monnisaurus

[monnisaurus]

By the way, not every story needs to have a hidden message. Or a deep meaning. Or be a moral teaching. Or educate its audience.

Sometimes you just want to write something disturbing for the sake of disturbing.

[monnisaurus]

It is your sworn duty, when you're in your 30's, to do something every day that would have gotten you viciously bullied in high school.

[monnisaurus]

idk how to word this properly but wrt the fanfic thing you reblogged earlier. Why do fanfic writers have such different expectations than any other content hosting platform?

Like lets take youtube as a point of comparison, Engagement like comments and likes largely exists to boost the works place in algorithm, thats why youtubers put in calls to action and other engament bait. Few with decent reach even read the comments and the audience shouldnt try to develop any weird parasocial relationship with the youtuber. Fanfic authors ask for likes (kudos, because the websites gotta use nonstandard language for some reason) and comments despite them not having any impact on an algorithm, and seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author based on tumblr posts like that one.

Why the radical difference in behaviour away from the norm? And honestly with all the (usually) metaphorical blood spilled online about parasociality why are authors really surprised that the audience tries to keep their distance as is best practice with any other content producer?

okay I am going to answer this as kindly and as calmly as I can and try to assume that you are asking this in good faith. because my friend, the fact that you feel the need to ask is, to me, The Problem.

[this is, for the record, in response to this post]

fanfiction writers are not *posting content.* (I also have reservations about engaging with the term "content producer" or "content creator" but let's put that aside for now, I'll circle back to it.) you say "they seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author" as though it is strange, off-putting, and incomprehensible to you, when in fact that is the point of writing fanfiction. it is a way of participating in fandom. it is a way of building community and exchanging ideas and becoming closer with people.

if authors wanted to solely ~generate content~ that would get them attention (?? to what end, the dynamic you have described seems to equate algorithmic supremacy as winning for winning's sake, as though all anyone wants to do is BUILD an audience without ENGAGING with them, which I cannot fathom but let's pretend for a moment that is, in fact, true) then like. if that were the case why on earth would they choose a medium in which they categorically cannot succeed and profit, because it isn't their IP?

you are equating two things that are not at all the same thing. to the degree that parasocial relationships are to be avoided, and "that person is not trying to be your friend they are trying to entertain you, please respect their boundaries" is a real dynamic -- which it is!! -- like. you have to understand that the reason that is true for the people of whom it is true is because it is their JOB. they are storytellers by profession, and they are either through direct payment, or sponsorship, or advertising, or through some other means, profiting off of your attention. i don't say this to be dismissive, many wonderful artists and actors and comedians and any number of a thousand things that i enjoy very much go this route but they do so as a *career choice.* and so when you violate the public/private boundary with them, you are presuming to know a Person rather than their Worksona. the people who work at Dropout or who stream their actual play tabletop games or who broadcast on TikTok or YouTube are inviting me to feel like i know them to the degree to which that helps them succeed in their medium and at their craft, but there MUST be a mutual understanding that that's a feeling, not a fact.

however.

a fanfiction writer is not an influencer, not a professional, and is not looking to garner "success." there is no share of audience we are trying to gain for gain's sake, because we are not competition with one another, because there is nothing to win other than the pleasure of each other's company. we are doing this for no other reason than the love of the game; because we have things we want desperately to say about these worlds, these characters, these dynamics, and because we *want more than anything to know we are not alone in our thoughts and feelings.* fanfiction is a bid for interaction, engagement, attention, and consideration. it is not meant to be consumed and then moved on from because we are NOT paid for our work, nor do we want to be. the reward we seek is "attention," but attention as in CONVERSATION, not attention as in clicks. we are not IN this for profit, or for number-go-up. there is no such thing: legally there cannot be. we are in this because we want to be seen and known.

like. please understand. i am now married to someone i met because of mutual comments on fanfiction. our close friend and roommate, with whom i have cohabitated for over a decade now, is someone I met because of mutual comments on fanfiction and livejournal posts. that is my household. beyond my household, the vast majority of my closest personal friends are people with whom I built relationships in this way.

