Plebian Taste

I occasionally talk about stuff I read. Side blog for more obscure fannish stuff that I would like to not be perceived.

[laniakeaxox]

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陳奕迅 - 富士山下

誰都只得那雙手 靠擁抱亦難為任你擁有 要擁有必先懂失去怎接受 曾沿著雪路浪遊 為何為好事淚流 誰能憑愛意要富士山私有

[bigsleeps]

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[lovestereo]

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[olderthannetfic]

How does fic do aftercare wrong, that bugs you this much?

--

A lot of fic has a one-size-fits-all approach to kinky stuff where all people need the same things always and where only bottoms need aftercare. In reality, it's going to depend a lot on what you were getting up to, and there are definitely characters and scenarios where I think it's more likely the top needs reassurance they aren't a bad person than that the bottom needs to be brought a glass of water.

The thing that grosses me out is when there's a palpable air of smugness about the fic--"Ah yes, I have written Healthy Kink"--meanwhile it's super obvious that the top is being treated as a kink dispenser without needs.

Times one billion for those fics where the bottom violated the tops boundaries a lot and got them to do things they're blatantly uncomfortable with. I love that shit, but not if the narrative clearly thinks the bottom is in the right because they have ~needs~.

It's one of those "Did you know you were writing abuse, author?" things and very I Know It When I See It.

[phantomato]

There’s likely a larger conversation to be had about the bottom being the POV character, the one with which we are supposed to empathize, leading to some of the more unquestioned portrayals of top-as-kink-dispenser… but, yes, it’s frustrating as all hell when a ship very strongly sorts into ‘real main character’ and ‘flat love interest,’ and the love interest’s emotional landscape isn’t developed to the point of considering these issues. All that much more when your fav is more commonly slotted into the role top/love interest/prop for the main character!

[olderthannetfic]

I have seen many a fandom wank that boiled down to “How dare you make my fave the emotional support prop one”.

TBH, I think the strong tendency towards bottom POV or fics that are more interested in the bottom is just a natural consequence of the distribution of fantasies and preferences. Granted, “bottom” can mean a few different things, but if you go on a kink site, you’ll routinely see people complaining that there aren’t enough tops in the world. There pretty clearly isn’t an even 50/50 spread in what humans like or most commonly think about, so there also isn’t a 50/50, spread in the art we produce. At least, that’s my take on it.

[walkingbetweenwords]

amusingly enough, irl also tops being treated as "sex dispensers" is a problem. as is the "aftercare is for bottoms only" attitude

[olderthannetfic]

Oh yeah. This ain’t coming from nowhere.

[shamelesslymkp]

I don’t know if you’re talking specifically about kink being written within a larger narrative/plot - I have seen this in those fics too, at times, but my reading has given me the impression that this is more often seen when the writer has narrowed in on a specific scene, and they end up writing a lot of shorter/more focused kink fics that might be a little off balance in terms of aftercare individually but end up en masse building up an unfortunate pattern that - if the fics are connected - signals a pretty unhealthy relationship.

I get the impression from allosexual fans’ complaints about fandom’s prescriptive use of safe sex and anal prep practices that this is a related phenomena, wherein fans are learning about and participating with kink entirely within fandom, and typically from/with others who also learned about it entirely through fandom, and then all of a sudden you have The Kink Club showing up nearly identically everywhere, the same safeword conversations, the same exact aftercare routines, etc.

(I am all over the place tonight, apologies for anything particularly confusing or like... tangential)

I also have this vibe that a LOT of kink fic that falls under this umbrella is like, an evolved form or near relative to the more traditional romance ravishment dubcon scenarios - hear me out! not just kink scenes that are OBVIOUSLY related to that, but just kink in general - there’s this fantasy that somehow someone who cares about you enough will miraculously be able to understand and meet your every need, and that ideal is compelling! especially when this ideal person also won’t be demanding anything in return! like. in reality? that would not work and would end terribly if it even kept going at all, but I can grok the appeal of the fantasy, at least, and also the appeal of feeling as though if you follow the right narrative rules then you’re ‘allowed’ to enjoy this unequal dynamic guilt-free?

