You look sad... when you think he can’t see you. Are you okay? And don’t just say you are, because I know what that means, looking sad when you think no-one can see you.
I got an email from a reader earlier. The sender was a lovely young woman who had just re-read my first published fic and wanted to tell me how much she enjoyed it—how it made her feel, how it made her smile, how it made her cry, how it made her excited to get home each night and curl up in bed with it, how it helped ease the pain of a difficult patch in her life, and how much she misses it now that it’s over. It was a beautiful letter, and my reaction to it must have been visible enough to make my saner half take notice from across the room. He shot me a questioning look, and I turned the laptop around and gestured to the screen.
I followed his eyes as they scanned each line, saw his lips tip up in a smile that grew broader as he read, then braced myself for the good natured snark I’ve come to expect when my little literary hobby comes up in conversation.
“Wow.” He said. “That was kind of amazing. How does it feel to be someone’s favorite author?”
“Don’t be a dick,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder.
“I’m serious,” he replied, gesturing to the screen. "That’s what she said—right there: You’re my favorite author.”
“I think she means favorite fic author. Not real author.”
“Is there a difference?” He asked.
“Yes,” I said, rolling my eyes. ”Of course there is.”
“Why?”
“Because, as someone in this room who isn’t ME is fond of pointing out, self published gay mystery romance novels aren’t exactly eligible for the pulitzer.” I said, turning the computer back around.
“So what?” he shrugged, “Something you wrote inspired a stranger to sit down write what it meant to them and send it to you. A lot of total strangers, as a matter of fact. You write, people read it and react. That makes you an author.”
“Huh.” I said, very eloquently, then got up and went into the kitchen to start dinner.
Hours later, sitting down to reply to the letter in question I find myself writing this post instead. Because here’s the thing: That wonderfully crazy man who lives in my house is right. (But please don’t tell him I said that)
From the moment I realized that letters made up words and words made up sentences and sentences made up worlds that were mine to explore any time I wanted to I’ve been a reader. I have fallen in love with perfect phrases and epic stories and countless characters pressed between the pages of the thousands of books I’ve read in my life so far—and sitting down to string together those same 26 letters into tens of thousands of words of stories I felt needed telling? That makes me an author.
I have adored the work of countless authors in numerous genres, and the world of fan fic is no exception. I have admired and cherished and savored the words of talented writers whose work is no less legitimate for the fact that their names include random keyboard characters and their words don’t live on bound paper on a shelf.
It’s not JUST fan fic. It’s literature. It’s published. It’s read. It’s loved.
It matters.
Thanks to all of my favorite authors for every word on every page on every screen that I’ve ever loved.
“Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than any other literary corporation in this world, no species of composition has been so much decried. … There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and under-valuing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.“
–Jane Austen, defending that most reviled of genres: the novel.
As Joanna Russ says in How to Suppress Women’s Writing, “Jane Austen … worked (as some critics tend to forget) in a genre that had been dominated by women for a century and one that was looked down upon as trash, a position that may have given her considerable artistic freedom.”
This is us, now. This is fanfic.
Russ also writes that “women always write in the vernacular. Not strictly true, and yet it explains a lot. It certainly explains letters and diaries. … It explains why so many wrote ghost stories in the nineteenth century and still write them.”
As I’ve said before, what is more vernacular in the 21st century than ephemeral, fannish internet porn? This is us. We are part of the long tradition of women writing and being told their writing is not real and does not matter, that the things we love and value are worthless and foolish, for so long that we even begin to believe it.
Our work is real work. Our writing is real writing. Our stories matter. Our community matters. We are here, together, doing this thing. This is real life. This counts. If you write something on the internet, you write it in real life.
Fanfic matters. Fanfic is literature. Fanfic is literature that breaks the bounds printing technology and capitalism once imposed on the wide distribution of the written word. Copyright law, royalties, the logistics of producing and selling paperback books, none of those can touch the heart of what a story is. None of those make your story any less a real story that can really touch another person.
If anyone tries to tell you different, you can tell them Jane Austen begs to differ.
I’ve had someone tell me I literally saved her life, by giving her something to look forward to, to keep reading. I’ve read stories that’ve made me get teary and smile and stay up until 3am.