you ask why fanfiction writers want THIS and not "the norm," but the idea of everything being built to cater to an algorithm to continue to build clout, as though the only method of reaching people is Distant Overlord Creator and Passive Receptive Audience being "the norm" is EXTREMELY NEW. this is not how it has always been!! please think of the writers of zines in a pre-internet fandom, using paper and glue and xerox to try and meet like-minded people in a world that was designed for you to only ever meet people in person, by happenstance, in your own hometown. imagine the writers of the early internet, building webrings from scratch to CREATE a community to find each other, despite distance. imagine livejournal groups, forums, and -- yes, indeed, of course -- comment threads IN STORIES -- as places where people go to *converse.* in the past, we had an entire Type Of Guy that everyone knew about, the BNF ("Big Name Fan") whose existence had to be described via meme because it was SO DIFFERENT THAN THE NORM. treating fellow fans like celebrities or people too cool for the regular kids to know was an OUTLIER, and one commonly understood to lead to toxicity.

in the past, I have likened writing fanfiction to echolocation. i am not screaming because I like hearing the sound of my own voice, though i can and do find my voice beautiful. i am screaming so that the vibrations can bounce back to me and show me the world. the purpose is in the feedback. otherwise it is just noise.

does this make any sense? can you see, when i describe it that way, why an ask like yours makes me feel despair, because it makes us all sound so horribly separate from one another?

perhaps I will try another metaphor:

a professional chef who runs a restaurant will not have her feelings hurt if you never fight your way into the kitchen to personally tell her how much you enjoyed the meal. that would, indeed, violate a boundary. professional kitchens are a place of work, and you have already showed her you enjoyed the meal by paying for it, or by perhaps spreading your enjoyment by word of mouth to your friends so they, too, can have good meals. you show your appreciation by continuing to come back. if a bunch of people sitting around randomly happen to have a conversation about how much they love the food, it wouldn't hurt that chef's feelings to not be included in the conversation. however: EVEN IN THIS INSTANCE, it is ADVISABLE AND APPROPRIATE to leave a good review! you might post about how much you like this restaurant on Yelp, and it would probably make the chef feel great to see those positive comments. but the chef doesn't NEED them, because the chef is, again, *also being paid to cook.* that's why she started the restaurant, to be paid to cook!

i am not being paid to cook.

i am at home in my own kitchen, making things for a community potluck where i hope everyone will bring something we can all enjoy together. some people at the potluck are better bakers, some better cooks; some can't cook at all but are great at logistics and make sure there's enough napkins for everyone; some people come just to enjoy the food, because that's what the party is for. and if I, as this enthusiast chef who made something from my heart for this reason alone, learned after the fact that a bunch of people got together in the parking lot to rave about my dish but no one of them had ever bothered to tell me while I sat alone at my table all night, occasionally seeing people come by to pick up a plate but never saying anything to me -- of course that would bother me, because I am not otherwise profiting off the labor I put in. this is not a bid to be paid, because if someone WERE to say "hey, great cake!! here's five bucks for a slice" i would say no, friend, that is not the point and give them the money back. i'm not trying to Get Mine. I am in it to see the look on your face. I'm in it so you can tell me what about it moved you, so that I can say back what moved me to make it in the first place. so we can TALK about it.

because what happened in the first place is this: one time I had a cake whose sweetness, richness, flavor, intensity, and composition moved me so much that I *taught myself to bake.* so I could see how much vanilla and sugar was too much, so I could learn how to make things rise instead of fall flat, so I could even better appreciate the original cake by seeing for myself the effort and talent and inspiration that goes into making one even half as good.

learning to do so is a satisfying accomplishment in and of itself, yes.

but I also did it because at the end of the day we should EAT the cake. and it's a lonely thing, to eat alone when a meal was always designed and intended to be shared.

so, to answer your last question: i'm not surprised, i'm just sad. because somehow two things that were never meant to be seen as the same have been labeled "content," and thus identical. and it diminishes both the things that ARE intended to be paid for AND the things that are not, because it removes any sense of intimacy or meaning from the work.

i hope you know i'm not mad at you for asking. but i'm frustrated we've come to live in a world where the question needs to be asked, because the answers are no longer intuitively obvious because we're so siloed.

[monnisaurus]

The fandom culture people want back so badly pisses me off bc it’s always antis saying it

Proship/fic is fandom culture!!!! Block and ignore things you don’t like, don’t harass people

Dark/comships is fandom culture!!!! Stuff like bipper and shit like that was peak back then!!

Nsfw is fandom culture!!!! Nsfw has been a huge thing, it’s never going away no matter how much you “cancel” the artist for drawing two fictional characters fucking!!!