I’m not sure what I was saying tbh but hopefully there’s something thoughtful buried in there - it’s always so interesting and just. educational? when fandomers with brickspace kink experience talk about kink specifically as it exists within fandom.

[olderthannetfic]

Yeah, exactly.

It’s a valid fantasy, and I totally get where it’s coming from. (And yes, I agree there’s a similarity between all the different flavors of fantasy that are about lying back and being catered to.) It’s just a fantasy that produces fic I often find yucky.

And yes, I think some of the “formal rules” that aren’t actually terribly workable or realistic do come from getting one’s info from the same pool of people as all the other writers. Sometimes, I see that people have done a bunch of research on SSC but maybe not noticed the squabbling about SSC vs. RACK vs. whatever (i.e. offline kink communities even within the English-speaking Western world have a few different takes on how to do things safely and appropriately.)

[bakedapplesauce-deactivated2021]

I am baffled and bamboozled and really fucking confused that once again, a lot of the top / bottom discourse for Joe and Nicky revolves around Joe topping and being dominant and pushing Nicky around (and how that might play into racist stereotypes, which is a whole different can of worms I’m not going to open, but I don’t disagree.)

all I’ll say, once again, is this: those terms are not… interchangeable anyway? nor do they… necessarily relate to each other? like, Joe topping doesn’t even have to mean he’s being… dominant or in charge or what the hell ever some people are fantasizing about. it can mean that, sure, in addition to him topping, but those terms do not mean the same thing?

top / bottom literally only refers to whether you enjoy having a dick up your ass or not. that’s it. literally, that’s it. there are no inherent corresponding personality traits. it has nothing to do with dom/sub dynamics or preferences.

why do people always get them confused, it baffles me to no end??

[olderthannetfic]

People have been observing for years that fandom likes to put the favorite character on the bottom, so a lot of top/bottom wank actually boils down to a covert attempt to say: “I think you wrote that fic like you liked A more than B, and B is my fave, so this is unacceptable.”

[liliaeth]

It’s about heteronormativity. Bottoming is seen as the ‘feminine’ role. And since for the longest time most fanfic was written by women, the character that the writer most identified with, was put in the feminine role, aka as the bottom.

[olderthannetfic]

This is a terrible take.

Most fanfic is still written by women, but this pattern is not in any way restricted to women’s writing:

Read nifty.org. Read literotica. Aside from a tiny handful of “the cheerleader turned me down so I did bad things to her” misogyny kink, amateur erotica is overwhelmingly full of bottom POV. Sometimes, it’s in a happy, fluffy, consensual way, sometimes the exact opposite, but humans seem to be drawn to the POV of the one who gets to lie back and let the action happen.

Even a lot of really misogynistic superheroine depowering erotica nominally aimed at straight men is very much from the heroine’s POV. She’s the one we’re focused on. She’s the one done to, not the one doing. There are certainly some stories about someone’s gary stu getting a harem, and Nifty has some gay erotica about ~teaching some dude a lesson~, but there’s just so much bottom POV. Or if not literal POV, then the sort of story where we spend the whole time focused on that character’s feelings and reactions and barely get any sense of the personality or wants of the other party.

It also seems like in real life there are more subs than doms, more masochists than sadists. It’s a not uncommon observation on kink forums.

“I am not a life support system for a whip,” goes the old saying… except in fiction, it’s not a problem: There are exactly as many tops or doms or sadists or vanilla supportive partners with no needs of their own as any reader could desire, delivering exactly the right things. Tirelessly. Forever.

For some women, sure, it might be a gender thing, but more than that, it’s a human thing: humans in general find fantasies where they get catered to to be relaxing and fun. Being the top/dom/etc. in a kink scenario is work. So is being the care-taking partner who arranges the perfect romantic date. The fantasy of being so desirable someone pursues you is more common than the fantasy of chasing somebody around. (Even the Hollywood movies that reward the hero with a hot girl for winning the plot are often more about him proving his worth to himself than to her. And a lot of those harem stories may have gary stu sticking it in, but he’s still the one being pursued and fought over.)

It’s really, really frustratingly obvious to those of us who don’t feel this way.

