i'm honestly so glad for fanfiction writers. to all the fanfiction writers out there: i love you to death, and i hope your pillow is cold on both sides and exactly as soft or as hard as you want it for the rest of your life. thank you, thank you, thank you. y'all make my life better everyday.

Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:

I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.

IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.

I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.

Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).

Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.

At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).

Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.

So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.

Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.

Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).

Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.

The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.

The bible is way shorter than I thought

I've read the bible 4x over worth of fanfiction in the last 3.5 months, and that's just adding up the big ones

God works hard but fanfiction writers work harder

This Horror Which Bleeds [ read on A03 ]

He'd known, realistically, that Lilith was gone, and that she'd no intention of coming back. The knowledge didn't make Lucifer anymore prepared to find her mark engraved on the Radio Demon's soul.

Charlie asks her father to check in with Alastor after the hotel's reconstruction. In the process, Lucifer makes a discovery, and things get worse before they get better.

Well, it is here—my first ever big bang! I’ve kept VERY mum on this throughout the whole process, but I am super proud (and dreadfully nervous) to present to y’all:

nothing grows in corpses (in the earth of me)

Just over 100k words in a universe where the show ends the same way as the comics do until Death decides it doesn’t. Things…fall apart in a spectacularly ghastly fashion.

Ft. angst, whump, hurt/comfort, the VERY long road that is physical & psychological recovery, and by and large Hob being a life-loving bastard and Morpheus being a grave-obsessed bitch. Please heed the full tags list. Got nearly every category of Dead Dove: Don’t Eat in there.

But it’s not all heavy! Have some spectacularly captured comedy from my amazing artist @shrugsinchinese ! You were such a joy to work with, and I am so glad you were the first person who shared in the complete story. 😊

•

TAGGED:

@strandhai

@the-centennial-husbands-bigbang

That's right!! The Fic List is going to New York Comic Con!!!! 😱🤯🥳

Come see us and the unparalleled @icaruspendragon aka Berklie co-host "An Abridged (Unhinged) History of Fan-Fiction" on Thursday, October 12 at 7:15 PM! Expect goofiness, shenanigans, and the occasional history lesson 😉

Visit NYCC's official page for more information about our panel and the con! Hope to see you there!

mini-oneshot; post Neil's death. the usual content warnings apply - depression + some pretty severely bad mental health + alcohol + injury + quite a bit of swearing.

For a long time afterwards he lay and did nothing. He lay until his bones fused with the sheets and Meeks started to look pale and then they came in and threatened him with suspension so he got up and went to class. But in his mind he was lying still, all the time. The others let him alone half out of pity and half out of fright, like a dog that should have been put down when it was a runt. He tried to care but could not care about caring. The new teacher set them an essay on iambic pentameter and instead of writing it he reproduced one of Rimbaud’s poems, the one that began Pitoyable frère! Que d'atroces veillées je lui dus… The essay came back unmarked with a hasty grade scribbled in the margin, and he thought, great. So I can’t even rebel right. Then what the hell did he do it for? At nights he would lie down and listen jealously to the sound of his own breathing, trying to breathe like someone else, and hating all the time the dark mound of blankets that was Cameron’s back in the corner of his vision. 

He lay down and he lay down and he lay down until one night he woke up and he was no longer lying down but climbing out of the window. It had stuck in the frame as he pulled it up but it was holding, and he shimmied his legs out over the narrow sill, avoiding the open bottle of schnapps on the desk, and thought perhaps there had been enough lying, perhaps he would try running. It must be nice to feel the ground beneath your feet, the steady jolt of your heart in your chest, no entrapment, no cage… his fingers spasmed on the sill and his legs kicked involuntarily, like the legs of men when they were sentenced to hang. He made himself stop thinking. And then after that all was an explosion; sound and noise and no light, no light still but the sharp clinical mortuary beam of the moon by the window. He could not touch it, he tried, and then it was gone again out of his sight and Cameron was kneeling over him on the floor of the room, looking furious. What the fuck did you do that for, he was saying, or maybe it was Why the fuck are you acting like this, or even, Why the fuck him and not you? He tried to say something pithy like I was hoping you’d tell me that, slick, but his mouth seemed to be missing somehow. The words came out of him but he kind of knew he had not said them. Cameron knelt there for a long time, his mouth twisting with a great and terrified fury. There was something shining on his face – tears, maybe… he looked closer and it was blood. He looked down at his hands and saw two deep gouges, running lengthways across his palms. Then the words came. Kind of like Jesus, huh? he said, holding his palms up in front of him. Behind Cameron the door opened and Pitts came in. Maybe he’ll come back.

Jesus Christ, said Cameron, you’re drunk. All around them the shards of the schnapps bottle lay like diamonds, glittering, like the water of the lake he could see from the window. He remembered now; he had been trying to get there. His arms ached to swim. Cameron got up and trembled and said, Could have killed yourself. The rest of it he forgot in the time that passed. 

It was some days later that Pitts slapped him round the face; he jolted, surprised, but with no pain. Pull yourself together, he said to him, do you think any of us like seeing you like this, you shit, don’t you dare go away like that. Pull yourself together. It was desperation and it was ugly desperation but even the ugly desperation was something and everything stopped blurring together if only for a second. The anger had drained away with the slap and Pitts said to him, Meeks is sleeping in your bed tonight. You can take his.

They had moved the stack of books on his desk to Meeks’ temporarily, only taking his favourites, and something very muffled inside him began to weep at the sight. Pitts sat him down on the bed which was newly made and shoved him not unkindly into a lying position and tucked the blanket under him on all sides so that he felt enfolded, and said, Sleep. I’m going to bed too.