You don’t want the fandom culture you think you want bc it’s “wrong”! You want the fandom you have now mixed with the childhood you grew up with!! >_>

[monnisaurus]

The funniest part of the “ummmm actually ☝️🤓 birth control can be REALLY bad for you” responses on my ‘hey I think the current health fad demonization of hormonal birth control is right wing propaganda’ post is that I can’t take hormonal birth control. It reacts badly with my body’s chemistry. But I am wise enough to understand that it is a lifesaving medication for many people and encouraging people to get off birth control if it is working for them with no adverse reactions is bad. Birth control is bad for me and it can have terrible side effects but the potential of pregnancy and periods are worse for many people.

[monnisaurus]

good news i'm the most fuckable person at this vehicular manslaughter

[monnisaurus]

Exams are stressing me out, so to calm down I rewatch Hannibal to remind myself that at least I am not going through whatever Will Graham is doing

[monnisaurus]

Leia post in honor of Carrie Fisher’s passing which was 7 years ago today.

[monnisaurus]

fake relationship but its a king and his concubine that was once an amazing soldier but he couldn’t go up the ranks for whatever reason so the king was like listen. hear me out. you can be my strategy dude. u just gotta be okay w walking around shirtless a lot. and soldier dude is like man that’s an UPSIDE and yknow they end up falling in love

[monnisaurus]

it’s completely acceptable to stay alive for tiny reasons. because you want to hear your favorite song one more time. because your dog will miss you if you leave. because the moon is just too pretty to never see again. because you haven’t seen the next season of a really good tv show. because you want to see the christmas lights this year. if you’re alive, you’re doing enough. if you’re surviving, i’m proud of you.

[monnisaurus]

physically at work, mentally lost in the fact that what started as a "i will show you how to be a gentleman, you show me how to be a pirate" ended being a lesson on love, self-discovery, trust and forgiveness

[monnisaurus]

Got to have 3 weeks of vacation since I had to look for housing in a rush... And honestly I really would love not to be back kdkdkd

Like, I'd really like to do something else and use my time in fulfilling things and yet I just know I need to be clicked back into the machine to achieve anything because capitalism and I hate capitalism omg

[monnisaurus]

You know what, let's take this apart, shall we?

You can dislike or hate a trope or a ship all you want, you can be disgusted by it and it's a-ok.

The problem starts with you, antis, trying to declare what fictional content is allowed and what isn't.

Proshippers don't call you puritans for disliking a ship/trope, we call you Puritans for the overarching narrative of sex negativity and the hypocrisy of celebrating gore and violence but God forbid the "wrong" characters kiss.

Proshippers don't call you fascists or Nazis for disliking a ship/trope, we call you fascists and Nazis for displaying obvious characteristics connected to fascistic beliefs such as censorship of fiction and censorship of opinion.

Proshippers don't call you fascists or Nazis for thinking something is gross. That's an opinion you are entitled to have. However, having an opinion and/or preference doesn't entitle you to dictate what others are allowed to enjoy in fictional spaces.

Proshippers don't call you fascists or Nazis for not wanting to interact with media that disturbs or upsets you, we call you fascists and Nazis for actively calling for bookburnings.

What we do call you fascists and Nazis for are posts like this:

What we do call you fascists and Nazis for is putting your mascots in Nazi-adjacent poses and outfits.

TW for actual NSDAP propaganda poster below (I censored the symbols!!)

The colour scheme is awfully similar, no? Not to mention the arm wrap.

I'm sorry if I'm getting heated here but y'all lost the plot so hard that you can't even see just how fucking close and chummy you've become with straight up fascist ideology and it shows.

This is the picture of Nazis burning books in Berlin on the 10th of May 1933. Look at it. This is real, this happened and it hurt countless people - unlike the pixels you all keep sending death wishes and rape threats over.

[monnisaurus]

"birth control is evil and fucks up your hormones and is making women depressed" is incredibly funny to hear when you have PMDD. girl in my ~natural divine feminine state~ i wanna kill myself every 4 weeks

[monnisaurus]

this might sound stupid but I can’t help but believe that the new wave of “birth control is actually horrible for your body, you need to get off it immediately” misinformation from influencers and the ‘natural cycle tracking’ apps suddenly being advertised is a sneaky underhanded way of causing more unplanned pregnancies that people now cannot abort. now is possibly the worst time ever to turn towards ‘natural family planning’

[monnisaurus]

I think every lesbian who says she wouldn't date a bi woman is functionally on the same wavelength as men who say they would only marry a virgin

[monnisaurus]

Young people need to realise that the internet is not a safe space unless you make it into one. Youre gonna have to block people and content you dont like. So sad new apps like tik tok don't let you easily block tags/content you dont want to see.