civilizations' mistakes so we'd stop repeating them...)

I like cats. And betta fish. And purple roses (I used to collect purple rose cultivars, before I got too fatigued to be able to take care of my garden properly. Some still live! Rhapsody In Blue is a trooper, if you want a really hardy purple rose! They can even live in pots, if you don't have a garden.)

(See, I told you I could never resist a chance to share a photo...)

I am very, very forgetful. I got my neurodivergence diagnoses very late in life, and by then my brain was so burned out, it's permanently damaged. Fatigue, memory problems and concentration issues are things I always struggle with. If I ghost you, it's not because I'm upset or dislike you – I either missed your message, or forgot about it, or just didn’t know what to say. I'm sorry. I'm trying my best. ♥

I believe in kindness.

I try to be kind and understanding, and meet others with patience. It's taken me a lifetime fraught with generous amounts of trauma to learn to feel strong, comfortable and mostly at peace with myself, and I have very little interest in conflict or drama.

That's about it, Silvy all summed up.

Wishing all you a happy weekend!

#long post #longpost

[road-rhythm]

For me, shipping is Y/Z = explicit content so ppl know. My default for DNI notes is to respect boundaries because people have reasons to curate their own space, but what happens if I interact with someone's ao3 where they don't have that note and I didn't know beforehand until I read their blog, or if I just don't see the note until after interacting? Ao3 is easier because people tend to DLDR or have more boundaries, but idk how to account for other cases? That's just one question I have.

ETA: It turns out page jumps don't work in ask-reply posts, so the topic list below—which was supposed to be navigable—is just dead text. Nor do the footnotes work. I am disproportionately bitter about this but cannot fix it.

I'll level with you, anon: I was thrown for a loop that anybody would ask this blog, of all blogs, for advice. But the issues I understand your questions to be about are interesting to me, so while I'm not sure I'm the best resource on this, I will answer as well as I can.

Which brings me to the first thing I want to say: any time you're going to argue on the internet, it can't be with the motivation of changing the mind of the person you're arguing with. You probably won't. Therefore, the payoff needs to be something else. Often people get into debates in the hope of convincing onlookers rather than opponents; while that does have a better chance of success, my own motivation is usually more that I want to organize my thoughts about the topic.

With some of these questions, I get the feeling that you're looking for articulate responses to be able to give when you want to push back against people who are trying to dictate how you participate in fandom. If so, you should know that being articulate won't fix that. It won't protect you from hate, criticism, or general malcontent. It can give you clarity about your own positions and feelings that's very worth having, but it won't by itself defuse any emotional tensions or forestall people who are already upset with you. Articulateness can help a conflict management strategy, but it isn't one.

A cool side effect it does have, though, is helping you build a better friend group by making it easier for like-minded people to understand what it is you have in common—and what you don't. That won't remove all conflict from your online social life, but it can help bring it to manageable levels.

Before I respond, I'm going to go through your asks and paraphrase them. These are the questions I think you're asking; if I have misunderstood something, which is probable, please feel free to let me know.

1, C2: What ethical obligations does a DNI note impose?

2a: How do I not feel bad when I have a different opinion from other people I'm interacting with in fandom?

2b: How do I not feel bad when enforcing my boundaries?

3: Why do some people go after others who write content that happens not to be to their taste?

4-5: Why do some people go after others who interpret or interact with canon in a way they disagree with or that happens not to be to their taste, and what should I do about it?

6b: If I engage in discussions with people who see something very differently from me, how do I maintain my own boundaries without feeling bad if people get personal and invalidate lived experiences which I based my meta and fiction on? (verbatim) (elaboration/example of 2b)

6a: If I write something that is somehow different from my previous output and it turns out someone can't handle it, does that mean I have harmed them?

C1a: If I write something that is somehow different from most other output for that pairing/trope/etc. and it turns out someone can't handle it, does that mean I have harmed them?

C2: What responsibility, if any, do I have to followers or subscribers who are distressed by content that I have tagged but which they find somehow distasteful or objectionable?

Rather than taking these one by one, I'm going to talk about a few areas that I think intersect most of these questions somewhere. Fair warning, anon: this is long as hell and I'm pretty sure most of it isn't even what you were looking for. I hope that enough of it's useful enough to make it worth your while, and if it not, sorry. Whatever sort of reputation I have, I'm fairly sure it's not for giving people what they actually wanted.

DNI notes (block me yourself, bitch)

Why are people?

Expectations, surprises, and distress vs. harm

How do I not feel bad?

———————————————————

DNI notes (block me yourself, bitch)

[W]hat happens if I interact with someone's ao3 where they don't have that note

Not a thing,

and I didn't know beforehand until I read their blog,

not a thing,

or if I just don't see the note until after interacting?

and not a single, solitary, country-fried thing.

DNI notes are interesting to me, partly because I'm not sure where they came from. They seem to be a fairly recent phenomenon, but no one agrees on what platform primarily popularized them: one source says Instagram, another Twitter, another Tumblr. My perception is that DNIs are much more common among younger users, say under 25 or even under 21, but I don't have data to back that up. (If anyone does have any sort of reliable information about DNIs' emergence/use, please drop it on me somewhere!)

Anyway, here's my thought about DNIs as boundaries: they aren't.

Not to say I will disregard a DNI note if I see it. "W*ncesties DNI!" lets me know I'll probably be happier not interacting with whoever has that in their profile, so the note is already serving most of its practical purpose. For that matter, I'll avoid interacting with someone who has "Hellers DNI!" up top for the same reason: I'm not in the category named, but it's still a good clue I don't want to get involved and that there will be content I don't want to see. In that capacity, it's like hazard lights on a car. Another stripe of fan will see a pointedly offensive DNI and deliberately violate it, at which point the note gets to serve the rest of its practical purpose; viz., stirring shit for the bored and attention-starved. In that capacity, it's more like a mating signal. Those setting the bait and those taking it usually deserve each other. Either way, the DNI achieves a goal.

But it's not how you set a boundary. It might even impinge on others', inasmuch as it attempts to foist a kind of contract onto random strangers. Again, it's not the not interacting that I think most reasonable people will dig in their heels about when confronted with a DNI—it's the implication that they have been invested with the responsibility of curating someone else's internet experience for them merely by that DNI existing. It's trying to say that this line in your Twitter bio automatically creates a covenant between you and all who read it, and maybe even those who don't.*

Reasonable and effective boundaries don't work that way. It is fine to express preferences about what topics you dislike or prefer to avoid, and your Twitter or Tumblr profile is a fine place to do it. It's the "About You" section, after all. But if your emotional wellbeing depends on strangers on the internet clicking through to your profile to check if you have a note banning all shippers of, IDK, Dobby/Davros from interacting with you before liking some GIF you posted on a site that is designed to disseminate your post as widely as possible, you fucked up somewhere.

Interpersonal boundaries can be societal or individual. Societal boundaries are things like personal space (so, variable by culture), and you don't have to set them yourself, though you may unfortunately be required to enforce them. A fandom-relevant example would be an expectation of freedom from targeted harassment online, which is socially recognized and codified in the TOS of pretty much any site that allows users to interact with each other. You shouldn't have to tell anyone in advance not to send you unsolicited dick pics, blitz your DMs with slurs, or drop suicide bait in your asks.

Individual boundaries are ones you cannot reasonably expect others to know unless you tell them. A preference for all individuals who enjoy a given fictional pairing not to speak to you in any context falls here. Yes, even if the pairing is kinky. Yes, even if it squicks you. Yes, even if it medically triggers you.

A DNI note isn't a good faith effort to tell anyone this preference. Blog and microblog profiles aren't like TOS consent pages—and they're definitely not like the consent pages you click through to use AO3. Unlike a TOS pop-up, you have no technical means to force eyeballs connecting with your posts to pass over your profile first. Short of pasting your DNI note into every post you make, then, you have no reasonable expectation that the people viewing your content will ever see it.

Leaving the issue of the DNI note's visibility to one side for a moment, what about the "I" part? So long as you're being proactive about notifying people of your preferences, do you get to claim any extent of interaction as a boundary? Can you declare content you publish off-limits to a class even for consumption, and claim their reading it as a violation? If you've got a line on your blog or a tweet somewhere telling people, "Do not consume my fanworks if [X]" and you expect this to restrain all members of X from reading your fic over on AO3, it's plain why that is dumb; but what if you paste "Do not read if you ship Dobby/Davros" into the header of every chapter of every fic you have on AO3? Do people have an obligation to respect that boundary?

Honestly, no, sorry. You chose to post it on a public archive. If the thought of some freaks who are into twisted shit reading your lovingly crafted tales about your comfort characters makes your skin crawl, then frankly, that discomfort is something you're inflicting on yourself. (I would wager that inflicting it on yourself is even the point.)

Not all boundaries are reasonable or necessarily deserving of respect just because they're there. Replace "wincestie" or "heller" or "anti" or "bronly" with a religious or ethnic group, and this becomes instantly apparent. Asking, "are we obligated to follow a DNI if we know about it?" is pretty much just asking, "are we obligated to respect someone's preferences whenever we know them?" And the answer is always some combination of "depends on the preferences" and "depends on the situation."

There's a difference between being exposed to content and being exposed to people, and there's a difference between interaction and association. I can't think of any matter in fandom that would override your right not to associate with anyone you don't want to. No TOS can allow someone to be your friend. On the other hand, there's all kinds of crap that could override your preference not to have a group of people you think have icky ships interact with you via matter you've posted.

"I don't want to read Wincest/DeanCas/whatever the fuck": fine and reasonable boundary. "I don't want to hear a peep out of any member of a group of people I devote large amounts of time and energy to slagging off in public": not a fine and reasonable boundary.

(Whether members of the group in question should avoid interacting for their own sake is a separate question.)

It's not someone else's job to hide themselves from you. No matter how repulsive you find them, it's not their job to create the conditions that will allow you to pretend they don't exist. Especially if you're not actually going to.

Erring on the side of respect is a good rule of thumb: absent some more compelling interest, do as people ask. But 1) people may indeed have more compelling interests, and 2) if you're asking other people to assume responsibility for your experiences on the internet, there's already no respect there. You can't put that on another person, particularly not a fellow fan who doesn't know you and is no less likely to be dealing with their own shit than you are. You can't do it both in the sense that it cannot be accomplished and in the sense that you are kind of an asshole if you try.

Are DNIs all created equal? Obviously not, because "X/Y shippers DNI" != "Buddhists DNI," et cetera. So what about DNIs that are about real-life stuff rather than ship wars, like "racists and TERFs DNI"? Personally I find those a lot less eye-rolly than the fandom ones, but if this is the only or the most effective way you can find to send the message that you disagree with bigotry… ehhhhh? (When was the last time fandom had its biggest problems with anyone who'd admit to being either of those things, anyway?)

What about "minors DNI"? Not wanting to talk to children you don't know is indeed a reasonable boundary, for many reasons, but you can't rely on a note in your profile to establish it. Not discussing adult content with minors you're not responsible for is a societal boundary—because the designation "adult content" is a societal boundary—and it's codified on all the platforms we're discussing, including AO3, with requirements to tag in some way. Not wanting to discuss anything with minors at all is an individual boundary, and you will need to set it accordingly.

