And other fanworks, for that matter, but let’s talk about fic: When AO3 was proposed, it was in response to Strikethrough and other similar events. Livejournal deleted a lot of accounts without bothering to distinguish between actual pedophiles, survivor support groups, and 100% consensual fantasy fandom activities being done by adults with other adults (most of which involved RP accounts for 16-year-old Harry Potter characters anyway).
I helped write the first AO3 Terms of Service and set up the Abuse committee. AO3 was always intended to be welcoming to all kinds of fic, no matter how dirty, sick, socially unacceptable, bizarre, or out of fashion. During those initial TOS talks, we specifically discussed grotesque RPF snuff porn as the test case for something all of us on the committee found distasteful but would nonetheless defend because, by defending it, we created a space where all of our own favorite things were protected too.
Policing fic content is a slippery slope. Even if you only police the “worst” stuff, you create an environment where the more sensitive authors and no few of the ones “shipping to cope” are no longer comfortable posting at all. Attacking people for posting fic about rape/abuse/etc. is demanding that all survivors disclose. No amount of whining and backtracking will change this fact. It is a disgusting behavior that drives people from your fandoms and creates needless misery while adding nothing of value to the community.
If you want to kick certain kinds of content off of AO3, you do not belong on AO3 in the first place.
Tag Archives: on fanfic
Sort of linked to the sex ed posts, I’ve encountered several posts recently where an anti demands, in various ways, that shippers MUST “educate” with their fics/art. And I, a fandom ancient, thought “Wait, what?” Where’s this constant demand for fanwork to be “educational” come from? Sorry Jan, I’m not writing smutfic to educate you about a goddamn thing, “socially responsible” or otherwise. If you’re resorting to fanfic of all things for your education on anything, YOU’VE ALREADY BEEN FAILED.
This is only one side of the phenomenon: you have antis demanding that fanon content educate people, then that adults in fandoms take care and protect children, and what does it all tell you?
These teenagers are being left alone on the internet and are projecting the parenting they’re either not receiving or are not receiving as they need on perfect strangers on the web. They legit believe that they can make the internet space they like safe by demanding that the adults in it become their surrogate parents.
Sorry, random teenager on the internet, I’m not your parent, I’m not your teacher, and nobody owes you anything. Fandom is not a safe space. Internet is not a safe space.
Some thoughts re: this post, because I’m always so confused as to why these heated discussions always center on Daniel. Anon said:
“for so many years, a goodly bulk of this fandom has only [attributed?] Daniel as having any value to the story when he’s attached to Armand, or made him the butt of crazy jokes.”
Again, I’ve been in this fandom online for a decade now and spent a lot of time on websites from the 90′s (@i-want-my-iwtv’s been here since the late 90′s I believe), and honestly? Yeah, people make train jokes. It’s in the nature of fandom to take one trait in a character that people find funny and make jokes about it that are parodic or caricaturish in nature. Is it kinda dumb? Yes. Is it reductive? Yes. Is it not-really-that-funny-the-fifteenth-time? YES.
But I genuinely, hand on my heart, cannot say that I’ve ever felt like people made train jokes any more often than they made pyro jokes, or, jesus christ, blender jokes. Or Nicki’s hands jokes.
Is there a difference between the seriousness of the things being joked about here? Yes. See above – this is in the nature of fandom, and it’s one of the downsides. Characters frequently get reduced to one trait, sometimes in ways that are insensitive, and always in ways that disregard their inner depth. But this isn’t something that is particular to Daniel or reflects how fandom feels about Daniel in particular. The entirety of my experience in the VC fandom indicates that Daniel has consistently been one of the best loved characters, despite the lack of screentime that Anne has given him (a lack which I’ve seen lamented a lot), and has generally been considered one of the “main four” or “main five”, alongside Louis, Lestat, Armand, and sometimes Marius.
As for fandom only being interested in Daniel when he’s with Armand – the only screentime Daniel has is with Armand. Unless you count the framing narrative in IwtV, and he doesn’t even have a name there. Daniel becomes a fully-fledged character in QotD, in which he’s with Armand. That’s the reason he becomes a vampire. And again – I don’t think this is a Daniel thing. It’s a fanfic thing.
I could probably count on one hand the number of Louis fics I’ve read that don’t ship him with Lestat or with anyone, or the number of Pandora fics that aren’t about her relationship with Marius, or the number of Gabrielle fics that focus on her solitary travels. Or even Armand fics that aren’t about him and Daniel or him and Marius (which is a whole other topic). A lot of fanfic is focused on romance, it’s one of the main reasons why people write fic. I really don’t think it has anything to do with a lack of fandom interest in Daniel or any of these characters as people.
It’s okay to have fictional characters do problematic stuff. Really, it is. Fictional characters are there to tell a story; not to be perfect paragons of virtue.
“Yeah!” some people will say. “It’s fine as long as you show that it’s problematic!”
And I’ll say: No. You don’t need to always do that either. We can’t expect writers to point out every moral misstep a character makes.
It’s okay to have characters do something problematic, and it’s okay to assume that the readers can see why it’s problematic on their own.
The number of notes on this that say “No, you have to moralize, because readers are stupid!” is… disheartening. So what? We have to treat everyone like toddlers just in case someone happens to get the wrong idea about some fiction? If random fanfic (or any other semi-anonymous online content, for that matter) is a major determiner in someone’s life, they already have bigger problems than any fic could affect.
How about this: if someone pays me to write, they’ll get a say in what I write. As long as I’m writing for my own pleasure for free, I will write what I want.
Another suggestion: if you need moral guidance, stop reading fan fiction and turn to victorian children’s literature! Very helpful in encouraging good morals in the young!
On Fanfiction
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.
That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.
But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.
A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
This is what stories are supposed to be.
This is what stories are.
This is the most beautiful thing I have ever read. Thank you. Read this, @audlie45, and especially @goddessforloki, who doubts herself for no reason. @hallotom, if you can, please tag some necessities you know.
I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.
I-want-my-IWTV 