Oh thank god, I was just telling my partner that I'm not the one who starts fights anymore
Yeah, I don't really get taking Maul and then writing him as a completely different character that already exists. Like, 'what if we took this one character we already have and we called him Maul for some reason'. You don't have to like Maul.as a character, I just don't get people who don't like who Maul is as a character so they just write him like another character that's already there. And it's not even 'we have replaced this character with Maul' it's 'we have made no changes to the character that is already there, except now we call him Maul'. Like, just write the other character if you don't like Maul.
Thank you so much, Wendolyynn (Registered User), for bravely saying this with your whole chest. Most insipid dipshits on AO3 log out first in an act of ritualized cowardice, or merely confine themselves to public bookmarks, which cannot be deleted by authors. Truly, you are a pinnacle of the unserious dickheads of the internet, blithely jerking yourself off with the keyboard of your Macbook and cockily hitting post on the resulting ejaculate.
If nothing else, and there is nothing else, I appreciate you volunteering yourself as someone I am allowed to be mean to. As for my response?
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I sincerely hope you don't leave similarly twattish comments on the fics of someone who may actually care about your deeply unqualified opinion, but to be fair, I also can't imagine such a person exists.
I do know young, inexperienced, or simply burnt-out writers may find this particular bit of nastiness so demoralizing they might stop writing altogether, and have in fact seen that happen several times. Not that you'd know anything about that, since I see you rather pointedly have at least 1200 bookmarks but not a single written word of your own to your name. I myself am not young, am not inexperienced, am not even burnt out, have over 130 fics and over 330k words on this website alone across various names, and to be absolutely clear I don't precisely care about the fact that you apparently go around being rude and bafflingly entitled in random strangers' spaces, so much as how comfortable you seem to be about it.
I aim to make you a little less comfortable, if only so you don't beam this snotty little copypasta into the comment section of damn near every Star Wars fanfic that includes Maul on the whole damn internet. It sounds exhausting, and I can only assume you're already so busy complaining on Reddit that nobody will date you and on Twitter that everything is too "woke" now.
There are only so many otherwise unoccupied hours in the day, I understand.
Because, yeah, I don't really "get" why you're so bent out of shape as to bang out this inane rant instead of minding your own business about a fic posted eight years ago. Maybe you confused a fic being anonymous with it being orphaned, and thus assumed nobody would see it—or at least not respond? I can understand your confusion since, again, you don't seem to have posted anything yourself, and I know the author side of the website may be a little opaque to those who've never even seen it.
The difference is, I still get email notifications about every comment on every fic I've written. Which means I opened my email to a notification on a fic that's older than both of my small-child nieces, and thus more mature than you are, to see this bit of self-important fuckery.
But hey, you do seem perennially confused about things authors do that don't affect you even a little, and thus you rightfully have zero say in, so I'll graciously clear some things up: I do like Maul, quite a bit actually! Which is why, when I was brand new to the Star Wars fandom and wanted to write a silly little AU on Tumblr, I used this fic to drag him away from his abuser's influence and give him a support system of other characters that I liked. You may notice that this is a fairly common occurrence in the realm of fanfiction and fandom at large: changing a fictional character's circumstances and relationships with other characters in order to write a story in which they are safe and loved. Contrary to your repeated assertions, however, to my knowledge there is no pre-existing character that Maul is taking the place of in this fic; a formerly-Sith, massively-abused teenager who's pseudo-kidnapped by a former Jedi and dragged to a found-family unit on a planet run by a drug-running, slave-owning empire would be fucking rad, but is not in fact a character that already exists. It's a shame, but it is a fact.
Now, I theoretically would be delighted to know who you even think you're talking about, but as I will be blocking and muting you after this on account of—and stop me if you've heard this before—you being an insufferable asshole that I have negative interest in interacting with further, maintaining a dialogue won't really be feasible. I will, however, leave you with a couple nuggets of wisdom for you to ignore and never mull over because you don't seem like the kind of person who does self-reflection, self-correction, or growth.