The bottom in slashfic is often the one readers identify most with, sure, but look at the other guy: sometimes, the other one is the hottie the audience wants to bang, as would make sense in this heteronormativity scenario, but I find that instead, he’s very often the emotional support boyfriend and prop. Sometimes, he’s little more than an ambulatory dildo.

The bottom isn’t just the self insert: he’s the desirable one and the one whose feelings are of more interest to the audience. He’s the fave.

“Do I want to fuck you or do I want to be you?” is a huge part of slash fandom and always has been.

Reducing it to heteronormativity is trite and simplistic.

[dumbbookreader]

[dgalerab]

current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.

[dgalerab]

someone brought a cake analysis robot to feed the cake into to determine the exact ingredients and supposedly it can spit out the exact same cake. and if you're like dude. what. then they're like well if it bothers you you should have made more cake. i'm hungry and i deserve cake. and you're like dude we're at a party.

[gaymattsharp]

captain underpants was kinda insane for revealing that one of the main characters is gay and marries a man as an adult and then not making a big deal out of it or really acknowledging it like at all and carrying on like normal. who was doing it like dav pilkey

[dumbbookreader]

1999 WRITE THE FUTURE, Ghostface Killah, Rich Brian, Smino, Surprise Chef - SPIKY BOiz

[sylviii]

was asked to make a transmasc version of the meme

[imoanurparentsnames]

transfem version for those who can’t/don’t want to access twt

[scramratz]

Oh hey that’s me

[olderthannetfic]

Reading fic in swedish feels so weird. I kinda wish it didn't. But media-specific terms and other jargon is also often hard to translate and so English is simply easier. Especially since most of us swedes are fluent in english. Im guessing Chinese and Spanish and maybe German have a higher concentration of own-language fics bc of things being dubbed and the general population being a lot more comfortable with the media in their own language.

--

Having poked around while doing research, Chinese and Russian seem like some of the more robust non-English fandom communities that have tons of visible fic online. German and Spanish are okay, but from what people have told me, it sounds like a lot of older fans learn English and switch.

[holyscream]

I know lots of people write fanfic in German, but I haven’t read any in years. “A lot of older fans learn English and switch” sounds about right; no idea if it’s a majority though. To be honest, I don’t even know where most German fic writers post these days. Last time I checked the big hub was still fanfiktion.de (and maybe Animexx lol).

I think another anon brought up a good point about the difficulty of trying to translate the idiolects of characters into another language. Those 4Kids dubs really gave professional localizers an undeserved bad reputation.

And—in my honest opinion—when it comes to sexual content specifically: German just isn’t a very sexy language. Our vocabulary gives us four tonal choices if you don’t want to remain vague: Clinical, childish, comical, or crass.

There’s even a German Kabarett song about this. It’s about a guy trying to dirty talk to his girlfriend but being unable to find tonally appropriate words for what he wants to do. He ends up constructing a clunky metaphor instead and his girlfriend tells him to just show her instead of talking.

TL;DR: Basically this tweet, but for German:

[olderthannetfic]

Haha. Yeah, I hear this from a lot of people. I don’t know that it’s so different from English. One thing that makes writing porn about women so annoying to me is that I loathe the word ‘pussy’. Talk about infantile. ‘Cunt’ is pretty crass in American English, but I prefer it. And if you don’t go for one of those, it’s all dewy folds and moist caverns and other libido-killers like that. Our penis words are a lot better.

[kaanbaltlak]

I thought this about Spanish, but I think there's at minimum a way to make it work.

I mean, in Spanish (including dialect variants) we have a shit ton of words for "penis" —and the majority of 'em made me fuckin' laugh because we use 'em in jokes. "Pilín", "verga", "pito", etc. This also applies to "vagina" and "ass". For example, usually (even in published books) authors write "nalgas" and I... just can't read that without giggling, usually because I feel the word simply don't work with the tone that the author established. It's a funny word for me —but if the general tone is, idk, silly or comical I'll feel that "nalgas" belong there and I won't giggle.