So I won't say that DNIs are Bad or never serve any function at all, but most are on the same wavelength as "unfollow/block me if [X]!!1!" Like, block me yourself, bitch. I'm happy to ignore all kinds of people, but I ain't curating your social media for you unless it comes with dental.

Why are people?

Why do people attack other people "who write certain content"? Why do people go around telling other people they're "wrong for interacting with media in [some] way"? Why are people constantly treating hobbyist fiction as "a moral thing" and cause for flame wars or outright harassment? Why are people like that—and in fandom, of all places, this thing that literally exists for fun?

I shouldn't waste time seriously trying to answer those kinds of questions, but it's a guilty pleasure. Dynamics in fandom fascinate the fuck out of me lately. I've got a shortlist of factors I've been considering as underlying causes for the kinds of conflict you're describing, most of which interact with or reinforce each other: tribalism, id-buttons, hypervigilant reactivity, conversion kink, and safe exploration.

The short version of all of this: emotional reasoning is a thing; news at eleven.

Tribalism: is a gimme. It might be kind of unsatisfying, but it explains at least half the dumb shit we do (we, homo sapiens and we, fans). What else can you say? Groups define themselves against outsiders as much as they do by common ground within. And we're all hungry for identity, so that's a lot of juice going in. Both sides of any given ship war will do this, SPN's most definitely included. I don't even think it has to be an evil thing: it does aid bonding; that's why we do it. But it's a strong force that tends toward conflict and self-righteousness, and on that level, it doesn't really matter how good your "side's" actual position is. Tribalism brings out the worst in us a lot more frequently than it does the best.

Which really sucks if you're a multishipper. If you're actively fannish about two or more ships (or characters) that fandom at large has decided are opposed to one another, you're going to see the worst of each side while being treated as suspect by both. I don't know your exact situation, anon, but it sounds like that's you.

I don't have a great solution for you. It sucks; it'll continue to suck; the way to make it suck way less is to curate your fandom experience aggressively, so if you're getting shat on coming and going by friends who can't tolerate ships they don't share with you, get better friends.

Same for cliques within a ship. In my experience those are usually organized around purity/fanpol stuff or "anti-anti"-dom: the subgroup defines itself by what it abhors, so crusading against those atrocities is the primary bonding activity. It sucks; it'll continue to suck; the way to make it suck way less is to curate your fandom experience aggressively, so if you're getting shat on coming and going by friends who enjoy one end of your creative output but can't tolerate the rest and think they're entitled to govern all of it, get better friends.

Id-buttons: really just my personal shorthand for that thing that happens when we experience strong emotion without clearly understanding what has triggered it. Being upset and not knowing why is an unpleasant state, but not a particularly dangerous one. Problems start when we misattribute the cause.

How well do any of us understand our own inner workings? In fandom we talk about idfic or (my fave) describe things as "iddy." Id-stuff is powerful, highly individual, and belongs to a realm reason can barely touch. Why do I love the psychic nosebleed trope? It's dumb as hell. It's dumb. Why do I love it? Fuck if I know. All I can tell you is that the sight of Sam Winchester trickling red out of his over-sized nostrils hits my eyeballs, travels a fast track down to the depths of my psyche, and mashes a button in there that I experience as extreme gratification. My prefrontal cortex knows psychic nosebleeds make no sense. My id thinks psychic nosebleeds are fucking marvelous.

A lot of fic, God bless us, goes whole-hog on whatever is iddy for the author; as such, idfic tends to be Marmite. One fan's kink is another fan's squick, and that goes as much for stuff that's not sexual in any obvious way—maybe goes double. The psychic nosebleeds that make my id do the Bulbasaur eyes make many others facepalm. H/C? It's love it or hate it, and even those who love it often require that very specific characters occupy very specific roles or they're gonna nope out. The id wants what it wants. Nudge an iddy dynamic two inches in the wrong direction and it becomes a live wire of squick and/or cringe.

Squicks I conceptualize as: this thing took aim at a button your id doesn't have; so it hit your regular, squishy brain matter instead, and since it wasn't designed to do that, the whole experience is like chomping down on psychic tinfoil. Ew, but you spit the tinfoil out and carry on.

Then there's stuff that hits our ids in ungood ways that go beyond squick or cringe. If there are green buttons waiting in everybody's id, there are other buttons that are very, very red. Like the green ones, we don't always know where they are. We may not even suspect they exist until they get hit, and—here's the kicker—even when they do, we still don't necessarily know what the fuck just happened. And it's hard to sort it out when you just got laid out flat by an emotional tsunami.

The stronger an emotional reaction, the stronger our need to explain it. Not just that, but the more important we assume the cause must be. So when people's red id-buttons get smashed, they need a framework to explain what just happened to them, and moral frameworks tend to feel satisfying because morality is important.

Another way we might misattribute the reason for our upset is if the real reason is somehow unpalatable. Why might it be unpalatable? Well, it could be bound up in issues that we're not ready to look at for one reason or another, including trauma. It might be something we think reflects poorly on us, like ingrained prejudice. Or it might be something we think is objectively dumb. The lengths we'll go to to justify a dumb antipathy are impressive. The justifications can be well reasoned, and insightful, and even accurate; but the really high-voltage emotions are still coming from a different place that happens to be dumb as a psychic nosebleed.

That combination is hard to get past, because admitting that some reasons for a preference or antipathy are basically dumb feels like you're invalidating others that might not be dumb at all. But that's all that is: a feeling.

Incidentally, the absolute last thing most fans will admit as a reason for any conviction is their ship.

Anyway. Here again, I do not have a great solution for you. Telling somebody they're confused about the real reasons for their own emotions is unlikely to go over well, and frankly, even though I believe it happens to all of us very frequently, I don't think it even should. Especially if you yourself are going to proceed to offer theories of your own as to what those real reasons are to fill the void. Emotional reactivity isn't something you can persuade someone out of; the best you can do is be watchful for it in yourself.

Hypervigilant reactivity: Not all disproportionate reactions are about id, though. A reliable source of heightened fear, anxiety, and, yes, anger is hypervigilance. A hair-trigger danger meter makes us susceptible to interpreting as threats things that are not; once we feel threatened by something, we are far more likely to erect justifications around the feeling than examine whether it's realistic. That's just human nature.

Many if not most antis are not trauma survivors, but as @soulless-puppy​​​ has pointed out elsewhere, if you want to recruit people to a cause, trauma-related hypersensitivity is very exploitable. Give or take a few outliers, it's not like anybody is sitting around twirling their moustaches and asking themselves, "How can I manipulate trauma survivors to spread my puritanical or pro-censorship message today?"; it happens stochastically. But thanks to social media, it does happen.

Conversion kink: Why are so many fans who demand moral purity in media (and/or fanworks) drawn to fandoms like It, or Hades, or Hannibal, or Supernatural, of all things? Why are some people marching into tags or fanworks that clearly indicate the ships or other features they contain only to object to the contents? Why aren't they just… watching and reading shit that has the messages and representation they ostensibly want entertainment to provide?

Outrage is addictive; anybody with a Twitter account knows that. But these folks aren't just hate-reading or hate-watching. Some of them have devoted literal years to ranting about a given ship, or lambasting fanworks they find offensive, or even campaigning for a show to change course to give them something they consider Good Representation and/or Healthy (usually in the form of canonizing a specific ship). That's a lot of time and energy, and while fiction does impact us—else why bother reading it—most arguments that problematic fiction is morally liable for widespread social ills are easily rebutted by things like the fact that sexual violence was not less common in 1823 than it is today. Triggers are very real, but it's pretty odd to vigorously oppose the existence of fanworks with content regarded as commonly triggering while enthusiastically consuming canon that makes the same content its bread and butter. Media and stories that tick a lot more of the boxes these fans say they want ticked are out there. So why can't they stop reading or watching the "bad" stuff, or at the very least shut the fuck up about it?

The first thing I suspect is: they don't find the "good" media that compelling. The unproblematic stuff doesn't speak to their id. But, see above re: dishonesty about our own preferences and emotions: they think unproblematic is what they should want, so they sure as shit can't admit the fucked up stuff turns their crank because it's fucked to hell.

And the second thing I suspect is that they get off on making other people change.

Metaphorically, of course. I'd class this as a non-sexual kink, where the gratification lies not in the object—canon, fanwork, or just somebody's position on the internet—being Good or being absent, but in causing the object to transform. So, a canon that's already Good isn't worth much to these people because they didn't make it be Good. And if they do harass a fan into taking down a Bad fic or artwork, that will be gratifying only for a moment; once the thing doesn't exist anymore, they will have to seek out something else that's Bad, because they get their dopamine hit from seeing the world change to conform to their vision.

Whether there's anything more to this than your basic widespread human need to mind everybody's business but your own, I've no idea. The best solution to this one is to tell those people to fuck off to the ends of the earth and then ignore them.

What all of these factors have in common is that the only thing you can control to improve your experience is yourself.

Expectations, surprises, and distress vs. harm

I understand your anxiety in 6a and C1 as: "What happens when someone comes into my work with expectations that are not met?" And I guess the question underneath—apologies; I’m running the risk of mistaking what I'm personally interested in for what you're trying to ask—is, "What is the compact between author and audience, and what does it mean to break it?"

Since you’ve chosen my blog to ask, you probably have some inkling of what my position is already. Perhaps you just need to hear somebody else say, "Fuck the haters, write what you want"; perhaps you need to practice saying it yourself. I dunno. In any case, "Fuck the haters, write what you want" is pretty much the upshot.

Let's back up a minute. I'm going to clear some of the relatively trivial examples off the board first, then get down to the messy, meaty core. Spoiler: there aren't any pat answers down there.

Your example in C1:

[I]f i have an audience that is used to certain content (for example fluffy Sam/Cas)… but then I write a fic that some people might not be able to handle the tags with because i changed what type of relationship it was (so like, unhealthy Sam/Cas) and they aren't used to me writing content differently, do I just tag it? What if someone can't handle something I wrote and isn't expecting to see that tag? Is that my responsibility?

First of all, whether you're at fault if someone follows you, sees a tag they don't expect—not even the fic; the actual tag—and is distressed… no. Hell, no. Even if the distress rises to the level of injury: no. If the tag itself is an obstacle for you, that really, truly sucks, but it is going to have to be your part to manage your needs there because no one can possibly do it for you. Tags are the system everybody else uses to curate their own experiences. So asking a tag not to be used is really asking for all content described by the tag not to be posted at all (because without the tag, no one can filter out the content).

Nobody has the right to ask for that in a shared space. You may, from time to time, encounter someone throwing a hissy fit to the tune of, "I shouldn't have to filter out incest/pedo/abuse/this thing that is neither incest nor pedo nor abuse but that I'm going to call all of those things because it squicks me personally!" Perhaps you will wonder—worry—if they have a point. Why should they have to filter out such terrible things?

Because it's none of their business what other people jack off to and they don't own the platform, that's why. If they want a space where they don't have to curate their own experiences, they can build it themselves or rustle up a few million and come back when they've bought Tumblr. Until then, they can fuck off.

(Unless you want to commit to a path of education that requires a shitload of self-restraint and bears fruit slowly if ever, though, don't bother explaining any of that to them. Don't fire back at them, which will confirm them in their sense of being aggrieved. Just block them and move on.)

