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  1. #3781

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    I prefer that one because much of my sustenance comes from others pain.
    Ask not the EldarGal a question, for she will give you three answers, all of which are puns and terrifying to know. Back off man, I'm a feminist. Ia! Ia! Gloppal Snode!

  2. #3782
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    Then you'll be pleased to know I'm 143,000 words in and still no smooches heh heh heh

  3. #3783

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    Fanfiction? You monsters...
    Read the above in a Tachikoma voice.

  4. #3784

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    Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeGrunt View Post
    Fanfiction? You monsters...
    Ask not the EldarGal a question, for she will give you three answers, all of which are puns and terrifying to know. Back off man, I'm a feminist. Ia! Ia! Gloppal Snode!

  5. #3785
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    Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeGrunt View Post
    Fanfiction? You monsters...
    If you look at it Paradise Lost is really just Bible fanfic (Joyce's Ulysses is an Illad fic), and, like, 99% of the Renaissance is biblical fanart

    Also:









    I agree, all men should learn about women’s sexuality by reading My Immortal.

    --

    Hi friend! Foz here. Just a couple of points:

    - I’ve specified good fanfiction in literally the first tweet. While this is, obviously, a value judgement wherein YMMV, My Immortal is famous for being arguably the most terrible fanfic ever written, and is therefore demonstrably not what I’m talking about.

    Similarly, I’ve seen other responses to this post bring up 50 Shades, which, despite its popularity in mainstream circles, is pretty much universally regarded as being not just terrible fanfic, but an excruciatingly bad and dangerously inaccurate portrayal of BDSM that romanticises abuse. So no: these are not the droids you’re looking for.


    - Here’s the thing, though: you already knew that. The decision to respond to this post with a flippant reference to a fic that’s notorious precisely because of its poor quality is exactly why I used up precious Twitter characters to specify good fanfic, even though I shouldn’t have had to.

    Every mode of artistic expression is composed of good, bad and mediocre works, but when it comes to genres that are traditionally viewed as less worthy or literary - like fanfiction, or romance - we have a reflexive tendency to conflate the bad with the whole, such that the good is implied to be either exceptional or nonexistant.

    I specified that I’m talking about good fanfiction, not because I think such fics are an exalted minority, but to pre-emptively combat the assertion that they are, and then you’ve gone and made it anyway. So, thanks for that.


    - But while we’re on the subject of quality, let’s make a very important distinction. Though fanfic is a largely unmediated medium, it’s not bad; it’s amateur, in the very literal, dictionary-definition sense of engaging or engaged in without payment; non-professional.

    While there’s a stereotype that lots of ficwriters are teenage girls - which, why is that always wielded as an insult? oh right, misogyny, carry on - a lot of us are, in fact, grown-*** adults of varying genders, some of whom also happen to write professionally in other contexts; like me, for instance.

    I’ve read fanfics that are unquestionably as good as, if not better than, many professionally published works I’ve read, some I’ve simply enjoyed or felt meh about, and others where I’ve mounted up on my Nopetopus and ridden off into the sunset after the first paragraph. It’s a grab bag, is what I’m saying, but if you think that’s an inherently different spectrum of enjoyment over quality than applies to any other medium, then I’d politely invite you to reconsider the matter.

    - In conclusion: fanfic might not be your bag, but it has its own culture of editing, collaboration, publication, criticism and dissemination, its own conventions and subversions of same, its own extensive history and trope awareness, and, yes, its near-unique status as a medium invested in female sexual desire.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t other things straight dudes can do to learn the mystical ways of What Women Want like, oh, say, talking to them, always bearing in mind that women are not a ******* hivemind, but given that there are a frightening number of guys out there whose first or primary exposure to any type of porn is whatever degrading mainstream het they can scrounge up for free without virusing the hell out of their PCs, then yeah: I’m gonna go out on a ****ing limb and suggest they maybe balance it out with some fanfic.
    Why is femslash the smallest genre in the world of fanfiction? Why is femslash the most underrepresented relationship type by a sizeable margin? More importantly, why is it that almost all femslash writers are queer women?

    Male slash pairings are written by straight women, queer women, and even some men (I say “even” because men are rarer than a two dollar bill in the world of fanfiction) and they’re read by a mostly female audience. Femslash has a completely different ideology, because it’s almost exclusively written and consumed by the community it portrays. Unlike a straight girl writing about two boys having sex (and I guarantee that they’re two conventionally attractive white boys whose female love interests have been deemed either worthy of death or asexual by the fandom), femslash is written by those whose identities and personal narratives are reflected in the stories themselves. Maybe the writer of that erotic scene hasn’t had sex with a girl yet, but damn, she has thought about it a lot.

    That queer author writes two girls falling in love even if they’re straight in the original work because two girls falling in love means something to her and to so many people like her, and it’s important that she sees herself in a piece of media whose canon forgets she exists. One of the great frustrations of LGBTQ media is the fact that so little of our representations end up coming from LGBTQ-identified creators, and thus we see inaccurate portrayals with limited diversity.