Another word that I think makes sense in English but not in Spanish is "cum"/"cumming". In Spanish we don't have something that doesn't sound better than in English (yeah I think that 'cumming' is a silly word, lol). "Eyacular" it's too formal and boring; "venirse" and all the conjugations are funny (specially if you consume constantly the Faraon meme) —so authors vote to not use it or rephrase the scene to make it more sexy. Like, I seriously prefer saying "alcanzó su clímax" than "eyaculó", even if I hate euphemisms.

But also, things that made me see what works (in general but also for me while writing) is, well, reading how other people manage to make "unsexy languages" sexy. Like Chinese!! I read a good post and all their words for "penis" for example are euphemisms but they make sense (also like, cultural shit). Of course, not everyone have to do this, this shit ain't an obligation and even when you like, read something more than fanfic in your native language still things doesn't make sense and feel still cringe (but maybe less).

Also, translations. God, Marques de Sade in Spanish (plus if it's de Spain version) make me laugh so fucking hard. I can't take that shit, I simply can't. (Plus I consider French to be less sexy than Spanish, that ain't the language of love for my ears.)

[calabronzo]

I hear the same complaint from Italian fans who prefer reading and writing NSFW fics in English because 1) it feels less awkward, and 2) in English, they say, there are more vocabs to use.

But as someone who writes lots of NSFW fics in Italian, I feel like Italian has more than enough words to write sex scenes with—they're simply different words than the ones I'd use in English? Which is true for writing in general. I don't write the same way when I'm writing in Italian, English, or German. This is the reason why translation is such a difficult and important job in the first place.

Like, some of the biggest complaints in Italian spaces come down to specific kinks, like Daddy kink. Everyone says that you can't write Daddy kink in Italian because it simply Does Not Work. And they're right! It does not work if you try to simply translate word for word from English, because Italian has different writing conventions. We also don't have the same kink culture that anglophones can draw on, so we have to work around things and adapt them to make them work.

It's not as easy. We can still make them work, though. We just have to stop thinking that English is the only language that makes sense for these types of stories. Because it isn't! Sure, there are some things that might work better in English—but at the same time there are some things that might work better in Italian, or in German, or in Korean, or in whatever other language. So what do we do? We try to make things work with what we have. Sometimes that takes time, and I get it. It's easier to write in English, also because of the higher amount of potential feedback you might receive.

If you have to completely reshape the way you're used to writing and reading for a fic that will reach 8 people max, it's just more convenient and satisfying to simply switch to English and get, like, an infinite number of readers. I get it. But it gets tiring when “I'm not used to/I don't know how to write this in my native language” morphs into “so all fics in my native language are badly written,” which is sadly something I see a lot.

I lost count of how many people have told me: “I don't read Italian smut because it's all badly written.” As if all English smut is lyrical poetry level? I read so many English fics to know this isn't true, but for some reason a bad English fic does not define the whole English fic sphere, while a bad Italian fic does define the whole Italian fic sphere. (This probably has lots to do with the amount of fics you can find in any given fandom in Italian vs. in English. But at some point the argument stops being fandom-specific and gets universalized as “All Italian fics are inherently bad”.)

To sum up. Sometimes I wonder if it's true that our non-English languages are not fit for sexy stories (or any kind of stories), or if we're simply too used to English being the language of fandom and the specific storytelling that comes from anglophone writing and cultural conventions. And if it's the latter, which I kinda think it is, I have lots of issues with it.

[olderthannetfic]

#sorry for jumping in lmao#I just. have this discussion so often in italian spaces and I'm sad that all languages different from English get this weird treatment#and also maybe I'm tired of how we always put english culture and english fans (mostly from the states) at the center of every discussions#languages are just so beautiful man. I love how different languages shape different writing styles and the specific way we tell stories#anyway. sorry again for jumping in

Don’t be sorry! It annoys me too!

Honestly, a lot of things boil down to that old xkcd cartoon:

--

I think it can sometimes be easier to go to a language where you don’t know the associations a word has... but that doesn’t mean the associations disappear. Everything people have been saying in favor of English, like words being inherently humorous and unsuitable for horny writing, is something I’ve thought about English at some point.

