Anghraine

I don't even recall who posted this, but apparently at Worldcon, Seanan McGuire presented this simple flowchart to explain what is and is not fanfic:



I have no grievance with McGuire in general, but this is both elegant and quite wrong, IMO. Sorry, my Austen fanfic is very much fanfic (and there's no need to give the P&P "variations" industry any more delusions of grandeur than it already has, lol—those are very much fanfic, too). Some of my fics could also be considered re-imaginings or retellings—First Impressions is the obvious example as a deliberate retelling of P&P with genderswapped leads, rather than a true what-if AU—but they are absolutely fanfic. They're fiction written as a form of fan expression.

Sometimes there is a real sense of difference between fiction of this kind, especially when written in a fandom context that is clearly informed by or in dialogue with other fanworks, wider trends in the fandom or in online fandom in general, etc vs some literary re-imaginings that interrogate the source material but are not really fannish (not even in a fan hatred way). So it's not that I think all fiction of this kind should be defined as fanfic. I think that has to do with the conditions of creation rather than the novelty of the cast, setting, and/or plot. But the defining artistic criteria of fanfic as a form or genre are not determined by externally imposed legal codes or the opinion of the source material's author.

There have been many attempts to develop an authoritative definition for fanfic that ultimately comes down to "can you legally make money off it?" But that is not what fanfic is, and I'm deeply skeptical of conceptualizing genre, any genre, based on whether or when it can be sold. A lot of licensed IP writers seem very invested in distinguishing their work from fanfic—sometimes claiming it's not about superiority (sure, Jan), but it's just very important to them that they not be perceived as fanfic writers. But I'd argue that what makes licensed work fanfic or not isn't actually the license, or it being a professional job for money, but the approach of the work in question. Some IP writers are very much fans and clearly approached the licensed work as a chance to write fanfic about some part of canon they're super into with authorization from a parent company or something (various Star Trek writers seem to be very much of this type, say). Others don't really seem to be approaching their work as a form of fan expression, which is not morally wrong in any way, but definitely different. Going back to P&P, there are some takes that I wouldn't really consider fanfic (unlike the variation industry), just because the authors don't seem to be writing as fans but for some other goal. So you sometimes get P&P sequels that are really different from the fanfic—more literary in some ways, but often less engaged with Pride and Prejudice or its adaptations than the fanfic tends to be and prone to little canon errors that fans don't usually make. It's a little hard to describe but you can usually tell.

In any case: some licensed IP work is fanfic and acknowledged as such by the authors, while some isn't; some fanfic is based on source material that is long out of copyright (and some other things based on the same or similar sources isn't fanfic), and the time since publication does not merit a specific respectable distinction from, idk, normie fanfic by Marvel slash superfans or whoever is the fannish target du jour.

It'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?

The biggest problem with working on the same projects for so long is that when I hear “it’s okay if people don’t like it, you can always write something new,” I’m just … uhhh, no?

Ordinarily, I work on my pet projects over 5-10 years. Sometimes I don’t care if people like them, to be sure. But sometimes I do! And just shrugging off the response to something I’ve dedicated a substantial chunk of my life to—whether it’s fanfic or original—is just, nope.

Tagged: #and the longer it takes to finish things (always pretty damn long) the more i feel like this #sure i have other stories in me #but each one matters and the decade plus ones PARTICULARLY matter #so nah i'm just going to angst over the ones whose reception i care about #(though thinking about it ... my most popular fic ever is one whose reception i didn't really care that much about #which feels like a lesson i should learn or some kind of personal challenge or something but NAH. CHALLENGE REJECTED)

sqbr responded to this post:

It also opens the door for “I know there’s no indications they’ve done anything bad irl, but I can tell they’re terrible because I hate their work” and “They can’t have done anything bad irl, their work is too good and makes me too happy”. Both of which do a lot of real world harm.

[ETA 5/13/2024: I don't recall if I ever replied, but I completely agree!]

YouTube keeps reccing “what your favorite [X Fandom] ship says about you” videos, and it’s like … without additional information, your ship says nothing about you! Yes, even if it’s [Ship Someone Really Hates]. Other people don’t know your life and motivations, and it’s patently obvious that people ship the same things for different reasons. It’s how you ship it + other behavior that reveals something of yourself—and even that is easy for strangers to lump into an undifferentiated mass.

