When you entered a new fandom to have some fun and it suddenly becomes a nightmare
Hello there.
You don’t know me personally, but I believe you’ve heard about what’s been happening lately involving a story of mine on BG3 fandom. I came here to talk about a few things, and hopefully this is the last time I have to address this situation, because my mental and physical health cannot take the damage anymore.
I want to start by clarifying a few untruths that were told about me, so please bear with me because this will be long.
First, I never owned a Reddit account before a reader talked to me about a post that had the name of my fanfic on it. The alleged post, made with the purpose of recommending my story and another one, was not made by me, and I am sorry that people think the only way a new author gets recommended in any fandom is if they do it themselves.
The author of the post was born in my country, though, and I believe that is the reason why this rumor has spread. But I can tell you this: if, by any chance, you want to make a post recommending your own work, do not be ashamed of it. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, nothing at all.
Second, I did not manipulate the situation in private so people could see me as innocent and the other side as the villain. Before things started to escalate, I never even talked in private with any of my readers; the only interaction I had with them was in the comments. I was, in fact, invited multiple times to join Discord groups, but didn’t accept due to the fact that I am very shy, very new to the fandom, and also hadn’t read the fanfics for which the group was dedicated. I only reached out two days ago, when I saw how things got totally out of control, and for that I had to create a Reddit and Discord account because I didn’t have any.
Third, I did not delete my AO3 account because I was guilty. That day, I woke up at 2 a.m. to rude comments on my fanfic accusing me of copying another author, and I immediately tried reaching out to them to talk about it and explain my point of view, because I believe the mature thing in any situation is to speak directly to the person who has a problem with you. Unfortunately, I realized that the person was not willing to sit down with me and talk about it or even solve it between us; rather, they preferred to make a whole public spectacle out of it.
I’ve been dealing with a very bad case of anxiety and profound depression because of many things happening in my life. Beyond that, I am a neurodivergent woman trying to manage sudden changes in my routine, isolation, and a lot of other challenges. I didn’t need this situation to make everything even worse. So, I put my mental health first and deleted everything so the matter would be over and I could go on with my life.
Fourth, I was told that they said I use AI because I write too fast, and let me be clear about something: my husband and I are expatriates in another country, and I’ve become a stay-at-home wife ever since. I don’t have children, so I wake up at 4 a.m. every day so I can write and close my computer only at 6 p.m. Each chapter has only 20 pages with the most cliché content ever written, not a complex, Kafkaesque tale, so you do the math.
If I get too excited about what is happening in my story, I can easily update it once a week, sometimes even two. And believe me, I was having a lot of fun writing Ascendant Astarion. So much fun that I simply had a lot of chapters prepared because I couldn’t stop writing about it (before I deleted the whole thing, I already had 3 whole chapters ready to post). I coped with my real-life problems by writing this fic and I got totally obsessed with it.
Finally, I never knew this author before the moment I woke up to those messages. No, I had never heard of them. When I say I am very new to the fandom, I mean months new. I had five months of reading fanfics and almost three of writing my own after that. The stories I had read were Kindred, Hellish Rebuke, Unravel, Dancing With My Demons, The Broken Chosen, and, most recently, Curriculum of Kink. I have no problem saying how much those stories inspired me, they are all amazing, and you can probably see traces of inspiration here and there when you look at my text. I am sure they inspired a lot of other people in their writing too.
Because that’s the thing about art in general, right? No one is the first to invent anything from scratch, not even the father of fantasy himself, Tolkien, invented Middle-earth and its races without being inspired by preexisting mythology. I think it’s important that we, as writers and artists, learn this as soon as possible and stop harassing each other with these crazy arguments.
When you study art, you learn tons and tons of examples of artists having the same source of inspiration and thus having similar creations, and yet each having their own way of doing and developing things. Take Perugino and Raphael, for instance: they both painted the exact same scene of The Marriage of the Virgin, but each left their own unique traces and styles, and that is what made them so special.
When we look at huge sagas like The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and Star Wars, we can see many similar themes, characters, and behaviors — all intrinsic to the Hero’s Journey, by the way — and what makes each one unique is the way they decided to tell the story itself, the whole context of it, not isolated things (because, when we isolate every single detail, they are pratically the same thing).
Instead of pointing fingers and trying to claim that we were the first to ever write a scene, or that a simple phrase or dialogue is our exclusive creation and that no one else could have possibly thought of something like that on their own, we should start looking at our own stories and ask: Where did my inspirations come from? Why did I make the character say this and do that? How many people I’ve never even heard of could read my work and say, “Well, I did this back in 2015, so you obviously copied from me”? And how many video game creators can look at the BG3 script itself and say: “Wait, I used that exact dialogue and situation in my work before”?
Yeah, we’re not as exclusive as we think. Our minds do not work apart from society; we cannot close ourselves from receiving information from outside or avoid being influenced every second of our lives. This is close to Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious: a shared reservoir of images, ideas, and experiences that connects us all, influencing creativity beyond individual borders.
So, making a 53-page PDF to “prove” that I actually copied not just one (as I was first accused of) but suddenly all of those stories because of basic words and phrases is insane to me. To see my paragraphs all chopped up, taken totally out of context, without ever showing the reader why I used those phrases and in what situation, and putting them side by side with their own writing just to fit the narrative really shocked me.
And the worst thing about this whole situation is that a simple and respectful conversation would have solved all of this in a minute.
No, I did not copy anything. No, I did not enter this fandom with the purpose of being famous, well-known, loved or steal readers from someone. I was actually shocked when I received my first comment because I never thought anyone would give a chance to a new author like myself.
But if what I wrote made them feel so disrespected to the point of not only publicly shaming me but also making fun of me and my writing in Discord groups, I would have found a way to make us both feel comfortable, you know? Damn, I would even have changed a little dialogue here and there so they wouldn’t stress about it anymore (even though none of the dialogues were exclusive and you can find them in basically every single dom Astarion fanfic out there).
So, this is my answer to this entire situation.
I will not stay here arguing, fighting, and engaging in toxicity because I do not approve of Mean Girls behavior and we are not in high school anymore. This is a fanfic space for fans to love their favorite characters, not a million-dollar contest in which the winner will be on the New York Times Best Seller list. We gain nothing from it other than friendly interactions, and we all need to have a life outside the internet.
My fanfic was very small, very cliché, very stupid, and very, very basic. And, unfortunately, I didn’t know that in this fandom I needed to ask permission to say that my character felt cold when she was dying in a vampire’s arms after being drained, or that the male character had a big **** and the virgin wondered if it was going to fit, or that I couldn’t describe Astarion ascending and asking for the protagonist help, or.... insert any other example here.
This is the first and last time I will ever talk about it. I am very, very tired. I am not even sleeping or eating properly anymore because every day I have to wake up and read things about myself online. So, please, just stop.
Anyway, thank you so much for reading this.
romaincrisis
stormborns
origamiaround
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
dededos
tangentwithtanner
yousharknotpass
