By taking long, long breaks, and by fandom peeking.
I do get burned out. I am burned out right now, as it happens. After nearly four years, I am SO burned out!! But I stick to my guns, because I promised I would finish. And I remind myself of what I love about this gigantic, consuming, wonderful thing.
And yeah, fandom peeking is fun. I read a fair amount of fic outside of Tolkien fandom. And often it is for fandoms that I don’t know anybody active in, or have never participated in. Sometimes I need a total change of pace, a new vista, and a fresh gust of air to blow the Mirkwood cobwebs off my brain.
We’ve all seen a lot of posts telling us we need to comment/kudos/reblog/love our fanfic authors or they will stop writing. I know, I’ve shared them.
But those posts never talk about what you, as a reader, get out of it. So here are my entirely selfish reasons that you should engage with fanfic (writers) that you love:
1. Free, quality content on your blog in the time it takes to smash reblog.
2. It’s good for you: people who “practice gratitude consistently report” higher levels of happiness, lower blood pressure, feel less lonely and other good shit.(x)
3. It’s not just writers who read those comments and reviews, you might find yourself a flail buddy. It just feels good to say “this is the BEST” and have someone else say, “I know, right?!”
4. The actual author might respond to your comments, follow you, start chatting to you or publicly thank you for encouraging them to write more.
5. If you start putting out fic rec lists, people might come to you asking for more recommendations. Who doesn’t like to feel like their thoughts and opinions matter?
6. Get so inspired you have to make art for a fic? Writers looove that – you could find they say thanks, share your art, use it as their header (on their blog or fic – seeing your picset at the top of a fic you love is just jandjdjbdudndj) or write you a fic.
7. And, of course, you’ll make a writer happy. And happy writers write more fic. Even if they never, ever engage with you, just knowing you’re there reading and caring means you get more fic to read.
8. All the ways we have of showing writers some love makes you a part of something. Fandom can be weird and wonderful, and at times utterly mental. But being in the club feels pretty damn great.
I had to think about this, very hard. My first thought was to dedicate it to perhaps my family, or the Sansukh Podfic Cast, and truly both deserve it for all their love and support. But then I thought: without a particular legacy, Sansukh would simply never have happened at all. So I changed tack. Here it is:
To the fic writers, past and present, who wrote us into the story.
I know a LOT of 30+ adults in fandom. Some 40+ and 50+ as well!
My family and life and job, of course, are the biggest part of me, and so they take up around 90-95% of my time. I can’t spend uninterrupted hours on my hobbies like I did when I was 17-25, which can be frustrating at times. But there’s no age limit on fandom, so I just plod along at my own pace nowadays 🙂
If anything, having the dwarfling has solidified our nerdiness – both of us. I can’t WAIT to read her The Hobbit. CAN’T. WAIT.
(Mr Dets is determined to introduce her to Classic Who. He is a massive DW fan, going back decades… when I bitch about Moffatt, he shrugs and says, ‘should have seen the stink about John Nathan-Turner as showrunner’.)
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
Posting this because I’m seriously tired of people thinking fanfiction authors are machines that pop out stories for your enjoyment. No, you can’t just go to Settings and adjust our update times to your liking, that’s not how it works. We’re human too.
Listen. Do not let anyone tell you what to write or what not to write.
Do not let prevailing fandom interpretations keep you from writing something different, do not let the personal opinions/perspectives of Big Name Fans™ keep you from presenting your own interpretation of characterizations/ship dynamics. Do not be afraid to write for unpopular ships (people will read it and be forever grateful that you created content for their rarepair).
Fandom is a communal experience, yes, but it is made up of individuals. Do not be afraid to stray from the norm. People may disagree with your choices/your interpretations/your writing; that doesn’t make them objectively right.
Do not be ashamed to deviate from fandom narrative.
The thing about Tumblr that probably makes me saddest is the underlying assumption that women past a certain age (which seems to be about 25?) stop having any sort of outside interests beyond family/career/kids. Like, y’all are always so shocked that grown women have lives and can fangirl as hard as we did as teenagers.
It makes me sad not because it makes me feel old (although it does), but because these younger women are constricting their own lives–they fully expect that this will happen to them someday. Y’all deserve better. Y’all deserve to EXPECT better.
And worse than that, the idea that there’s something WRONG with a grown woman who has other interests.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
One of the biggest things I realized growing up?
It doesn’t happen.
You expect somehow you will change when you are finally An Adult™. You’ll stop enjoying the things you enjoy now for something more “adult” or “mature.” You’ll FEEL like an adult and not like a child anymore. You’ll feel comfortable and secure and not scared and unsure and confused. You expect you will feel like you have your shit together.
But I can tell you that it doesn’t happen. You’ll still feel like the “you” you were at 15 or 17 or 19.
You just have these…things to deal with. Like rent. And insurance.
You have a job either because a) you like it or b) it keeps the lights and internet on.
You’ll look up from fangirling one day and realize “Shit. I am twenty eight years old. That’s almost 30!”Or maybe it will be that you look down at the small child clasped around your legs and realize “That is my child. I have a child. A human being child.” Or maybe it will be that you have to negotiate your budget around con tickets AND a mortgage payment.
