I also read fic for a specific fandom dating back a couple of decades. In the last year or so a few very unappealing and normally extremely badly spelled fics have started appearing, turning the characters into trans people — which is especially daft and risible, as none of the characters of this fandom would canonically have been even remotely likely to be taken in by trans ideology, I mean you might as well not even bother 🤣 (it’s not Star Trek, but imagine the equivalent of writing a fanfic about trans Picard who “comes out” to Commander Riker in great tearfulness and drama that he is, in fact, actually a teenage transman. Or wants to be a trans woman. That kind of stuff 😂) These fics are clearly written by young and very impressionistic teenagers and are generally extremely silly.
In other fics, though, I see a huge change. In what used to be a overwhelmingly female-authored fandom that produced both non-erotica fics and erotica in equal amounts, but which was generally very female-focused and well written, now there is much less genuine erotica and a LOT of “kink” stuff (smut fics involving porn categories like choking, “breath play”, “praise kink”, all the sub/Dom kink bdsm stuff, “daddy kink”, “creampie” and so on). And those fics are largely written by young women in their early twenties. It’s really quite disturbing to see, because it really is quite the change, and it makes me think that young women’s sexuality has already been shaped so much by porn that this is what they genuinely find sexy and also quite normal.
It makes me sad, not just because it was a fandom with really well written erotica that was based on female pleasure and desire, which used to be written by a huge range of women including older women; and now there’s a lot less of that, and what there is, is porny, male-porn-fantasy dominated, and often implausible. (You can tell from some of the fics that some of these young women are writing about stuff they have seen in porn, but some anatomical impossibilities make it clear that they have no actual practical experience with sex.)
This fits in with the trans/anime/porn connection (and some of those categories are now routine on major porn sites. Of course they are shaping people’s sexualities!) It’s like a real time demonstration of how this generation’s sexuality is being rewritten and reshaped by internet porn, right in front of our eyes. A generation ago, choking, slapping, “daddy kink” and so on were niche interests. Now they’re so routinely part of young people’s erotic imagination that they’re imagining them back into quite mainstream characters from decades ago, and seeing no problem at all, because they genuinely can’t imagine there was a time — really quite recently! — when people had mutually satisfying sex without “power play”, the woman being choked round the throat, or the female character orgasming to calling her partner “Daddy” while he slaps her.