Did you see Second Story 's fanfiction video? 💀 (Spoiler alert: it's bad)
"It would be more accurate to say that fanfiction is 80 to 90% responsible for the degradation of modern literature. And that statement is something I stand by."
This video has 8.6k likes. :/
"Bad" is putting it lightly, anon.
"Harry Potter was the series that launched a thousand ships."
Says the person who doesn't know anything about fandom history. Fans of DC Comics, Marvel, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Transformers, Jem and the Holograms, Dragonball Z, etc., launched many ships long before Harry Potter came along in 1997.
"Do you think YA literature is partly to blame for the decline in literature right now? Thank fanfiction. Specifically, thank Twilight, which was originally a work of Harry Potter fanfiction."
What? LMAO
Layne did not elaborate on how she reached that conclusion.
"Do you think E.L. James' 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a major offender in the rise of smut in modern society? Thank fanfiction."
She acts like people weren't writing lots of smut before Fifty Shades' popularity. Lol
"Self-indulgence demands, above all, representation. That's why you get an abundance of people of, say, African descent in stories set in Scotland in the 11th century, for example."
Layne is one of those Nazis that ignores the history of black people in Britain.
"We've talked a bit about cultural decay. . ."
Another Nazi talking point.
"There are some crazy folks out there who would go as far as to say that Dante's Divine Comedy is fanfiction."
"Needless to say, there's a large subgenre of fanfiction focused on whump." "What does this indulge exactly? It depends on the reader or writer. For some, it is absolutely sexual, and so the story will even veer into smut territory. For many, though, it's entirely emotional and fulfills some attention fantasy or caregiving fantasy, or what have you, of the writer or reader. Some will say that it's therapeutic, which is probably often true, but that's therapy, not literature. And a good therapist would probably caution against a constant, ever-increasing indulgence in works that could potentially retraumatize the reader or writer."
This woman sounds like the average anti.
"If I was being... extremely generous, I could say that 20% of fanfiction isn't smut of the strict observance."
Easily debunked. She compared Ao3 to Only Fans, so I assume the "majority" of fics she is talking about are teeming with sex; explicit and plentiful all the way!
Let's take the explicit fics on Ao3, and see how many of them there are versus the other ratings (G, T, and M — left out NR/1,781,453 fics)
"The primary, original function of fanfiction in the current age was always shipping, which means that at the very least fanfiction is intrinsically romantic, but also is just as intrinsically sexual."
*Facepalm*
Always question people who use the word "intrinsically" with regard to art.
Decided to stop there. I felt like my brain cells were dying while watching that garbage video, and I don't care what she has to say about BL, or "thE deCline in LiTeraRy qUalitY".
watching usamericans go into the "freedom of speech is good, but what if CHILDREN see BAD THING????? and think BAD THING is GOOD THING? so we ban every bad thing." rhetoric is insane. do not go there!!!!! nooooooo!!!! people behind the bans do not care about those abstract children and neither do you!!!!!!!
you are cheering on massive media bans because you unironically believe there is such thing as "degenerate art"!!!!! just because something hurts your feelings, or, god forbid, is yucky, doesn't mean nobody should read it!!!!!!!!
i live in a country that bans A Lot of things! i access most foreign websites with a vpn! because foreign media contains Yucky things, like.... queer people and people of color. talking about opression. living as their authentic selves. horrible, awful things like that.
(and let me tell you, The Children are also accessing those Yucky and Bad things you are oh so worried about just fine.)
i thought i blocked that idiot redheaded woman from youtube but i keep getting video recs from her channel and i watched one today and she thinks a woman assulted two high schoolers and told them they should feel lucky to sleep with an older woman because of FANFICTION???????? HUH???? WHAT ARE YOU SNORTING
The short, nice answer: Hilary Layne is a homophobic, racist, xenophonbic and EXTREMELY misogynistic woman.