But I'm assuming the meat of your question is whether you're at fault if someone is upset or indeed triggered if they expect one thing from a tag, but your content, though correctly labeled with said tag, delivers another. And my answer is, still, no. Hell no, fuck no, Christ no, sorry but no.

Your example uses a ship. A ship! Something as broad and open for interpretation as a whole-ass ship! It's shortsighted to expect a genre or even a trope to portray only one dynamic or strike one tone, but a friggin' ship? Hell will freeze before an entire fandom agrees on what the "default" dynamic for a given ship is in the first place, but let's suppose for a moment that it were possible and this condition did obtain. Suppose that one day, to a fan, everybody agreed that the default dynamic for Given/Ship is "unproblematic and fluffy" and achieved 100% concord on what qualifies.

Then the next day, somebody new reads or watches the canon for the first time and excitedly dashes off a darkfic.

No, seriously; if we say that "fandom norms" need to be respected as a baseline, what the hell are new fans supposed to do? Perform a lit review before posting so they can flag any departures from a fandom consensus that almost certainly doesn't exist? Run a poll to check what everybody else expects from Given/Ship before they tag their fic, accurately, with Given/Ship? What percentage reporting should we require on that poll, is 80% of all fans sufficient and are there membership lists somewhere to establish who is or is not a fan?

"Hang back in respectful silence and observe our traditions" is a reasonable instruction to, like, postulants in a monastery or congressional interns, but it's a bit much as an entry requirement for squeeing about a TV show.

You can't expect anyone else to know exactly what your expectations are in a fandom. More to the point, you can't expect anyone else to sign on. And if you're an author trying to gauge other people's preexisting expectations, you can't be sure of accuracy. Or uniformity.

Assuming that you've offered your example as an example merely, though, I don't want to get too hung up on the details of it. However obvious and universal a certain expectation may seem to us, it will never be shared by or obvious to everyone, and a failure to make peace with this is a major factor in most wank about specific fanworks. But the salient feature in the situation you're describing is that you are aware that your work will run against the grain of some readers' expectations. You know the mismatch is there. You have a reasonable expectation that they will be surprised, and experience tells you some of them aren't going to like it. So if you know some set of potential readers expect X, and you know this thing you wrote subverts or defies X in some way, do you have a duty to notify those readers in advance? Are you hurting them if you don't?

I want to take a minute or several to look at the notion of harm in fiction. (Look at, not dismiss.)

In the fandom spaces I happen to watch, it's become oddly common for people to talk about stories as perpetrating harm, storytelling as a brand of violence. The rhetoric has ramped up even more during the pandemic, as the end of Supernatural closed the conditions under which that fandom's TJLC-esque conspiracy theories operate, all the usual terms get extra-weaponized in the wank bubble that accompanies most series finales, various hashtags focused on this idea of narrative-inflicted harm get bandied about on Twitter, etc.

Mind you, even in fandom, these are still outliers; pull up any really large forum and find a post to the effect of either "an author harmed me with their correctly labeled fanfic" or "canon harmed me by failing to conform to my expectations," and the bulk of the responses you'll see will be asking if OP has lost their grip on reality. Outside of fandom, stuff like that just gets laughed out of the room. This is a niche problem. Of course, the niche matters to me, so the problem does, too; and "subculture" does not mean "hermetically sealed jar."

As far as SPN goes, this too shall pass, but it’s possible this "stories = attacks" framework is going to be with us for a while. @ameliacareful​​​ sees puritanical fan culture/teen culture as part of a broader societal pendulum swing between extremes of permissiveness and conservativism, and as such, part of an ebb and flow that's been present for all history and inevitable. She terms it "the New Victorianism"—and she points out that though OG Victorianism (predictably) became a cage and always had radically different implications for members of different social groups, many of its traits began as responses to real threats and abuses women faced. (Unevenly applied depending on women's socioeconomic status and ethnicity, but what ever isn't.)

The non-fandom example my brain keeps going back to is the US marriage equality movement in the ’00s. A big part of the push for marriage equality (which is intertwined with fights for a host of other civil rights issues such as employment, housing, and adoption rights) has been trying to convince straight society that LGBTQA+ people are Just Like Them.

Don't be afraid of queer people getting married/adopting children/teaching your children, Straights! Queer people, too, enjoy planned communities, financial stability, station wagons, pedestrian infrastructure, farmer's markets, fantasy football, keeping Obama 2012 bumper stickers on your car long after they begin to peel, and optimal neighborhood saturation with Panera Bread, Just Like You.

What? Leather daddies at Pride parades? Oh, no, we completely agree with you: not suitable for children. But please know, that's not all of us. "Queer" is not a synonym for "kinky" any more than it's a synonym for "deviant," and we hate that some people are out there giving society the wrong idea. In fact, we'd like to ban leather from Pride. It's not that we mind what consenting adults do in private, you understand, but there’s a time and a place. We want Pride to be for everyone. Here, Straights: have a rainbow lei and don't be afraid, because we are Just Like You.

No doubt my tone gives clues to my personal feelings about respectability politics, but here's the bitch of it: it weaponizes ideas that are in some wise true. Queer people aren't some fucking exotic species; and we did and do have to counter lurid misconceptions; and "queer" isn't a synonym for "kinky" and is sometimes treated like one; and there are prevalent and pernicious ideas that queerness is inherently obscene laced all through our culture that do untold material and psychic harm to queer people, and it's not even that much of a leap to think that maybe leather daddies at Pride help keep those ideas alive in some people's minds.

So I can understand a desire to purge "deviance" from the image American cultural consciousness holds of queerness. I can understand queer teens wanting to be able to hold hands with their crush and explore innocent young romance without feeling the weight of centuries of cultural baggage on their shoulders, or indeed to have a thoroughly normal adolescent sexual relationship that isn't construed as an act of rebellion in and of itself. I can understand not wanting your existence to have to be a rebellion. I can understand queer adults just not giving a damn about leather or kink and not wanting to hear about it and not particularly enjoying all the straight onlookers who, because they associate queer sexual orientations with kink, now believe they know something about total strangers' sex lives and who not infrequently feel at liberty to fucking talk about it with them as a result. I can understand wanting to be accepted, at any age. And so on, and so forth, because there are millions of queer people of all ages with varied lifestyles, interests, political leanings, and feelings about all this shit, and that's before you even leave America, never mind the West.

I can understand, which is why I try to be gentle about it when I tell anybody who wants to chuck free expression under the bus in favor of respectability politics to get fucked.

The point I went spelunking down that thousand-word digression for is that while I think the push to subject stories to moral tests is not born out of nothing, it's misguided, and ironically enough, ends up being actually immoral. Cultural pendulum swings happen. That they are inevitable doesn't make all of them a good idea.

In fandom's New Victorianism, stories are assessed not as engaging or boring, effective or flat, interesting or bland, beautiful or trite, but as good rep or harmful. Not even just harmful, but harm. When these fans call a story "traumatic," they're not using hyperbole to express that the story evinced strong feelings on account of being engagingly written; they mean it literally.

Their use is incorrect.

It would be overstepping to say that stories can't ever contribute to trauma, because it seems clear to me that microaggressions can and do contribute to trauma, and fictional representations can be microaggressions.† However, that legitimate use has (much like "grooming") been co-opted in onanistic motte-and-bailey arguments so long and so hard it's lost all meaning in common fandom discourse—and 90% of the time, it's not what these people are talking about in the first place.

Rather, they're using it as a synonym for "triggered."‡ As in: "Reading this story triggered me, and that is trauma."

Being triggered is not trauma; it is a trauma reaction.

Does it still suck? Oh, yeah. Is it reasonable to want to avoid it? Very.֍ But they are different things, and the distinction matters in a discussion about whether publishing/broadcasting particular stories constitutes harm.

Distress is not harm. Distress may accompany harm, but it may accompany a hell of a lot of things. Distress is not a signal that someone is hurting us. It signals something, and we should pay attention to it, but to assume it indicates someone with whom we are currently interacting or whose work we’re reading has just harmed us is a misinterpretation.

In the case of a trauma reaction to a story, the distress stems from past harm. The person who has perpetrated that harm is not present. The story is not perpetrating harm; the author is not perpetrating harm. Someone else perpetrated the harm, likely years before, and they're either not around to eat the consequences, are too powerful to have consequences visited upon them, or both.

But here's this fanfic author, just an AO3 comment or a Tumblr ask or a Twitter dogpile away.

Say an author posts a story, accurately (whether or not all readers agree if adequately) representing its content with rating, tags, summary, and/or other front matter. Someone with a history of trauma reads the front matter, takes it seriously, and still thinks that what's inside won't surpass whatever emotional limit they're prepared to deal with at the moment. So far, so much good faith from all parties.

The reader decides to read, but even though the front matter was accurate and their assessment of same was reasonable, nevertheless something in the story takes them past their limits. It could even be something like your C1 example: you post unhealthy!Sam/Castiel with tags and a rating and summary that are faithful to the dynamic the story explores; but a reader who's only ever seen fluffy, wholesome!Sam/Castiel, and who due to their perspective doesn't connect the dots on the very real clues your front matter provides, reads the story; and something in it intersects somehow with (say) a personal history of abuse such that the reader ends up with an experience far more intense than they foresaw.

Perhaps the fic even triggers a flashback to the abuse they experienced. Possibly the flashback has material consequences: the reader misses meals, or uses self-harm to try to counter their distress, or snaps at a client and gets written up at work. Suffering both the immediate distress and all its ripple effects, they accuse you of causing them, giving you an earful about how harmful your story was. After all, they were fine before they interacted with your story, and look at them now.

Yikes on a bike. Did you, the author of this unhealthy!Sam/Castiel fanfic, do this to this reader? Is your story harmful? Are you culpable?

No, you fucking well didn't; no, it fucking well isn't; no, you fucking well aren't.

You know who harmed this person? Whoever perpetrated their abuse and whatever social structures enabled their abuser. Apparently your story reminded them of their abuse, and that sucks, but it's not the same thing and if they're lashing out at you, they're forgetting the first rule of Fight Club: their mental illness is not their fault, but it is their responsibility.

In interactions like this, there is a culpable agent somewhere—but usually it's so far outside the immediate exchange that it can't even be complained to much less forced to make amends. Precious little justice will ever be forthcoming from most abusers or abusive systems. That is a very hard thing to live with.

Defenses of CNtW or darkfic tend to devolve into "Well, it's their own fault for not taking the tags/their own mental health seriously" pretty fast. Which, to be fair, is probably because often that's exactly what happened. But it's not rare for people to read the front matter, maybe even consult with a friend who's read it, carefully consider whether the story is for them, and still find painfully that it is not. They weren't stupid, and they weren't cavalier, and they weren't lacking for information. So what went wrong?

Nothing.

The author didn't do anything wrong. The reader didn't do anything wrong. The tagging/rating system was not deficient. The story was not some innately abominable superweapon that should never have seen the light of day. Everything worked here. The reader might revisit their criteria for selecting reading material—but they might decide they won't be changing anything because the risk is still worth it to them, and so long as they continue to take responsibility for themselves, there's nothing wrong with that, either. It is possible to have an interaction where people get hurt without anything actually being wrong, or anyone acting wrongly, within that interaction.

But accepting "I got hurt even though no one was at fault here, not even me" is really fucking hard. Most of us need to blame somebody: it's preferable to conceding a lack of control or the impossibility of justice from the parties who actually owe it. We need to believe that somebody in striking distance fucked up.