1) In fannish spaces (i.e. websites and environments that house and/or cultivate communities of fans who create fanart, fanfiction, fanvids, fandom discussions and meta, etc.), you will encounter fan works that are offensive, upsetting, boring, unoriginal, confusing, poorly-written, and/or out-of-character; I'd even argue that the majority of fan works can be described that way, and that does not diminish their value and contribution to the fannish spaces in which they inhabit. Yes, including this fic you don't like. Yes, including every fic I don't like. The onus, however, is on you to appropriately manage your own emotions and adequately curate your experiences going forward when you encounter such fan works (for your own mental well-being) and also to not be a bitchass loser about it in the creator's comment section (for everyone else's mental well-being).
2) I notice from your very public bookmarks that you are a mean little cunt with no redeeming qualities who regularly leaves deeply rude, unpleasant, derogatory, and pointlessly cruel feedback on others' work, in between some wildly unwarranted self-aggrandizement. It is truly astonishing how many times you confidently say you'd like to rewrite someone else's fanfiction that they poured their heart and soul into creating, when you yourself have created and contributed absolutely fuckall to any fandom because you're either too lazy or too cowardly to even bother trying.
Frankly, I'm betting on both.
In conclusion, you are a dick, and a human tar pit, and this is why no one loves you. I assume you've always been confused about that, considering the very concept of fanfiction authors not writing very well or precisely to your tastes also seems to confuse you, and so thoroughly that you enter a state of frenzied aggression.
From the bottom of my heart, I hope you die mad about it.
There's not a lot of autistic representation, or non-binary representation, or [insert a marginalized group a fan creator is a part of] and so they create it through headcanons. They headcanon that a character they love has a backstory similar to their own history or comes from a culture similar to theirs so they can go, "this person is loved/successful/powerful/whatever, and *I* can be, too."
Sometimes it's obvious, making a character a direct copy of these real world groups that the person making the headcanons is known to be a part of--they have the same disability as the fan creator, they have the same race, etc. Sometimes it's less obvious, like the common trope of using monsters as metaphors, and so this character is now a monster but people love them, still, anyway.
These are, for the most part, good things that don't affect other people and should just be ignored (or complained about in private or so vaguely it could be about anyone, if it really gets to you lol), because someone adhering to a personal headcanons doesn't normally negatively impact others.
Except sometimes they do. Not necessarily because of the nature of the headcanon (though there are a few of those that are inherently harmful), but because the fan creator starts being unable to disconnect what is a headcanon and what is canon.
They become "right" and everyone else becomes "wrong," and since these headcanons often come from a place of seeking representation, the "wrong" people are now being called bigots, are now being accused of attacking the fan creator on a personal level if they point out why that headcanon isn't actual canon, why they themselves don't use it.
And because there are a lot of people wholly uneducated on actual social justice issues, they cling to whatever the fan creator says so they're not called bigots, because to them being called a bigot is worse than being a bigot. So it creates a feedback loop for the fan creator, who had gotten so caught up in having their headcanon seen as the One True Canon that they're now caught in the throes of a power trip, attacking others and encouraging the people too scared or ignorant to not agree with them to do the same. To the point where their already weak headcanon (which is based on seeking representation and not necessarily the canon, and would be absolutely fine as an individual headcanon), becomes weaker and harder to see as they have to continually find new, ridiculous ways to justify why they're right and everyone else is wrong.
It comes up a lot here on tumblr, and on AO3, and now on twitter (because that's like what 7 years delay or something?), and it's a sad phenomenon to see people still falling to it to this day.
........okay look. I'm not saying that racial dynamics definitely don't play into fandom and it's creations, that'd be dumb as hell, I just wanna point out that maybe. Just maybe. A fanfiction in which a canonical slave army much beloved by fandom is freed and treated with dignity and care is far less about any kind of ""trust and confidence in the gobernment"" and much more likely to be about the indulgent and wish-fulfilling nature of a fanfiction most likely tagged #fix-it. Like I think if a fic starts out with "and then the evil was defeated and here is the happily ever after" then it's probably not interested in the dubious realism of Star War and probably just wants to present a universe wherein systems of power don't fucking suck so bad. Like. Just spit-balling here.
FUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYSFUCK YOUR SHITTY CIRVRAN IORNON AND CIRYS
Marina, is it? Speak to a therapist (or potentially a psychiatrist) about your obsessive and compulsive tendencies which are ruining both your own mental health and your ability to interact with others in healthy, constructive ways without lashing out at strangers for harmless and meaningless differences in opinion.
