#a lot of the stuff i said about censorship and chinese fandom is more extrapolation from what i've read about other fandoms

[kdsburneraccount]

pressing the ‘more observations from the men’s basketball rpf tag’ button

(Spins in chair like Dr. Evil and strokes chin) I am much obliged to answer this ask 🧐 One thing that stands out especially compared to a couple of other Sports RPF fandoms is just the sheer amount of Chinese fanworks under the tag (checked and it makes up about ⅓ of the works, which is a pretty big portion, pretty sure with other sports it's a lot less than that). I'm willing to attribute that to how popular basketball is in China, and because of how large that fanbase is, there probably are more than a few people out there writing fic in Chinese 😎 This part is more "me extrapolating this detail into a more meta-y thing" than an actual observation but I do see that a large amount of those fics in Chinese are either Not Rated, Explicit, or Mature. I believe that the high amount of Not Rated probably has something to do with being kind of vague about the contents of the fic in question, perhaps because Chinese fans are accustomed to that manner of posting (reminiscent of the olden days of fandom? Probably) due to censorship and whatnot. In general in Chinese fandom it does seem like AO3 is viewed as the black market for fic, where the darker and more explicit subject matter can be uploaded without fear of getting taken down compared to other sites that are mainly used in mainland China. Especially since AO3 has been blocked in China for a while, I remember one author mentioning it in their notes. It's kinda interesting to consider, because it shows how fandom can vary depending on location, especially in places that have different cultural (or governmental?) norms from the US. I've translated a couple of Chinese fics because I do speak it, I'm not the best at reading but I manage, and I'd say that some of them are pretty interesting. A couple premises I found sort of fascinating:

Multichapter fanfic that had Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell team up as police officers to track down Ricky Rubio, who is apparently some kind of smuggler (They fall in love along the way, of course, and there are a variety of shenanigans that ensue). Also includes Frank Kaminsky, for reasons I do not know, as a well-meaning but pretty dumb rich kid. It's incomplete and I don't know if the author will ever update but it was one of the first NBA fics I read on AO3 that stood out to me, so I do have a very rough translation of it (read: used Google Translate) in my Docs. Would say that it's definitely a wild ride, maybe one day I will share with the author's permission.

This one PG/Kawhi fic that was about them as workers in an aquarium, where PG is an actor in the mermaid show they run and Kawhi owns the aquarium. I actually translated it, felt like a lot of the prose didn't need a lot of tweaking to work, but then again it's been a year since then so looking back might actually be kind of rough but anyways...

But yeah, there are some other things like the Spanish fanfic that I'm not super well-versed on, would assume that's to do with the popularity of those players, but those are some interesting things I've seen under the tag.

#there's also the occasional weird crossover fic but those aren't really written as rpf-rpf if you catch my drift #me when i have an excuse to overshare about that jazz fic: it's free real estate #just such an interesting premise (to me) #a lot of the stuff i said about censorship and chinese fandom is more extrapolation from what i've read about other fandoms #not really specifically about nba fandom bc that is tiny but kinda drawing conclusions #hopefully this was a good response! enjoy reading the word salad my friend #nba #ao3 #basketball #fandom culture #fandom meta #chinese fandom #my asks #nba rpf