olderthannetfic - Tumblr blog

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/747721307928559616/re-747330342209404928-every-time-a-discussion?source=share

I wouldn't even make this purely about oversensitivity - I've seen fic writers refuse to tag, say, breakup because they think it would be a Good Experience (tm) for fans of the ship in question to read it (because they often think it's Problematic in some brain-wormed way), or they just think their writing is so good or so "socially important" that people who would normally avoid this commonly tagged trope should have to experience it anyway, "it's good for you" etc. and then melt down when people have the predictable reaction that something that seemed to be billed as a fluffy romance was anything but, and of course, these people's social statements are never as deep and sophisticated as they think they are. These people are weirdly, often very outspoken about the need for Content Warnings in basically any other context.

Obviously, I don't want to say that anything other than major archive warnings are a requirement to tag (and I mean, even those aren't required, you can use CNTW), or that you're required to indicate a breakup will happen if it's a big spoiler or something.... but this wasn't just that, it was deliberately false advertising the fic as something it wasn't bc they thought it would be morally edifying or something for people who dislike that trope to read it.

I like fanfiction and I'm not going to say it can never be effectively used to convey Important Ideas (tm) .... but I do think if you are going to take this attitude and especially if you're over the age of 15 or so, and especially if you're then going to have a meltdown and accuse people of "harassment" for disagreeing with you when the readers are predictably not happy, you need to consider that perhaps fanfiction is not the medium for you. Maybe write original fiction instead.

I don't know why it's so hard for some to understand that people tend to be more allowing for a story not being as happy or fluffy as they expected when the story isn't about characters they're already attached to, especially when they're in a space that's often about seeking out specific outcomes that the original work didn't give them. Like I'm sorry there's often a double standard between fanfic and original fic in this way, but it exists for a way.

But also, none of these fanfic writers I've seen do this (and this sounds niche I know but I've seen it several times in different fandom) ever actually have Takes that are remotely original or startling or groundbreaking, lol, such that it's worth misleading people because they "need to hear." It's always like.... cool, I saw this take for the first time on a Tumblr post in 2017/from someone in my women's studies class in 2010, and I thought it was a bad shallow take then and still do.

Interestingly, the people who genuinely have really interesting and unusual and thought-provoking takes that they use fanfic to express feel no need to tag it inaccurately, feel no desire to force it on people who don't want to read it. Wonder why.

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Hah. I too have seen this silly behavior many times.

[olderthannetfic]

I have now seen multiple antis who call themselves anarchists on Tumblr. Also these people's blogs are those extremely pink "kys uwu" things.

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[olderthannetfic]

I'll be honest I've never gotten the appeal of just blowjobs in media. Like there's the service angle but I'd rather watch 2 people get pleasured or just smashing. And I like dicks. And pussy. But I've never gone into an erotic piece of media like "yes show me the blowjobs". I don't mind oral sex on women I just prefer actual penetrative sex acts.

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Fuck the service angle: the tactile experience is awesome.

[olderthannetfic]

People on fandomsecrets are really mad this week about other people reviewing fanfiction on goodreads and I don't want to litigate whether people should or shouldn't use that website in that manner right now, because the thing I'm actually wound up about is:

when someone asks why, they say "BECAUSE FANFIC ISN'T BOOKS!!!1!1!" as though this is supposed to explain everything, and when asked to elaborate they basically just find ways to say "fanfic, by virtue of being fanfic, is not a book, which is a different thing from fanfic, by virtue of books being books which are not fanfic" in more and more words without adding any coherent information.

Fanfic is a type of story. Books is a type of physical object. In the digital age there are now lots of professional ~official~ works of literature which have never once been published in a physical form. The comparison is meaningless to begin with and also doesn't answer the question.

Is this just a way of ignoring the goodreads thing entirely so they can stealth complain about the Wattpad thing where people used to that site call all stories "books"? Is that what's going on here?

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Sighhh.

I know some people think Goodreads is for Real Books™, but a hell of a lot of what's on there is trashy romance novels. I myself am an author... of indie selfpub m/m mystery novels that are overtly fandom-adjacent in that BL way. Like most people in that space, I'm mainly focused on ebooks. Why are these things not fic? Well, because we sell them for money and we don't call them fic and because we've done a successful find and replace on the character names.