Fanfic works on an emotional, connective, affective, aesthetics-of-pleasure level. This is a different function from most ‘mainstream’ literature, as the professors over at fangasmspn have pointed out in their academic book on fandom. It serves a different purpose–one that’s closer to romance novels or other ‘pulp fictions’. This is not to denigrate either function–we need to know how to read Shakespeare or Chaucer, how to think objectively and analytically about lives lived in other places and times, how to read factual scientific pieces for data, how to engage with the literature of ideas–by which I mean idea-driven rather than character-driven (and most literature blends the two; it’s not a hard-and-fast boundary).
Fanfic serves a different and equally valid purpose: community, social engagement, empathy, emotional catharsis, subversion of traditional conceptions re desire and sexuality, exercise of pleasure and reclaiming of the importance of pleasure, aesthetic appreciation, creativity plus appreciation for others’ creativity, and as Larsen and Zubernis point out in Fandom at the Crossroads, a form of healing that’s potentially both individual and collective, involving a space for exploration of identity and identification.
#i’m thinking of bourdieu’s ideas on cultural capital #highbrow versus lowbrow #the first being the *legitimate culture* #it’s kind of where it always comes back #the idea that there’s a legitimate culture #a superior one #linked to class ofc #it’s so useful to reframe the discussion #it erases the gender politics part of the equation #and instead of thinking in terms of different functions #you think in terms of different audiences and of *quality* (via @and-then-bam-cassiopeia)
Thank you Cass for bringing Bourdieu in your tags! It’s such a crucial part of the discussion about fanfiction, and why it is always judged as the opposite of “true” (read “noble”) literature. Yes, there is a gender aspect to it, but we should never forget that when we talk about “culture”, we necessarily talk about class.
as someone who spent a lot of time this week arguing for the basic legitimacy as fan fiction as a fucking form (and i’m not even a big fic reader), this resonates. this is so good.
It’s so strange when this shows up on my dash from time to time…like a weird little gift from the past. But for the record, I still believe every word.
When you freely pump out multiple 100K+ word fics, it’ll never be ‘just fanfiction’. When you sit there researching the type of insults used in 1980s Japan for a fic, it’ll never be ‘just fanfiction’. When you memorized the parliament and government history about a small island nation off the coast of the African Continent, all so it can be briefly mentioned in your fic for like 5 paragraphs, it’ll never be ‘just fanfiction’. When you are crying because you don’t want to disappoint your readers, especially those who bother to let you know their thoughts, it’ll never be ‘just fanfiction’.
‘Just fanfiction’ is a fucking insult if I ever saw one.
Also, I agree with all of this. When you drag yourself from your sick bed to slam out a few hundred more words of heartbreak before dosing yourself with cold medicine, it’s not ‘just’ anything. When you carefully collect trivia like “what candy was available for what costs in 1935?” and “How did you say ‘gay’ in 1870?” and “What sorts of PTSD treatments were available in Norse villages?” and “What city in 1997 had a big enough crisis to merit a special forces team?” to write stories with, it’s not ‘just’ anything.
When you know for a fact your readers have used your fics to survive the worst of all possible things, that they have stayed alive through trial and pain because they needed to know what happened next, when they’ve fucking told you that you gave them hope and comfort in their darkest hours…
It’s a lot of things, but “just fanfiction” isn’t one of them.
I talked about this a lot before, but I started to really appreciate him as my disability representation. It gets me so emotional, especially the Wakanda scenes, when he’s at peace & without prosthetic arm. I truly hope he’ll get some happy story-lines in the future.
You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?
Hell, no. That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. I’m following him.
You know what makes me the happiest?!?!?
That he’s got everything now: an amazing and supporting wife (who’s got her own career), three wonderful and no doubt adorable kids, one hell of a body of work under his belt, many of them passion projects, and now that damn BAFTA we always wanted him to have!!!!
He deserves it all but I’m soooo happy that Sophie was there, by his side to celebrate the biggest win in his career!!!
Cause that’s what this is: the biggest win!!!
Getting this for any of the other nom’d things in the past would’ve been amazing, yes, don’t get me wrong.
But FINALLY getting it for the one role he’d been dreaming and talking about for YEARS, makes this the sweetest and bestest win EVER!!!!
So yeah, FUCKING HUGE CONGRATULATIONS, B, you finally fucking did it! You’re taking home the Bafta for Best British Actor for the best and most outstanding work (as of yet) in your career!!!!
I’m sure I can speak for many of us when I say, we’re all sooo fucking proud of you!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now go and party - you’ve earned it!!!!
