what's so wrong about fic authors having ko-fi pages??? it's not like everyone who writes fic is rolling in money or has tons of time to spend on fic instead of working.
okay, so like…here’s the thing that it really all boils down to: fanfiction is a luxury and a hobby. it happens to be a hobby that other people may reap the benefit of via reading the fics, but it remains a hobby; it may be a luxury that technically affords equal and easy access to those who want to read it, but it remains a luxury.
even if we don’t get into the fact that legally and ethically it is very not okay to pay people for a product they create using the intellectual property of another individual, the implication of ko-fi and patreon for fanfiction is still that fic is a consumer product that should be paid for. the problems with that are variable and wide-reaching, but can be condensed into a few points:
when people pay for a product, the people who are creating said product are treated as employees. as soon as someone is paid for the delivery of a product or service, expectations change on both sides of the transaction– and to be clear, payment for fic, directly or otherwise, in a broad and systemic system such as ko-fi or patreon, turns the creation of fic into a transaction. sitting down in a starbucks with your favorite fic author and buying them a latte is one thing; making a cash payment via a website to someone who’s writing fic you like is another thing, and is very much an exchange of currency for a good or service.
on the author’s side, it shifts the creation of fic from what it has been– a hobby, a passion project, practice for original fiction, a way to engage with friends in fandom; something inherently informal and undemanding– into a structured system of delivery that they must adhere to. when an author is being paid for fic, or tipped for fic, as i’ve seen it phrased, they are then tasked with the delivery of fic in exchange for the payment. you know how so often a fic won’t update for three months and the author will be like “sorry, been busy at work/school/family stuff, real life got in the way”? as soon as payment for the delivery of that fic is brought into the equation, the author no longer has the opportunity to shelve fanfiction in favor of dealing with real life, because they are completing it for payment.
on the readers’ side, it fosters in the people who submit payment a sense that the fic is being written FOR THEM, that they have exchanged money for a good or service and have the right to state and enforce their own expectations on the product. a while back i wrote a glee fic that didn’t end with the ship that people wanted and got actual death threats and people telling me to jump in front of a bus, saying they wanted recompense for their wasted time and effort in reading the fic. they paid precisely zero dollars for any word of that fic and still felt entitled to tell me to kill myself because it hadn’t ended the way they wanted. how do you think they would have reacted if they had given money via ko-fi or patreon for that? “you, graduate student with no income, reimburse me for my wasted money because quinn and santana should have lived happily every after”?
similarly, it instills in the people who submitted payment a feeling that they are more deserving of enjoying the fic than the people on the internet who DIDN’T pay for it. it creates tiers of fans and enforces gatekeeping and limited access to fanfiction. even with free and equal access to fanfiction for anyone who has an internet connection, fandom is already still floundering under the weight of expectant consumers, exclusionary mentalities, gatekeeping, bigotry, and bullying. the involvement of money will do literally nothing but make all of that worse.
on a very fundamental level, the change that this instills on both sides of the transaction violates one of the most important and long-standing mentalities in internet-based fandoms: that fandom is for everyone. internet fandom is and should remain available to anyone who has internet access, and this includes fanfiction.
to address your other point re: people not having the money to write fic instead of working. to be very frank, if you have to choose between making money at a job or writing fic, you really should not be choosing to write fic. fanfiction is not legally a way to make money, and additionally is not a reasonable way to make money at all. if you want to make money for writing, do it with your original work, not for something that is in fact illegal for you to profit from; setting up a ko-fi or patreon to fund your ability to create original work instead of sitting at a desk job is well and good, but doing it for fanfiction is really just not.
even more importantly, to me, since i’ve dug myself primarily into the femslash side of fandom, is that so much of this fandom community is young, growing, and mostly are not financially independent themselves yet. asking them to contribute money to enjoy femslash fics, when femslash representation in paid media like television, novels, and movies is so limited that they can sometimes ONLY get it via free fanfiction, is pretty much morally repugnant. queer fanfiction is not just about the queer creators: it’s about the queer consumers, and frankly, asking for money from an underrepresented, already generally vulnerable population, is just incredibly gross and is taking advantage of people by effectively holding hostage queer content by queer creators. whether or not that’s the intent of fic authors creating ko-fi pages, the fact remains that it implies that they SHOULD be getting paid for their fic (which, again: illegal) and that they may not have the time to dedicate to creating this content for an underrepresented population if said population doesn’t pay them.
again: fanfiction is a hobby and a luxury. it is not for profit and should not be for profit, and yeah, it sucks that sometimes we have to choose between working a regular job that pays and writing fic for fun. but i’m gonig to just keep hammering this home: fanfiction is a hobby, one that is legally acceptable when no profit is turned because it uses protected intellectual property. people should absolutely not be asking for money for it, no matter how much people like their fics, because it’s illegal and, frankly, completely undermines some very fundamental and important tenets of fandom as a whole.