I think people have trouble articulating why fic is not books because they're used to thinking in terms of content, and they know perfectly well that Goodreads is full of content that might as well be from a fic.

But no, I don't think this is an anti-Wattpad thing at all.

What they're trying and failing to articulate is that fic is not a book by virtue of its author not intending it as one.

Fic authors, or at least ones adhering to a certain kind of AO3 culture, mean their work to be a not-for-profit gift for their fandom community. They often have a horror of it escaping containment to reach the eyeballs of outsiders.

Now, frankly, with the multitude of Goodreads users reviewing original omegaverse mpreg romance novels, I'm not sure that the site actually counts as outsiders, but that's how the people going "Fic is not books!" feel. It's a violation to bring fic there just like it's gross when a talk show host digs up some horny fan art to show to actors so they can have a good laugh at fandom's expense.

[olderthannetfic]

One reason the "why not f/f" discussion doesn't go away is that it's paired with the Kool-aid that Fandom made for itself. "We do what canon doesn't! We write what canon refuses to give us! We do better than the patriarchy-driven industry, because we are the ignored minorities doing it for ourselves!" And in the context of all of that trumpeting, I think it's fair for people to ask "but do you really tho"

You can't have it both ways, throwing around claims of having better diversity because Fandom isn't the industry shackled by the patriarch executives, but also wehhh of course you shouldn't expect diversity, the industry refuses to give us canon diversity, there's no way we could do better than the industry, if only there was a diverse canon anywhere that would definitely fix me

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Yeah. Some of the early theorizing, especially around slash, has really overstayed its welcome. The most tiresome and least nuanced versions of these talking points tend to recirculate and recirculate on social media.

I think a better way of analyzing it is to say that fandom adds id.

We bring the horny, and that means we're endlessly creative and will do things the industry won't... in certain spheres.

It doesn't mean we're striking out on our own to develop terminally underdeveloped canon characters. It means we're adding a tentacle monster.

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But ultimately, a huge portion of the howling on this topic boils down to a lot of AFAB people, including quite a few who identify as women, saying "In my fantasy life, I see myself as a man" and other people losing their shit over that.

[olderthannetfic]

I didn’t expect to feel like such a crotchety boomer so young but everytime I see some zoomer respond to an argument/rebuttal with ‘I’m not reading all of that’ my immediate reaction is always, sweetheart we know you’re not…you literally can’t.

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While that's one thing I associate with zoomers, they've also given us waves of people prancing around in turtlenecks reading Vanity Fair or whatthefuckever. I wouldn't worry too much: anti intellectual dolts are eternal but never everyone.

[olderthannetfic]

In some of the fandom related tags I frequent there's been a strange uptick in people writing fics recently but... But instead of paragraphs with line breaks or anything like that it's... Bullet points? Like it's a fic but it's bullet points. Every place there should be a line break it's just a bullet point. ????? I generally try not to be too much of a stickler about formatting when it comes to fic but this is a stylistic Choice that I genuinely cannot wrap my head around. Off putting even.

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Shades of not!fic.

[olderthannetfic]

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but I find that with a lot of art, culture, music, etc that's labelled as "pretentious" , the people that hate it actually act a LOT more pretentious than the people that like it. I don't love The Beatles but I find that people that hate The Beatles are way more pretentious than Beatles fans. Same with modern architecture and art. I love gorgeous old houses but I hate that any account that posts them always has a million comments about "omg this is way better than SOULLESS MODERN HOUSES!!!" like chill, we know you're cool and different, and no one cares. I've actually seen a lot of gorgeous modern houses too, "gentrified beige modern" isn't the only modern out there

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Wearing your heart on your sleeve is kind of the antithesis of pretentiousness, yeah.

[olderthannetfic]

There wasn't a specific famous purge around that time as far as I can remember (though there are always smaller ones). I don't remember when the mid-fic ads started really sparking complaints, but it could have been around then.

Does anyone remember what happened to FFnet between late 2016 and early 2017? I was looking on Google Trends and in September of 2016 the searches for FFnet appear to plummet drastically, but I cannot seem to remember what might have happened around that time.

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Not off the top of my head. Maybe AO3 got more popular.

[olderthannetfic]

Nooooooo!