Not even curfew, Todd said.

Who gives a shit about curfew, said Pitts, it’s some kind of social construct, it doesn’t mean anything. Sleep. You want me to read you a story?

When he woke up again the moon was stark bright and casting light in slabs through the window and the book in Pitts’ hands had slumped to the floor. He had gotten halfway through the Morte d’Arthur. There had been a lake in that, too… He got up and went soundlessly to the window, which did not squeak this time, and climbed out. 

His shoes he left neatly by the bank. When he came back to himself he was already in the water, and it was so lovingly cold he could have cried, and did. The reality of each of his senses came back to life. Cold and cold and cold. He stretched out an arm and the water held it, and a foot and the water held that too. Each spike of ice through his limbs felt sweet. He heard Neil’s voice and saw Neil’s face, saying, No, and he told him No too in return. He would have to take care of himself, now. But he twisted in the water and thought to himself that Pitts would be waiting for him, which was a beginning. 

He pulled himself out of the lake and gasped for long burning moments, heard by no-one, and understood with complete certainty that he was alone. He would always be alone now, in some sense, for the rest of his life. That space within him would be empty. He opened his mouth and said it loudly: “I do not think he is coming back.” There was a relief to the feel of the words in his mouth that made him retch and he started to cry as he retched, ungracefully, sprawled there by the cold and glittering water. 

He cried until the tears and the vomit stopped coming and then he put the heels of his palms on the ground and pushed himself up against them, ignoring the sting. There was a new great and hollow space inside him and a piercing cold clarity and he had left, it seemed, all of his confusion inside the water. He stood up feeling like he had just been born. Then he started walking.

at first i can't really relate to the whole "bad art is better than good art" thing until i realized the so-called "bad" art are just artworks made by people who are driven by passion to make what they love and not because they aim to sell it for mass consumption

it's mostly because every time i encounter this topic in art space the examples are always a bit too... far-reaching for me to understand, like no dude i don't get french cinema or any european shit most of the time it's hard for me to relate to it as an asian

but when the argument is presented like what i said earlier, now i can finally understand what it means

because i've seen and read so many fanworks that are "rough around the edges" yet still really caught my attention and makes me inspired to draw more and create more

its not that art made for mass consumption are not art, is that when commercialization comes into factor when making art, it become less about people wanting to express themselves but more about a bunch of executives wanting to sell a product and gain profits

just like everything else really, capitalism makes us care MORE about the work as we care LESS about the people who have to make it

how many people get annoyed to the point of verbal abuse when a comic chapter released one week late from its scheduled release

that's what i mean by caring more about the product than the people making it

Gwynriel

Elucien

Miscellaneous

Multi-chapter Fics

Acotar Writing Circle

Usually the problem is a fandom having way less fanfics than you expected/wanted but I’ve just come across the opposite: a fandom with way more fics than I could have ever expected

Why does The Stanley Parable have almost 3000 fics?!?

People act like fanfiction shouldn't be taken seriously, but 10 Things I Hate About You is Shakespeare fanfiction and I think we can all agree that that is one of the greatest movies of all time

Dear Tumblrers, do you like writing flashbacks in your stories?

There's this story I'm working on, and I've written it with a serious flashback to 3 years ago, but I've come to regret it. I think it's a poor plot device - personally. What's your take on it?

To all my writer loves out there. ✨

Drop me a link in my inbox to a favorite of your works, and I will be sure to drop some positivity and love in your comments/inbox.

Alternatively, drop me a link to one you had/are having trouble with and I’ll see if I can offer some advice/suggestions!!! 🖤🖤

I’m having a bit of a moral debate about the morality of writing fanfic about real people (specifically historical figures) and I’m interest on other people’s opinions;

idek if this is actually true but i saw ppl arguing abt the atyd james pov in a tiktok bc its apparently going to include jegulus which deviates from the original plot quite a bit. do you still think it should b called an atyd pov fic?? tbh i just think ppl are making a big deal out of nothing and anyone can write and take inspiration from anything yk?? but i do wanna know ur opinion on this

truly cannot emphasize enough how much i absolutely do not care what other people wanna write in their fics lmao

honestly i think ur right it's just people making a big deal out of nothing. if someone wants 2 imagine what jegulus would look like in an atyd universe then...that's fine. nobody has to read it if they don't want to. i certainly have no place 2 judge bc i included things in my own fic that were extrapolations and/or inventions that mkb likely would not have intended to/imagined including as part of her story. that's what fanfiction is tho! it is specifically someone else's take on a work that is separate + distinct from the og writer's, and nobody has to read it + treat is as gospel if they don't want to. like i honestly don't see the problem with someone writing a hyopthetical "atyd canon-compliant" fic that includes jegulus bc atyd itself is a "harry potter canon-compliant" fic that centers on wolfstar lmao. like do we see the irony there.

anyway i honestly just think that there's a portion of this fandom that is incapable of treating atyd like fanfiction and instead try to put it up on a pedestal in its own venerated category that treats it as if it is somehow simultaneously subject to much harsher + more public critique but also a piece of work that must be taken as gospel within the fandom which honestly just sucks for everyone imo. like people wouldn't care if someone's writing an atyd james pov including jegulus unless they feel entitled, in the first place, to certain representations of atyd fic that match what they view as the pure + untouchable "canon." but nobody is entitled to have a fic perfectly catered to their desires, even if it's an atyd fic! and if someone is deeply bothered and just needs to see their vision realized, then they can write their own fic and ignore the other ones.

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