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anghraineIt's always a bit surreal to read a fic and become increasingly convinced that the author has been influenced by a post or fic of mine even though they never mention it, or me.
This has happened to me in a couple of fandoms. It's one thing when the author freely acknowledges influence, but sometimes it's a weird déja vu where they never mention me, and at first I don't want to assume I'm ground zero for [whatever], but it just becomes increasingly obvious that either they've read my thing or read fic by other people who were strongly influenced by something I said or did.
I've personally run into this the most with Rogue One and The Borgias fic. It's interesting because RO fandom (not SW broadly, just RO) and Borgias fandom are absolutely the nicest and most generally pleasant fandoms I've probably ever been in. They're both fairly low on discourse and high on actually making things and promoting other fans, so although my experiences of them aren't 100% positive, the overall feeling is one of broad good will and friendly exchange. So it's not that I mind seeing ideas and emphases that I'm pretty sure I came up with spreading beyond my own fic/meta/headcanons. It's just a slightly odd feeling when a formulation is so close to mine and so specific that it feels somewhat implausible that it wasn't influenced by me, personally, in some way, even though these fandoms are pretty big.
In Rogue One fandom it's actually fairly easy to trace influence for various reasons (one of them is a tendency for my stuff to spread through specific mutuals). It's harder with The Borgias, but now and then I'll read something and be like "okay, maybe this is egocentric goggles or something, but this really feels like you read we get dark, only to shine."
Like I said, I don't mind this "oh, they definitely read [fic]" experience, it's just a little odd when it's my own fic and it's not acknowledged at all, yet is so specific and obvious that it seems kind of undeniable. Sometimes people do acknowledge the fic that inspired some element (AO3 has a mechanism specifically for this purpose) and that's really sweet and gratifying, but not nearly as surreal—maybe because that's a more old school approach and so more familiar to me personally, but also because the explicit acknowledgment ensures that it's not a gradually dawning realization but known from the first. The "huh, I also used that idea, cool to see it again..." -> "wow, that is actually really close to how I think about it, even in phrasing, interesting..." -> "okay, did this person read my specific fic?" -> "uh, yeah, they definitely read it" thing is a kind of different experience from an AO3 alert, you know?
This has happened to me in a couple of fandoms. It's one thing when the author freely acknowledges influence, but sometimes it's a weird déja vu where they never mention me, and at first I don't want to assume I'm ground zero for [whatever], but it just becomes increasingly obvious that either they've read my thing or read fic by other people who were strongly influenced by something I said or did.
I've personally run into this the most with Rogue One and The Borgias fic. It's interesting because RO fandom (not SW broadly, just RO) and Borgias fandom are absolutely the nicest and most generally pleasant fandoms I've probably ever been in. They're both fairly low on discourse and high on actually making things and promoting other fans, so although my experiences of them aren't 100% positive, the overall feeling is one of broad good will and friendly exchange. So it's not that I mind seeing ideas and emphases that I'm pretty sure I came up with spreading beyond my own fic/meta/headcanons. It's just a slightly odd feeling when a formulation is so close to mine and so specific that it feels somewhat implausible that it wasn't influenced by me, personally, in some way, even though these fandoms are pretty big.
In Rogue One fandom it's actually fairly easy to trace influence for various reasons (one of them is a tendency for my stuff to spread through specific mutuals). It's harder with The Borgias, but now and then I'll read something and be like "okay, maybe this is egocentric goggles or something, but this really feels like you read we get dark, only to shine."
Like I said, I don't mind this "oh, they definitely read [fic]" experience, it's just a little odd when it's my own fic and it's not acknowledged at all, yet is so specific and obvious that it seems kind of undeniable. Sometimes people do acknowledge the fic that inspired some element (AO3 has a mechanism specifically for this purpose) and that's really sweet and gratifying, but not nearly as surreal—maybe because that's a more old school approach and so more familiar to me personally, but also because the explicit acknowledgment ensures that it's not a gradually dawning realization but known from the first. The "huh, I also used that idea, cool to see it again..." -> "wow, that is actually really close to how I think about it, even in phrasing, interesting..." -> "okay, did this person read my specific fic?" -> "uh, yeah, they definitely read it" thing is a kind of different experience from an AO3 alert, you know?