Conflating pain with wrong done by a proximate agent is the fallacy that allows, even requires, people to recast "I experienced distress when I read this story" as "this story harmed me." Doing that robs our experience of the story of much dimension, completely fucks our conceptual relationship to the author, and sends our collective conversations about storytelling straight to hell. Maybe this is all part of that New Victorianism pendulum swing and there's nothing anybody can do to shift its path; but if so I'll probably spend the whole of the cultural moment getting progressively more flamboyant manicures on both my middle fingers, because I hate the whole thing so much.

Having, I hope, gotten some clarity about questions of culpability and harm, I want to circle back to expectations and the author-reader contract.

On the most recent episode of the Conjoined podcast, @teiandcookies​ gave a particularly insightful response to a question she and @lovetincture​ received about "misleadingly" presented fics. The question is nominally about CNtW, but Tei illuminates how it's only incidentally about tagging at all. The following excerpt starts from 02:27. Bold text is my emphasis.

TEI: An anon sent us the following question:

…I've been burned in the past by fics [where] the author sets it up on purpose to look like one kind of fic and then puts in rape or major character death or extreme gore, when if the fic was what people thought, obviously they never would have clicked, and that feels mean-spirited to me. Just not warning is one thing, but when you're putting other tags you know are popular to lure readers to read something because they're going to think it's something else, then that's fundamentally dishonest….

…I think even a couple months ago… my initial reaction would have been, "Well, how often can that be happening?" More recently I have been doing a volunteer role with the OTW and… as a volunteer, I have now been seeing more of this kind of stuff…. Obviously this gets into questions of intent, and how can you tell what someone's artistic intent is; and there are many, many cases (probably the majority of the cases) where you really can't. However, there are some pretty clear-cut cases where you can say, "Yeah, this is just a fucking troll, and this person literally just wants people to be upset by this and that's what they're getting off on." So, I think that's the kind of thing that this person is asking about, and I have to agree with them that, yup, that absolutely happens.

But I think the word "trolls" is maybe more important in that sentence than any other, because I think this is… a conversation about trolling that is disguised as… a conversation about Choose Not to Warn. And it's easy to get those mixed up, maybe, because trolls use the tools that are available to them….

So you can't stop the misuse of your tools, right? Every platform has different tools, and every platform has people misusing those tools differently. And I think… you can go down some unfortunate paths if you convince yourself that you can stop trolling if only you find the correct set of tools. Right? If only you make people use the site correctly, then they'll use the site correctly. Because that's just never gonna happen.

So you can't stop it, [but] I think what you can do is decide whether the misuse of a tool is worth the correct use of the tool. So, for sure, Choose Not to Warn is one of the tools that trolls have on AO3 to convince people to click or, y'know, trick people into clicking on things that they wouldn't otherwise click on.

It's certainly not the only one. Another really obvious tool that trolls have if they want you to click on something that is not going to be anything even close to what it looks like it is, is, for instance, relationship tags. Because something that people may not know is that the only tags on AO3 that are enforceable—as in, if they're wrong, you can report them to Abuse and they will be changed or deleted—are fandom tags, language, rating, and warnings. So if those things are egregiously wrong, you can essentially force them to change it; but other things, like relationship tags (significantly) and any additional tags, if they're just flat-out wrong? That's not against the Terms of Service.

Here Tei gives "the top-kudosed Reylo fic" on AO3 as an example and points out that while this trolling could perhaps be circumvented by making relationship tags enforceable, it would be completely impractical "to have a team of volunteers litigate whether every single fic qualifies as being the relationship." She concludes:

I think the question isn't so much, "What do we do about trolls in general?": it's more, "Is this tool worth the price of admission?", and the price of admission is it being used wrong. In this case, paying the price of admission is just that sometimes you're gonna click on things you wish you hadn't. And this is where it's totally reasonable, I think, to disagree about what prices are worth it to pay.

I think for me, the fact that someone could use these tags in a way that is intentionally misleading is an acceptable price… and there aren't solutions that would easily eliminate that problem in a way that wouldn't have [their] own much larger costs, so to me, I kind of look at this right off and say, "Yeah, this is okay, this is worth it." Other people might feel differently. But I think it is important to make sure that we're talking about the prices of various things and not just laboring under the delusion that there's some kind of Platonic ideal of a set of features that are impossible to abuse, because I don't think that really exists.

From your acute anxiety about hurting people, anon, it's apparent that whatever your motivations as a writer, you're not trolling. I pulled this out because—well, partly because it's just a really good discussion that places probably half the tail-chasing around CNtW in its proper context. But also because I want to place the conversation about the author-reader contract and what stories "owe" us in its proper context, which is that benefits have costs.

What, presentation-wise, is the Reylo example actually doing? It's leveraging readers' expectations and AO3's front matter conventions to get people interested in one topic to enter the story and, once they're there, telling them something they might not want to hear. At the level of that particular fic, that process can fairly be labeled a mere bait and switch.

A lot of people will slap the "bait and switch" label on pretty much any story that subverts their expectations, though, and I think often an apter concept is Trojan horse. If the author knows the audience expects one thing, and leverages that expectation to say something different—even if the horse is constructed out of 100% ethically sourced clue-by-fours—then yes, it is a bit like they're sneaking a message past the reader's… well. Here, some might say, "past the reader's boundaries," and revile it as an act of disregard and violation.

Some might rather say, though, "past the reader's preconceptions," casting it more as a technique to force an audience to confront something overlooked or ignored. Including their own biases. If this is a trick, such subversion seems to say, it's a trick you're playing on yourself.

Not only do I prefer the second formulation because I value being surprised, but I have some beef with the first one. I think it's the reader falling down on their half of the author-reader contract. It looks a lot like disavowing, when convenient, the fact that cognitive and emotional manipulation (if you want to call it that) is exactly what we come to fiction for. It's one thing to complain that the massage you got sucked, but it's shitty if your whole one-star Google review is bitching that the process involved laying on of hands.

So what is the line between artistically justified subversion and mean-spirited baiting? Good faith, probably; but what's "good faith"? "Clear-cut" cases like the Reylo fic aren't usually what people fight about. I'm not even as convinced as Tei that the clear-cut ones are what her anon is thinking of, because when people are upset about a surprise, they tend to form immediate, vehement opinions about the motives and intent of the surprise's author. I know this for reasons.

Readers don't only end up surprised because authors are trying to surprise them; there are real disagreements about what's obvious, and I want to keep that in sight. But deliberate subversions force us to evaluate what the contract between author and reader actually is in a way that accidental surprises do not. What do authors owe audiences? What do audiences owe authors? What are we all showing up for?

When you get all the way down to the bottom, the question is, "Should art be safe?" And I come down, really hard, on the side of no—not because I think "challenging" should be the default instead of "comforting," or because I think challenge is more important than comfort, but because I think art's ability to comfort is inextricable from its willingness to challenge.

And because it can't be safe. Sometimes experiences aren't what we expect. Sometimes they're exactly what we expect, but they hit us in ways we don't. Sometimes they're exactly what we expect, and they hit us exactly how we were told they might, but advance knowledge is not the same thing as living. Sometimes there's no way to be warned for something.

Someone might point out that driving a car is never risk-free, either, but it's still a moral imperative to take every step to reduce the risk that we can. Behind the wheel, efficiency or entertainment or style have no business overriding safety. Or take architecture: you don't build a structure that has a one in a thousand chance of collapsing no matter how cool it would look or what emotions it might inspire. Why should authors be held to a different standard?

Stakes are why. If a writer fucks up, people lose interest or get offended; maybe justly, but they're still breathing. If a structural engineer fucks up, people die. This isn't some kind of side-issue or technicality; it's one of the major functions of storytelling.

Art is one of the safest experiences open to us—even when it's uncomfortable. That's why we do it. It's sandboxing.

I don't want to be dismissive of the impact stories can have, whether we're talking about their impact on our mood, the complex interplay between art and society, the mirrors they hold up to us individually or collectively, or any of the other ways they are important to us. If I didn't believe fiction mattered, I wouldn't spend so damn much time making it, never mind thinking about it.

But I do think here in our fandom bubble, we sometimes overstate its… not importance, but consequence. It does matter that the events in fiction are not real. Bizarre that we've arrived at a place where it needs saying, but apparently it does. A lot of voices in this echo chamber have gotten in the habit of giving fictional and real-world experiences equal weight. That's why it's so easy for people to conflate distress with injury, why it's so hard for them to distinguish trauma reactions from trauma.

Some of the greatest vitriol I've seen toward CNtW or the very idea of shock in literature has been from fellow fanfic writers. I don't think that's coincidence. Who else is more invested in elevating what we do? That South Park episode with San Franciscans smelling their own farts comes to mind. Look: surprises, even nasty surprises, can be totally fine in fanfiction because art has no duty to safety, only duties with which safety can be either compatible or incompatible. I'll cheerfully die on that hill. And when people get all, "Think a lot of yourself, do you?" over calling fanfiction art, my internal response is something along the lines of, "Bitch, I'm not the one out here making it out to be life or death."

If the first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious, the second is to assume the unserious isn't important, and the third is to run around being a fucking asshole about art you don’t like.

So where does that leave us, on a practical level? Those of us out here on the mean streets of fandom, just trying to make some porn?

A bit later that Conjoined discussion, @lovetincture​ quotes Margaret Atwood quoting Alice Munro: "Do what you want and live with the consequences."

That. Do that.

At 17:46, Tei points out that "[t]here's a difference between 'consequences' as in, 'I know that this thing might happen' and 'consequences' as in, 'this is in the right.'" It's a crucial distinction. Plenty of reactions are predictable, but not all of them are just. Some of them are predictable precisely because they're unjust. Directly protesting an unjust reaction is often a waste of energy, but just knowing for yourself which is which can take a lot of the weight off.

The possibility of encountering bad actors is the price of admission for both reading and posting fanwork. On the posting side, there are certain stories (and ways of presenting them) where you'll know it's going to generate backlash. There are others where you won't see it coming, but you can accept that the potential is always there. It's up to you first to decide whether the backlash would be just, and then whether this thing you want to say is worth weathering any backlash that’s unjust.

If you decide it isn't, the consequence you live with is leaving the thing unsaid.

Here's what you owe your readers, whatever you know about the expectations they're walking in with: respect. Compassion. The best story you can tell that day. Whether that feels like a warm hug or a backhanded slap depends on you, them, and the story.

Here's what you don't owe them: more of those things than you owe yourself.

How do I not feel bad?

There's kind of a lot of this question salted through your others. "How do I not feel bad while establishing and enforcing boundaries that will let me have the experiences I want in fandom?" "How do I not feel bad while writing and sharing the things I want to write and share?" "How do I not feel bad while exploring sensitive topics, and myself, and what it means to communicate through art?"

Anon, the answers are above my pay grade either way, but I think "How do I not feel bad?" is the wrong question.