These things go through artistic phases too: US romance novels of the 80s aren’t going to say “come” and certainly not “cum”. To the readership of that form of erotic art at that time, the prose sounded normal.

There’s a certain AO3 house style, but it’s not a property of English: It’s a property of fans spending a lot of time making particular kinds of art together and evolving a convention for what’s hot and what’s expected.

(In fact, if you go read fics from the 90s, they’ll often sound a bit different from current AO3 house style. These things evolve even within fandom.)

There are perfectly understandable reasons why people don’t try to make fetch happen in other languages the same as they often don’t in tiny fandoms. Fic is supposed to be fun, and if you feel like you have to do 100% of the heavy lifting in your fandom community, that’s rarely fun.

But I hate how we pretend that the inherent properties of English have anything to do with it. They don’t. English is just another Germanic language and we giggle just as much like we’re 12 while trying to find a sexy word for the asshole.

If English is free from embarrassing associations, it’s probably because people haven’t been catcalled in English, navigated dating sites in English, gone to the gynecologist in English, or cringed while reading terrible sex scenes in litfic novels by men in English.

If you join a robust erotica tradition in any language, there will be conventions to draw on. If you don’t, you have to make more up from scratch.

The only thing that makes English special is the size of fandom in it.

[theothersarshi]

I’m reading a book from the early 19th c. and, while it has no erotica, it mentions a word for bawdy songs that I didn’t know existed in Romanian! The word is gone by now; our culture has been purged of vulgarity as much as it could be, and the bawdy songs are so long gone that I hadn’t even heard of that name („lela”, fellow Romanians). Luckily, a footnote told me what it was about. (there are small exceptions to this purge; not everything vanished. We still have a story of Jesus blessing a field of corn to turn it into a field of cocks that activate when whistled at, fucking the speaker relentlessly; hilarity ensues). 

So we have to start anew. Good connotations are born with use, with reclaiming vulgarity and making it ours. 

There’s very little (in)decent erotica to be found, but by God*, I’ll try my best to write some eventually. Someone has to do it. 

(* I am not a Christian, but when I say “by God”, I mean “by Our Lord and Savior, Jesus of the Field of Cocks”)

[olderthannetfic]

A short while ago you mentioned fic on AO3 that was written in the “AO3 style”, or something to that effect. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that means/is?

--

Oh god. This topic comes around every 6 months or so. Others should feel free to help me out here, but basically...

A lot of fanfic sounds like the other fanfic and other stuff that the same communities consume. In a given era and sector of fandom, that leads to a samey style. It often has a lot of overlap with a specific sector and era of genre fiction with a heavy dose of watches-tv-does-not-read-books elements on top.

AO3 House Style is relatively similar to the height of LJ Western slash fandom. Other fanfic styles are often similar but start showing other influences the more distant you get.

There are some major strains, not always in the same works:

Transparent genre fiction prose that doesn't call too much attention to itself. It's there to convey plot, not make you notice the language qua language. You'll see something similar in, say, a Mercedes Lackey novel (along with the terrible editing and protagonist centered morality that are also common in fic, haha).

YA boom era YA vibes.

Kind of forced "snark" and samevoice from many characters in a way that tells you the author spent a little too much time watching Buffy.

World building and complex thriller/mystery/etc. plots that actually work typically take a back seat to pining, angst with a happy ending, and other more ship-focused, character interaction-focused, and emotions-focused things. The general idea of a mystery, vampire AU, etc. is often present, but it's more of a backdrop. (Depends on the part of fandom though!)

Huge focus on the internal psychological and emotional state of characters.

Lots of hurt/comfort, both physical and emotional.

Lots of serialized work that shows the traces of being written that way (dangling plot threads, inflated word count, returning to similar plot points in a way that wouldn't happen if the thing were completely written, revised, and then only posted serially).

Certain cliched phrases like "He smelled of __ and __ and something uniquely him", carding fingers through hair (thanks, commenters for researching this one a year or two ago and proving it's way more common in fic!), "Oh. Oh.", etc.

If the fic is more self-consciously literary, it's full of sentences that trail off to the point where you're almost not sure what actually happened.

