If you make fanart, you can treat it like real art. Learn to talk about it. Learn how to talk about your work and the choices you make. Respect what you make and what others are making. So much of fanart is tangled up in the internalized misogyny within fandom communities—it’s hard to see yourself or others as the artist you actually are if you can’t respect the art and why it matters. Fandom communities are very strong and very passionate, and we are lucky to have them. Other art communities don’t even come close to that.
And with art, you either have to be what they want or change their minds about what they want.
So. I think we do both. We can treat the act of fan creation with the respect it deserves because of what it is: a powerful, subversive reclaiming of your right to see yourself in stories and to belong to a mythology that has been taken from you.
And we can use that to change minds. Fandom can and has been a great force for change in how stories get told, and social media is the best vehicle there is, and I think raising ourselves up to a level where we treat our art and others’ art with the respect we’d treat more accepted art is the most powerful thing we can do (or continue to do, for the many who are) to push through barriers.
I love ideas, and story tropes, and headcanons. But what I really love is the fanworks that explore these things. The idea, the trope, the headcanon…those alone don’t give the work value, for me. What I love is your unique perspective.
I would never tell the story the way you would. We all have completely different lives and experiences and values. You’ll think of things I’d never think of, and beyond that, you have skills I don’t have. Your craft has developed differently. The way you structure your story or render your art…it’s unique to you. No one else can do it your way.
I love seeing creators leverage their individual skills, the culmination of their lives up to the point of creation, to bring forth a wholly unique work.
It doesn’t matter to me if there are 500 bedsharing fics. I’ll read yours because it’s yours. It doesn’t matter if a thousand people have drawn a bridal carry. Yours will delight me because it will show me you.
You don’t need to have a completely unique idea. That’s impossible. What you need to do is put the effort into developing it and creating a finished work. That work will be yours, a work only you could have made, regardless of the original idea.
“There’s already a fic about…” Doesn’t matter. There isn’t already your fic about it.
Show me your art. Show me your craft. Create something.
Not sure how to put this coherently but in regards to anti shipping/fiction reality discourse i feel like a lot of the main argument comes from assuming that people view fiction as wish fulfillment. This to me reads as very Freudian/psychoanalytic. e,g the concept that all dreams are somehow wish fulfillment no matter how disturbing. this is quite clearly bullshit as a lot of Freudian ideas are.
A lot of anti shipping rhetoric comes from the idea that somehow you can tell a lot about a person by what they like in fiction, and through that you can tell what kind of person they are (good/pure, bad/demonic (which isnt weirdly christian at all eyeroll))
the fact is people like horror and disturbing content. this doesnt mean people want to expierence this shit irl, but rather fiction is a safe way to explore intense feelings and difficult scenarios. Stop armchair analyzing people based on what they read or write. its not helpful.
You can ship characters for happily ever afters, sure, you can ship them for tragically-then-happily, you can ship two or three or four or more, you can ship endless combinations of personality types and relationship dynamics
but you can also ship characters under very specific circumstances, or for a certain period of their life but not for all of it, or only in a certain universe. You might say “I ship these characters” and what you mean is you think they are fascinating together and could have a story together. That story could be any kind of story.
Sometimes it means you want them together for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it means something different than that.
I don’t know about you, but for me, “I ship it” means “There is a story in this ship and I am interested in that story.”
for me, “I ship it” means “There is a story in this ship and I am interested in that story.”
So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.”
Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.” YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.
Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.
Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.
Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.)
And THIS, this is hopepunk:
HOPE AND HONESTY IN A SOCIETY THAT VALUES CYNICISM AND DECEPTION IS SUBVERSIVE AND THEREFOR PUNK
I AM HERE FOR THIS MOVEMENT. HOPE AND HONESTY ARE DEEPLY PUNK ROCK. KINDNESS IS GOTH AS FUCK.
I-want-my-IWTV 