Fan fiction and feminism

[Endofthedays]

A thread for discussing fanfic.

I've said on this board before that I have a Tumblr account for fandom. I'm pretty picky about who I'm friends with and most of them are older women, like me, with one or two younger people. The thing we all have in common is the fandom we're in, but the vast majority of us write fic for that fandom too.

What I've found is the younger people in the fandom are all excessively woke - there is a lot of 'I would die for trans/non-binary/ace/aro/etc' stuff and many of them will say that they're gay or bi or non-binary or trans or something. It's rare to come across anyone in that fandom under the age of 20 who isn't 'different' in some way.

How this manifests itself in fic is interesting - one of my friends writes prolifically (she's also a published author) and her writing is well-followed and loved. She writes m/m (the biggest pairing in the fandom) and is sexually explicit in her writing. The interesting part is that younger fans will often target her with pretty strong hate for pairing these two men together and call her disgusting for suggesting it - while at the same time claiming to be all about gay rights.

The younger fans that write, in my experience, also tend to be the most extreme in what they write. That's where we tend to get rape, incest, extreme BDSM and death. And there's a correlation between the young women writing this, and their personal lives (if they're telling the truth). An awful lot of broken relationships with parents and an awful lot more worrying relationships with partners. I don't know how much of it is for shock value but I find I cant read a lot of the fic by these younger members.

I read one or two ABO and they weren't for me - I really didn't like the power dynamics in them. MPreg make me feel ill so I don't read those. And I definitely avoid anything with non-con or incest. I think, as an older member of fandom, I am conscious of checking tags extremely carefully when looking for something to read and adding plenty of tags of my own when uploading something I've written.

The majority of my own writing focuses on m/f though and yes, I write explicit sex, but it's very vanilla - the worst I wrote about was someone having their hands tied behind their back in role play and consent was implicitly sought beforehand. And it was one of the things my friends picked up on - 'I loved that he checked with her first'.

Someone pointed out on the other thread that kids are learning about sexuality through fanfic and I take issue with that. I know of at least one fan who has been told by their parents that they should not have a Tumblr account but have been given an ipad by school and use it secretly that way. There are others on Twitter who I'm sure have parents that are completely unaware of what their children are up to - I don't interact with minors but we often have mutual friends so I see what they post, and it ain't pretty.

But the issue I have is that we, as adults, use A03 (or whatever) carefully and correctly - we tag extensively, we share between small groups of friends. We are not responsible for other people's children who are not being monitored by their parents as to what they're doing online, and I feel like laying the blame at the feet of fanfic writers is just another way of censoring women online.

Sorry for the essay!

the idea that women think nothing for themselves, that they're blank canvases, as innocent as children, until they 'internalise misogyny'.

Well, that's a flagrant misrepresentation.

EVERYONE internalises misogyny. Male, female, or intersex, we're all raised in a misogynistic society. ALL our minds develop within that context and are informed by the norms of that context.

You can dispute that if you want, but I would suggest this is not the thread for it (and perhaps not the board for it either).

I do find it baffling, this insistence that people are born with fully formed minds that are in no way influenced by their surroundings.

You moved on and said a lot of what I wanted to say, in much less wording, while I was typing!

fanfic is the place where I read the most explicit scenes of discussing and negotiating and defining consent.

Mm - because in fanfic the author can do this. The author's in control of both characters, so it can be used to explore what explicitly-communicated consent might look like. It's a rather harder thing to explore in real-world situations. It's a safe sandbox for testing our ways to phrase things and to see how it could be done.

Why no one seems to want to explore it in other media is the question.

Yes, definitely an exploration of gender politics, and many explorations will be done badly or in ways many people won’t agree with.

Fan fiction is a folk art, in that it’s main good point is that it is participatory. Everyone is encouraged to join in and the community tries not to mock poor quality in the same way you don’t mock a grandmother’s quilting skills or someone in a congregation singing a carol with a not great voice. We want all the writers - not just the good ones.

There’s obviously a problem when it bumps up against the very authoritarian social justice people who want to control other people’s words, but they tend to chase after transphobia or racism.

The actual discussion about what women are writing or why they write it has declined because the platforms fan fiction are written on are not conducive to decent discussion.

But fan fiction still has the benefit that it is overwhelmingly a community of women, so some gems of gender exploration exist.

Troh I do get the impression it varies from fandom to fandom. My main fandoms are pretty tame and untouched by much po mo genderist stuff, but one friend writes in a fandom where every other work is aro/ace/genderqueer (and in which one of her friends got death threats for "cultural appropriation" ). Another has regaled me with stories of the civil war in her fandom over the most popular m/m pairing about which one of them "topped" and whether they ever "switched".

As I say, my corner's pretty tame and sane, but there are some really quite unwell people drawn to fanfic.

Mind you fanfic is huge and the vast majority is pretty sane and harmless. There can be a bit of a tendency to demonise it on Mumsnet, but seriously, who didn't go through books as a teen looking for the naughty bits?

The actual discussion about what women are writing or why they write it has declined because the platforms fan fiction are written on are not conducive to decent discussion

I think that's the inevitable flip side of "don't criticise a grandmother's quilting." It's very hard to offer concrit of writing or of sexual politics. Concrit tends to take place in closed groups of writers.

It wasn't always this way - there used to be whole sites devoted to "sporking" (ie making fun of) badfics.

Trohmaniac what you say about the younger ficcers you know mirrors what I saw in my fandom days.

So many girls and young women with so many issues around trauma and relationships, using fanfic not just as an escape but also as a means of trying to process their experiences.

It's not a bad thing, per se. Fiction can be very useful in this regard. But if the author doesn't realise this is what they're doing, it can all too easily take a turn for the worse.

