#it feels like. you've got a field that now has huge influence but apparently critique remains unthinkable

[aeide-thea]

there's context here but frankly making a real post abt this would require my brain to be in better shape so this is just the little orphaned scratchpad version, but like

everybody's always on about, like, fanfic is just an amateur peer community so we can't critique it the way we would Real Lit bc the power dynamic is different and everybody involved is tender and delicate

but like. how many readers have to Only Read Fanfic—which like, i have no actual numbers but anecdotally that seems like it's more and more of a thing—before it's like, actually fic has effectively grown up and become the Man it was imitating. also frankly plenty of BNFs *do* in fact have status and influence over their audience, like, yeah they typically are more *accessible* to their audiences than pro authors and if yr going to take advantage of that by addressing them directly it does in fact behoove you to treat them like an actual person rather than an Invulnerable Content Purveyor, as in fact you should be treating *everyone* you interact with on the internet despite all of our facelessness, but like

kinda feels like fic has in fact reached a level of visibility and influence with the reading population where this whole argument that like, it can do whatever it wants while we can't point at anything it's doing as being an issue in any way starts to feel a little dubious to me?