#after (todd)

[aimmyarrowshigh]

wait they made a movie of after

...who wanted that

[aimmyarrowshigh]

USA Today says "After" is "the must-read fic of 1D fandom."

#disclaimer as usual: i have nothing against its literary quality#i have everything against it romanticizing rape and abuse yet again in the romance genre and worse: because it's for teenagers

[aimmyarrowshigh]

One Direction tales are scorned by many fan-writing communities — as one fanfiction expert explains

It’s a dream situation for one particular One Direction fan: Anna Todd, author of the fanfiction series After, was signed to Simon & Schuster for a three-volume publishing deal. The names of the real-life One Direction singers will be changed and the story will go mainstream, in the latest big example of what’s known as filing off the serial numbers (in the style of Twilight inspiring 50 Shades of Grey) by removing references to the original inspiration.

But going pro doesn’t necessarily mean getting respect.

Real Person Fic (RPF), the genre of fictional stories about celebrities, is a big thing in the world of fan writing — but it’s often been the subject of inter-fan derision, and that’s particularly the case when the real people in question are the members of One Direction. An essay by scholar V. Arrow, which is featured in the recent book Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison, explains why:

RPF is something even other fanfiction writers often mock and deride as “creepy” and often “juvenile.” …But even within RPF, there is a hierarchy of respectability, and One Direction, along with other boy bands — due to the poppy style of their music, their prefab start, and the perception of their audience as teenage girls — is at the bottom.

One of the biggest issues is the perception that people who write fic about a boy band are only interested in writing out their own fantasies, scripting interactions between their idols and characters who serve as stand-ins for themselves. There’s also the notion that the writers must be young teens — despite the fact that data shows that most 1D fanfic readers/writers were over 16, and two-thirds of readers said they weren’t interested in stories that were mere wish-fulfillment for their authors.

But, the essay continues, there’s no reason why RPF has to be looked down upon: after all, Julius Caesar was based on a similar idea.

Speaking to TIME, Jamison — a University of Utah professor who will also teach a class about fanfiction at Princeton next spring — says that she doubts that the success of After will affect fan-community attitudes toward One Direction, but that the story was unusual already. For one thing, even in the time since Arrow’s RPF essay was written, Wattpad has exploded. Jamison says that when she was first exploring Wattpad, the writing platform on which After was originally posted, the company’s management encouraged her to check out the story, which is one of their most successful ever. (“I haven’t read that much of it,” Jamison says of After. “It’s really long.”)

In the course of using Wattpad, though, Jamison noticed that the fan community on Wattpad was different from other sites. Bands, for example, are very popular fic subjects on Wattpad — One Direction included. “The idea that it’s stigmatized doesn’t seem to apply to Wattpad,” she says. “Her fans on Wattpad tread [Anna Todd] like a celebrity.”

Jamison also notes that the idea of making money from fanfiction — something long seen as dubious among fans, even as recently as 50 Shades of Grey — doesn’t seem to be so strange to younger and newer fanfic writers. That’s good news for 1D fans: if the success of After changes anything for the fanfiction world, Jamison guesses, it probably won’t be the way that followers of fandoms like Sherlock or Star Trek see the boy-band’s devotees; it’s more likely to be the influence on a fresh crop of RPF writers. After all, it’s much less legally thorny to file off those serial numbers when the inspiration is reality: changing the names of a boy band doesn’t risk overstepping the fair use of someone else’s creation. And besides, it’s a time-honored tradition.

As Jamison says: “Every fiction author bases their characters on real people.”

[aimmyarrowshigh]

HOLY CRAP AND I JUST GOT QUOTED IN TIME MAGAZINE.

WHAT A DAY!!