She also has extremely harmful views about smut. To the point where I believe she is a genuine harm to the public, ESPECIALLY all queer people and cishet women, and should be quite frankly egged in the face forever.
Her youtube channel has too many fucking subcribers (The Second Story).
Also listening to Confessions of a Rotten girl would send her into a coma. Which is why she should listen to it right now.
Anyway all hope abandon ye who enter here. Go my readmore, for your sanity. Everything TW.
Hilary Layne (pictured in her shitty fit, learn how to dress yourself cunt) is such a homophobic, misogynistic piece of shit, who is a danger to the public. She fully believes:
Fiction containing characters who are emotionally involved is basically smut
Smutty fiction, ESPECIALLY that between MLM pairings (and I assume also WLW), if read by women, will lead to women becoming sexual predators toward young men. No, I'm not joking. Yes, the point above combos here.
These are perhaps the worst of her beliefs, but I want to open with them. Now I understand that is a BIG claim, which is why my hateful little rant will now turn into a hateful little rant with endless links to her video.
Also to clarify before I begin, Hilary Layne never talks about Trans people (to my knowledge) and I doubt she even knows if they exist. So assume when I am speaking of men and women, assume I am referring only to cis men and women. Because Hilary Layne is a creature who believes 100% in things like gender stereotypes, and thinks men and women are biologically wired towards such stereotypes.
Hilary Layne published a video entitled "Fanfiction Has Destroyed Writing (And Everything Else)", which is a follow up to a video called "The Absolute Degeneracy of Modern Writing".
I did fully watch "The Absolute Degeneracy of Modern Writing" (TADMW) live on stream at some point, RIP the vod, and know my experience was essentially shouting for five hours "Hilary Layne is a misogynistic prude of shit".
While this video is not the focus it is the precursor and thus deserves a brief explanation. The video itself is bashing "modern women's literature" as being #bad because #smut, and in the video she expresses the beliefs (which she states as fact) that Women are emotional creatures, who need to connect emotionally to things, especially to get off.
Unlike Men who can jack off to whatever, I guess.
This video exists almost completely to bash books like Fourth Wing and a Court of Thorns and Roses. Books which are undeniably pieces of garbage but not a big deal. It also implies the idea that women, especially younger women, who enjoy smut will eventually need to read smut that increases in intensity, until they are predators and pedophiles.
She also in general expresses the sentiment that women should not be proud of enjoying sex or reading sexual books. As well as vaguely bashing queer people and feminism, but never quite explicitly.
Her sources for this claim is are random, unlinked reddit posts. In fact she doesn't actually link her sources for basically anything, ever.
I will now begin to quote her video w/ a shit ton of time codes and make so much fun of her. In FHDW, Hilary Layne begins the section of her video entitled "BL" (46:14) as follows:
TADMW contained an offhand comment that was "All fanfic is bad and is porn", and since TADMW is an anti-porn video and that statement is fucking crazy, a lot of people got on her about that. So she made her followup video, "Fanfiction Has Destroyed Writing (And Everything Else)" (FHDW). Along with an article on her shitty blog, that is a companion piece to FHDW, entitled "Fanfiction Ruins Everything" (FRE).
I will not be talking about FRE as much because I am not reading that pile of horse shit. I have also not fully consumed FHDW, and I have done so on 1.5x speed. So if I have missed any of her snarky eyerolls or a strange xenophobic comment, oops.
In case you're wondering why I'm color coating these it's because I find it easier to remember what an acronym refers to. I will also color coat any quotes to specify if they are from FHDW or FRE.
BL is short for boys love. It's gay romance, almost entirely gay smut between two male characters, which has a disproportionately large female audience.
In FRE, she does state at the beginning of II.c. BL (Boys love), "As I said in my video, there are stories with gay characters, and then there’s BL. These are pretty distinct." but refuses to make a notable distinction between the two later. Put a pin in this.