It's in fact very salient to bring up the issue of queerness and homophobia in these interactions and your behavior because they are clearly a root cause. I am a queer person, making queer content, and you explicitly attack myself and others for that queer content. You compulsively bring up Roche "not being gay"—as if that matters to fandom creation and as if gay is the only option in the queer spectrum that could lead to him being potentially attracted to men—and him being attracted to women, specifically the blonde woman you constantly bring up despite me not knowing her, in these tirades you go on. You attack and insult queer fans for our queerness, specifically and deliberately and relentlessly, because our existence upsets you. That is homophobia at its basics. You don't have to call me a tranny faggot in order to reveal yourself as homophobic, because your insistence on bringing up straightness as a default and denigrating any mild interpretation of queerness does that already. You're a homophobe, you're a bigot, and again, it's fine because it's hardly noticeable amongst the cyberstalking and verbal abuse and harassment and constant unprovoked invective that you inflict on random strangers who are just minding their own business making content that makes them happy.
I actually don't demand love and respect for myself or any ship—I haven't demanded anything, not even for you to fuck off, although I wish you would—because you don't have to care about it any more than anyone else has to care about yours. That's just you projecting: you are so transparently desperate for validation of your preferred ship, and pathetically vitriolic towards anyone who doesn't fawn over it, that you routinely engage in harassment campaigns of strangers just to make yourself feel better. You flood the inboxes of people who don't want to talk to you, evading the boundaries set up by those people to try to get away from you, with such intensely hateful rhetoric that you've chased off all but the most oblivious of people who could have been interested in your ship, had you not insisted on being an asshole to everyone.
I don't know your ship. I don't know that woman, I don't know that game, and I don't care to, because I have my own that I already enjoy.
My ship is stupid because it's queer, your ship is stupid because you make it so in the eyes of everyone you harass, and everyone else's ships are stupid because it's fandom. Fandom is the place to be stupid and have fun with it, without being bogged down by the constraints of canon. I'd say I'm sorry that you're not having fun, but you're not having fun because you're too busy wallowing in your own toxicity. That sucks, but it's fundamentally something that you're doing to yourself.
Again, you should really speak to a mental health professional about how upsetting this all is to you and how to better manage your feelings so that you aren't constantly being cruel and hurtful to people you don't know. Maybe bring up the possibility of having OCD or something similarly obsessive and compulsive. You may be a dick, but you're still a person and you deserve help with whatever it is you're going through.
Now I'm going to go play Fable 3, feel free to keep having your breakdown but I'm not going to respond again until I feel like it.
Just remembered a couple years ago when drawing clone trooper BoobiesTM was a big thing for a few weeks and it was just a really fun time for mens' tits lovers and then the anti-cloncesters killed the party and a bunch of random artists made youtuber apology posts like "i am so.....sorry.....to my audience......to my fans.......for participating in such disgusting fetishization........the fictional brown men deserve better........than to be treated as sexually appealing to people.......thank you to everyone who were kind enough........to teach me better.......i am listening........and learning......🙏" and then i had to unfollow and block a bunch of new people for being such weird fucking babies about being horny on main.
Anyway we should do that first half again sometime, that was fun
You know, funnily enough, I actually can use the canonical enslavement of the clones as a point of criticism against the Jedi and senate and all other characters in Star Wars. And I do. Because the clones are literal, by-definition slaves. And it is a worthwhile point of criticism regardless of narrative framing because the heroes very literally and textually use slave labor to fight their fundamentally unjust war. Like it happens right on-screen, no ambiguity about it at all. And it doesn't matter that talking about it isn't how you "professionally analysis media" because I'm not getting paid to call George Lucas and Co. an insufferable hack, I do this for free and fun! For the joy of calling the creator of a slave army of brown men a cunt! And also yes I apply it to every single character in Star Wars and consider them all at least mildly evil for accepting the widespread evil of slavery to exist, nay, flourish unchecked, and that actually supports my analysis of Star Wars, to wit: age up the intended audience about 10 years and it's just Game of Thrones In Space. Everyone is shit, they all suck, there's no winning only widescale losing because the fights are literally never going to not be about stupid esoteric religious bullshit and maintaining the status quo in favor of the rich elite at the expense of the actual fucking people. Ta-da.
