I'm absolutely gonna forget to finish this thought
Y'all remember Brit picking? Any of y'all ever think about how fucked it was?
For the new kids--back in the superwholock era, Sherlock fic was...having a moment
Disclaimer this is not about the more serious shit like the death threats and I read johnlock basically exclusively, idk if this phenomenon happened in other areas of the fandom but
Brit picking was having a native Brit (or the closest thing to it you could get your hands on) to check your spelling and your slang for you. Failure to take this step, maybe especially as an American, was the height of sin and folly and led to some INTENSE shit. You were not taken seriously as your very best case scenario
Every author's note thanked inspo, friends, their beta, and their Brit picker. Again, best case scenario is you aren't taken seriously
And like. That was somehow normal. I never saw anyone speak against it or say it was weird or anything. This was normal. It was expected. Maybe not from go, but certainly by season 3 ish/somewhere shortly after a/b/o took off (it's bedtime I am not about to look that up)
But you go anywhere else. Any other big fandom. Nobody gets on people for not American checking. I've read like six obviously written by a British person teen wolf fics in the past two weeks and I have a stranger things fic open right now that disclaimers it in the AN
So many no-american-picker fics in a row has forced my brain to really send a lot of thought on this and how antithetical Brit picking was to the spirit of fandom
Authors do this for free. Betas do it for free. We can bind for free. We're doing all of this as a show of love, for the fun, and the spectrum of quality is a huge part of the experience
Some people bang out 1k words of crack fic, and immediately post, some people research more than any other author in any field you have ever read. I've read fanfic researched more thoroughly than full length novels. Some of y'all go hard and I appreciate it so much don't get me wrong
Like I do love the effort. I love the passion. I am so extremely here for it. And I can see how this general enthusiasm for accuracy can lead to this. Maybe you missed the terf books and that fandom, maybe you don't recall slang easily, maybe you don't have enough exposure, so you ask someone to look it over. Is it a boot? Flashlight or torch? Am I using pants correctly?
And the desire and the asking isn't what's bad here, it's the expectation that arose
Your best case scenario was that nobody would take you seriously. No hits, no reads, maybe a comment about how you suck and their immersion was ruined. Like all things that spin out control on the internet, this grew consequences
Again. We do this for free and for fun and for love. Because we love our little blorbos so much we can't put it down and we wanna share our toys. We LIKE to have a beta read fic, but by and large we don't EXPECT it. Maybe we can't handle no beta, but we skip and move on, with no hard feelings. No beta we die like the cosmic chewtoy of the franchise doesn't have real consequences. There's no expectation. We take you seriously. We take you seriously if you're writing something set in the US but slip and call it a boot instead of a trunk.
But for whatever reason we didn't extend grace to Sherlock writers, and we did treat them differently for not Brit oicking
Idk how to wrap this I should be asleep and I honestly didn't think I'd get this much out now