Anyone with a brain can see why this is a problem to begin with. For one, BL is not "entirely" gay smut. Yaoi (a word she is TERRIFIED of) is not inherently sexual. BL fiction is specifically focuses on gay men, and is usually only about romance.
For two, "disproportionately large female audience"? No. Obviously fucking not While Fujoshi's certainly exist BL is not primarily consumed by women.
Now with this section, you may be thinking, "Wow, Hilary Layne must be a tourist." Yes she fucking is she doesn't know anything about what she's talking about. For example, at 46:54, she says (while quivering, quietly gagging, and holding back slurs and displaying genuine physical discomfort) she says
One of these beautiful men is the, um, how should we put this? ... Submissive half of the relationship, while the other retains a more traditionally dominant masculine role in the relationship, if you get what I'm saying.
In the Article FRE she does acknowledge that she knows what a Fujoshi is, what a Yaoi is, but never explicitly says "Fujoshi" and generally demonstrates some homophobic ass views (I will get back to it) that willfully misunderstand the topic at hand.
Her words here so obviously imply that to her, gay people are only mimicking straight relationships—that there must be one man and one woman in this scenario.
Now I am about to talk about a section of her video, 49:48-51:22. However I will be quoting it out of order to make my point, and because this shit is so misogynistic and homophobic all at the same time.
In her article she also includes a section entitled "Examples of BL in the Wild", to which she bitchily cries about needing to use a VPN to view the SCAWY BL or whatever. and then just links to fucking hentai.
(By the way, in the article, she also conflates Dead Dove fics w/ general queer stories. I don't like Dead Dove shit but go fuck yourself Hilary Layne).
Just as gay shipping fanfiction created BL in the first place and saw publishers create it as its own genre marketed specifically to women... The BL fandom tends to bring about the most intense mentally ill fanatic behavior from fans. Women have stalked their favorite BL actors, which suggests very overtly... that the infatuation is sexual in nature. And as is often the case with women, sexual infatuation very, very often must include a strong emotional element. Which is why the story doesn't need to be sexually explicit to satisfy a female fans emotional needs.
This is monstrously wrong and dangerously so. For one, OBVIOUSLY, women are not wittle emotional creatures who need emotion to enjoy sex. My attraction to Trickster DBD is clear demonstration of this (joking, but you get what I mean).
Now I know little miss Hilary hasn't been railed in a little while and is MAD coping, but people are not sexually satisfied by non-sexually explicit media, unless it is purposefully consumed with sex in mind.
To imply however that women who enjoy Yaoi are typically mentally ill stalkers who are exclusively female sure is a take and a half. To also imply that stalking always happens for sexual reasons is wrong and dangerous.
Remember that pin from earlier, where she says in FRE that stories with gay characters and BL are distinct? This section proves she does not fucking believe that. As "Which is why the story doesn't need to be sexually explicit to satisfy a female fans emotional needs" explicitly states. To Hilary Layne, stories about gay characters exist solely for sexual purposes (for women, anyway).
She also does state, "The Venn diagram of gay shipping fan fiction writers/readers and BL fans is almost a perfect circle". So.
She does make a note in FRE, that "Most of these readers and writers are heterosexual", with an extra bullet point beneath stating "In the west, a growing percentage of the female readership identifies as “queer”." As one of these “queer”s, I find this extremely fucking weird. To put in quotation marks queer and lump in queer women consuming/writing Yaoi with straight women implies, to me, that she does not think these women are actually queer. Or they're only queer for woke social points or whatever. I'll maybe return to this later, but she is REALLY weird in FHDW about "own voices" and queer people writing queer stories. (Along with anyone who isn't white and neurodivergent people)
In FRE, she also writes this absurd shit, "The audience and writers are overwhelmingly female. In fact, in the east this genre is specifically marketed to women, not men.", "The writers of BL are by majority female.", and "(Personal observation: a huge percentage of tumblr users who post a lot of BL content list their age as “30s”)"
Ah. I love "My personal observation of random women I loathe on tumblr" with no links. By the way she links fucking AMVs on youtube of M/M pairings like a petty cunt. So like she isn't above adding links to her shit.
