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Notes on Broadcasting your petpeeves
Jan. 16th, 2016 11:23 pmI’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.--
buckballbearing has a good comment on this, that the issue is not money, per se, but cultural prestige. And they bring up the marketing of BDSM associated with 50SoG as an example of something that a lot of people are critical of. A number of other people have said that they felt a responsibility for responding to issues of representation in 50SoG that they wouldn’t have felt about Master of the Universe.
And there’s clearly a line somewhere, where for instance, people can talk about whether they find the violence in Bitch Betta Have My Money to be misogynist or empowering. Or whether 24 normalizes torture. And even in indie press books with very small runs, there is a place for public critique and negative reviews, that wouldn’t be appropriate for fanfic.
Really, I’m still working on where I stand on this.---
I’ve been thinking of trying out WattPad for exactly that reason. I’ve got a thing I’m writing, but I am really reticent to post it on AO3, because there seems to be a cultural norm against making major edits after posting. So it’s sort of moldering as a WIP because I’m not happy with the next chapter.
Tumblr is so huge that content quickly becomes unfindable. And link rot means that any rec list that’s pointing to Tumblr content is going to become useless pretty quickly.
So it makes sense to me that people are backing up their drabbles on AO3. Bits are so cheap now that people may be using it as a form of cloud storage. I think previously a lot of this stuff would have been written on kink meme and then maybe or maybe not de-anoned and cleaned up and moved to AO3, but now it’s being written straight onto Tumblr and so is never anonymous.
I would actually love if a lot of meta got archived on AO3, though of course images and GIFs are an important part of meta, and that’s not really what AO3 is for.
