olderthannetfic - Tumblr blog

olderthannetfic · 28 minutes

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Bisexual Woe, Legend of Korra Edition: Shipping Korra with a man makes her straight. Shipping Korra with any girl other than Asami means you're biphobic and playing into the stereotype of bi women sleeping around. Shipping Asami with anyone else means the same thing. Shipping Makorrasami means you're a filthy bigot fetishizer who thinks bi = threeways or polyamory. Bisexual means eternally devoted to one woman and one woman only.

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olderthannetfic · 3 hours

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https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/748198204050423808/it-has-to-be-one-of-the-biggest-scam-in-stem?source=share

I feel like any "potatoes are for white eople and therefore bad" rhetoric is going to have either American classism or European xenophobia for undertones, even aside from the overt racism of taking potatos away from their South American origins.

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olderthannetfic · 4 hours

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I found a fic tagged with hashtags, and the entire thing was ONE tag. #LikeThis#AllOnOne#ActualTagline#LikeThat

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olderthannetfic · 5 hours

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Has anyone noticed more use of “consensual sex pollen”? Doesn’t that feel like it kind of defeats the purpose of the trope? I guess it’s people using it consensually as an aphrodisiac, but i feel like I’ve been in fandom drama land so long it’s hard not to view it as people trying to make “safe” a trope where the unsafe nature is the whole point. Like people who feel guilty for their love of the trope or something

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I remember a kink "wiki" (actually a set of DW posts) that harped on and on about how tentacles could be consensual. Sure, they can, but my dude... you're running kink-themed fandom events... what the fuck do you think most of the tentacle fans are after? It was so egregious on so many trope descriptions that it ended up being mega kink-shamey.

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olderthannetfic · 7 hours

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Would you say that two teens (under 18) going to second base should get an underage or CNTW warning, or is it ok as NAWA? I realized this about an old fic and am wondering if I should re-tag it.

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Define second base

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olderthannetfic · 8 hours

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I get a little bit confused by people who say (or complain) that they were blocked by someone even though they never spoke to them as if that was a necessary prerequisite? Both here and on AO3, if I see somebody with a very stupid take or blog header (a DNI is usually block on sight), I'll just block them bc I already know I don't want to be dealing with them.

And on ao3 I know the two functions are relatively new, but still, when I see authors being nasty in tags, ANs, or in their profile, I mute (and/or block) because, again, that's somebody I already know I won't like interacting with.

So yeah maybe I'm weird but I really don't get this 'but why did they block me I never even talked to them' that I keep seeing ppl post bc... That's normal to me? You have an entire blog/profile that you've made, I don't need to talk to you to know what you think/post. Plus, especially on AO3, a mute/block doesn't prevent you from seeing the author's works anyway. I know it's probably natural to wonder 'but what did I do', but still.

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olderthannetfic · 9 hours

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I think with the "not tagging right" thing that annoys me the most is around squicks like SA, or other hot potato canon plot elements. Especially when it's one of those "gray canon" tags, like it's on the may be or may NOT be canon. Tags that annoy the shit outta me in that regard "canon abuse" "X's canon backstory" "Arc'name where that was a Gray canon happened."

Like, I'm in a fandom where this is a fucking split between writers, and you never know who's fic will mention SA, or in how much graphic detail. Especially mention it in a way that's written badly. At this point I feel like there's some kinda anti-purity kink with some of those writers, because of how they write it, but don't wanna tag because it'll reveal their kink.

Also Abuse=/=SA. I'm trying to filter here, and you won't let me.

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olderthannetfic · 11 hours

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Am I the only one who thinks some fanfic writers are nosy and insecure? Maybe it's just this particular Facebook group but it's a big Ao3 writers group so I know the majority are also here, but I was asking how I should thank someone nicely for writing a fic I didn't like (it's part of an anonymous gift exchange from a Discord server. Despite putting the things I want included in the fic the result was still disappointing) and some people were like "why didn't you like it?" or "share the fic, I want to see what's so bad about it," as if not liking a fic is such a big deal.

I said I would thank them for their hard work, I'm just bad at scripting the words (cuz I'm autistic) and I thought other writers who had been in my position could give an example. I expected short and direct answers and instead met with people wanting to know more about how I got to this point.

I have multiple people saying how "This is why I won't ever do gift exchange" or "this is why I stop making fic from other people, there's one time someone said really bad things about it." As if I didn't ask EXACTLY how I should respond politely.

This isn't the first time I got this kind of thing, whenever I ask a trope or a tag that's remotely dark or dead dove-related there will always be a person or two going, "Why would you want to write that? I don't think it will get people to read." Which is funny because there is a lot that has spoken about antishipping or antifiction behavior and how to not treat people that way. Esp since that group supposedly exists to help support any fanfic writer.

