Something I find kind of troubling and hurtful about the AR/VC tags being flooded with fanfic jokes this week is that like… aside from the jokes just inherently being unfunny/unoriginal cheap shots when the woman’s body is still warm, I don’t think they’re actually harming HER as much as they’re teasing the fandom & fic writers who have been there the whole time.
As the old adage goes: Anne Rice cannot see your hilarious tumblr post, but the grieving fic nerds can.
The thing about fandom as a subculture is that it thrives on fan content. Like, when I was really active in VC fandom my passion was because of the fanworks and the friends I made. It’s never been strictly about Anne or about VC. In fact, I think a large majority of VC fandom practices Death of the Author with Anne to varying degrees, as needed for our mental peace, because she was a complicated and problematic person.
Like this implication that 1500 works could be posted in the past 4 days and that people took the trouble of backdating them? Excuse you?
(Comments can’t be backdated, btw, if you need the proof.)
Fanfiction is also cathartic for VC in particular, in my opinion. It’s given a lot of us a tool to enjoy this space and explore it in ways that divorce it from the issues we might have with Anne as a person, whether it’s the professional missteps she’s made in her career, the damaging actions towards fans, or even just the questionable creative decisions in some of the books.
As an example, let’s look at Sk8 fandom for a moment?
It debuted less than a year ago and already has 9k works on AO3. It has a thriving fandom. I’ve purchased two zines already, and there’s like 4.5 hours of canon.
Fandoms EXIST on fanworks. None of us are here RB’ing the same canon content over and over. The fire is kept alive by meta, by fic, by art, by sharing headcanons.
So it just feels really shitty that so many people want to make jokes about fanfic where the butt of the joke is the fic itself, and the fic writers.
“LMAO We CaN POs T FIc NoW!!” — You could have. This whole time. And you haven’t. And the jokes you’re trying to land on an imperfect woman who JUST died are actually landing at the feet of fic writers. And for all the white knighting of these jokes coming from ~ fic advocates ~ it just feels especially tasteless.
“Anne Rice changed the fanfic climate and did irreparable damage to her fandom” is a true statement, and worth discussing, but clogging AO3 with troll fics was supposed to accomplish what, exactly?
I realize that trying to appeal to human decency & empathetic behavior in this hell site is absolutely futile, and the people who need to hear this the most won’t care, but I hope that all of us who are hurting this week can find each other and know we’re not alone.
Either way, I promise it wouldn’t kill you to keep it out of the tags. If for no other reason than because it’s been said 100 times already and you’re not unique lol.
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
areudirty
izzy806
kaledo-art