Often lots of very short paragraphs and lots of scenes that are almost all dialogue

Frequently third person limited present tense. Some third person limited past tense. Less of other stuff unless you're looking at a fandom where canon is first person or you're looking at readerfic (which is on AO3 but is not really "AO3 House Style").

Honestly, some people would just say "sounds like fanfic", but if you go read primarily on SpaceBattles or something, you're going to find a lot of stories that don't sound quite the same as your prototypical AO3 fic.

[berlynn-wohl]

someone I follow on the bird app just announced they're starting a very exclusive private fic server because they and a bunch of other people want to talk about how much they love the fics they're reading, and as an author can I just say that a really great place to talk about a fic you love is in the comments for that fic

I understand that people are trying to create safe spaces, but as the number of comments that I get on my fics dwindles with each passing year, knowing these spaces exist where my fics are being discussed, places that I am excluded from, makes me want to write fic LESS

I mean I guess who cares, right, because if I stop writing, there's 10,000 other people that will continue...but if you participate in a fic "book club" server and you say nice things there about a fic you loved, maybe copy and paste that into a comment on AO3?

the only thing fanfic writers are asking for in return for hours of hard work is attention. please don't rob us of the one thing that we hope for when we hit "post"

[berlynn-wohl]

this is directly related to this post I made about how fanfic authors now are treated like content mills, and not like valued members of a creative community who thrive on interaction. for the past decade, we've watched the fandom ecosystem disrupted over and over, as NSFW fan artists seek safety by putting their work behind paywalls, and self-conscious fic readers squirrel away their feelings in invite-only communities

an easy way to do your part to fight against the evils perpetrated by social media is to leave a comment on a fanfic you love

[berlynn-wohl]

but don't take my word for it -- here are some responses that my fellow authors have left on this post:

[mrlarkstin]

The fact I had a fic that was fairly beloved and NO ONE commented on it because it was all being done in a fucking book club server made me want to scream.

I haven't updated that fic in two years now.

[maxima-priscus]

I cannot express enough how imperative it is to show the writer how much you love their work. The comments don't have to be novels themselves - even just an "I loved this so much!" Or keyboard smashing works wonders to keep the writer going. Please, we need to bring back supporting writers and artists now more than ever!!!

[lustfulpasiphae]

I'm not really trying to fight anyone about this clear yearning for validation but "comments" are a relatively new development in fandom community. In the days of webrings and fic archives (as repositories only—ao3 and ff.net etc have a social aspect that comes from forums and early social media) you might have access to a contact form or maybe an email for the author, but mostly not. Fic was shared in email groups, posted on personal websites, sometimes in themed archives, and curated rec lists were common. As an author you were part of the community so you saw your work being shared—but sometimes you had to take it on faith.

I'm not sure where this yearning and expectation for direct adoration and positive feedback comes from. This isn't a job. You've got to come to terms with creating art for yourself.

Like I don't know how to tell you this but you have no idea how wild it is to hear about people reading your fan works second-hand or in passing. The chances of that suggest an impact beyond your imagining. Isn't that miraculous to you? Someone once told me a short original work I wrote on Tumblr was circulating in screenshots on Instagram and I was just bowled over with awe. Imagine!

[berlynn-wohl]

If an absence of comments has been your experience until recently, I'm sorry to hear that, but I have been posting fanfic since 2002, and back then it was on LiveJournal and ff.net (until all my fics got booted when they banned NC-17 and RPF, lol), and comments were a huge part of ff.net, and comments that might well kick off whole discussions with the author were a huge part of LJ, where plenty of us were still posting until the 2010s.

I also had a personal website where I archived my fic (and sometimes people would send me lovely emails...and sometimes the emails were decidedly not lovely), but I also posted everything to the existing communities for the direct feedback. Especially for small fandoms and rarepairs, like I was writing in the early 2000s, the sense of community was really strong, because the fanfiction and the discussion could all happen in one place, not scattered across an archive and several different social media platforms and private groups like it is now. (Yes, there were private groups back then, but the writers usually got invited to them, unless the group was made specifically to be nasty about fic. You wanted the writers there so they could join in the discussions!)