    Femslash exists because we were sick of being told we didn’t exist, so we wrote ourselves into their stories.

  6. #3786

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    My sojourner into the MLP fandom was my only contact with fanfiction ever. I knew a few who wrote it and it was pretty cool to chat to them about it. I still chat to some of them fairly regularly in general, but most faded away. The interesting part of the viewpoint is that they simply saw characters, rather than cartoon horses, which was why it was quite funny when you pointed out, "you're writing about cartoon horses falling in love." You'd get a reply along the lines of, "no, I'm writing about a snooty, high-society type falling for a grungy student DJ."

    It had that element of living vicariously through your characters, is what I mean. I imagine that's a common thread across fanfic.

    That said, there was still some weird sh*t in that fandom, make no mistake.
    Read the above in a Tachikoma voice.

  7. #3787

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    It's the shipping that puts me off fanfic.

    I mean, I know it's consciously released into the public domain, but some of it is just a bit too personal. Feels like snooping through someone's private diary.

    For everyone else, by all means read and enjoy. I'll be over in my corner being curiously weird about sex.
    Fed up for Scalpers? https://www.facebook.com/groups/1710575492567307/?ref=bookmarks

  8. #3788
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    Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeGrunt View Post
    "you're writing about cartoon horses falling in love." You'd get a reply along the lines of, "no, I'm writing about a snooty, high-society type falling for a grungy student DJ."
    You're an Octiscratch shipper?

    However the process of robo-insemination is far too complex for the human mind!
    A knee high fence, my one weakness

  9. #3789
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    However the process of robo-insemination is far too complex for the human mind!
    A knee high fence, my one weakness

  10. #3790
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    Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeGrunt View Post
    It had that element of living vicariously through your characters, is what I mean. I imagine that's a common thread across almost all literature and film.
    FTFY

    On a less facetious point part of it is that, as what I quoted above said, fanfiction generally isn't written by or for men. It's written by and for women (and girls), so the alienation most men feel to fanfiction (outside of the "eww teenage girls like it it must be dumb because I'm a misogynist" reactions) is very similar to what it's like for women reading about men - especially white men (ie almost all of "the classics).

    Difference is women are taught to accept this from birth, but the inverse is that men are taught that their view is universal - a film about a man is something everyone can relate to, same story but with a woman is a chick flick, and non-exploitative films about minorities are considered even more niche - so seeing something that challenges it is alien.

    Not saying that is necessarily your reaction CG, but whenever men (and it's men 99% of the time) go "eww fanfiction", my reaction is basically to roll my eyes because it usually comes from a place of ignorance and privilege. By that I mean people don't understand why people do it, which is both because of it being a way of interacting with media.

    Consider if 40k was just a series of novels & art books, would there be more fan art since there aren't official models to paint? Like making your own chapter or regiment or craftworld is very similar to the fan fic process - take the canon (ie a codex Marine Chapter) and put your own spin on it. These guys don't have land speeders but have lots of dreadnoughts because X. Veterans paint their left leg blue because Y.

    Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about.

    The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
    Look at that second paragraph & consider how fans react when GW does something that doesn't mesh with their view of 40k "culture" (kulture?) - 3rd party guys make alternate parts, people convert models or even scratchbuild. Very similar thought process to "I thought Godfather part 3 sucked and if they'd payed Robert Duvall properly and gone with the Michael vs Tom plot built up in part 2 it would've been great - so here's my version of it (230k words, alive!Sonny, Al Neri is a furry, Michael/Tom endgame, don't like don't read)".

    A little exaggerated, but hopefully you get the idea.

    Also fanfiction in it's modern guise started with Star Trek because the female fans wanted stories that reflected what they wanted - they loved the characters & lore, but they weren't seeing what they wanted from a storytelling perspective (or many female characters either).

    Just like women & minorities create or change characters to include themselves when people wont, gamers scratchbuild, proxy or buy 3rd party when GW wasn't supplying miniatures for their rules. Hell, even before the primarchs got rules people were making their own renditions of them and have been for years and years.

    Oh and fanfiction is hardly new:

    I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him
    (not quite accurate [URL="http://www.shmoop.com/don-quixote/false-sequel-symbol.html"]but carries the spirit of it[/URL])

    Jules Verne wrote his own sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's only novel and several essays about how great Poe was too.

    And I've read fics waaaay better than a lot of published stuff (I'm looking at you, The Last Church) so, um, yeah, ramble over now I guess

    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Mystery View Post
    It's the shipping that puts me off fanfic.

    I mean, I know it's consciously released into the public domain, but some of it is just a bit too personal. Feels like snooping through someone's private diary.

    For everyone else, by all means read and enjoy. I'll be over in my corner being curiously weird about sex.
    Yeah but you don't like anime so what do you know?

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