Growing up isn’t a thing that happens.
It’s a realization that it doesn’t happen.
Holy shit, y’all. There are some AMAZING responses to this post. Yes, everything alwayshometomarvel says. All that.
Feeling like I wasn’t ‘adult’ enough fucked me up for years. I would cry at night and feel like a total piece of shit because I was married with a kid, and yet I still did ‘not adult’ things–I played MMOs, I cosplayed and went to conventions, I drew fan art and wrote fan fic. I kept waiting for the day that I would wake up and realize that what I really needed to be doing was the laundry, cleaning the house, making dinner every night, etc. Basically, be the ‘perfect’ wife and mother.
And somewhere between then and now, I somehow managed to tell myself…fuck it. I AM an adult. I go to work every day and pay the bills and help raise my son and take care of the house. I do legit adult things. AND I play MMOs, go to conventions, and participate in fandom. And THAT’S OKAY. I’m 32 years old now and finally at peace with that part of myself. (Having a supportive husband and kid doesn’t hurt either!)
All of this is such truth. Believing these things about growing up, and especially about being over 25? Really made it hard for me when I turned 30.
I was literally suicidal on my 30th birthday. I spent the whole day in tears. I felt like I had died and my life was now worthless and small and never going to be hopeful or full of promise or fun again. I felt like killing myself on my birthday because I bought into this lie that somewhere after your mid-twenties, you diminish as a woman because the only thing that made you alive and shiny was your youth.
I’m 31 now and I’m done with that shit. I’m over it. I don’t care if you think I’m too old for something. If I’m an old lady in Tumblr terms, then I’m past the legal age where I’m obligated to care what you think.
So, I’m telling you girls out there right now who are in your teens and twenties, get rid of this idea of what older women are “supposed” to look like. Get rid of this idea that “soccer moms” don’t play video games or that all women over 25 should be married and contemplating kids. Get rid of the idea that fanfic and fandom and fun things are for “kids.”
Mostly, get rid of this notion that the only thing really valuable about you is your youth. Youth is part of life, but it’s not the most valuable or beautiful or exciting time of your life. I like my life at 30 about 1000% than I did at 15, 18, 20, even 25.
on her deathbed, my grandmother pulled my mom close to her and said, “i don’t feel old. i don’t know how i’m supposed to feel. but inside, i still feel seventeen.” when I was a teenager, I used to think that story was sad; sad and strange somehow, like she’d been frozen in time. but now that i am a woman in my thirties, I understand. I understand her. I am a grown woman in the ways that matter. I listen to myself more, trust my experience more. but inside? I still feel the joy and rage and mess; I am still changing. we’re not frozen in time. we are just still growing.
the more we acknowledge that modern “adulthood” is largely a concept designed to sell vacuums and sedans, and not an arbitrary total overhaul of self at age 35, the more we can admit our ongoing capacity– no, our ongoing NEED for play and playfulness and exploration. those are childish things we should never have to put away.
Firstly, I cannot argue with your Spock analysis! (Also, I adore Spock! I have a Spock tattoo! I promise that I love him truly.)
Now that I have said this piece, I’m gonna go on a long clarifying tangent, because it is a running theme in the tags on the post/the asks I’ve been getting. But know that the tangent is not directed at you, defender of Spock! I’m just reblogging this version because it collected the fragmented pieces of the discussion into one post, for context’s sake. 🙂
ANYWAY. The point I want to get to is that character archetypes totally exist, and that is not a) a problem, or b) what I am talking about.
Spock and Sherlock and Jeeves all more or less share a type, which is just a thing that happens when people tell stories, both consciously and subconsciously. That doesn’t mean the characters are identical or interchangeable, but you can see how they bear a kind of family resemblance to each other. For example– “it would have cost me my soul” and “it was worth a wound" and “there is a tie that binds” are rhyming moments of Great Import to all three characters, although they refer to moments that are specific to their canons. The characters ARE different, but when you put them together in a iineup, it’s easier to see how they’re similar. That resemblance, imo, is neutral.
What interests me about the fandom ghost isn’t that he is an archetype, or that many characters are very similar to each other. What interests me is that this is a character type that fandom periodically yanks out of the drawer and dresses up in the clothes of a minor character.
That’s a very specific thing to do. It’s not something we are inheriting from any canon. It’s something we are doing, collectively, as the great migratory fandom thing we are.
We (collective fandom we) have imbued minor characters with these traits so often that I can trace it as a type the same way that I can trace Sherlock Holmes as a type. That is a) VERY interesting to me, from a nerdy Henry Jenkins-style crowdsourced-story “the people talk back to the culture” way, and b) EVEN MORE INTERESTING GIVEN THAT THIS GUY IS HERE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY TO GIVE US A WHITE GUY SHIP WHEN THE CANON DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH WHITE GUY SHIPS READY MADE FOR US. When we talk back to the culture, sometimes we speak bullshit.