I don't think there's any merit in blaming fanfiction authors though. I don't think blame is a very useful concept in this sort of scenario. Looking at function and unintended consequence is far more useful. The answer to "girls getting their sex ed from dodgy fanfic" isn't censoring fanfic, it's ensuring girls a) get decent sex ed elsewhere and b) aren't lumbered with a fuckton of trauma they can't process.

Totally agree with those two points Tyro.

What about the concept of the Mary Sue? (Minor claim to fame: I know a woman who knows the woman who wrote the original Mary Sue parody).

Check list (not exhaustive): self insert as wish fulfillment for the author, ridiculously good at fighting, good looking, irresistible to the opposite sex.

That's basically every mainstream big box office pop culture hero/superhero.

Why are men allowed to write male characters like this in mainstream, financially lucrative culture, yet women are pilloried for doing the same thing?

And it clearly isn't the quality of the finished work. Dan Brown, anyone?

Barbara I think the Mary Sue double standard is one of those cases where, instead of saying "why are we shitting on women for doing something men do all the time?" we ought to be saying "why are men doing this thing that is eminently shit-on-able?"

I know that's not a word but I'm tired and I've done so much word-vomit today that I'm forgetting what real words are.

Maybe it's "why do we recognise this is shitty writing when women do it, but praise it when women do it?"

I loved sporking. The community I was in was a multi-fandom collaborative sporking thing. We had a brilliant time. And yet I can see how that environment feeds into problematic topical issues. We made our own world out of words. Our bodies were an irrelevance.

For myself, I think the fact that I had a double life helped. I spent a lot of time in fandom, but it was interspersed with going out and interacting with a wide range of real people. For so many, there just wasn't the option of real-world social interaction to any meaningful degree, and so the disconnection between body and mind was ever heightened.

"why do we recognise this is shitty writing when women do it, but praise it when women do it?"

See, I can't word any more. Why do we praise it when MEN do it?

The Mary-Sue has made a huge re-emergence recently, with Captain Marvel and Rey in Star Wars.

Neither of them are Mary-Sue's but boy, are men riled up about both of them - in both cases it boils down to 'these women weren't written for men or for the male gaze, they were written for women'. And both fandoms have lost their minds over it.

Captain Marvel came down to 'you've already had a Wonder Woman film, why do you women need another woman? And why is she so angry? Why isn't she turning her back to the camera like Scarlett Johansen and showing us her butt? Why did she hurt that man for telling her to smile more?'. Women's response was 'why have you, men, already had 3 Iron Man, 3 Captain America, 3 Thor, several Spider-Man, 9 X-Men, etc, etc, but you bitch about two female-led films?'

I would say that inserting an original female character into canon fanfic (as I've done) probably smacks of Mary-Sue-ing (I can't word either) but I'm not writing for publication, but for me and my friends. We're writing for one another.

And good Lord, yes, Dan Brown needs smiting with a smiting stick, doesn't he? Should we talk about Jack Reacher being 8 feet tall and sleeping with all the ladies? Talk about ridiculous. But it's cool for men to write that.

I too love a good sporking! (Oh no, have revealed myself as "not a nice person.")

As for shitty writing.. well I think Mary Sues can be well done or badly done.

I have nothing against well paced well plotted big blockbusters with 2d characters - sometimes escapism is fun. And I think women should get good escapism too. (I bloody loved Wonder Woman - both the corny 80s TV version and the big screen version).

I thought Wonder Woman was fantastic. Captain Marvel too.

I see these films with my son, who is 14 and he said Wonder Woman was the best DC film of the lot but was quick to point out that in Justice League she was reduced down to 'oh you silly boys', laughing fondly at Batman and the rest.

We also noticed that all the male heroes beat their nemesis with brawn while Wonder Woman used 'love' and Chris Pine went and sacrificed himself physically at the end of the film.

We watched The Hunger Games films this week and he rolled his eyes every time Gale was on screen. At one point, when Gale made some comment about Katniss only ever wanting him when he was in pain, my son threw his hands up in the air and said 'oh my God, he's such a Nice Guy! He's trying to manipulate her into being with him'.

I think Mary Sues can be well done or badly done.

I think any fanfic trope can be well done or badly done.

The application of this belief to the mpreg genre was an interesting literary exercise.

I enjoy fanfic there are a lot of really well written stories there .... and then there’s the rape fic usually abo. I have seen some excellent fics abandoned because young readers getting upset they didn’t follow a desired path and making it so awful the author just abandoned it.

YY to Captain Marvel!

One of my fanfic friends (that rare animal, the male fanficcer) wrote a bloody hilarious MPreg fic. Not only was it a brilliant parody, but because he'd paid attention during his wife's pregnancies, it was actually more plausible than most of the offerings emanating from the fevered imaginations of young women armed only with their copy of "What to expect..."

(I have lost count of the number of young women I've had to gently tell "no, she won't be showing at 4 weeks.")

I read one recently in which she had a massive bump at four weeks. Given the specifics of the fandom and pairing, I just assumed she'd been indulging in several-months-pre marital sex so her dates were well out, but it turned out the explanation was twins.

I'd never been pregnant when I wrote an mpreg, but my co-author was a biologist with a real bee in her bonnet about the appalling abuses of biological reality we kept reading, so a lot of effort went into researching the details.

I look back on it now, and in all honesty, I think the thing that brought that particular fic down wasn't the mpreg, but the het relationship that was in there. Painfully obvious in retrospect how uncomfortable we were writing het.

I recall there was a gay man who actually produced a guide to the basics of gay sex for female ficcers to refer to, because the bad biology just got too much for him. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could have a sex-reversed equivalent wherein men are expected to defer to women's expertise when it comes to accurate portrayal of sex in media?