I’m completely immovable on this point, so why I keep getting these videos is a mystery.

#i mean #at least the recs evolved from 'racist and misogynistic takes on tolkien' and 'dudebros whining about star wars' #to just inane shit #(okay and she-ra fanvids) #(but that is not a mystery lol)

[ETA 5/9/2024: this has completely disappeared from the algorithm over the last couple of years, which I find mildly interesting as a phenomenon! People asked if I was thinking of one specific YouTuber and I wasn't, I just kept getting recced this kind of thing.]

I have a longer post in drafts about it, but … one of the things I really enjoy about Austen is that she doesn’t hold back judgment of her characters or even altogether deny them agency (though her fandom sometimes does!), but she also frequently goes out of her way to highlight the experiences that have influenced their development into who they are.

Especially (though not exclusively) when it comes to her main characters, her good people aren’t good because they just had the innate moral fortitude to shrug off their upbringings or the things that have happened to them, which seems to be a lot of people’s idea of goodness. Austen main characters are good people and they’re impacted by their experiences and have qualities (often flaws) that clearly arise more out of upbringing than any essential underlying characteristic. Goodness isn’t just about super-resilience, but neither is experience wholly defining.

It’s not at all restricted to Austen, of course, but even now (…particularly now), it’s so refreshing.

Tagged: #i'm so tired of the resilience narrative or blank slate narrative #and i was thinking of how elizabeth/darcy is one of comparatively few ships i'm really into where the characters #are just about squeaky clean—and i think part of it (aside of their general magnificence lol) is it's not a magic resilience thing at all #she is extremely clear about the ways in which they have been influenced—mostly for the worse—by their experiences #they're allowed to be good AND to be affected by their lives in natural ways #shouldn't be as refreshing as it is but it's one of the things i keep going back for

[ETA 4/30/2024: I was also thinking about Mr Collins, of all people—Austen doesn't justify him in any way, obviously, but also doesn't try to pretend that his upbringing and history aren't what made him who he is. The effects of education, upbringing, and general history on people's characters and morals are a constant preoccupation of her books, IMO.]

I get some really weird corrections sometimes.

Tagged: #i was going to say it's mostly sw but actually no #austen fandom does a lot of it and tolkien fandom is like ... whew #but sw fandom does have its own particular flavor of condescension

[ETA 4/20/2024: I am about 90% sure this was about people correcting my fic/meta with factoids from SWEU byproducts no matter how many times I say that I don't take those into consideration, and often on the very posts and fics that specifically say that.]

me on Twitter under my real name: whining, academic rambling, inane D&D remarks, academic rambling, whining, pictures of my cat

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Tagged: #okay and occasionally korvira

I saw an interesting, but also somewhat disturbing, conversation about the history of the Sansa Stark hatedom that touched on something I've been thinking about for awhile.

The Sansa hatedom discussion was sparked by someone asking about the reasons for the dudebro Sansa hatedom of days of yore. Someone else brought up these same dudebros' idealization of Arya by contrast with Sansa and how they basically valued Arya in "not like the other girls" terms. Yet another person argued that this was #problematic because the criticism of NLOG is homophobic. Somebody was like ... don't you mean misogynistic? Neither of these characters are gay? The previous person explained that the criticism of NLOG ignores the social context that it arises out of and disproportionately targets GNC women who are often lesbians, hence the connection with homophobia.

I do get that a lot of the kneejerk condemnation of NLOG rhetoric arises out of the misogynistic and gender essentialist and generally fucked-up perception of GNC women as threatening to femininity in some way, that plenty of those GNC women are lesbians or otherwise WLW and thus it can factor into homophobia in practice, and that those condemnations of the NLOG rhetoric are trotted out to dismiss the most basic criticisms of gender role expectations for women (imagine a conversation about the connection between the make-up industry or body hair removal and the widespread social pressure put on women to conform to narrowly-defined and generally harmful and expensive beauty standards that did not promptly turn into defensive choice feminism screeds).

I even get that there are over-invested Sansa stans who prop her up at Arya's expense because they find Sansa's conformity to feminine gender performance appealing and more appropriate to their own expectations for women/girls, and that they have used criticisms of NLOG rhetoric to bash Arya (or basically any woman/girl who even mildly diverges from gender performance norms).

