Do fanfic discoursers ever…read anything other than fanfiction? Like, I feel like it’s only possible to be this horrified by problematic fanworks if you’ve never actually read a book.
Then again, if your only engagement with media is Marvel movies, that explains a lot about why you’d be so blindsided by anything that smacks of moral complexity.
Do they know what’s in books? Or do they sincerely think that all media has the emotional and thematic depth of a PG-13 blockbuster franchise, and naughty fandom pervs are introducing previously unprecedented elements to this uniformly tepid world?
“They don’t know what’s in books” is definitely a possibility; after all, most books don’t come with trigger warnings that you can read at a glance to condemn the contents. The major books I see complained about are ones popular enough that “everyone knows” what’s in them even if you haven’t read it (e.g. Lolita, 50 Shades of Grey). “They only watch Marvel movies” is also a possibility; apparently there are people in the MCU fandom complaining about the Spider-Man/Deadpool ship because “Spidey is 17!!!”… in the movies. In the comics, he’s been an adult for a while now, and Deadpool canonically has a crush on him. Like, some of them seem genuinely unaware that the Marvel fandom has existed since long before the movies came out. Anyway…
But I also think a lot of the time it’s less, “They don’t consume other media” and more “They hold fanfic to a different standard.” For some reason, there’s this perception that all fanfic is some kind of wish fulfillment porn and anything you put in fanfic is something you want for real. Hence arguments like “shipping something bad is romanticizing it by definition because ‘shipping’ means you think that’s an ideal relationship” (even though many shippers have said repeatedly that’s not how we use the term) or “those silly women who ship Reylo, don’t they know that a guy like that wouldn’t make a good boyfriend in real life??” Whereas when the same elements appear in a professionally-published work, people seem more willing to believe it’s just part of the story and not necessarily the author’s fantasy of an ideal relationship.
The weird part is that “fanfiction is all shallow wish fulfillment porn” is something I’m used to hearing from normies who have never read a fanfiction and just think of it as some weird hobby. They don’t realize that many fanfic authors put a lot of work into writing and editing their fics, and think of it as basically, “it’s like daydreaming except you write it down.” But hearing this from people who are ostensibly in fandom and read fanfic is bizarre.
Maybe this is due to fanfic becoming more mainstream, so more new folks are coming in, who have a different approach to fandom and can’t/don’t want to understand that older folks who have been around for a while don’t engage with it the same way. For example, one argument I’ve seen against darkfic is along the lines of, “But the world has so much bad stuff in it already, why would you want to write about bad things happening?” which suggests that wish fulfillment really is the purpose of fanfiction for those people, and they don’t get that that’s not true for all of us. That might also explain complaints about “problematic” fanfics for franchises where the original work is just as bad (or worse); to them, the purpose of fanfiction is to “fix” canon so keeping the “bad” elements of canon must mean the author approves of them.
“‘They hold fanfic to a different standard.’ …there’s this perception that all fanfic is some kind of wish fulfillment porn and anything you put in fanfic is something you want for real.”
“But hearing this from people who are ostensibly in fandom and read fanfic is bizarre.”
“Maybe this is due to fanfic becoming more mainstream, so more new folks are coming in, who have a different approach to fandom and can’t/don’t want to understand that older folks who have been around for a while don’t engage with it the same way.”
“to them, the purpose of fanfiction is to ‘fix’ canon so keeping the ‘bad’ elements of canon must mean the author approves of them.”
^ These are the points that stood out the most for me.
Lets not forget that the authors of fic are public, easy to access, generally women, and basically its socially acceptable to scold or yell at women doing free labor while published authors don’t have to deal with your shit.
I would love to know if these same people go scream at authors on nifty.org for their rapefics? Do you write them essays about how wrong they are? No. You don’t. Because they are men for the most part.
But policing women’s thoughts and virtue and tone is somehow ok?
I find it particularly bizarre when people accuse fanfiction of “normalizing” things. Fanfic itself is not viewed as particularly normal in mainstream culture. Maybe Kinkporn Georg, who lives in a cave and reads 10,000 tentacle daddy kink rape fic a day, has a warped conception of what is sexually ethical in real world relationships, but he is an outlier. Most fanfic readers do not rely entirely upon fanfiction, of all things, to inform their worldview.
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