Funny thing happened to me recently.
Twitter was on fire a few weeks back when a lady who runs a podcast about being a better writer tweeted about how shitty fanfic is and how “bleak” it is that young writers are cutting their eyeteeth on it. She got massively, massively dunked on, which I’m sure ruined her week but was pretty great for the spectators, but this story isn’t about her.
I was clicking around in the discussion, and I found a guy who agreed with a lot of her points, and had tweeted like, “Good thing this lady’s got everyone talking about fanfic, maybe it will drive traffic to MY new article about how terrible fanfiction is!”
A jeremiad is a literary form named for the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. It is a work in which the author bitterly laments the corrupt and immoral practices of their times, and preaches about how this break from humanity’s more innocent past will lead to society’s immediate downfall.
And this article’s subheading is literally, “Fan culture’s endless search for “content” is leading us into artistic poverty.”
You can read it here, but the basic gist is: Fandom used to be about creativity and telling new stories, but now it’s just about sucking up whatever derivative drivel Disney wants to sell us and never demanding better from corporate mass media. Fans are slaves to capitalism and never resist being monetized or economically exploited!
At which point I was like… not only has this dude failed to prove that there was an Edenic “before” point, especially since he himself points out that Sherlock Holmes fans in the 1890s were clamouring for Arthur Conan Doyle to produce more content the same way Star Wars fans want new eps of The Mandalorian, but also, have you fucking met modern fandom?
And like, I get that in, say, video game fandoms, there are a ton of fans who scream loudly when their newest Call of Duty game release is pushed back two weeks because it’s not like the people making the thing need to eat or sleep, and when it’s out they scream at any reviewer who doesn’t give it 10/10. But this guy specifically comments on stuff like Sherlock, Star Wars, and slash fandom:
“[O]fficial shows or books could offer ambiguous homosocial/sexual relationships between characters with a nod and a wink, while counting on fans to generate the more explicit possibilities of Johnlock on Archive of Our Own. The [copyright owners] could therefore capture audiences hungry for homoerotic content without needing to create any themselves […] these corporations have realized that the existence of fan-made slash fiction means they don’t need to actually include diverse relationships in official works.”
THAT’S NOT HOW THIS WORKS
THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS
So I got Big Mad and I tweeted about it. And the author found and replied to my tweet, defending himself.
I pointed out how bad his takes were, especially since fan communities have been a leading force in the push for more diverse media over the last decade and fan frustration over Sherlock and recent Star Wars movies IN PARTICULAR led to mainstream publishing houses putting out books like Claire O’Dell’s A Study in Honor, where Holmes and Watson are Black lesbians, Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, a Rogue One Malaysia-inspired wuxia Baze/Chirrut love story, and Emily Skrutskie’s Bonds of Brass, the Finn/Poe space royalty AU the movies never gave us. I stayed civil, and I think I made some pretty good points.
The magazine @ed me to say they’d buy my response article.
My word limit was 1600 because that was all they could afford to pay me for, so I had to cut out the part where my eyes rolled out of my head because this dude called some white guy who published a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in 1949 “the first truly archetypal ‘fan’“, but I’m mostly over that. I worked out some of my rage and cut my initial 3400 word draft down. I tried to focus on the facts.
And… it’s up. You can read it here.
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