In the process of becoming who you want to be, and writing what you want to write, and building the relationships you want to build, and discovering and integrating into the communities you want to be a part of, you will do things like distance yourself from people you once called friends, disagree with people you once agreed with, disagree with people you still agree with on other matters, lose respect for people you once respected, embrace new people of whom old acquaintances disapprove, and experiment with everything from liberal application of the block button to stone-cold skullfucking porn. Even if you act faultlessly at every turn, which you will not, you will sometimes feel bad doing it. You will feel bad when you break off a friendship, or someone breaks off a friendship with you. You will feel bad when a friend wants you to wade into an argument that you know will suck the time and creative energy right out of your day, forcing you to weigh up which sacrifice will leave you least dissatisfied. You will feel bad when someone flames your fanfic or harasses people you care about over shipping. You will feel bad if you censor yourself to try to avoid being targeted.

So a better question is probably, "How do I feel as comfortable in my own skin as I can?" And one of the most helpful things I've ever done toward that goal, personally, is work on accepting that sometimes I will feel bad.

That doesn't mean accepting any level of discomfort without question, any more than the fact that not everyone will like you is license to be a raging asshole. But I've generally found that in running, BDSM, and interpersonal relationships, there is a distinction between good pain and bad pain. I can't always correctly assess which I'm feeling. Nor is it a strictly black and white thing, any more than bodies or morality are. But I can generally figure out what really matters to me and thus when discomfort is worth it if I try, and I get better at it the older I get.

Compromises are part of life. People disagree about which ones are acceptable. There is none that will please everybody, so I recommend pleasing yourself and being forthright about your selection.

Or as @stripy-tights put it once, "Self-actualization is giving yourself permission to say, 'Fuck you, the horse you rode in on, and your extensive DNI list that includes people who wear pink on Wednesdays.'"

Good luck. You'll be fine.

——————————————————— ———————————————————

*Note that "[X group of fans] are disgusting" or whatever does not have the same problem. It's clearly designed to be dickish, but it doesn't seek to transfer responsibility to an unconsenting party; it's not posing as a covenant. Here in fandom, we are all a beautiful rainbow of infinite, slightly different ways to be assholes to each other.

†From a tagging/warning perspective, this is a case that's largely irrelevant, because tagging/warning debates are about the onus on authors to label their own work, and authors who are writing the kind of works that are bona fide microaggressions are not going to be aware of or admit to it. You wouldn't debate about whether Margaret Mitchell should have tagged "racism" for stereotypes like Mammy and Prissy, because Margaret Mitchell was never gonna see the problem.

‡Often they're using "triggered" as a synonym for "upset," but I'm not interested in judging whose use is or isn't in good faith and don't think an attempt to do so should be part of this argument.

֍Here is where often, in tagging debates, someone pipes up to say that the literature suggests trigger warnings may do more harm than good by encouraging survivors to "see trauma as central to their identity," and that what's needed to improve symptoms is in fact exposure therapy, to which fiction—being fictional—is ideally suited. I'm sure well informed people could debate this point, and if you're an educator considering how to present your syllabus, you might actually need to; but within fandom, this whole question is interesting but functionally moot. The only people who get to decide when or whether or how someone undertakes exposure therapy are they and their therapist. So please leave the efficacy of avoidance as a coping strategy the fuck out of tagging debates, or at an absolute minimum, let them who have never procrastinated on their taxes cast the first stone.

#asks #Aquinian Anon #meta #fandom meta #AO3 warnings #DNI notes #tagging #stories and surprise #tagging and morality #morality in fan spaces #purifying the problematic #the Conjoined podcast #long post is long #discourse for ts #The Reader will too soon discover that so large an interval of time was not spent in writing this discourse #the very length of it will convince him that the writer had not time enough to make a shorter

[killianmesmalls]

On your comments about Jack: ye-es, in the sense that Jack is a character who definitely deserved better than he was treated by the characters. The way Dean especially treats him reflects very badly on Dean, no question. But, speaking as a viewer, I think the perspective needs to shift a little bit.

To me, Jack is Dawn from Buffy, or Scrappy Doo. He’s an (in my opinion) irritating kid who is introduced out of nowhere to be both super vulnerable and super OP, and the jeopardy is centered around him in a way that has nothing to do with his actual character or relationships. He’s mostly around to be cute and to solve or create problems — he never has any firm character arcs or goals of his own, nor any deeper purpose in the meta narrative. In this way, he’s a miss for SPN, which focuses heavily on conflicts as metaphors for real life.

Mary fits so much better in that framework, and introducing her as a developed, flawed person works really well with the narrative. It is easy for us to care about Mary, both as the dead perfect mother on the pedestal and as the flawed, human woman who could not live up to her sons’ expectations. That connection is built into the core of SPN, and was developed over years, even before she was a character. When she was added, she was given depth and nuance organically, and treated as a flawed, complex character rather than as a plot device or a contrivance. She was given a voice and independence, and became a powerful metaphor for developing new understandings of our parents in adulthood, as well as an interesting and well-rounded character. You care that she’s dead, not just because Sam and Dean are sad, but for the loss of her development and the potential she offered. So, in that sense, I think a lot of people were frustrated that she died essentially fridged for a second time, and especially in service of the arc of a weaker character.

And like, you’re right, no one can figure out if Jack is a toddler or a teenager. He’s both and he’s neither, because he’s never anything consistently and his character arc is always “whatever the plot needs it to be.” Every episode is different. Is he Dean’s sunny opportunity to be a parent and make up for his dad’s shitty parenting? Yes! Is he also Dean’s worst failure and a reminder that he has done many horrible things, including to “innocent” children? Yes! Is he Cas’s child? Yes! Is he Dean’s child? Yes! But also, no! Is he Sam’s child? Yes! Is he a lonely teenager who does terrible things? Yes! Is he a totally innocent little lamb who doesn’t get why what he is doing is wrong? Yes! Is he the most powerful being in the universe? Yes! Does he need everyone to take care of him? Yes! Is he just along for the ride? Yes! Is he responsible for his actions? Kinda??? Sometimes??? What is he???

Mary as a character is narratively cohesive and fleshed-out. Jack is a mishmash of confusing whatever’s that all add up to a frustrating plot device with no consistent traits to latch on to. Everything that fans like about him (cute outfits, gender play, well-developed parental bonds with the characters) is fanon. So, yes, the narrative prioritizes Mary. Many fans prioritize Mary, at least enough that Dean’s most heinous acts barely register. To the narrative (not to Cas, which is a totally different situation), Jack is only barely more of a character than Emma Winchester, who Sam killed without uproar seasons earlier. He’s been around longer, but he’s equally not really real.

I debated on responding to this because, to tell the truth, I think we fundamentally disagree on a number of subjects and, as they say, true insanity is arguing with anyone on the internet. However, you spent a lot of time on the above and I feel it's only fair to say my thoughts, even if I don't believe it will sway you any more than what you said changed my opinions.

I'm assuming this was in response to this post regarding how Jack's accidental killing of Mary was treated so severely by the brothers, particularly Dean, because it was Mary and, had it been a random character like the security guard in 13x06, it would have been treated far differently. However, then the argument becomes less about the reaction of the Winchester brothers to this incident and more the value of Jack or Mary to the audience.

I believe we need to first admit that both characters are inherently archetypes—Mary as the Madonna character initially then, later, as a metaphor for how imperfect and truly human our parents are compared to the idol we have as children, and Jack as the overpowered child who is a Jesus allegory by the end. Both have a function within the story to serve the Winchester brothers, through whose lens and with whose biases we are meant to view the show's events. We also need to admit that the writers didn't think more than a season ahead for either character, especially since it wasn't initially supposed to be Mary that came back at the end of season 11 but John, and they only wrote enough for Jack in season 13 to gauge whether or not the audience would want him to continue on or if he needed to be killed off by the end of the season. Now, I know we curate our own experiences online which leads to us being in our own fandom echo chambers, however it is important to note that the character was immediately successful enough with the general audience that, after his first episode or two, he was basically guaranteed a longer future on the show.

I have to admit, I’m not entirely sure why the perspective of how his character is processed by some audience members versus others has any bearing on the argument that he deserved to be treated better overall by the other characters especially when taking their own previous actions in mind. I’m not going to tell you that your opinion is wrong regarding your feelings for Jack. It’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it, it harms no one to have it and express it. My feelings on Jack are clearly very different from your own, but this is really just two different people who processed a fictional person in different ways. I personally believe he has a purpose in the Winchesters’ story, including Castiel’s, as he reflects certain aspects of all of them, gives them a way to explore their own histories through a different perspective, and changes the overall dynamic of Team Free Will from “soldiers in arms” to a family (Misha’s words). In the beginning he allows Sam to work through his past as the “freak” and powerful, dangerous boy wonder destined to bring hell on earth. With Dean, his presence lets Dean work through his issues with John and asks whether he will let history repeat itself or if he’ll work to break the cycle. Regarding Cas, in my opinion he helps the angel reach his “final form” of a father, member of a family, lover and protector of humanity, rebellious son, and the true show of free will. 

From strictly the story, he has several arcs that work within themes explored in Supernatural, such as the argument of nature versus nurture, the question of what we’re willing to give up in order to protect something or someone else and how ends justify the means, and the struggle between feeling helpless and powerless versus the corruptive nature of having too much power and the dangerous lack of a moral compass. His goals are mentioned and on display throughout his stint on the show, ones that are truly relatable to some viewers: the strong desire to belong—the need for family and what you’ll do to find and keep it. 

With Mary, we first need to establish whether the two versions of her were a writing flaw due to the constant change in who was dictating her story and her relationship to the boys, which goes against the idea that her characterization was cohesive and fleshed-out but, rather, put together when needed for convenience, or if they both exist because, as stated above, we are seeing the show primarily through the biased lens of the Winchester brothers and come to face facts about the true Mary as they do. Like I said in my previous post, I don’t dislike Mary and I don’t blame her for her death (either one). However, I do have a hard time seeing her as a more nuanced, fleshed-out character than Jack. True, a lot of her problems are more adult in nature considering she has to struggle with losing her sons’ formative years and meeting them as whole adults she knows almost nothing about, all because of a choice she made before they were born. 

However, her personal struggles being more “mature” in nature (as they center primarily on parental battles) doesn’t necessarily mean her story has layers and Jack’s does not. They are entirely different but sometimes interconnected in a way that adds to both of their arcs, like Mary taking Jack on as an adoptive son which gives her the moments of parenting she lost with Sam and Dean, and Jack having Mary as a parental figure who understands and supports him gives him that sense of belonging he had just been struggling with to the point of running away while he is also given the chance to show “even monsters can do good”. 

I’d also argue that Jack being many ages at once isn’t poor writing so much as a metaphor for how, even if you’re forced to grow up fast, that doesn’t mean you’re a fully equipped adult. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I believe Jack simultaneously taking a lot of responsibility and constantly trying to prove to others he’s useful while having childish moments is relatable to some who were forced to play an adult role at a young age. He proves a number of times that he doesn’t need everyone to take care of him, but he also has limited life experience and, as such, will make some mistakes while he’s also being a valuable member of the group. Jack constantly exists on a fine line in multiple respects. Some may see that as a writing flaw but it is who the character was conceived to be: the balance between nature or nurture, between good and evil, between savior and devil. 

Now, I was also frustrated Mary was “fridged” for a second time. It really provided no other purpose than to give the brothers more man pain to further the plot along. However, this can exist while also acknowledging that the way it happened and the subsequent fallout for Jack was also unnecessary and a sign of blatant hypocrisy from Dean, primarily, and Sam. 

