#hey just so y’all know I’m incapable of making serious art

[femslashrevolution]

on femslash without fandoms

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

i was more than a little surprised to be asked to write for this, as i don’t actually consider myself to be in fandom anymore, largely because my experiences with Fandom As A Thing have been deeply negative. so while i have tried to keep this overall positive – and everything about femslash in it is positive – it does discuss some, uh, not so positive things about fandoms. (also i swear, a lot, it’s like 60% of my vocabulary and i’m bloody incapable of {a} apologising and {b} stopping.) 

i used to be In Fandoms, when i first joined tumblr. i was a teenager, naive and convinced that just because someone loved a show as much as i did, we were going to be best friends. it’s unsurprising, then, that at twenty-three every fandom i was a part of back then i have walked away from with few regrets, either because certain people would not quit it with the genocide apologism that was necessary to support their favourite m/m ship or i just got capital-T Tired of people having priorities so different from mine that it felt we were watching different shows. (the regrets that i do have largely centre around not being able to push Those Fandoms As Concepts into the fucking sea.)

but what does this have to do with femslash specifically? it took me a while to realise, too. i have always done things that i was explicitly or implicitly not supposed to do, the first often because i am Peak Slytherin fuck you i do what i want that’s definitely not a bad idea what do you mean, the second because if you combine my emotional intelligence and attention span you get something about the size of a pencil eraser. i started writing femslash because i wanted to and it was what i found important. it never consciously occurred to me that in the minds of a lot of people i shouldn’t write femslash until i started getting serious pushback from other people in those fandoms, including, in one instance so absurd that it was actively hilarious to me, death threats. (surprisingly not from the same fandom that was responsible for the genocide apologism. y’all, the internet can suck. choose your people well and hold on tight. if you choose poorly, kick those fuckers out of your life and be kind to yourself in the aftermath). i continued writing femslash, because i wanted to and it was important to me and i got the bonus pleasure of making Unfortunate People really mad, and i left those fandoms and never joined new ones. 

anyway, i kept some friends from those fandoms, and they are very dear to me. they are the ones with whom i shared not only a love of those shows but a love of sprawling worldbuilding, fey things beyond the skies, cities and space stations that are more than half alive, and, most importantly, ladies and ladies-loving-ladies. they were, i realised belatedly, basically the only people i had ever really interacted with when i (we, really, most of them left the same times and ways i did) was still In Fandom. it has left me with a lingering distrust of people who … well, ‘of people who do not prioritise femslash ships’ is harsh but mostly true, though i suppose ‘of people who are ambivalent-to-negative about more than a couple of my femslash ships’ works as well. still, perhaps, harsh, but aggressively curating your friendships and setting unbreakable boundaries is an act of self care that is really fucking necessary when fandom is so goddamn wide and the internet is, yknow, the internet.

so: i am not in fandoms anymore. i could carve out my own space over and over again in each one, but really? i am a fan of many things, and i have friends who are also fans of those things, and together we sit in our corner of the internet and chat with each other and write femslash set against backdrops of apocalypses or living cities or fey courts and process our various brainbads together and support each other. sometimes we will see A Fandom that we used to be in together, or A Fandom of a thing we’re currently watching have a Bad Opinion, and make a pact to write more femslash (spite is a beautiful motivator and you should never underestimate it). sometimes we will post a ‘hey there should be more femslash’/‘this overprioritisation of a het ship is really disturbing’/etc thing in fandom tags, and then actual children start trying to pick fights with us and we will remember that we are Old and Tired and if someone likes our fics they will probably find them on ao3 anyway. 

that, then, that is my advice about femslash: don’t create for fandoms. create for you. create for your friends. create because fuck you, do not tell me ladies and their relationships are lesser. there is a tendency to frame fandom as a genuinely and wholly positive thing but it takes a shittonne of effort to make it positive. and, you know, it can be worth it! but please never feel you have to create for Your Fandom. create stories and art about all sorts of ladies and how they love all sorts of other ladies – love them platonically, romantically, sexually, recklessly, violently, messily, beautifully – because ladies are fucking awesome and deserve all sorts of stories.

ladies are important. writing and art about ladies, especially right now and especially ladies who love other ladies, is important. take your anger and your spite and your friends and do fucking beautiful things with it kids.

–

kimaracretak is a perpetually undercaffeinated lesbian phd student who likes femslash, landscapes that would like to eat you because they love you, and the two of those in combination (and yes, she writes about ladies in her academic life too because fuck you, don’t tell me what to do). she can be found with the same username on 8tracks and ao3 and believes in the universe-altering power of spite, random dice rolls, and friendships between women in metal bands.

#kimaracretak #Type: Meta #Femslash February #Femslash February 2017 #I Am Femslash #submission