But, anyway. Back to the video.
A very alarming majority of these works [BL] have strange dynamics. The more dominant masculine character tends to be older or at least larger, often much older... and also tends to lack any sense of consent or boundaries. The more submissive character is often younger... [he] appears younger and less experienced, and sometimes doesn't even start entirely gay. Not always, but often.
She then yaps on about an explicit work where an older man drugs and sexually assaults a younger man, and she mutters homophobically,
...which led to his, I guess, gay awakening or something. I don't know, I don't really go here.
I will reserve my comments on the first quote for a moment, to talk about the "not entirely gay" parts. Her stating that these men "don't start gay" is fucking weird and shows how little she knows on the topic of queer people. In this case the younger character didn't know he was gay. Being drugged and raped did not make him gay. While I am nitpicking and maybe from someone else this is a homophobic slip of the tongue, from her this shit is actively so malicious.
I am skipping forward, into her 9th section of FHDW, "Fanfiction as Formation".
And one can't help but wonder if this constant indulgence in these BLs and underage fanfictions with increasingly disturbing consent issues and age gaps and, the underage factor is perhaps a contributing factor in the apparent uptick in sexual crimes against young teenage boys committed by adult women.
And then, in her article, "It has been observed that BL is threatened in some western countries for no other reason than that country’s law against explicit material involving children. Which should tell you everything you need to know."
While generally speaking I do agree that consuming fiction with any depiction of children in sexual situations will lead to a large uptick in sexual crimes against children... The implication that indulging in BL as a whole will lead to women sexually assaulting young boys is fucking frightening and wrong.
If you remember earlier, she talked about how these "strange dynamics" in BL include an experienced older man and a younger, more sexually immature man. I think this is her directly implying that all stories about gay men, (even just romance, if we remember from earlier) will lead to women becoming sexual predators.
After the quote I just gave she talks about a 38 year old woman in Shalotte who attempted to sleep with teenage boys at a hotel. In which she adds, afterward, "your honor, that sounds like fanfiction brainrot to me." Which is a crazy thing to say about a crime where child victims are involved, alive, and can potentially HEAR that.
[If you enjoy a piece of media] You will eventually feel the desire to embody that fantasy in reality. Whether it's seeking out a girlfriend or boyfriend who abuses you, or becoming abusive yourself on a long enough timeline, it always happens.
Which is plainly fucking INSANE!!! The woman in the article did not consume fanfiction, to our knowledge, and to imply that anyone who consumes fanfiction about gay people will end up becoming sexual predators should piss anyone off. (Or I guess, she only implies this for women).
To also imply that in western countries (which ones? who knows!!) all BL is banned for having sexual content involving kids is so fucking crazy. Me when I imply an ENTIRE genre is banned because BL is child porn.
In her article, she links directly to hentai websites dedicated to BL. In which she does bring up some drawings of underage boys in sexual situations. No one can deny this happens, but like. To imply that this random website she links to which contains "popular translated BL comics, which include underage characters" is the large majority of Yaoi as a whole is malicious and homophobic as shit.
Plus, a little later in the video,
So. Yeah. Everyone who reads fanfiction that contains gay people (or just ANY fiction that contains gay people), according to this bitch, will eventually end up sexually assaulting children. Fucking awesome. Outstanding work Hilary Layne. Fuck you.
I've seen the live-action Chinese Drama... In terms of story, it's actually quite good. The dynamic between the two characters was changed to a friendship instead of a romance. And the change did make the story significantly less self-indulgent and allowed it to focus on the rest of the plot, which is a lot more interesting than what may or may not have been happening between these two dudes and uhh... [homophobic discomfort abt them fucking]
Now I did skip over this section in her video, and admittedly I am not very well versed on this situation. However she talks briefly about a Chinese book "The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation", which was then adapted into a live-action movie called "The Untamed".
