Hi friend! Foz here. Just a couple of points:
- Ā Iāve specified good fanfiction in literally the first tweet. While this is, obviously, a value judgement wherein YMMV, My Immortal is famous for being arguablyĀ the most terrible fanfic ever written, and is therefore demonstrably not what Iām talking about. Similarly, Iāve seen other responses to this post bring up 50 Shades, which, despite its popularity in mainstream circles, is pretty much universally regarded as being not just terrible fanfic, but an excruciatingly bad and dangerously inaccurate portrayal of BDSM that romanticises abuse. So no: these are not the droids youāre looking for.
- Hereās the thing, though: you already knew that. The decision to respond to this post with a flippant reference to a fic thatās notorious precisely because of its poor quality is exactly why I used up precious Twitter characters to specify good fanfic, even though I shouldnāt have had to. Every mode of artistic expression is composed of good, bad and mediocre works, but when it comes to genres that are traditionally viewed as less worthy or literary - like fanfiction, or romance - we have a reflexive tendency to conflate the bad with the whole, such that the good is implied to be either exceptional or nonexistant. I specified that Iām talking about good fanfiction, not because I think such fics are an exalted minority, but to pre-emptively combat the assertion that they are, and then youāve gone and made it anyway. So, thanks for that.
- But while weāre on the subject of quality, letās make a very important distinction. Though fanfic is a largely unmediated medium, itās not bad; itās amateur, in the very literal, dictionary-definition sense of engaging or engaged in without payment; non-professional. While thereās a stereotype that lots of ficwriters are teenage girls - which, why is that always wielded as an insult? oh right, misogyny, carry on - a lot of us are, in fact, grown-ass adults of varying genders, some of whom also happen to write professionally in other contexts; like me, for instance. Iāve read fanfics that are unquestionably as good as, if not better than, many professionally published works Iāve read, some Iāve simply enjoyed or felt meh about, and others where Iāve mounted up on my Nopetopus and ridden off into the sunset after the first paragraph. Itās a grab bag, is what Iām saying, but if you think thatās an inherently different spectrum of enjoyment over quality than applies to any other medium, then Iād politely invite you to reconsider the matter.Ā
- In conclusion: fanfic might not be your bag, but it has its own culture of editing, collaboration, publication, criticism and dissemination, its own conventions and subversions of same, its own extensive history and trope awareness, and, yes, its near-unique status as a medium invested in female sexual desire. That doesnāt mean there arenāt other things straight dudes can do to learn the mystical ways of What Women Want like, oh, say, talking to them, always bearing in mind that women are not a goddamn hivemind, but given that there are a frightening number of guys out there whose first or primary exposure to any type of porn is whatever degrading mainstream het they can scrouge up for free without virusing the hell out of their PCs, then yeah: Iām gonna go out on a fucking limb and suggest they maybe balance it out with some fanfic.
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