And, yes, Jack can be different things at once because, I mean, can’t we all? If Mary can be both the perfect mother and the flawed, independent, distant parent, can’t Jack be the sweet kid who helps his father-figures process their own feelings on fatherhood while also being a lost young-adult forcing them to face their failures? Both characters contain multitudes because, I mean, we all do. 

I can provide articles or posts on Jack’s characterization and popularity along with Mary’s if needed, but for now I think this is a long enough ramble on my thoughts and feelings. I’m happy to discuss more, my messenger is always open for (polite) discussion. Until then, I’m going to leave it at we maybe agree to disagree. 

#long post #long ask #so long answer #guys it's 1 am #i hope this made sense #watch me read this after sleep and register things i wish i said #oh well #jack kline #mary winchester #spn #supernatural #spn critical #supernatural critical #kinda? #eh just in case #spn meta #supernatural meta #jack meta

[tlbodine]

Things That Do (And Don’t) Sell Books (in my experience)

I’ve just finished reading this book:

I am both amused and a bit disheartened to have read the whole thing and discovered that I knew pretty much everything in it. Amused, because I guess I’ve picked up a lot of knowledge over the years. Disheartened, because it clearly has not led to me becoming the break-away success I always dreamed of. Ah well. Live and learn. 

I’m all about transparency in this business, so I wanted to talk honestly for a while about book marketing and what I’ve experienced in terms of what does and does not seem to work. I’d love to hear your thoughts, so chime in with your own experiences! 

Branding and Audience 

The first third of Burke’s book is dedicated to this aspect, and it’s an important marketing step that’s easy to overlook. The idea is basically that you can’t market a product unless it has a brand identity. To create your brand, you need to do the following: 

Identify the audience who you are trying to reach with your work, or who would be most receptive to what you’re writing

Identify your dreams and goals so you have a clear picture in mind of what you want to accomplish 

Figure out how to position yourself in such a way that you a.) stand out from the competition but b.) people can still relate to and understand at a glance

Find a way to communicate your brand consistently in terms of the language used, your aesthetic, the way you act online, and so forth. 

When it comes to brand-building as an author, I think I’ve got a bit of a corner nailed down. I at least hope to be perceived as someone level-headed, thoughtful, generally positive/empathetic and humanist, but also critical and looking deeper into the meanings of things -- all of which are traits I personally possess and which are baked in to the work I do. In support of that branding, I curate my activity online as best I can: I post things that are of a certain horror aesthetic that I feel overlaps with my own interests/style; I give writing advice and boost people in the community where I can; I wade into discourse selectively and thoughtfully; I give media reviews and analysis that I think would be interesting to like-minded people. 

The “identify the audience” part is much harder for me. I’m still honestly not sure who my ideal reader is, or where exactly to go to find my audience. At this point I’m kind of scattering crumbs of myself out into the wind and hoping it will attract people who will, in turn, be interested in the work that I do (and both willing and able to support it financially). 

Things I’ve Done With Varying Degrees of Success: 

Aforementioned blogging activities. I have slowly but steadily grown my following her on tumblr and other social media sites as well as my author newsletter on substack, but it’s not clear to what extent that following translates into book sales. My writing advice posts vastly out-perform all of my other content, but I haven’t seen compelling evidence that the people interested in my writing advice are especially interested in my fiction -- it seems to be two separate groups, with maybe a sliver of overlap. 

Content marketing with more short fiction. This seems like it should be the safest, surest way to find more readers, but it’s time-consuming and discouraging because of the discoverability cycle. My horror flash fiction posts don’t get nearly as many notes as my advice posts. My attempts to get into the big anthologies that pop up have so far amounted to little, although I do need to write more. It’s just that coming up with new ideas and writing them all the time is a lot of work, and if it’s not paying off maybe I’m still better off dedicating that work to my novels. 

Sending ARCs to book bloggers/reviewers/booktube etc. I sent out dozens, if not hundreds, of these and got next to no response. I do think part of the problem is that, at the time, I had no Twitter presence, and -- like it or not -- there seems to be a bit of cliqueishness to this aspect of the book world. Now that I’ve spent more time on Twitter ingratiating myself with the horror community, I suspect I’ll have a somewhat easier job securing blurbs and reviews at least from the people in my extended social circle. But I won’t know until I try it again. *I also know I would have greater success with this if I’d been sending paperback ARCs instead of digital. I didn’t, because the cost of buying more author copies + shipping was prohibitive. 

Author Newsletter. I maintain mine in conjunction with my Patreon account. I send a monthly news round-up, making a point of shouting out both industry news and the milestones/achievements of others in the community as well as providing what I hope to be value-added or interesting content (in the form of blog posts my patrons vote on). It does OK. I average a couple of new sign-ups per month this way and tend to hover around a 25% open rate, which isn’t terrible. But it’s not great, either, and I won’t know for sure whether any of those opens will actually yield sales at any point. 

Interpersonal relationships/community building. Hands down the most successful “marketing” thing I’ve ever done is make friends with people. My writing discord group is small but very close-knit and interacting with them is one of the genuine highlights of my day. I didn’t really make it with mercenary intentions of selling books, but it has directly resulted in sales. Similarly, there are a handful of authors from Twitter and Wattpad that I’ve developed genuine friendships with, and we buy each other’s books and support one another. This whole community aspect is extremely rewarding and I’d do it whether or not it sold books, but it’s also not exactly easy to scale. I can only maintain genuine friendships with so many people. 

Posting in reading groups. The books that allow self-promo are so saturated with it that nobody pays any attention. The good groups do not allow self-promo, unless it’s in the form of getting down in the comments and recommending a book on a per-person basis to people looking for a specific thing, and only then if you’re not being spammy. Again, this is time-consuming. You could spend your entire life in these groups, hand-selling books to these people, and maybe picking up a few sales. They do seem like a good place to identify trends, though, so they’re good for market research if not direct selling. 

Things I Have Not Done, But Which I Suspect Would Sell Books 

Paid promotions. The golden ticket for book sales still seems to be landing a BookBub promo. If you’re unfamiliar, this is where you price your book at 99 cents or free and then pay bookbub to include it in their deals newsletter. Bookbub is very popular and moves a lot of copies. Ideally, you want to set it up so that your cheap book is the first in a series, and people snap that up and then come back to read the rest. This requires you to have written a series. Also bookbub is expensive because these are premium ads. We’re talking hundreds of dollars for one ad. There are other book promos that are cheaper but don’t have the same buy-through rate. 

Ads on facebook/amazon. I’m only dimly familiar with the ins and outs of these ads. They can be relatively cheap, but the amount of visibility they have is tied to your budget -- so the more you can spend on a campaign, the better your performance will be. 

Calling bookstores/libraries and asking them to order. I should do this. I have not done this purely because I am a coward. 

I am not certain what more I can do to promote my books without spending money. 

I understand the “spend money to make money” concept, but I also understand the “I have a limited budget and cannot spend it willy nilly on things that still might not actually pay off, especially considering how expensive self-publishing is when you want to do it right.” 

...This post ended up in a much more bitter place than I meant for it to. Sorry. I’ll check in if I remember additional points that could be successful strategies. 

#writing #publishing #writing advice #publishing advice #writeblr #long post

[rissynicole]

☕️ Tumblr?

Like a lot of people, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Tumblr.

(More under the cut for people who want to read a coffee-fueled ramble about Tumblr.)

The site is constantly glitching, I can’t ever find any of my old posts even with tags, etc., etc. One time, I changed my background color from pink to black, and Tumblr held my account hostage for having “adult content” on my blog. It’s just a hot mess.

As for actual content, I’m constantly torn.

I’m on Tumblr a lot, so I obviously don’t despise it. I’d probably never find some of the silly, goofy posts I see here on any other site. Every now and then, I’ll come across something pretty insightful, too. It’s also nice to be able to interact with fellow writers and artists.

As for how it’s set up, it’s very well-suited for me. I don’t have to worry about maintaining some sort of perfect façade since everything here is largely anonymous. I just don’t like social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. I hate taking pictures of myself, and I don’t feel the need to constantly update everyone and their goat on my life. Here, I can just chat about my hobbies and whatnot without feeling any pressure.

On the other hand, anonymity has kind of a dark side to it. The ability to be anonymous really brings out the worst in people.

Sometimes the content here drives me insane. I’m really not a judgmental person, but some people here are just a bit too much to handle. I’ve had to unfollow people for posting/reblogging too many political things that they don’t tag properly.

I’ve had to do the same thing to people who hold really extreme views that I just can’t get on board with. I couldn’t imagine holding such extreme views or getting so worked up over random things. One minute, I’ll checking out IZ fanart pics on my dash, and the next minute, I’m reading a 10-mile long discourse post on the evils of almond milk, where several misinformed people are automatically roasted into oblivion by really wound-up strangers hiding behind a keyboard. It’s mostly shit like that that just makes me… tired?

I can’t recall a single political discourse post on this site that actually reads like a civilized political debate. It’s more like a circle jerk fueled by group polarization. This site ends up being a slippery slope, where anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with a political viewpoint is automatically seen as the “enemy.”

And besides, I’m not on here for politics. I don’t want to constantly be angry and annoyed. If I wanted to research the evils of almond milk, I would search for credible sources online. I wouldn’t just mindlessly believe the wisdom of PussySlayer420 on Tumblr.

As for fandom, I absolutely understand how people can be relentlessly bullied on Tumblr to the point of leaving the fandom altogether. Again, I want to attribute that to anonymity. People get awfully brave behind a keyboard.

Any site like Tumblr that allows for easy anonymity (such as Reddit, Discord, or even Twitter) ends up being kind of a breeding ground for discourse. It dissolves into a lot witch hunting and petty drama.

All of that said, I firmly believe that you curate your own experience on social media. Don’t like someone? Block them. I’ve blocked a lot of people on this site. Far more than any other social media platform I’m on, in fact.

I mean, it bums me out. I don’t take pride in making enemies. But in order for me to have the best experience I can in the IZ fandom on Tumblr, it is necessary.

Anyhow, this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg. There are way more issues with Tumblr that I could go and on about, and it would probably end up in a full-blown essay about the pros/cons of anonymity online. 

I haven’t even discussed one of the most important things of all: the dangers that exist on anonymous platforms like Tumblr. Some weird people exist on the internet. Some dangerous people exist on the internet. Be safe. Use discretion.

I’m going to cut myself off here, though. I already feel like I’m rambling. Eh, this shitshow of a response could probably be summed up with this final message: just be safe on the internet. And don’t be afraid to unfollow/block people or blacklist certain things if it would be better for your mental health. 

#should I be nervous about posting this? #should i turn off anon just to be safe? #did I say something really wrong that will be misinterpreted? #I'm just a dumb 21 year old college girl who want to write action/adventure fanfiction and reblog IZ fanart #I have no hidden agenda #i dunno #I'm probably just being paranoid #rissy's asks #dana-chan325

[brotheralyosha]

In Odd Arne Westad’s magisterial volume The Global Cold War, the Yale historian reaches one conclusion that has received insufficient attention. Westad (who is Norwegian) asserts that “globalization” is the wrong word for the rapid expansion of a specific type of capitalist order in the late twentieth century. A better word, he says, is “Americanization.” In the early twentieth century, an aggressive and militaristic Western European settler colony was ascendant, and it became the world’s predominant power in 1945. With the accidental suicide of Soviet communism, the system that the United States had been imposing on its lessers in this or that territory became globalized—even if you might operate according to different rules domestically. From 1990 on—and now this is my contention, not Westad’s—Americanization was so profound that it became hard to even notice it. Invisible, that is, until it begins to fall apart, or is contested.