Don't pollute the hot sex pollen tag with this!

Yes, 'dubcon' covers a bunch of different tropes, but consensual-but-sucky sex is not one of them. It's not primarily a warning tag because people who regard it as a warning are likely to just see such situations as noncon and tag appropriately. In practice, it's more of a trope tag people love and look for. Think sex pollen, bad guys made them do it, etc.

I need people to learn that "mild" is a perfectly good and useful term for those "just in case" tags. Mild dubcon, mild violence, mild horror. Or "implied" if it's even less than that. Lets me, as a reader, know that there might be a punch and a blood nose, but if I want someone beaten half to hell then I will have to go elsewhere. Serves people who want intensity and those who want to avoid such themes entirely.

Though, obviously, everything is subjective. Still, I wish people didn't tag very mild edge cases "just in case" with the same tags people use for the really intense hard stuff. I want to see someone almost die in my violence fics, not get lightly slapped with barely a bruise. It's like when someone tags a fic as explicit but nothing explicit ever happens in it and there's a fade to black after some hand holding and you just sit there wondering why. The implications are there, sure, but nothing actually happens in the text!

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[olderthannetfic]

And if you are on AO3, you should prioritize the people looking for spanking.

[olderthannetfic]

There's this specific genre of informational post that drives me up the wall and over. It's basically a collage which may or may not be connected together always with a caption that's either off kilter to what's presented or simply reductive. It would be a collage of a screenie of an article then, for some reason, a google search of article titles then a stat graph of some sort, then whatever social post. What am I suppose to do with an infodump in visual form? It almost feels like filler. You see it everywhere in whatever argument on the internet. It's especially jarring to see people bust it out during a ship war because that is exactly the tone we were arguing in with our long paragraphed metas.

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[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/747730854795771904/in-light-of-yet-another-bnf-non-derogatory

Nobody sets out to achieve the frankly awful circumstance of being a BNF on purpose. It has all of the downsides of being a microinfluencer and you never get paid.

It's not just harassment campaigns, you know. It's also sooo many random assholes who think it's ALWAYS appropriate to dunk on you for no reason because you're "so popular" (are you??) and a new influx of personalised hate comments every time someone recommends your fic on spacebattles or Reddit. And hey! Now nobody wants to DM you or even try to talk to you one on one (except inappropriate come-ons and hate mail, obviously) because you're somehow suddenly perceived as "too big" for your own fandom community, and so INSTEAD people just quietly blame and resent you for something that is entirely their own projection, and then suddenly you'll be "cliquey" and "elitist" because of your sudden onset isolation. The next time you think you're just having a DM chat with someone you'll probably find out they were posting screenshots to discord so people could creatively reinterpret your responses. And if you defend yourself on any count, ever, you'll be "picking on people who aren't as big as you!" It's a massive waste of time and energy.

I never deleted my account. Why would I? You don't really HAVE to see or talk to anyone about anything on AO3. I just turned off all the AO3 emails and jumped into the invitation queue under a new address. The fandom friends who met the "would you share your wallet name?" test got told about my new account via Signal.

Luckily, I've found that even if you post another several million words under a new account name, it takes a specific combination of the right content, the right fandom and the right time for your account to "pop off," as the kids say.

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[olderthannetfic]

Does anyone remember what happened to FFnet between late 2016 and early 2017? I was looking on Google Trends and in September of 2016 the searches for FFnet appear to plummet drastically, but I cannot seem to remember what might have happened around that time.

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Not off the top of my head. Maybe AO3 got more popular.

[olderthannetfic]

ive been pronouncing it as lee-vey

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No, no, the LaVey stans were over at Deadjournal. ;)

[olderthannetfic]

That feeling when your very proship, extreme-kink friendly server loses its goddamn mind over something run-of-the-mill problematic. Stop clutching your pearls, Jessica, you bought them in a sex shop, that's not what they are for.

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[olderthannetfic]

I'm a trans man who didn't develop a real libido until after I started HRT. Tale as old as HRT, I know, but I've noticed something kind of interesting about arousal. Physical stimulous can make me wet and make my (now substantial) clit swell a bit, but to get actually *hard* I need a narrative scenario in my mind.

In other words, the only way I can get an erection is with fanfic.

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