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sleepydrabbles · 1 month ago

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To try and add on to this conversation, a little more aggressively, how do you determine which interpretation of a character is wrong?

And I don’t just mean “how do you know she isn’t [insert headcanon]?”

Do you ask the author? Surely they know? But I’m an author/OC creator, and I don’t know everything about my OCs. Part of writing their story is to discover parts of them, and other parts of them remain a mystery after the story ends. If you dropped my winged character with a birth defect into a coffee shop au, how would he react? I don’t know.

Do you rely on your own media literacy? That’s always going to be essentially limited, and in the worst case, you and the creator of something might have completely divergent media backgrounds. The “local” classics I grew up reading, for example, are very different from the “local” classics of my friend in Japan, and again both are different from the “local” classics of our other friend in Lithuania. You can attempt to interpret it from the author’s media background, but that still relies on you having the time and energy to read through all of it.

Do you rely on an “expert”? Is there such thing as a fandom expert? We tend to assume that if someone has a lot of followers, the right degree, or a forceful enough personality that what they say must be true and correct. But that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve participated in fandoms where large, popular accounts turned out to be less concerned with the material than with their own popularity and whatever would further it.

Then how about a gut feeling? That’s incredibly dangerous, and part of the reason we have dldr, the concept of dead dove, etc. They’re both reminders that you have the right to walk out the door if you don’t like something or if it causes you gut-wrenching discomfort, whether that’s because of some perceived wrecking of the canon and fanon or because a trope makes you sick to your stomach. This isn’t school, the fic or fanart or theory isn’t an assignment, and you have the right and privilege of setting it down and walking away. People who judge on gut feelings tend to attempt to force the world to conform to their comfort zone, and that’s not healthy for anyone.

Okay, so we’ll go with the voice of the people, then. Whatever the most people agree with must be true, right? Except throughout history, the right of the conqueror to write history has led to the assumption that all histories are biased and essentially lack the whole truth. Even if you patched several versions together, fact-checking as you went, you would still miss the whole story.

And sometimes that’s what this wrecking is about, really. Especially in fandoms where the creator of the original material was worldbuilding as they went, multiple gaps get left behind, little holes in our understanding of that world. Sometimes the full implication of an idea isn’t explored because it’s not the focus of the creator’s original work. Sometimes the creator has the ‘wrong’ idea about how something works, like mental illness or gender identity or high school drama, or at least a divergent idea from the fanfic author. Sometimes a fanauthor comes from a culture who served as the basis of a fantasy culture, and they want to highlight the parts of their culture the original author missed. Fans come from a variety of different backgrounds not just in terms of their location, but in the way they grew up, the kinds of world events they heard about vs. lived through, the books they read, how they came upon the fandom’s focus media, their health etc. I’ve watched in real time as those experiences mix together to create new interpretations of media— this birdwatcher knows the symbolism of the bird in the upper corner of the illustration, another recognizes a pose referenced from a historical piece of artwork, a third notes a quoted poem or shares the background of the culture from which a character’s clothes are taken. This is in my opinion one of fandom’s best traits, because in participating in discussions about our favorite media we are also learning about and from each other.

Something I think we also forget is that fanwork tends to be inherently exploratory.

Hand a kid a lego set. The kid could follow the instructions. They could play with the individual blocks and build nothing. They could create something entirely different. The blocks “meant for” a castle end up becoming a spaceship. The blanket becomes a dress, then a ghost cover, then a fort. Food is rearranged into a smiley face, repurposed as a weapon against a younger sibling, or even smeared on the face as “makeup”. Yeah some of these applications of legos, food, or a blanket are objectively “wrong” if you look at their “canon”: you build this with this, you use this to sleep, you eat this. But that doesn’t immediately make the other applications terrible horrible occurrences. Hell, it doesn’t even make them bad!

Fanwork is the same. We’ve been handed something that’s a certain way, that’s intended to be enjoyed a certain way. But we’re humans, and humans love building things and tearing them down and poking them apart and looking at their insides and unraveling them and making a mess of them and then arranging them again. And while some have acknowledged the role of that kind of play in art, it’s especially explicit here, where we didn’t even come up with the characters and setting we’re using half the time. It’s all paper dolls. So your pretty doll in victorian clothing is fighting sharks in the ocean with a military dress barbie. So what? Seriously, so WHAT?

No one’s forcing you to play with anyone. This isn’t like when your parents would insist you make friends with people you didn’t like because it wasn’t fair to not be friends with them. The kid across the playground just picked up the mud your friends were using to make fairy houses and has given themselves an epic mohawk. There’s disgusting wet foliage from the rain dangling out of their shirt. They haven’t even approached you, they’re just playing where you can see them. No one is forcing you to play with them.

This is also why it’s completely inappropriate to leave cruel comments, attempt to tear someone’s ideas down, call names, or even provide unasked for “constructive” critique. Doesn’t that kid know he could get sick? That it’s gross to put mud in your hair? Yeah, and that kid has a mom sitting on a bench not far away, reading(in this case the ‘mom’ could be a literal mom, a friend group, or a professional circle. generally irl people the person knows). You’re not their mom, no one is forcing you to talk to them, and if you go over and tell them “you look stupid”, congratulations, you are a bully.