Everybody understands that the military, as well as economic pressure and covert operations, are central pillars of American hegemony. It’s also fairly well understood that Hollywood is an important vehicle for projecting American “soft power.” But in the last ten to fifteen years, the internet has done far more to make the world think like Americans than Marvel movies.

At one level, this is because of the way the online experience is structured: the built environment of the internet, if you will. It used to be there were millions of different internet pages. But the logic of capital accumulation, within the U.S. regulatory and cultural contexts, has whittled them down to two basic models. Type one relies on you to supply content, then manipulates your subconscious desires, keeping you scrolling through other user-generated content, for as long as possible—all in the service of selling your attention to advertisers. It is by now quite obvious how the monstrously wealthy companies behind this trick have warped and reshaped how the world is represented, and the way we see each other.

The other major type of website requires you pay a subscription to watch some kind of television show. With a curated streaming service like Netflix (responsible for over 10 percent of global internet traffic during the pandemic), subsidiaries in India or Nigeria have local teams in place. But they were still hired by an American company, to maximize its profit. In order for streaming services to be profoundly American, you don’t need Americans running day-to-day operations on the ground throughout the world, just like the British Empire didn’t rely on persons with white English identities to do the same. Dynamics of dominance and cultural diffusion also happened through the selection of local vassals.

Of course, there are also “online marketplaces” where you can purchase goods. But you don’t spend any time there; you just lose money. And since I am a journalist, I should probably acknowledge that there are still media web pages, where you can read a newspaper or magazine. But in truth, for a majority of people, those are just sites where you click away four to five pop-ups before giving up and returning to scrolling through the news on social media. Mainstream media sites these days get all their money from guilty liberals.

Then there is the content. Both major types of websites started out overwhelmingly populated by American users, and this shaped their cultures. American voices remain primary on most social media platforms, speaking through the biggest YouTube and Instagram accounts. In Indonesia, social media influencers make sure to use English, even if their audience is entirely local. As importantly, whether in Chile or the Philippines, conversations tend to be governed by American concepts and discursive practices. Even if the conversation is about Brazilian politics, a huge amount of internet-cultural capital is associated with fluency in American terminology and meme language. The South American far right has obviously been influenced by right-wing U.S. YouTube culture. There are  German Q Anon accounts.

People from countries without our history of overt racial hierarchy get into labyrinthine conversations based on U.S. designations. Are Palestinians white? Are Filipinos the “Mexicans of Asia”? But the United States is not normal. We have a very particular history—beginning with the genocide of Native Americans, followed by a reliance on slave labor for development, and then de facto apartheid at least until the 1960s—which shapes our concepts for things like race and politics. There are many reasons you would not want the whole planet to normalize our cultural superstructure.

This summer’s worldwide Black Lives Matter protests illuminated the degree to which American culture is now universal. In an essay that I don’t agree with in its entirety, Alex Hochuli pointed out something remarkable about BLM marches in places like Finland and Serbia. Some people, it seems, weren’t marching in solidarity with the people of the richest nation on earth. They were marching as if they were themselves Americans. But this makes a lot of sense, because (with some major exceptions), when you are on the internet, you are basically in the United States.

#not sure I agree with that last sentence #I'd want to hear more about this from people who were actually involved with blm marches outside the us #still excellent and very much worth reading #vincent bevins #the baffler #tech #internet #imperialism #us foreign policy #long post

[scifrey]

WORDS FOR WRITERS: The Value of Fanfiction

There’s been a lot of chatter on social media these last few weeks, recycling that trashy, self-aggrandizing, tired old “hot take” that reading and writing fanfiction is somehow bad for you as a writer.

Before we go any further, let me give a clear and definitive answer to this take:

No, reading and writing fanfiction will not make you and does not make you a bad reader or writer.

 Period.

 Why? Here’s the TL;DR version:

1)      Reading and Writing, any kind of reading and writing, will make you a better reader and writer. And it’s enjoyable, to boot.

2)      Fanfiction has been around as long as Original Fiction, so we’d know if there was any negative impact by now (spoiler alert: there isn’t.)

3)      Practice is Practice, so matter what medium you get that practice in.

4)      Comprehending and writing fanfiction is harder than writing original fiction because you have to hold the Source Media Text in your head at the same time as you’re reading/writing a different story. It improves your understanding of storytelling.

5)      No hobby, no matter what it is, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else or yourself, is bad. And that goes double for if you decide to keep it a hobby. Not every fanfic writer wants to write original fiction, and that’s just fine. Not every hobby has to be monetized.

 Okay. But what do they mean by “fanfiction”?

 “Fanfiction is fictional writing written by fans, commonly of an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator as a basis for their writing.”-- Wikipedia

 Basically – it’s when you take elements (setting, characters, major themes or ideas) of a Media Text (a novel, a movie, a podcast, a comic, etc.) and create a different story with those elements. You can write a missing scene, or an extended episode, or a whole new adventure for the characters of the Media Text. You can even crossover or fuse multiple Media Texts, or specific elements, to create a whole new understanding of the characters or their worlds.

 Similar to fanfic, you can also create fanart, fancomics, or fansongs (“filk”), fancostumes (“cosplay”), and fanfilms. These are called Fanworks or Fancrafts.

 Fanfiction is usually posted to online forums, journals, blogs, or story archives and shared for free among the public. Before the advent of the internet, fanfiction was often printed or typed, and hand-copied using photocopiers or ditto machines, and distributed for free (or for a small administration fee to cover materials) among fans at conventions, or through mail-order booklets (“zines”).

 Fanfiction has existed pretty much since the beginning of storytelling (A Thousand and One Nights, Robin Hood, and King Arthur all have different elements attributed to them by different authors retelling, twisting, adding to, or changing the stories; there’s no single-origin author of those tales.)

 There are billions on billions of fanfics out there in the world—and while a majority of them are romance stories, there are also adventures, comedies, dramas, thrillers, stories based on case files, stories about the emotional connection between characters when one is hurt and the other must care for them, historical retellings, etc. There are also stories for every age range and taste, though be sure to take heed of the tags, trigger warnings, and age range warnings as your browse the archives and digital libraries.

 As a reader, it’s your responsibility to curate your experience online.

 So why are people so afraid or derisive of fanfic?

 People who are hard on fanfic say that…

 ·       It sucks.

o   Well of course it sucks! As it’s a low-stakes and easy way to try out creative writing for the first time, the majority of fanfiction is overwhelmingly written by new and young writers. Everything you do when you first try it sucks a little bit. 

I’m sure no figure skater was able to immediately land perfect triple axels ten minutes after they strap on the skates for the first time in their lives. No knitter has ever made a flawlessly perfect jumper on their first try. No mathematician has ever broken the code to send a rocket into space after having just been taught elementary-school multiplication. So why on earth do people think that new writers don’t need to practice? I can promise you that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first rap was probably pretty shaky.

·       It’s lazy or it’s cheating.

o   Listen, anyone who tells you that writing anything is lazy clearly has not sat down and tried to write anything. Writing is tedious. It is boring. It takes hours, and hours, and hours to get anything on the page, and then once it’s on the page you have to go back and edit it. UGH. There is nothing about being a writer—even a fanfic writer—that is lazy.

o   And anyone who tells you that trying to tell a fresh, new story within the limits and confines of a pre-existing world and have it make sense is cheating, then they have no freaking clue how hard it is to be creative with that kind of limitation placed on you. It’s harder when you have a set of rules you need to follow. What you do come up with is often extremely interesting and creative because of those limitations, not in spite of them.

o   The argument that using pre-made characters, settings, tropes, and worlds to make up a new story is cheating is also complete bunk. Do those same people also expect hockey players to whittle and plane themselves a whole new hockey stick from scratch before each game? No, of course not. And yeah, a baker can grow all their own wheat, grind the flour, raise the chickens and cows so they can get eggs and milk, distill the vanilla, etc. Or a baker can buy a box mix. Either way, you get a cake at the end of the process. Whether you write fanfic or original fiction, you still get a story at the end of the process.

·       It makes you a worse writer.

o   * annoying buzzer noise * Practicing anything does not make you worse at it. And reading stories that are not edited, expertly crafted, or “high art” will also not indoctrinate you into being a bad writer. If anything, figuring out why you don’t like a specific story, trope, or writing style is actually a great way to learn what kind of writer you want to be, and to learn different methods of constructing sentences, creating images, and telling tales. Or you know, just how much spelling and grammar matter.

·       It’s not highbrow or thoughtful enough.

o   Sometimes stories are allowed to be just comfort food. Not every book or story you read has to be haute cuisine or boringly nutritious. You are allowed to read stories because they’re exciting, or swoony, or funny, or just because you like them. Anyone who says differently is a snob and worth ignoring. (Besides, fun silly stories can also be packed with meaning and lessons—I mean, hello, Terry Pratchett, anyone?)

·       It makes you waste all your time on writing that can’t be monetized.

o   No time is wasted if you spend it doing something that brings you joy. Not every hobby needs to be a money-maker and not everyone wants to be a professional writer. You are allowed to write, and read, fanfic just for the fun of it.

·       It’s theft.

o   According to Fair Use Law, it’s not. As long as the fanfic writer (or artist, cosplayer, etc.) is not making money on their creation that directly impacts or cuts into the original creator’s profit, or is not repackaging/plagiarizing the original Media Text and profiting off it’s resale, then Fan Works are completely legal. So there.

 How, exactly, does fanfic make you a better writer?

 Fanfiction…

 ·       teaches you to finish what you start.

o   The joy of being able to share your fic, either as you’re writing it, or afterward, is a big motivating factor for a lot of people. They finish because they get immediate feedback on it from their readers and followers. Lots of people have ideas for books, but how many of them do you know have actually sat down and written the whole thing?

o   Fanfic is also low-stakes; there’s nothing riding on whether you finish something or not, so you have to inspire yourself to get there without the outside (potentially negative) motivation of deadline or a failing grade if you don’t get the story finished. You end up learning how to motivate yourself.

o   Fanfic has no rules, so you write as much or as little as you want, stop wherever you think is a good place to end the story, write it out of order, or go back and write as many sequels or prequels as you like. Again, it’s totally low-stakes and is meant to be for fun, so you can noodle around with what it means to write a “whole” story and “complete” it, which teaches you how you like to write, and how you like to find your way to the finish line.

·       teaches you story structure.

o   Before you can sit down and write a story based on one of your favorite Media Texts, you’re likely to spend a lot of time consuming that text passively, or studying it actively. Either way, you’re absorbing how and why Media Text structures the stories it tells, and are learning how to structure your own from that.

o   Once you’re comfortable with the story structure the Media Text you’re working in is told, you’ll probably start experimenting with different ways stories can be told, and find the versions you like to work with best.