Although Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers have been fixtures of each other’s character arcs, their relationship went ignored in Avengers: Endgame, undermini...
Although Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers have been fixtures of each other’s character arcs, their relationship went ignored in Avengers: Endgame, undermining not only a crucial storyline, but Captain America’s entire characterization. Major spoilers lie ahead.
Avengers: Endgame was a movie with a runtime so long, fans called for an intermission. Avengers: Endgame was a movie that contained seemingly thousands of relationships. It carefully made space for Carol to see Nick Fury snapped on a screen, gave us Rocket fighting openly for his family back, and actually let Clint become a murderer to avenge the pain of losing his wife and kids. This movie had time for Shuri and T’Challa to find peace in Wakanda, for Scott to grasp Hope in battle, for Peter to finally get his hug from Mr. Stark, for Wanda to mourn Vision, and for Sam to crackle to life in Steve’s ear. It even had time for Star-Lord to reunite with a Gamora that didn’t know him at all.
And yet nowhere, after, at minimum, two, arguably, four, movies with their relationship at center, was there time for even so much as a second of closure for the battle-tested, inseparable since childhood, through sickness, tragedy, Hydra, and the end of the world, friendship of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.
There are really two key parts of Endgame, before the snap is un-snapped and after, two key parts which, based on everything the audience has seen of Steve Rogers, should, if not revolve around, at least contain one Bucky Barnes.
But they don’t.
In Infinity War, it is Bucky that Steve sees disintegrating in front of his eyes, a position that is occupied, contextually and narratively, by the most important person a hero could lose. But for Steve, unlike any of the other heroes who lose their loves, this is not the first time he has watched Bucky slip from between his fingers, it is not even the second, it is not even the third. Time and time, movie after movie, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes battle fiercely for each other, defend each other, protect each other, and always, always, lose each other, and yet it is Peggy that Steve mentions in his therapy group as the loss that haunts him. Peggy who has been dead for almost eight years now. in Steve Rogers’s life. Peggy, who has nothing to do with the snap at all. Peggy, when it is Bucky who blew into the wind.
This repeats, egregiously, as the team suits up to fight Thanos for the first time in the movie, with Steve looking at Peggy’s picture in his compass before telling Nat that “if this doesn’t work, [he] doesn’t know what he’ll do.” But if it does work, it’s Bucky he’ll be getting back. Peggy has nothing to do with this narrative moment, and yet she stands in, where, for every other hero, the person they saw vanish, or whose vanishing they feel the most, is featured.
For instance, when Tony finally returns from space and Steve runs to him, Tony tells him, “I lost the kid.” [Peter]. Rocket yells at Thor to pull it together because he needs to get his family back. [Groot]. Carol and Nat both think about Nick, even though they didn’t see him vanish. Clint talks about nothing except for the loss of his family. But for Steve, Bucky is carefully removed.
Even more glaring though, is the absence of a scene in the second part of the movie, during the final battle. Every. Literally, EVERY character who could possibly reunite with another, does. Steve and Sam, Steve and T’Challa, Rocket and Groot, Tony and Peter, Hope and Scott, Okoye and T’Challa, Tony and Doctor Strange, and yet, there is not a single moment, as all the characters step back from non-existence into existence, where Bucky and Steve find each other. As the original “battle-tested friendship,” this seems like an impossible oversight.
Bucky and Steve have battled together for a century, have been at each other’s sides fight after fight. Not even a thousand years of torture or Steve’s love of his new family prevented that in the other Captain America movies. And yet here, the full circle of Steve seeing Bucky vanish into dust never comes. They don’t find each other, they don’t look for each other, they don’t speak to each other. The movie tells us that narratively Doctor Strange and Tony have more of a relationship than Bucky and Steve.
They may as well be strangers.
All of this seems so against Steve’s DNA, that it shakes the character. Steve Rogers, who once said, “even when I had nothing, I had Bucky,” who fought Tony and dismantled the Avengers for Bucky, who took on every nation of the world to defend his best friend, does not seem like the kind of man who would suddenly forget a century of loyalty. However, the relationship is construed between them, as brothers, as comrades-in-arms, as friends, as more. Bucky was once the only person Steve had in this world, and Steve is now the only person Bucky has.
But nothing, nothing, was as character assassinating to one Steve Rogers as the final moments of the film where Steve decides to abandon his current timeline to dance and marry his one-time crush, Peggy Carter.
