batrak911

[batrak911]

My favourite thing about fan fiction is the experience of watching/reading something and being like ‘huh - I can see a potential pairing there, those two characters could be interesting together’. And then you casually look up the pairing on AO3 and someone has written the most beautiful, heart-wrenching love story you’ve ever read, with character analysis that makes you want to scream, and they’ve teased out the threads of the relationship dynamic in such an interesting way that makes so much SENSE, but you never would have thought it would be so fucking ELECTRIC. And then you recover enough from that fic to read another one, and it’s JUST AS FUCKING GOOD, and before you know it, it’s 3am and your eyes are burning and you’re squinting at the 100th scene of them confessing their love for each other and it’s still not enough. You know what I’m saying???

[batrak911]

I thought that ao3 did have a handful of paid employees like lawyers? Or are they considered contractors and not working for ao3 itself?

The AO3 legal team are not paid, they’re also volunteers.  When you might see in the AO3 budget that there are expenses set aside for contractors, those are outside parties being paid for a specific task - almost always coding-related, and large or complicated enough to be beyond the scope of what our coding volunteers can be expected to handle in a reasonable period of time.  

[batrak911]

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

[batrak911]

This takes place during the Criminal Minds episode of the same name (07x22).

As the team assists Rossi with a guest lecture at a University, they're caught off guard by a young man in the audience with striking golden eyes.

A smirk. He knows what I’m doing, Reid realized. What we’re all doing. Because he’s doing it too; he’s profiling us.

[batrak911]

[batrak911]

What do you MEAN that I have to write the fanfics that caters to my very specific tastes and interests if no one else has written it!?!?!?!?

[batrak911]

Me: Its alright if no one else comments or kudos my fic. I wrote it for me and not only was it fun to create, but I can read and re-read it at any time. Plus there's always a chance that somebody else will find it and enjoy my story at a later time :)

Also me, 2 seconds after posting my fic and wanting immediate validation:

[batrak911]

Writing fanfic is so hard. Idk how y'all do it, I feel like I'm smashing two Barbies together telling them to kiss meanwhile bitches out here writing masterpieces.

[batrak911]

[batrak911]

[batrak911]

[batrak911]

Side blog for Fanfic stuffs.