the majority of fanfic is unreadable. how the hell do people get like obsessed with fanfic and spend hours and hours reading this crap. like i can count on one hand the fics ive actually liked, yet i scroll past pages upon pages of utter drivel with tens of thousands of views, the whole time just baffled anyone could possibly derive enjoyment from it. whatever isnt porn is unfathomably bad or has nothing at all to do with the source material beyond borrowing licensed characters for non-canon formulaic plug & play storytelling. fanfic is the picrew of so-called literature, just frankensteining together tropes and character archetypes into a mad libs-like slurry of regurgitated content. perhaps the main issue with people who create fanfic is that they only have the consumption of mass-marketed media and the vacuum of fanfic to refer to rather than nonfiction or academia or independent creative works so they end up with an echo chamber that becomes self-referential almost to the point of parody, and anyone outside the cave can only pity their worship of shadows
i wrote this because im tired of my favorite character being depicted in fan content as a rapist and/or pedophile despite there being nothing in the source material about his sexual proclivities at all. he’s the quintessential powerhungry villain and all the fucking geniuses on fan sites can come up with 99% of the time is to “reimagine” this dark-skinned, musclebound, tattooed villain of a rated T video game as a rapist. this isnt about “minors writing for minors” (though if minors are writing this shit thats a separate problem) this is about how fanfic is so dependent on consuming the same tired tropes over and over that they perpetuate extremely lazy and harmful stereotypes at the expense of the original material and further audiences looking for faithful characterization.
this editorial on “roving dudeslash fandom” has been linked on tumblr in the past and it’s a great breakdown of how alienating “fandom” can be for people who are actual fans of something versus the people focused only on whittling down characters until they fit the mold to play out stock storylines and archetypes (”beige blank slates”). not to mention most of this “dudeslash” is written by women for women’s consumption rather than for gay men, leading to an even more insulated and exclusionary space under the delusion that it is somehow diverse or fulfilling sorely needed representation. people love to bark “dont like dont read” because then it puts the onus on the reader to curate their exposure to oppressive content rather than for the author(s) to interrogate themselves as to what they are writing, what it contributes to and for whom, and why they prioritize the inclusion and safety of certain people in fandom over others.