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olderthannetfic · 12 hours

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www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/748145715822362625/one-reason-the-why-not-ff-discussion-doesnt-go I'm the anon complaining about "imagined hypocrisy" if you remember me: hey, yeah, so what this anon is doing is 100% what I meant by that. You (anon) might have seen people say "fandom does what canon does even better than canon." But do you know for sure that the M/M shipper anons here have all said that? Have they all set out to do what canon does better than canon? Have they all guaranteed that their fic is better than canon? Because most of them probably haven't. This is what I was referring to! This exact rhetorical device! "You CLAIM X, but you ALSO say Y, which contradicts X. So can you ACTUALLY claim X?" Even though most of the people claiming X have NEVER claimed Y! Most of these M/M shippers have NEVER claimed that their fic is better or more progressive than canon. They've never set out to "fix" canon. They just wanna write dudes fuckin'!!! That's all! You're imagining hypocrisy where there's no evidence of it to suit your own argument and paint your opponents in a less reasonable light!

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("Imagined hypocrisy" anon here again): To be very clear, I HAVE seen people say "fanon is better than canon/fanon is more progressive/fanon fixes canon." I'm not here to accuse original anon of lying about what they've seen people say. I'm saying that to discredit the people defending M/M by going "but hmmm, doesn't everyone claim fanon is supposed to be better than canon?" is a rhetorical fallacy if you don't know for a fact that the people defending M/M are a part of that "everyone." Some of them probably ARE, yes, but to conflate the circle of people insisting fanon is better than canon with the circle of people defending M/M so as to discredit the circle of people defending M/M by accusing them of hypocrisy is fallacious.

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olderthannetfic · 13 hours

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It's impressive how some people can talk about intersectionality, acknowledge and understand the difference between SYSTEMIC racism and (individual) racism, but when actually confronted by the fact that individual racism exists and concrete examples they completely shut down and default to only speaking about systemic and erasing individual racism, even when the case pointed at clearly is born from individual racism, or "demographic" racism.

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olderthannetfic · 13 hours

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I was running some AO3 stats and going "What is this and why is it so popular??" but then I saw the vids, and it was no mystery.

1 week ago I barely knew 911 the tv show existed. Today I am 2 seasons deep and unsure how I thought the gifs made this show look so deeply heterosexual. thanks tumblr

so sorry if I helped inflict this upon you except no I’m not! the entire show makes me feel like I have taken powerful hallucinogens and every time I think the most insane thing has happened a new scene begins and I yet again learn my lesson. “what if we wrote a 5+ year slow burn gay romance where first comes coparenting a child and then comes curtainfic and then comes a coming out scene and then comes [TBD] and also that is just two characters and everyone else is having equally unhinged plots” yeah okay go for it. The show is like the videotape in The Ring, only way to survive it is to pass it on and permanently alter the landscape of someone else’s psychological stability. Truly impossible to explain, must be experienced to understand (jk comprehension is impossible)

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olderthannetfic · 14 hours

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(Freydís Moon anon) sent too soon, sorry. I was only going to add that the author had (allegedly; I haven't seen the posts/tweets myself) used their identity as a nonbinary Latine person as a defense when people made criticisms of their books or how they wrote certain characters.

On the one hand, this is one reason I don't like pushing You Own Voices on a pedestal. Even if it turns out the accusations are wrong and Moon is exactly who they say they are, Moon can still have fumbled with how they wrote those characters, even if they are Latine. *points to criticisms people have of Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas*

On the other, I hope this doesn't lead to another wave of minority authors being scrutinized. Once I'm published, I would rather not have every part of my person picked apart and examined. Critics can keep that to my work. I'd rather keep my life and identity private.

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olderthannetfic · 14 hours

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More author drama dropped recently. Freydís Moon, an indie nonbinary Latine author, was recently outed as actually being white with a history of racism under a different penname. I can't see the twitter thread about it since I don't have an account anymore, but I started looking at the Google doc someone shared in r/romancelandia.

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I saw some mentions in a discord, but I haven't dug into it yet. What kind of work does this asshole write?

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olderthannetfic · 14 hours

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just going to put my 2 cents as someone who writes F/F and a few rare F/M and M/M fics.

This is a doosy but here we go.

A little caveat before I thought, I write F/F for a small fandoms.

The F/F ships are not canonical, but if i compare the amout of times I got comments telling me that i'm writing through "male gaze", that a woman won't behave like that, or that this fic that i'm writing is not a good representation of F/F dynamic I would have a lot of sickles.

The amount of negative comments is unfathomable compared to the negative comments I get on my rare F/M or M/M fics if any.

I'm sorry but sometimes people don't know what they want and people also put too much pressure on fanfic writers.

One day i woke up to my fic being shared on big subreddit and i legit turned on comment moderation.

what i will say about M/M spaces though I feel like and this may be the experience of me being mostly in drarry and wolfstar for M/M the community there or at least the part of i've experienced is... how should I call it not welcoming exactly.

The few servers I've joined they treated F/F and F/M ships as though they are below them and that writers will eventually "graduate" to writing the more wholeshome ships like theirs.

funny how M/M ships are the wholesome ones, they have all the range, they can be messy and all over the place and "unhealthy" (Whatever that word means as the fandom really bastardized the meaning of 'toxic' and 'unhealthy relationships).

