Critique and fanfic
Jan. 14th, 2016 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fandomnumbergeneratorI’ve been thinking about this a lot. Because it’s something that I’ve had to relearn – the difference between consuming and criticizing commercial media and consuming fanfic.
I first got into fanfic because I wanted to see how people were dealing with Shelock’s drug use in the first two seasons of the BBC show. And as a former drug user, and a sometimes harm reduction activists, a lot of what I saw really upset me.
But the world of fanfic is expansive, and I don’t need to hold any individual piece, or even fanfic in aggregate, to the same standards I would hold something that is published for money, especially film and TV, where SO MANY people and SO MUCH money are involved.
I think the most powerful tool in fandom is the recommendation. Instead of bashing things you don’t like, you can hold up the things that you do like. And if grammar and word choice or novelistic writing, or certain types of representation, are important to you, you can express that with your recs.
I first got into fanfic because I wanted to see how people were dealing with Shelock’s drug use in the first two seasons of the BBC show. And as a former drug user, and a sometimes harm reduction activists, a lot of what I saw really upset me.
But the world of fanfic is expansive, and I don’t need to hold any individual piece, or even fanfic in aggregate, to the same standards I would hold something that is published for money, especially film and TV, where SO MANY people and SO MUCH money are involved.
I think the most powerful tool in fandom is the recommendation. Instead of bashing things you don’t like, you can hold up the things that you do like. And if grammar and word choice or novelistic writing, or certain types of representation, are important to you, you can express that with your recs.
