I think what probably gets me deeply into my feelings about this “JKR should have just made her students Of Color to start with, she can’t ret-con and pretend she did it right the first time” is that I grew up with Anne Rice and Anne McCaffery, two female fantasy writers who hated headcanons and fandom and sued people for deviating from their original vision or doing any kinds of derivative works without their express contractual permission.
I feel like people who get irritated with her about defending black!Hermione don’t appreciate how much healthier JKR’s attitude toward the inclusivity movement in her fandom is than theirs was. Or Moffat’s is. Or Gatiss’s. Or Whedon’s. Or Green’s. Or even, until very recently, Lucas’s.
She’s not a PCR, but goddamn, at least she’s passing us the milk rather than pissing in our cornflakes.
Jo is actually almost entirely responsible for fanfiction being what it is today.
BUT WAIT, I hear older fandomers cry. X-Files, Star Trek, Xena, how dare you. And yes, I say to those fandomers, you held those banners first! Be proud of the paths you forged. But Jo–
Jo did something no author or creator had ever done before.
She was a household name who encouraged fanfiction.
When I first began writing fanfiction in 1998, it was common practice to preface your fic with this massive disclaimer about how you weren’t selling it, and it was for fun, sometimes quoting the Fair Use part of the Creative Commons act, and even begging authors not to sue. Because in those days, that was a very real danger. Eleven-year-old me had reams of fanfiction on floppy disks I didn’t dare send to archives because I might get arrested and taken to Plagiarism Jail.
And then there was Jo. And no, Jo said, this is not a private amusement park at which you may stare longingly from the other side of wrought-iron gates. It is a giant sandbox. Here are my pails, here are my toys. Come sit and play with me. Eventually you may decide you like some other sandbox better, and all I ask is that you leave my toys here for others to play with, and not try to take them with you. But why should I lock you out of my sandbox? It is, after all, far more fun to play in a sandbox with many people than by yourself.
People were boggled. They didn’t get it. They thought she was crazy. And the fans? They kept loving, and writing, and drawing, and creating, and Jo kept loving them back. Potter Puppet Pals, A Very Potter Musical, Potter!, Remus and the Lupins, all stuff Jo just kind of went “whatever, they’re having fun.”
And attitudes began to change. And then someone else threw her lot in with Jo, someone who doesn’t get a lot of credit for contributing something massive to fandom culture and should:
Stephenie Meyer.
Yeah, you read that right. The goddamn author of Twilight, who refused to sue teenage girls who just wanted Bella to end up with Jacob. (And who is way more gracious than I would be about Fifty Shades.) She actually has a fanfiction archive right on her website! I’m serious: Smeyer has links to a personally-curated list of Twilight fanfiction she personally enjoyed or found interesting. Whatever you may think of her writing, that loving attitude of “we’re all here to have fun, I love that you love my world and my characters, please enjoy” was such a departure from the days of C&D letters and page-long disclaimers.
These two women changed the face of how fandom works forever. Yes, their work is flawed. They are products of their time and upbringing. But just the fact that they embrace the concepts of “my world as I see it and my world as you see it are not the same, and that’s not just okay, that’s good” is something to be celebrated.
I have a lot of issues with Meyer, but her treatment of fans is not one of them.
I did NOT know that about Meyer. That is VERY cool.
And yes, I remember those days, and they were not good days. They were days in which people were frightened of things that, in retrospect, seem and ARE ridiculous, but were quite threatening at the time.
fandom history. This is cool.
Yeah, you can be upset with JKR about things, but the tweets about canon sidebits aren’t Jo waking up one morning going “I’m going to spit out something today on Twitter to stay relevant!”
She’s answering people who @ her or ask her things via DM.
when people make fun of those who enjoy imagine-loki stuff
I fucking hate when people who are part of fandom make fun of how other people enjoy fandom! Don’t we get enough belittling from society at large? Having our interests or art called frivolous? Why would you do this to other people? Why? Just because you don’t enjoy something, doesn’t mean the people who do are dumb and deserve ridicule.
I don’t go in for imagine-loki content, but fandom isn’t made for me and me alone. I for one feel great pride that fandom has something for everyone. I like knowing that people are enjoying themselves in this space.
I make liberal use of the blacklist function on XKit. It only works on my browser, not my phone, but that’s where I do most of my Tumblring. If you don’t like seeing it, blacklist “imagine-loki” and check the “include URLs” option. If there are people whose opinions annoy me, I don’t block them (unless they’ve done something to offend me personally), let alone write blog posts complaining about them by name (that counts as bullying inasmuch as it has the potential to encourage dogpiling and anon hate-sending); I blacklist their URL so that I just don’t see posts they’ve contributed to.
While I find the notion that Loki’s an innocent and pure angel annoying and ridiculous, I find the notion that Thor’s innocent and pure equally so. He doesn’t have to have been a morally righteous, wonderful, unproblematic sunshine boy since birth to be a hero. He can have made serious mistakes, held gross, racist views, perpetuated Odin’s imperialism through both rhetoric and action, etc. and still be good because he’s grown as a person. Because he continues to grow and learn from his mistakes. Excusing his bad behavior, calling it justified (even the stuff he did/said to/about the Frost Giants at the beginning of Thor), only encourages the dumb idea that heroes can’t be flawed, that people are always one way. I’ll always maintain that Thor had good intentions, but, for fucks sake, Loki has good intentions in Thor (selfish good intentions, but he’s trying to be the hero to prove himself). Good intentions =/= morally right. Condemn the heroes for their wrong actions, just as we condemn the villains.