And yet the F/F fics should be perfect and exactly right, and good representation. Not to mention how the readers are reacting to butch characters.

anyhow... i'm angry it's 4am and i'm tired. let me just write my silly fics ffs

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olderthannetfic · 15 hours

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I suspect one could say the same of due South and Highlander and SGA.

There used to be The Next Big Slash Fandom that just about everyone stampeded to. It's just that it was an "everyone" that was a lot more niche than now when far more people are into fanfic and far more different fanfic communities cross-pollinate.

But yes, man, the sheer staying power of Sentinel fandom!

You keep talking about the origins of AO3 as this group effort by an actual group of people who were friends and who spent time discussing this with each other in person. It's kind of blowing my mind. Is there a post or a journal somewhere that specifically keeps record of this?

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I'm dying.

Nonnie, seriously?

No, that's mean, I know you're serious. It's just flabbergasting how much fandom has expanded and how much there isn't a direct link to the past.

Astolat and Cesperanza floated the idea at Vividcon and various places, I think, though I wasn't going to cons in that era. We were all on LJ in those days, and Astolat made a big post nailing her theses to the door. Discussion in the comments was instant and prolonged.

A LJ com was set up to discuss. It was later renamed to otw_news, but if you go all the way back to the beginning, you can see brainstorming mess instead of official news posts.

Fanlore page linking to Astolat's post and giving a little context.

Early brainstorming: https://otw-news.livejournal.com/2007/05/

For example, here I am collecting links to older archives to look at for research when designing AO3.

Fun fact, we never intended to call it AO3. There was a whole call for name suggestions, but nothing was as evocative as astolat's original post title referencing Virginia Woolf. (For those who haven't thought about it, AO3's name is a reference to A Room of One's Own.)

Here's the name discussion

Here's the poll that came out of it

But also notice how many people voted: 562.

That's how many people cared at the time: a few hundred. Maybe a thousand if you count lurkers, but frankly, that community was not as lurkery as now. It wasn't just ten friends. It was a community effort. But what "our" community looked like at the time was vastly different. It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon astolat, not a vast sea of strangers like fic fandom on AO3 is now.

Here's an early post suggesting we ban the under 18s from the site entirely. Pity we didn't do so, given the rise of antis.

Here's the invite to a fundraising party at astolat's in NYC that following Halloween. I dressed as Amanda from Highlander, not very well.

You can tell we knew each other by looking at those comments on astolat's initial post. You can also tell how discussion-based that part of fandom was back in 2007.

The way my tumblr is now with a ton of text, back and forth, and hopping around between threads of conversation, all featuring a consistent set of faces, is very much like LJ. Most of tumblr is not.

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olderthannetfic · 16 hours

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Saw this person on YouTube complaining about how a lot of fictional works make a point of mentioning body count and doing a Madonna-Whore complex (especially for female characters) which, y'know, valid point.

And then they say "historical romance is the worst offender" and I'm like ...

Hmm, I wonder why characters in a historical romance set in Ancient China / Medieval Europe / Regency Era / etc. don't have a feminist understanding of sex positivity and will slutshame / praise virginity. It must be that the authors are drinking the purity culture kool-aid and no other possible reasons, after all the patriarchy was invented by the Reagan.

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olderthannetfic · 17 hours

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The F/F debate reminded me of what got me out of writing Disney femslash, which I suspect is the culprit behind many talented writers leaving many fandoms full of F/F: the rise of antis panicking about what had been a long-established and big-name ship. In this case, Merida and Elsa. For lots of us, the contrast of "strong-spirited, open, does what she wants, repaired her relationship with her mom" and "secretive, reserved, does what she thinks is best for others, never repaired her relationship with her parents" was a lot of fun. Visually different, both have their own fully-realized character arcs, and neither seem canonically into men.

Then antis lost their shit about the age gap. And of course you can't say in your AU they're the same age, because once a minor, forever a minor, somehow.

This drove a lot of very talented fan creators (artists, writers, comic makers, etc.) out of the Disney femslash community and the Disney fandom entirely. Pivoting to other, less-controversial ships was not enough to avoid harassment if you'd done work with this ship before.

And in the same way people go "women suck at math" instead of "you suck at math", this problem is really prominent in M/M and M/F spaces. But when there are fewer F/F shippers to start with, people being driven out of making it makes the existing gap in F/F vs M/M worse.

The problem isn't that people don't like female characters. Female characters get gushed about in the Disney fandom far more often than the men, even by M/M shippers - it's common for M/M writers to write the woman from canon's M/F ship as living her best life, either single or with a woman, often at the top of her field in a canonical hobby or interest turned into her new career. Even non-shippers focus on women more than men in the Disney fandom; Esmeralda has much, much more genfic than Quasimodo, because the fandom is smitten with her.

In the end, while a lot of radfem types try to blame cis lesbians for not "doing their part" (good lord that wording is gross), the culprit here is the same culprit as in the comic example you gave: the common factor between "you suck at math/we need more fic" and "women suck at math/we need more F/F fic" is toxic fandom.

Until we fix fandom's toxicity - and I have no Earthly idea how that would come about - we're not going to get this fixed.

Discourse is unnecessary. We know what the problem is.

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