[aimmyarrowshigh]

The issue is that people are mocking the idea of girls/women/fic writers-at-large writing themselves into fic because it is, to them, an inherently funny idea. To them, it’s funny that girls/women/fic writers-at-large would want to imagine themselves in romantic or sexual scenarios, and/or because they see it as a sign of automatically bad writing. (Note that this almost only ever is applied to self-insert characters by women or girls, where Stan Lee, Dan Brown, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, White Male Writers In General can write the same male-power fantasy over and over and it’s considered ~empathetic narration~ or whatever). 

The problem isn’t really that people are noticing that it’s self-insert, but that the surface facts of that are what they a) notice and b) automatically see as mockworthy. 

On one level, that annoys me because I DON’T think that it’s inherently mockworthy for girls/women/nonbinary people to write themselves into exploratory sexual fantasy. That’s one of the aspects of fanfiction that is most maligned by the “outside world” and the one aspect that I think is actually the most salient and important part of fanfiction/fandom as a subculture.  It’s not one that I personally take part in as a writer because I just don’t have those feelings about the people/characters I write and that I don’t participate in as a reader because it feels too much like reading someone’s diary for my taste, but I think that self-insert fic is really important and really valid, even if I haven’t ever read one that I thought was like… actually serviceable writing. 

The writing of them isn’t the point; the experience of the author while writing it is the point, and to that end, like, more power to anyone who wants to Mary Sue a fic.  Genuinely.  Anyone who is shitting on After just because it’s a self-insert One Direction het fic can go stick a fork in their eyeballs because they are disrespecting one of the only cultural outlets that young women have for self-centered pro-female kink-positive anti-abuse anti-misogyny non-threatening sexual exploration and gratification.

BUT.  If they, you, we, whoever, is criticizing After for NOT FULFILLING THAT — being pro-female, anti-abuse, non-threatening, and kink-positive, I mean, which is what good fic and a good fanfiction community should strive to be — then that is Very Important. 

Because I feel like the continued veneration of these horrifically abusive, woman-negative, heteronormative, kink-negative fics by the mainstream world is really telling in a really negative way and it’s setting up fandom and the fanfiction community a) as something that it is not, and b) for something that it does not want. 

I already have a Lot Of Reservations about publishing paying attention to the fic world at all, because I think introducing the idea of monetary compensation or “traditional success” into a self-modulating gift economy is already gross and problematic. But I think that SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE the most frequently “rewarded” fics perpetuate these abusive, hetero-focused, and frankly badly researched kink-negative ideals, the publishing world’s interest in fanfiction is downright malicious.

Because if the new business model for fandom, for young women and teenage girls and women and related audiences, is “this heinously abusive self-insert story has 55 million [dubious] hits, let’s produce it,” then the business model becomes “this plotline is what this target demo wants.” And the idea of abuse normalizes.  More than it already has for this audience, which like, IDK how much paranormal romance you read in the YA section, but it’s pretty ubiquitous already. 

And if the business model becomes making money off of abuse of women, then the abuse of women has become a commodity.  And when it is a commodity, it is something that people strive to own.  It becomes a marker of success to be an abuser of women or to be abused.  And that is so, so not okay.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

it annoys me that the only fics i've ever seen turned into movies or books are fics which feature pretty solidly abusive relationships disguised as 'bad boy/good girl' or 'bdsm' or 'complicated' -- like nah it's straight up abusive don't give me that. like stop making fun of the fact that some young girl wrote a probable self-insert fanfic about harry and start talking about how some young girl wrote and is publishing this book which she apparently has no idea features a highly emotionally and mentally abusive relationship between the main characters; who cares that it's a self-insert i don't give a rat's ass THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE.

heyspibsy

Spibsy, V, I see what you’re saying, that making fun of someone for writing a probably self-insert is obscuring the real issue, but I think the idea that this story is (or could be) a self insert is important.

*I* care that it’s a self-insert. I care that this young girl is writing this as wish-fulfillment, and as what she thinks she deserves, what she wants for herself. Because she’s writing what she sees portrayed in our society as desirable, but she’s putting HERSELF in the title role. And that’s dangerous, It’s dangerous for her and for her readers.