I used to write this pairing that only 10 people wrote and maybe 100 people read -- and we were all on one LJ community. I felt like every single one of those people were my friends, and every one of us writers commented on everyone else's fics, so we all wrote with confidence, knowing that we weren't just writing into the void, we were going to hear what everyone else thought of our prose and plotting and characterization (for better or worse--concrit was more acceptable in those days!).

I wasn't around for the heyday of Usenet fandom, but those groups were also places where people posted their work and then watched as discussion was added to the thread. That means writing fic and expecting to have people comment has been going on at least... (checks origin year of alt.startrek.creative) 35 years.

So like I don't know how to tell you this, but fanfic authors directly receiving the validation that we so yearn for is not a "relatively new development"...unless your time scale is geologic.

[atlinmerrick]

To those who say comments are a new thing and the equivalent of "in my day we went uphill both ways so stop complaining about not getting comments!"

No.

It's called community. And because we maybe lacked cohesion before, we do not lack it now. We have the chance to let people know they touched our heart and if we choose not to do so on a medium designed to share that information, then we've no right to be piqued when creators wander off, sure no one gives one hot damn about what they create. Staying silent shows them no one cares.

Do not demand they care in a void. Why should they?

[fridayincarnate]

"You've got to come to terms with creating art for yourself."

Creating art and sharing art are two separate activities. It's so funny to me when people have this knee-jerk "you're not entitled to comments!!" reaction and don't see the corollary that you're not entitled to fic.

This attitude that asking for engagement is some "yearning and expectation for direct adoration" is extremely cynical. If you can't tell the difference between "please share in a dialogue with me about the thing we both enjoy so our community doesn't become a ghost town" and "shower me with adoration" then I feel really sorry for you.

I'm sorry that silence was that person's experience, but the ff.net and LiveJournal communities I was involved with in the 00s were a veritable comment-palooza! To say that comments are a "recent" development is just plain wrong, unless you count 2000 as recent.

Younger writers, do not let one person's bad experience gaslight you into thinking that it's some newfangled thing to want feedback or validation. It's not. You deserve validation. You put TONS of work into creating something special and shared it with the entire world for free!

And yeah, you should learn to create art for yourself. Not because wanting feedback is entitled (it's not!), but because it's freeing.

To those feeling "if I stopped 10000 people would take my place," I get it, boy do I get it. It gets lonely. But:

So what? Who cares what other people are doing? I want to know what you have to say.

No one can take your place.

It sounds cheesy, but it's true. No one can write your story the way that you would write it. If you are willing to share it with us, that is our privilege.

Which is why writing for yourself is not mutually exclusive with desiring feedback! Feedback is how you get better, what the fuck! Absolutely buck wild to shame writers for desiring validation when writers give readers validation, comfort, catharsis, entertainment, and so much more through their stories.

And if you're going to posit that just because readers aren't commenting doesn't mean they're not reading, it follows that just because writers aren't posting doesn't mean they're not writing.

Between the dearth of interaction (comments, etc) and nonsense shit like AI scraping and people trying to monetize others' fics on Kindle or fucking whatever, I see more and more authors taking their work behind walls or stopping sharing altogether. It's simple cause and effect:

If readers take their community behind walls in these book clubs and don't even invite the authors to those communities, then authors will take their communities behind walls, too, and only share with friends who they know appreciate their work (and aren't going to feed it to ChatGPT).

It won't even be out of malice. It will be because we literally don't know you exist if you don't interact, so how can we invite you?

I hate to see fandom fracture this way. It all just makes me very sad.

[notwhatiam]

They’re dating

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

narratively I am a fan of romances that don’t ever actually become romances

I don’t mean in an aromantic life partner way, I mean romantic tension that is never resolved or acted upon for whatever reason but by the end it’s clear that both characters experienced the love of their lives without ever acknowledging it as such. but they know. they know.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

this is the post that I’ve had like five people accuse me of romanticizing fucked up and traumatizing relationships in fiction about btw

[electracomplexshiv]

guy who’s terrible at sucking dick but he had a bad childhood so you have to grade on a curve because otherwise you’d make him sad and he’s already had a hard enough life