Replies to this post!
@necro-divergent:
that post’s got some weird conflation between “writing for marketability” and “thinking about audience interpretation and enjoyment” that i do not understand. not a fan of it either
It's conflating a lot of stuff, frankly. Leaning into one's kinks without apologetic scaffolding in the narration is different from, uh, "two people feeling the biggest craziest feelings of their entire life and they cannot do anything about it except bang it out". There are a lot of different things being clustered together here, and I frankly think it would have been served better by talking about register, rather than author motivation.
But yeah, you're right to point out that considering one's audience on any level is different from aiming to be maximally marketable. Do I "write for myself"? Sure, and one reason I got into writing fanfic was because I was burned out on public fandom interaction and needed to retreat into my own head and interpretations. But if I am putting the effort into writing at all, I am usually thinking on some level about how it will be read, even if it's just on the level of "would this paragraph be comprehensible to someone who doesn't live inside my head and already know what I mean by it?"
@wizardysseus:
i dislike it in a different way? being that: i do not really enjoy reading about fucking, and am made constantly aware in fandom spaces that what is self-indulgent for me may look like holding back the good stuff to someone else. so ultimately the same reason: you're talking about how you don't want writers to give a shit but how do YOU know if a writer gives a shit? based on whether their writing is tailored to YOUR preferences?
I feel this sooo much, if for different reasons. It's actually a point of insecurity I have about my current fic, so, cool post to see at this particular moment in time!
@aeide-thea:
ugh tumblr ate my first reply but. agree, & basically i think that post has the same problem as #ownvoices in that it thinks you can necessarily deduce things abt an author's positionality/attitude/&c from a text. which is just. not in fact true! sometimes your thin-slicing will be right, yes, but sometimes people are operating according to a pattern you don't personally recognize, and your assumptions about them are in fact totally off-base in erasive, dangerous ways!
Yeah, that's a good comparison. And, as I implied in my original tags, it's a little rich to frame an entire post around what you, the poster, personally like to read, but in a way that's supposed to champion personal enjoyment on the part of writers. Like.... what makes you think people who've written stuff that's off-putting to you cared about what you thought, then?