But in this case, the conversation was about the ways Sansa has been harshly criticized for her association with femininity/feminine performance, mostly by adult men hyper-scrutinizing the gender performance of a fictional eleven-year-old girl, and framed as inferior to Arya because those men (like many men!) hold anything and anyone associated with femininity in contempt. That is something that very definitely did happen, frequently. There is a reason that "like a girl" or "girly" is an insult and has considerable power in defining what masculinity looks like to so many men and boys (there are further complications w/ this that I don't have the time to get into, but it's certainly a very conspicuous aspect of the construction of normative masculinity). The idea that an entirely accurate description of something that actually happened is problematic, even unspeakable, because the criticism has been misused in other contexts sits really uncomfortably with me. It feels a bit like creeping up to alternative facts from the other side.

However. I'm also writing about hyper-scrutiny in my dissertation—generally speaking, the way in which women's behavior (especially wrt sexuality) is placed under such intense scrutiny that you get this obsessive nitpicking and over-scrutinizing of anything and everything a woman or female character does or feels. Literary critics absolutely fall prey to this and that's the context of the discussion in my dissertation—essentially, that each individual nitpick they're making could be correct as far as it goes, but the cascade of so many of them and the way some early modernist critics concentrate this scrutiny on female characters does seem pretty misogynistic after a while. And I've seen that kind of behavior in other contexts.

Like, when MTG released LOTR art in which Aragorn was depicted as Black, some people were explicitly racist about it, and some people explicitly welcomed the depiction. But the thing I noticed was the way that some people would make all these detail-focused criticisms of the art that didn't mention race at all, but seemed very disproportionately directed towards the art pieces that presented heroic characters as POC. And many of the people doing this were familiar as the same people who responded similarly to The Rings of Power, especially the characters played by POC. Some of these critics just kept escalating and eventually went full mask-off; there was one former follower (former because I blocked him) who at first seemed a normal enough nitpicky purist (something I get), then suspiciously so, and within a couple of days his blog was just overtly racist responses to any heroic Tolkien characters being depicted as POC. Some of these people never went that far, but would actively minimize the impact of racism and misogyny on the general ROP discourse (like, there were popular ROP discourse memes in which the more respectable criticisms were presented up front in large letters and the racism/misogyny in significantly smaller font on the edges of the image). Others didn't do that, either, but still hyper-focused on every "wrong" detail about characters played by POC like Disa, Arondir, and Míriel.

It is, let's say, unsurprising that the ROP characters who probably got the most positive fandom reception in the end despite the general histrionics around the show were Elrond, Durin, Halbrand, and (more controversially) Galadriel. The most popular ROP ship by a gigantic mile is a white het ship, and at least on AO3, Celeborn (who does not appear in the show and is only very briefly and belatedly mentioned at all) shows up in more ROP fics than any of the characters played by POC (Arondir and Isildur barely squeak onto AO3's top ten list of commonly tagged ROP characters, following after Galadriel, Halbrand/Sauron twice, Elrond, Adar, Elendil, Gil-galad, and Celeborn, with Míriel, Disa, and Bronwyn not even making the list).

So, like ... it's not news that Tolkien fandom is racist and misogynistic. But the broader point is that popular condemnation of something can reach such a volume and be so disproportionately targeted that even things that are individually true or at least defensible in isolation start looking really suspect. And often they are really suspect in ways that become pretty obvious (it's about ethics in gaming journalism!!!!). But I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile my extreme distaste for "you can't use criticism of NLOG to characterize dudebro fans actively using that exact framework in a grossly misogynistic way because of the homophobes" and my extreme distaste for Tolkien fandom's refusal to consider the context before they start going on screeds about Arondir or MTG Aragorn.

I know sometimes people feel self-conscious about going through and leaving kudos/bookmarks/comments/likes on a bunch of works by one author, but I got a bunch of stuff from one or two people across multiple fandoms, and … :)

Tagged: #it's fine if people only read my stuff for a given ship/character/fandom! #but there's something kind of uniquely flattering when they just keep going even when the fandoms change #now and then someone will tell me that they're not even in the fandom and don't know the canon and it's like :))))))