·       teaches you how to write characters consistently.

o   Fanfic is really hard because not only do you have to write your fave characters in a way that moves the story along, but they have to be recognizable as those fave characters.

o   This means you have to figure out their body language, verbal and physical tics, their motivations and they way the handle a crisis (fight, flight, or fawn?), and then make up the details you may need for your story that you may never see on screen/the page, like how they take their eggs or what their fave shampoo is, based on what you already know about them. That takes some top-notch detective work and character understanding to pull off.

o   Once you know how to do that, just making up a whole person yourself for original fiction is a breeze.

·       Teaches you how to hear and mimic a character/narrator voice.

o   You have to pay close attention to how an actor speaks, or how a character’s speech patterns, dialect, work choice, etc. is reflected on the page in order to be consistent in your story.

o   And all of this, in turn, teaches you how to build one for yourself.

o   I have a whole series of articles here about building a narrative voice, if you want to read more on constructing an original voice for your narrator.

·       Teaches you how to create or recreate a setting.

o   Again, like achieving character consistency, or mimicking a character or narrative voice, it takes work and paying attention in order to re-create a setting, time period, or geographical region in a fanfic—and if you’re taking your characters somewhere new, your readers will expect that setting to be equally rich as the one the Media Text is based in.

o   Which, again, teaches you how to then go and build an original one for yourself.

·       teaches how to take critique.

o   Professional writing is not a solitary pursuit. In fact, most writing is not entirely the work of an author alone. Like professional authors work with editors, critique partners, and proofreaders, some fanfiction writers will sometimes work with beta-readers or editors as well. This are friends or fanfic colleagues who offer to read your fanfic and point out plot, character, consistency, or story structure errors, or who offer to correct spelling and grammar errors. This is a great way to practice working with editors if you decide to pursue a professional career, and also a great way to make friends and strengthen your community and skill set if you don’t.

o   Many fanfic sites offer readers the opportunity to leave a comment on a fic, rather like a reviewer can leave a review on GoodReads or Amazon, or any other online store or blog, for a novel they’ve read. Sometimes these comments/reviews are 5 star and enthusiastic! Sometimes they are… not. The exact opposite in fact. As you get comments on your fanfic, and learn to ignore the ones that are just mean rather than usefully critical, you gain the Very Important Skill of learning to resist firing back at bad comments or reviews, while enjoying the good ones.  It also teaches you how to ignore drama or haters.

·       Teaches you how to exist within a like-minded community.

o   While the actual writing part of writing is solitary and sometimes tedious, nothing is ever published into a vacuum, whether it be fanfiction or original. Besides your editing/critique/beta reader group, you will also likely develop friendships, a support network, and mutuals. It’s always great to uplift, support, cheer on, and celebrate one another’s accomplishments and victories, whether the writing is fanfic or original.

·       Teaches you that it’s okay to write about things important to you, or your own identity.

o   You can change a characters ethnicity, cultural background, sexuality, religion, or disabilities to match yours, and talk about your lived life through the megaphone of that character. Or, you can insert original characters based on you, your desires, and experiences.

o   Once you’re comfortable writing in your #ownvoice in fanfic, you can approach it in original fiction, if you like.

o   See my article titled Your Voice Is Valid for more on this.

 What if I want to be a professional writer?

 Notice how I didn’t say “real writer”. Any writer who writes any kind of story is a ‘real’ writer. I mean, pinch yourself—you’re real, right? The difference is actually between being an “amateur” writer (a hobbyist who does not write for pay), and a “professional” (who is paid for their writing). Just because you only play shinny on the street with your friends, or in a house league on the weekends, it’s doesn’t mean  you’re not still as much of a hockey player as someone who plays in the NHL.

 Writing fanfiction before or at the same time as writing original fiction that you intend to sell is a great way to learn, or practice, everything I’ve mentioned above. If you read it widely, it will also expose you to different story telling styles, voices, and tropes than your reading of published fiction.

 ·       Can I sell my fanfic?

o   No. For fanfiction to remain under the umbrella of Fair Use Law, you cannot profit off your fanfiction. There’s some grey-area wiggle room around things like charging a small amount for a ‘zine or a PDF to cover administrative costs, but zero wiggleability around, say, selfpublishing your fanfic and charging heaps for it.

·       Can I “file off the serial numbers”?

o   “Filing of the series numbers” is when you take a fanfic you’ve written and essentially pull it apart, remove everything that’s clearly someone else’s Media Text, and reassembling the story so that it’s pretty much a completely original piece of creative writing.

o   Yes, you can sell these, provided your filing is rigorous enough that you aren’t likely to be dinged for plagiarism. It’s widely known that Cassandra Claire’s Shadowhunters was once Harry Potter fanfic, and that Fifty Shades of Gray was once Twilight fanfic. But did you know that my Triptych started life as an idea for a Stargate Atlantis fic? There’s lots of stories out there that were once full fics, or the idea for the novel was originally conceived for a fandom, but written as original instead.

o   So long as you’re careful to really rework the text so that it’s not just a find-name-replace-name rewrite, you should be fine.

o   Be aware, though, that the agents and editors you might pitch this novel to know how to Google. They may discover that this is a filed-off story, and depending on their backgrounds and biases, might be concerned about it. There’s no need to inform them of the novel’s origin straight off in your pitch/query letter, but you may want to have a frank discussion with them about it after it’s been signed so they can help you make sure that any lingering copywrited concepts or characters are thoroughly changed before publication.

o   Should you take down the original fic-version of the novel while you’re querying/shopping it? Well, that’s up to you, and whether you’re comfortable with an editor/agent potentially finding it.

·       Should I be ashamed of my fic, or take it down, or pretend I never wrote fic?

o   What? Why? No! I mean, I have hidden some of my most immature work, but I’ve left pretty much my whole catalogue of fanfic online and I don’t deny that I was/am a ficcer. Why? Because it’s a great repository of free stories that people can read before they buy one of my books, so they can get a taste of how and what I write. Also, you will be in good company. Lots and lots of writers who are published now-a-days started in fandom, including:

Steven Moffat

Seanan McGuire

Rainbow Rowell

Claudia Gray

Cory Doctorow

Marissa Meyer

Meg Cabot.

Naomi Novik

Neil Gaiman

Lev Grossman

S.E. Hinton

John Scalzi

The Bronte Sisters

Andy Weir

Sarah Rees Brennan

Marjorie M. Liu

Anna Todd

...and me, J.M. Frey

 How fanfic can harm.

 Like with anything else, there are ways that reading and writing fanfiction can actually harm you, or others, but it has nothing to do with the reading or writing of fanfiction in and of itself.

 ·       Some creators may prefer that you don’t (and may or may not follow up with legal action).

o   Anne Rice famously went after fanficcers in the 90s who wrote fanfic of her work, handing out Cease & Desist notices like confetti.

o   99% of creators don’t care. Those who do will generally have a notice on their websites or social media politely asking fancreators to refrain. Mostly this is due to their general discomfort over the idea of anyone else getting to play in their worlds. The best thing to do is respect that request, and find a different fandom to write in.

·       Flamewars and fandom fights leading to bullying and doxing.

o   Regrettably, just like any other community filled with people who have different favorites, opinions, and preferences, there will inevitably be clashes. It’s up to you to decide how to react to negative interactions, and how to model positive ones.

o   Don’t forget, you curate your online experience, so don’t be afraid of that block button.

o   Also, don’t be the jerk who goes after people for liking different aspects of the fandom. Everyone is entitled to interact and like a Media Text their own way. “Don’t yuck my yum,” as they say.

·       Trying to make money on other people’s IP/Media Text (law suits, etc.)

o   It doesn’t belong to you, so don’t try to make money on it.

o   There’s a grey area here in terms of selling prints/plushies/jewelry/etc. and there’s no hard line about where one copyright owner will draw the line, and another won’t. Warner Bros. owns the film rights for both Harry Potter and Hunger Games, but I’ve seen Harry Potter-themed bars spring up while fans wanting to make Hunger Game fanfilms have been shut down. A friend of mine sells hand-made fandom-inspired items at cons—there is no rhyme or reason to what she gets told to stop making and what she’s left alone on.

o   Best thing to do if you’re told to stop is just so stop, move on, and find a different fandom to be active in.

·       Writing Real Person Fanfic (“RPF”) can be considered a violation of consent.

o   This article sums it up pretty well, but basically… if you decide to write RPF, be aware that they person you are writing about is a real person, with real thoughts, and emotions, and they may feel violated by RPF. If you decide to write it, never send it to the people it’s about, and always clearly tag it so other can choose to engage with it, or avoid it.

o   Also be aware that it could ruin their love for what they do. For example: the friendships between the members of 1Direciton became strained and the band eventually disintegrated because people wouldn’t stop sending band members smutty stories or art of them having sex with one another, and it made them too uncomfortable to continue in the band.

·       Showing/sharing fanfic & fanart outside of its intended context. Fanworks are for fans, and there are definitely issues if…

o   It’s shown to celebrities/actors/creators.

  Shoving your fantasies onto the people who create or portray your fave characters is rude, and wrong, and also kinda gross. If they seek it out themselves, that’s one thing, but the same way you wouldn’t throw it at a complete stranger, don’t throw it at them. You may love the characters these people play, but they are not their characters, and they are not your friends.

  It may also really weird them out and ruin their love for what they do.

o   it’s shown to writers working on the series.

  There was a famous case where a fanficcer sent a story to a novelist, and the novelist was accused of plagiarism by the ficcer when their next novel in the series resembled the plot of that fanfic. There was a whole court case and everything.

  Because of this, writers of TV shows, books, etc. don’t want to (and often times, legally can’t) read your fanfic. They don’t want to get accidentally inspired by what you’ve written, or worse, have to throw out something because it resembles your fic too closely. Just let them write their stories the way they want, and if they choose to seek out fic, they will.

o   it’s mocked by celebrities.

  I’m not letting Alan Carr and Graham Norton off the hook. If it’s super rude and gross to shove fanworks at actors/writers/creators when you’re a creator, then it’s doubly rude for anyone to take a story or art made for a specific audience (the fans), by a specific community (the fans), lift it out of it’s context, and invite the public to mock it while also shoving it at the actor/celebrity in a place where they are literally cornered and can’t leave (i.e. the chat-show sofa). Man, it really steams me up when they do that. It’s rude and it’s tone-deaf, and it’s not fair.

  And most of the time they do it, they don’t even ask the artist or writer for permission, first, which is just…. Uuuuugggghhhh. It may be fanfic, but it was still created by someone, and you should always ask permission before publicly sharing something created by someone else.

  Grrrrrrr.

 In Conclusion

 If someone tells you that reading or writing fanfic is bad for you as a creator, tell them to get bent.

Famous Fanfic

·       Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda

·       Wicked by Gregory Maguire

·       Wicked: the Musical by Stephen Schwartz

·       The Phantom of Manhattan by Fredrick Forsyth

·       A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman

·       Sherlock by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat

·       The Dracula Tape, by Fred Saberhaugen

·       Paradise Lost, John Milton

·       Inferno, by Dante

·       The Aeneid, by Virgil

·       Ulysses, by James Joyce

·       Romeo & Juliet, by William Shakespeare

·       The Once and Future King by T.H. White

·       A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain

·       The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

·       Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, by Seth Grahame-Smith

·       Phantom, a novel of his life by Susan Kaye

·       …and so many more.

#words for writers #fanfiction #fan fiction #fan fiction is good for you #writing #am writing #writing community #writing fanfiction #writing fanfic