It’s fascinating because Steve never refers to Peggy as the “love of his life” in any other movie before Endgame. In fact, Peggy is an undercurrent, but not overly involved with Steve throughout his narrative journey, even in The First Avenger when they are both alive and both the same age. Endgame writer, Christopher Markus, even once referred to Peggy as “a woman Steve once kissed.”
It is instead Bucky who Steve loses, fights for, and saves, over and over again in his arc. And it is Bucky that Steve leaves, callously, at the end of the movie to find Peggy.
This is a strange, selfish, and un-Steve Rogers like thing to do and insults both of the people who are closest to him. Peggy, we know from the Agent Carter TV series and from The Winter Soldier, lived a full life, of which she was proud. She tells Steve that she lived her life and her only regret is that he didn’t get to live his. She had a family (a member of which Steve kisses in Civil War), she builds S.H.I.E.L.D, she is a boss, and a powerful woman. And in ten seconds, Endgame relegates her to “Steve’s wife,” showing her as an object of his affections, merely there to fulfill some strange, domestic fantasy which neither one of them has ever expressed an interest in living out. Peggy has no lines in Endgame, she is there to be peered at and held by Steve. She is not a real character. She has not even had any meaningful character evolution with Steve. She is a woman he kissed once, and now she is his wife. And that’s all she is allowed to be.
It is hard to believe Steve Rogers would want this for a woman he admired as much as Peggy Carter. It is hard to believe he would ignore her expressly telling him she lived a life, a life she could never meaningfully understand losing, even if Steve explains it to her, just to play out a half-baked dream he had a century ago.
And as for Bucky. Where to begin.
Bucky is sad in the last scene of Endgame, which is a confusing choice if the audience is meant to believe that what Steve is doing is just dandy. He seems reluctant, tired, and upset in the ten seconds of interaction they have, he tells Steve he will miss him, he barely makes eye contact. And Steve. Steve doesn’t really seem to care. He doesn’t seem to understand that he’s dooming his best friend to what his own worst nightmare was, being alone in the present without anyone who could understand what that is like. This desire to have shared experience is one of the main reasons Steve is so desperate to get Bucky back in his movies, and all at once, he can’t remember that at all. Perhaps viewers are meant to believe Bucky is no longer alone, and yet, Wakanda aside, where potentially he is friends with Shuri, Steve aside, Bucky has spent no meaningful time, no time at all, with the rest of the remaining team, none that we’ve seen and none even that the storyline set up allows for.
Steve is leaving Bucky alone, alone after Hydra, after being hunted, after dying. And he doesn’t even seem to care.
After four movies devoted to their relationship, this is an insult to the fans and a dismantling of Steve Rogers, who is not a perfect soldier, but a good man. Steve Rogers, who would never do this.
But why?
Why was even a second of closure too much for Endgame to hand over?
The answer lies in Marvel’s inability to process the way the relationship between Steve and Bucky has played out, even as they themselves created it. Bucky’s pain is alien to them. His vulnerability, his arguably feminine role as the damsel, always in distress, as the weapon, an object to be used not heard, as a man whose trauma is so ingrained into his character that it can’t be turned into stoic snark, like Tony’s is, or humor, like Thor’s, and instead sits bright on the surface, are all beyond the scope of understanding. And the notion that it is not a woman who takes him into her arms and heals him, but Steve, drives it to unshowable.
As others have written, there is such a deep intimacy between Steve and Bucky, such a powerful love and an intensity of loss, that if they are together, they must express it, and that expression is taboo. For the fans to like it, is taboo. And the only way to deal with it is to separate them.
In direct contradiction to everything that has come before in Marvel’s own universe, Marvel refuses to give Bucky and Steve the closure they deserve.
At the end of the line, the story goes unfinished.
endgame steve after a few days: yeah so…peggy actually dumped me after like three months bc she realized we weren’t That compatible After having to spend more than Like. 15 minutes at a time together…and eventually married her actual husband..and had kids. so that’s why the timeline didn’t separate! but i got stranded with no WiFi for 50 years bc i didnt have any more pym particles
sam: bro. What?
steve: I got the ring from the dollar store on the way over here bc i didn’t wanna look dumb :/
bucky: that ships BEEN sailed bro
sam: bro. WHAT?
steve: at one point i almost got polio bc i forgot i never got vaccinated
prguitarman
amandla
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