Gosh, I’ll never understand why people want Thor to be so boring, stagnant, and artificial! XP
We (people who are Loki fans in the first instance) don’t even have a problem saying that Loki has worse moral problems than Thor does. Guess what? You’re allowed to like characters who have done bad things! You’re even allowed to prefer a morally worse character over a morally better character on aesthetic grounds! I do it all the time.
There’s a consistent problem with people on this site, or maybe in fandom generally, denying the existence of moral complexity and ambiguity. They claim their favorite character is always good and pure all the time, and if that character comes into conflict with another, they feel the need to claim that the other character is totally evil and wrong. I really wish people would stop doing that. It makes the characters and the movies (or books or TV shows) more boring than they actually are.
I am sick and tired of the way we critique misogyny in fandom.
Why is it always “shame fanwork creators (overwhelmingly young women and queer ppl) for not including enough female characters” and never “question the fact that we’ve created a media culture where canonical female characters are by and large so boring that no one wants to create fanworks based on them?” (Not to mention the fact that any person who dares to include an original female character in a fic will have the deadly accusation of “Mary Sue” leveled at them, even if they’ve written the most well-rounded character in the world)
Why do we talk about the danger of fetishization when straight women are writing about male/male pairings, and never think about the fact that slash is often being written by young women who have been socialized to be so ashamed of their sexuality that their own fantasies never include people of their own gender?
Why are we placing the burden for destroying problematic tropes about sexuality and romance exclusively on this tiny, relatively powerless subculture made up of relatively powerless people who are creating media exclusively for their own enjoyment, and not on the gigantic megacorporations that are profiting off the romanticization of abusive, unhealthy, destructive relationships, an attitude fans are only repeating?
Why do defenses of fic always turn to “it’s not all gay porn !!!1!!!!111” as an argument? What’s wrong with people creating erotica that they can enjoy, when almost no one is making mainstream porn for the audience that reads fic, when people can explore potentially problematic or even dangerous kinks/desires without actual performers having to participate in making video porn, when the “gay porn” side of fandom can lead to some of the most wonderfully freeing discussions about sexuality possible in our society?
Say I write a fanfiction. The only female character complies to the problematic sassy/helpful best friend trope, mostly because the story revolves around two main male characters (well-developed in canon, with lots of canon jokes about how much they love each other, and played by male actors I find extremely attractive) getting together and having a fair amount of extremely explicit sex. This fic is read by, oh, 200 people, all of whom are already familiar with the conventions of fandom. How does that compare to the literal millions of people who watched, for example, the first Hobbit movie, which contained (as I recall) no women or queer characters at all, and had an audience full of all kinds of people, likely including little girls who are looking up on screen and learning that their stories aren’t seen as worth telling?
I’m not saying fandom tropes aren’t harmful, I’m just saying we should look at the scope of the damage done by them as opposed to, oh, every other kind of media ever, and then think about why we’ve chosen to shit all over the not-for-profit hobbies of young women and queer people.
I am disgusted by the insistence of some younger fans that AO3 be made child safe and fit to be an electronic babysitter. AO3 was dreamed up and built out of the ashes of the ff.net purge, Strikethrough, Boldthrough, and any number of smaller scale attempts at silencing us, isolating us or making us create less than we can. It was built by adults for adults from the ground up. It’s entire purpose was to give fandom a hub nobody else could drive us from.
And now these young folk, some of them well-meaning but misguided, but too many of them just thrilling on the ‘power’ they think comes from their pseudoactivism, are demanding that we abandon what we made and why we made it, and turn it over to their control, in the fine tradition of the lawsuit-happy lazy parents and homophobic fundamentalists before them.
They could go to ff.net, there’s still plenty of traffic there and the work of content limitation is half done. They could revive something tame as they like on LJ. They could even learn to code and build their own damn site if they really cared to. But no, they’d rather have AO3. Because it’s the cool place. The place with all the views. With no thought to how long it would stay the cool place if all the adults moved on like they think we should. Who’s paying for the servers and tweaking code? Not them. Who’s making that crowd they want to be viewing their works? Not them.
The censorship and fake activism was bad enough but this attitude of theirs, that they’re entitled to what we built and what we made, entitled to change it for their purposes and profit while we get fuck all, but that we should still stick around and do the heavy labor behind it for them of course, that needs to be driven the hell out of these little neo-colonizers before they start trying it on a bigger scale. Had quite enough of that already, children. Stop.
I’m sorry, I think you forgot a panel, so I drew it for you
knife needs to be bigger
That storyline cuts pretty close to the id, you know? And it’s just one of a large number of similarly… charged storylines (soul bonds, every fuck-or-die scenario ever written…) that you see very very often in fanfic, and from time to time in profic as well.
And the profic? Almost uniformly sucks.
Because pro writers either have some shame, and relegate the purest, most cracklicious iterations of those stories to drawerfic that their workshop buddies will never see, or else they’re shameless. But they usually have to be shameless alone– and so their versions are written so solitarily that they don’t have any voice of restraint, to pull them back from the Event Horizon of the Id Vortex when it starts warping their story mechanics.
But in fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material– not all of it, and not for everyone, but. A lot of it is, and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (At least in matters of content. Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.)
And so we’ve got all these shameless fantasies being thrown out into the fannish ether, being read and discussed, and the next thing you know, we’ve got genres. We’ve got narrative traditions. We have enough volume and history for these things to develop a whole critical vocabulary.
We have a toolbox for writing this sort of thing really, really well, for making these 3 A.M. fantasies work as story and work as literature without having to draw back from the Id Vortex to do it.
a friend was asking, in light of me promoting@iddyiddybangbang about the use of the word “id”. This post really helped fandom define the term for itself.
I used to be such an uptight miserable jackass that I *hated* this concept for a while (even while I was writing werewolf porn, idk). NOT ANY MORE.
Loki is the Philosopher King 