Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.
So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. Iâve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts Iâve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why Iâve come to the conclusion that Iâm a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.
Lurkers really are great, tho
Iâm a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days itâs just cuz I donât feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, Iâd spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular communityâs culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And yâknow, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person whoâd clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.
Lurking isnât bad or weird or creepy. Itâs perfectly normal. I love lurking. Itâs hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally Iâll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but Iâm always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but Iâve long since made peace with the fact that itâs just the way my brain works. Iâm a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.
The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. Thatâs not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but itâs simple cause and effect. You may think of it as âyour communityâ, but if youâve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someoneâs LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.
Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. Youâre in the park, but youâre not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you donât introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you wonât be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they werenât told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.
Thereâs nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. Itâs just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that youâre on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.
Iâve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know thereâs a lot of people like me who just donât socialize often. I know thereâs plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe theyâre nervous, maybe theyâre young and their parents donât allow them to, maybe theyâre in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, Iâve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if Iâm away from my computer I just read whatâs publicly available.Â
I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I donât even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers donât know I exist.
I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know theyâre there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.
So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if itâd be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.
But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. Iâve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that itâs time for me to set some boundaries.
I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if theyâre in a situation where they canât make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.
Should we gatekeep fandom?
Iâve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I thinkâŠyeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--
A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, âOh, yeah? Well if youâre REALLY a fan, name ten EU novelsâ to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a âreal fanâ would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of âbeing a fanâ and peopleâs right to describe themselves as one.
Thatâs not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, thatâs fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom communityâŠthat might be something worth gatekeeping.
See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to justâŠnot go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasnât until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was justâŠa hobby.
So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasnât here yet.
The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.
And itâs a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isnât a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, itâs right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didnât set out to be the main fanfic website, but thatâs definitely what itâs become. Itâs easy for people to find us--and that includes people who donât care about the community, and just want âcontent.â
Transformative fandom doesnât like it when people see our fanworks as âcontentâ. âContentâ is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it weâre usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.
Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we donât get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.
And look, donât get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been âno one comments anymoreâ wank. There have always been people who only comment to say âMORE!â or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.
However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks arenât actually in the community.Â
I wonât say âthey arenât real fansâ because thatâs silly; thereâs lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they donât appreciate fan labor. They want our âcontentâ, but they donât respect our control over our creations.
And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the authorâs permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company?Â
And sure, people have been doing shady things with other peopleâs fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but Iâve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once inâŠI think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling âhisâ novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I donât even remember where I read it.)
But aside from that third example, the thing isâŠas awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging weâre seeing from community outsiders today.
Money, on the other hand⊠Well, fandomâs just a giant, untapped content farm, isnât it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.
Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day theyâll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe theyâre active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community theyâre active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if theyâre not active community members, they understand the community.
Fans who see fanworks as âcontentâ donât belong in the same category as lurkers. Theyâre tourists.Â
While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:
[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandomÂ
OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since itâs true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and youâd think itâs the minors only but thatâs not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck⊠:/ END ID]
-
âTouristâ is an apt name for this sort of fan. They donât want to be part of our community, and they donât have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they donât steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that theyâre fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI âpodficsâ for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fmâs shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). Theyâll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they donât care about seeing âthe ending this writer would have given to the story they were tellingâ, they just want âan endingâ. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.
I donât think this is confined to a specific age group. This isnât â13-year-olds on Wattpadâ or âZoomers on TikTokâ or whatever pointless generation war weâre in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who donât understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.
Itâs so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and itâs easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, itâs so easy for people who donât care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits.Â
So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, Iâm referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they donât need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didnât look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never wouldâve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they donât understand it, and they donât want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.
And then theyâre surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internetâs content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. Weâve lived like this for ages and we like it.
So if someone canât be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I donât see why I should give them easy access to my fics.
Think of it like a garden gate
When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.
The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and Iâm proud of it, and Iâm happy to share it with other people.Â
Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much theyâve enjoyed it.Â
Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I donât always manage it, but my ficsâ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like Iâm pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.
My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.
But now thereâs a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.
I donât care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so Iâve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.
Admittedly, itâs a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if theyâre lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writerâs wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom communityâŠwell, theyâre not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, theyâll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.
And yâknow, Iâve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope itâs not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didnât think Iâd ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you donât have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. Iâll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. Thatâs my contribution.
Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.
Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.
Thereâs lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.
4K notes
·
View notes