Again, I don’t think any individual person is Wrong or Bad for liking or writing the ghost (I have liked the ghost! he can be very likeable!) but I think the fact that we keep resurrecting him and resurrecting him and resurrecting him IN FANDOMS THAT DO NOT HAVE HIM AS A PRE-EXISTING CHARACTER tells us something about what we as Fandom want. It’s a symptom that tells us something about the state of Fandom, the way a bechdel test fail does not tell us whether a movie is good or even feminist, but DOES tell us something about the state of hollywood.
TFA isn’t an incredibly diverse movie, but unless you pump up the empty balloon of Hux’s character with the ghost the only other white guys to pair Kylo Ren with are his blood relatives and Supreme Commander Gollum.
This is in a movie where he and Poe snark at each other with Poe on his knees; where he ties Poe up to a table and digs into Poe’s brain, where he looks at Finn from across a crowded massacre and Feels A Literal Magical Tug, where he and Rey basically mindfuck each other for agonizingly long minutes. There are Other Opportunities here, is what I’m saying.
Kylux is the most popular pairing in TFA fandom. Expanding Hux’s character is a choice that fandom made. Kylux is a choice that fandom made. The fact that Fanon Hux came canned and prepackaged for us–our ready made mayo sandwich–is SOMETHING TO PAY ATTENTION TO.
It’s not the character of the ghost, or his origins, or the canon characters that bear a family resemblance to him that really matter, imo. It’s the fact that WE, FANDOM, keep resurrecting him when we aren’t seeing a familiar enough white guy ship in the canon cast. That’s a canary collapsing in a mine, is what I’m saying.
I think what’s being said here is amazingly on point. It’s fascinating, the way that over time we remodel certain characters in fandoms – deciding they have certain traits and committing to this idea despite no real canon evidence, to the point that reading a fic where they don’t fall act in that way feels genuinely OOC.
In my view – and I’m sure it’s not an original one – Mr Fastidious-Kinky White Guy has a sister, a female character who is recreated again and again across fandoms. She’s the flawless pal of the main white boy couple, you know, the one who mostly exists to roll her eyes at their stupidity and probably save the world off screen while they’re getting their shit together.
Now, I’m being unfair. This character, as you’re saying with Hux, can be brilliantly written and wonderfully entertaining. I first came across her when deep into an obsession with Merlin, filling the role of Morgana – and perhaps significantly she mostly appeared in modern AUs. This Morgana was heart-stoppingly beautiful, wicked smart, eternally snarky, and in turns mean to and indulgent of ‘her boys’, who meanwhile spent the majority of each fic dithering about getting together. And I loved it every time. Actually, Morgana was generally my favourite part of these stories. She got all the best lines, and often felt like a refreshing and well-drawn character. If she didn’t much resemble the canon character, well, it’s hard to reconcile an increasingly murderous witch with a nice coffee-shop AU, especially when you genuinely like the character and want her to have nice things.
It was only a couple of fandoms down the line that she started to bother me. In particular, I found her in Teen Wolf. Mainly it was Lydia who took on the role, although most of the other Teen Wolf ladies could be co-opted into it. Again, I don’t mean to condemn the fandom. There are plenty of fics where lydia is a gloriously complex character. And as in Morgana’s case, there are plenty more where this archetype-Lydia is wonderfully written and puts a smile on my face. But ultimately, she is an archetype, created by the fandom to facilitate the getting-together of the white boy love interests.
And what I find particularly difficult about Morgana-Lydia-etc is that all too often, she’s not actually a minor canon character. Unlike Hux, she’ll often have be drawn in some detail by the writers. Maybe not in ways we always like or approve of, but she’s not an empty shell, and there’s really no need to superimpose a prepackaged character onto her.
We’re not gifted with a huge number of complex female character arcs on screen, and I think it’s interesting that we’re collectively so willing to put aside women in fanfiction and elevate minor male characters like Hux, especially while we’re simultaneously praising a movie like SW:TFA for being more diverse than typical blockbusters. I don’t really have an answer for why – I suspect that if I tried I’d descend into amateur hour psychology that anyone with a brain could tear apart in an instant. But I think it’s something we need to recognise in ourselves.
ABSOLUTELY. It’s a different but related thing, I think? The way canonically well-developed female characters (especially female love interests) get possessed by this “eyerolling at the boys and telling them what their feelings are while being badass conveniently elsewhere” ghost in fic.
Which, I should note, is a thing I have 100% written. Because I was being lazy, and rested the story on a sexist trope instead of doing justice to the characters. It can be done well, as you’ve mentioned, but I think mostly it’s lazy writing.
This one hits me harder than the ghost dude actually. As I read the initial description of Morgana above I was thinking, “that sounds just like how teen wolf fic treats Lydia.” And following the rest of the description, it also seemed a lot like Elizabeth and Teyla both in SGA, and like Natasha in Avengers fic, and even Karen, Marci, and Claire in Daredevil fic.
And yeah, the most frustrating thing there is that all these female characters are actually well-developed characters! They have agency and great stories! Why are they always turned into the sassy, snarky bff who tells her boys to get their shit together and date?
Aw Yiss 