And I want to present this story as evidence that these messages that our society gives young women, that they’re only worth anything if a man says he loves them, and in addition to that, that the abusive behaviors PROVE that he really does. He must, or he wouldn’t be jealous, wouldn’t put up with her. Stories like ‘Always’ show that these messages (that we agree are TOXIC and hateful and dangerous) are taking root, and young women are deciding that they want that. And that upsets me. So I agree that nobody should be making fun of the fact that the story is probably a self-insert, but I do think that idea is important to the discussion. Ya know? ~ k8monster

#a good point and something i mentioned later in the conversation v and i were having#what matters most is that young girls are going to internalize that abusive rhetoric is just how relationships ARE or SHOULD BE#and that is super harmful#when i said the fact that it’s a self-insert is unimportant#i meant that it specifically should not be what people have a problem with#but this should be recognized yes (via heyspibsy)

Absolutely.  The issue is that people are mocking the idea of girls/women/fic writers-at-large writing themselves into fic because it is, to them, an inherently funny idea that they should want to imagine themselves in romantic or sexual scenarios and/or because they see it as a sign of automatically bad writing (note that this almost only ever is applied to self-insert characters by women or girls, where Stan Lee, Dan Brown, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, White Male Writers In General can write the same male-power fantasy over and over and it’s considered ~empathetic narration~ or whatever).  The problem isn’t really that people are noticing that it’s self-insert, but that the surface facts of that are what they a) notice and b) automatically see as mockworthy. 

On one level, that annoys me because I DON’T think that it’s inherently mockworthy for girls/women/nonbinary people to write themselves into exploratory sexual fantasy, and that’s one of the aspects of fanfiction that is most maligned by the “outside world” and the one aspect that I think is actually the most salient and important part of fanfiction/fandom as a subculture.  It’s not one that I personally take part in as a writer because I just don’t have those feelings about the people/characters I write and that I don’t participate in as a reader because it feels too much like reading someone’s diary for my taste, but I think that self-insert fic is really important and really valid, even if I haven’t ever read one that I thought was like… actually serviceable writing.  The writing of them isn’t the point; the experience of the author while writing it is the point, and to that end, like, more power to anyone who wants to Mary Sue a fic.  Genuinely.  Anyone who is shitting on After just because it’s a self-insert One Direction het fic can go stick a fork in their eyeballs because they are disrespecting one of the only cultural outlets that young women have for self-centered pro-female kink-positive anti-abuse anti-misogyny non-threatening sexual exploration and gratification.

BUT. 

If they, you, we, whoever, is criticizing After for NOT FULFILLING THAT — being pro-female, anti-abuse, non-threatening, and kink-positive, I mean, which is what good fic and a good fanfiction community should strive to be — then that is Very Important. 

Because I feel like the continued veneration of these horrifically abusive, woman-negative, heteronormative, kink-negative fics by the mainstream world is really telling in a really negative way and it’s setting up fandom and the fanfiction community a) as something that it is not, and b) for something that it does not want.  I already have a Lot Of Reservations about publishing paying attention to the fic world at all, because I think introducing the idea of monetary compensation or “traditional success” into a self-modulating gift economy is already gross and problematic, but I think that SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE the most frequently “rewarded” fics perpetuate these abusive, hetero-focused, and frankly badly researched kink-negative ideals, the publishing world’s interest in fanfiction is downright malicious.

Because if the new business model for fandom, for young women and teenage girls and women and related audiences, is “this heinously abusive self-insert story has 55 million [dubious] hits, let’s produce it,” then the business model becomes “this plotline is what this target demo wants,” and the idea of abuse normalizes.  More than it already has for this audience, which like, IDK how much paranormal romance you read in the YA section, but it’s pretty ubiquitous already.  And if the business model becomes making money off of abuse of women, then the abuse of women has become a commodity.  And when it is a commodity, it is something that people strive to own.  It becomes a marker of success to be an abuser of women or to be abused.  And that is so, so not okay.