feynites:

weconqueratdawn:

ardwynna:

I wonder where the break happened that such wide swaths of younger fans don’t grasp fandom things that used to be unspoken understandings. That fic readers are expected to know fiction from reality,  that views expressed in fic are not necessarily those of the author, that the labels, tags and warnings on various kinkfics are also the indication that they were created for titillation and not much more, please use responsibly as per all pornography. The ‘problem’ isn’t that so-called ‘problematic’ fic exists but that some of the audience is being stupid, irresponsible, at worst criminal, at best not old enough to be in the audience to begin with. And that’s on the consumer, not the author who told you via labels, tags, ratings, warnings and venues what their fic was about and what it was for.

I can’t stress enough how important this post is

I’m not totally sure, but I would guess that this shift in attitude ties in heavily with fanfiction’s shift in image over the years.

Back when I first discovered fanfic, it was still in the ‘dirty little secret’ category of hobbies. It would have been utterly laughable to go ‘this fic is immoral’ because fanfic was like the black market of literature. It would be like going to an opium den and going ‘um you guys I don’t think this is healthy’, people would have just chased you off, because clearly, if you’re bothered by this kind of stuff then you’re a liability. Wouldn’t want you reporting everyone’s fansites to Warner Bros or something, right?

Obviously, that time was not a great time for fanfic, in a lot of respects. But it was a different attitude that carried different default expectations, too.

Nowadays, though, fanfiction is less ‘dirty secret’ and more ‘subversive literary activism scene’. Which isn’t to say that image is 100% accurate (or inaccurate, either) but that’s the shift in the community attitude. Whereas once it was considered fair to go ‘I don’t support homosexuality in real life, I’m writing naughty bad stuff in this dark corner of the internet’ on your fic’s disclaimer, now it’s more common to see ‘my slash fics prove I’m an LGBT+ ally’. Both attitudes have major issues, obviously. You can’t even say one’s more honest because half the people who used to make the first assertion were just lying to try and avoid getting angry hate mail, and for some people, exploring certain concepts through fiction really IS the gateway to better social awareness.

But presenting fanfiction as something that’s virtuous instead of ignoble has changed the nature of the hate mail as well. Now instead of it being pointless to throw the ‘it’s immoral’ argument around, it’s effective. So people do it all the time, even when it’s self-contradictory, hypocritical, or disingenuous. 

(On top of that, it’s probably worth noting that we basically teach kids to judge stories this way, and have been doing so for a while now. Like, in children’s literature, every story has a lesson, and the contents all have to be filtered for ‘inappropriate’ factors that might offend parents. We have way more teenagers who are just openly teenaged in fandom too, like, when I was a teenager, I had to lie about my age to get into a lot of forums, and that made me wary of criticizing stuff because I didn’t want to seem immature. So there are a lot more teens actually just being themselves and not holding their tongues and that can, at times, make it seem like fandom as a whole is suddenly full of people who don’t understand how to have mature conversations…. because they don’t, because they’re literally still maturing. Go figure.)