The claims the book contained both BL and also explicit scenes with underage characters. Put a pin in this.
When the book was adapted into movie form, it was censored by the Chinese government to the point where the main characters were reduced to just friends, where before they were lovers. Hilary Layne claims,
I feel like her saying the story was made more interesting by the straight-washing of two queer characters speaks for itself. This piece of shit then goes on to talk about some sexual RPF posted on AO3, but she prefaced it with this.
However, fans of the original novel inserted their own needs into the live-action
She vaguely talks about Naruto while doing this btw. Have fun with that Naruto fans.
Sorry. Inserted their OWN NEEDS? Into the story censored by the government to make it explicitly not fucking queer??? THEIR OWN NEEDS?
Considering she threw a bitch fit and assumed someone talking shit about her shitty book (I read like 1 chapter it's bad) thought her two main characters were gay men, I think it is safe to assume she feels like every character is inherently straight unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Haha jk she does think that, because in her article and video she whinges over and over and over about how "these dastardly women are writing STRAIGHT characters as GAY!!!" in media where such characters are never explicitly specified to be gay.
Anyway the TLDR of this strange RPF situation is some stans of one of the actors got really mad at this fic on AO3, and strategically coordinated reports to the Chinese government to get this work taken down. And also probably have the author shot, maybe. Which ultimately led to AO3 being banned in China. To which she said (52:43),
The Chinese access to AO3 was and still is blocked as of filming this video, and became illegal to write such works or make art about real people or about underage characters. That latter part is kind of hard to get mad about if I'm being honest.
Oh so censorship is cool to this woman then. Just full on government censorship is fine. Don't get me wrong, I hate how Ao3 allows Underage shit, and Underage RPF especially so. However supporting a ban of AO3 that happened under the guise of "pedophilia bad", which actually will mainly ban queer stories, makes this piece of shit a fucking dickbag. Like sorry, that isn't a fucking good thing, because queer people can't read and write about queer stories now.
Also then she goes on a screed about how indulgence (anything that isn't stoic and serious in fiction) is inherently poisonous to the mind and not normal and perverted.
Due to restrictions on explicit content, the original original novel, which was published serially online in Chinese, had very little smut, if any... Many who read that version get very confused if you call The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation smutty. But later, the author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (a pseudonym) released additional chapters on her own blog/website to occur at various parts of the novel which were wildly explicit.
Also also remember that pin from earlier? About the explicit content in "Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation". SHE LIED. I LIED. THERE WASN'T SMUT IN THAT FUCKING SERIES.
In her own fucking article, she states,
I don't know how to really end this. There is obviously more about this nasty cunt to say, but like. I have been furiously, ragefully writing for two hours. And quite frankly this prudish cunt isn't worth much more of my time and hatred.
While, yes, these extra parts of the novel are made by the author and are supposed to take part in the novel, they are not officially part of the novel. You had to go out of your way to find the sexual parts of the series.
While it's totally fair to interpret those as canon to the source material (and I certainly would), she LIED in her video. She claimed it was just in there, which is not fucking true. Yeah, sure, it takes a while to explain how it's like partially true, she fucking should have. Which idk man this is the least important part but it pisses me off.
So yeah. Fuck this nasty bitch.
If I talk abt her again it'll be about her weird xenophobia, racist shit, or just her other queerphobic nonsense.
That or I'll talk about her raging hatred of women (dw she's one of the good ones).
That or I'll shit all over her hypocritical personality and her dry ass book.
So I'm listening to a response video to The Second Story, and I can't tell if Hilary Layne is a right-wing version of Lily Orchard, or Lily Orchard is a left-wing version of her. Because their views on fanfiction, tropes, romance, and what they consider to be harmful "smut" are eerily similar.
Funny how the Venn Diagram of conservative Christian women and radical feminists is too often a circle.