Fanwork is exploration. It’s play. We have sets of rules like tagging, summarizing, respecting spaces, dldr in the same way that the playground has the rules don’t hit, don’t push, respect people’s nos, be kind. I think even the word “hobby” has started to feel a little uptight lately, but that’s just me. We’re all playing in here. There are forms of play that hurt others, like games around name-calling or games made to exclude each other, and those aren’t welcome. There are forms of play that are weird and hard to explain, that not everyone wants to participate in, and that’s fine, people don’t have to. Each of us participates from our own context and yeah, sometimes that means disagreements, but that’s part of life. You’d be hard pressed to find a set of best friends who haven’t argued about anything in the years they’ve hung out together, from politics to which bug is the coolest to whether someone’s hair is blonde or not (true story). This space doesn’t function like this on accident. People have set up these rules over the years because they work, they help keep everyone safe and (mostly) happy, and they help outline these spaces as nonprofessional, play-filled and open spaces where people can hang out. They’re not these little handwavey phrases to keep people from criticizing each other. They serve the same role as the ruleboards in other playspaces asking that you not misuse the equipment.

To be blunt and a little mean, no one is forcing you to be here. I lived completely ignorant of fandoms and their politics for the first decade and a half of my existence, and I found plenty to amuse myself with in the meantime. This space is optional. We are all here voluntarily. And we have these rules, these boundaries we agree upon by participating in these communities, that help keep everyone (ideally) safe and feeling welcome and happy. The satisfaction and vindication you experience when you storm into someone else’s playspace to tell them they’re doing it all wrong and possibly call them some choice names comes at the expensive of that person’s sense of safety, enjoyment, and calm. You may see yourself as the one in the ‘right’, but the truth is you’re working in a space full of mostly subjective takes and interpretations, and choosing to insert yourself in someone else’s space just to feel good about yourself doesn’t make you cooler or smarter or more right. It just makes you mean.

This world is rough enough to live in as it is. Quit making it harder for other people just so you can feel better for a few minutes.

I'm just gonna say it.

I have problems with this fandom idea of "anyone can make whatever they want, it doesn't have to adhere to canon, if you don't like don't read, etc. etc."

On paper it's a nice idea, and I get it. We don't want to overly police what fandoms consider "acceptable" because that's a deep rabbit hole to fall down. Everyone has their own tolerances for what's OK and what isn't, and we can't really set any ground rules when everyone looks at things in different ways. What's OK to me may not be for someone else and vice versa.

And I get that the idea is meant to encourage people to explore new ideas while discouraging others from shouting them down. Which is what you want to do when trying to keep a fandom alive and healthy. And yeah, a lot of these odd takes are harmless in the grand scheme of things. It's not like riots are going to break out because of the umpteenth coffee shop AU that maybe has one character conveniently ignore a part of their backstory that the author thought was contradictory to their overall character. A lot of these fics do merit the response of just moving on with your day if you don't agree with it.

But I am willing to bet good money that just about everyone reading this post has come across a couple of fics in the past that are just wrong. I don't mean that in the sense that it has some content that just doesn't sit well with you no matter what the context of it is. I mean in the sense that it seems almost designed from the ground up to go against everything you understand about the canon material. Like they're going out of their way to mischaracterize just about everyone in the story to prop up their bad take that completely misunderstands everything, or deliberately write everyone wrong just to prop up one OC as the greatest and most amazing who can do no wrong and makes everyone fall to their knees in deific worship just at the sight of them.

You might still say that it's better to ignore those and move on, and you're probably right. But that feeling of anger and disgust that wells up inside of you when you see that happens because you care about the fandom you're part of. You care about the characters that are getting mishandled, you care about the setting that's being twisted into something else, you care about the plot that's getting mangled beyond recognition. We can argue about what's a level of healthy care, but regardless, you still care. And that means that anger won't always go away when you try to disregard the fic and move on.

So what can you do?

Well, most people head off to write something new to counteract the bad fic they saw, and that's entirely valid. Probably the healthier option, even. But sometimes that just doesn't work. Because it's not specifically about showing other people how to handle the concept right, it's about showing that one specific writer who's fucking it all up how wrong they are. And making a retaliation fic isn't always guaranteed to be viable because they'll likely ignore it, or maybe you already have a dozen other projects you're working on, or you have other things going on in your life that make it less possible to do something like that.

So no, essentially walking up to that author's home with a list of 90 reasons why their fic is trash and is built on the worst take you've ever seen and nailing it to their door isn't the healthiest option. It's also likely to get ignored or disregarded, and the fic somehow has fans and they'll just end up going after you for whatever reason they can think of.

But isn't there a part of you that feels better after getting it out of your system?

#fandom ettiquette #fanfiction #writing #media consumption #media criticism #creative writing #creative arts #creative community #it’s okay if you want to believe that these rules are useless #they’re not perfect #and a lot’s fallen through the gaps in recent years #but I refuse to throw out the baby with the bathwater here #if you approach someone unsolicited to demean them #criticize them #or otherwise make their day worse #just because you don’t like them #you are a bully #and of course discussions of harm are more nuanced than that #but most of us came here to play around #to hang out #if you will #and I don’t appreciate the rhetoric of regulating that play through selective bullying #for all the various jokes to the contrary #the door to a fandom is always open #and it works both ways #you can walk in and out as you please #so ffs #use the damn door

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