Your recent YouTube video was one of the most insightful things I’ve watched in a long time. I came over here because your work deserves far more reach. Please keep going.
I came here after watching your YouTube video, and your analysis was spot on!
Something I've noticed in the fanfic community is the inability to handle constructive criticism. From what I've seen, some people think that since most people write fanfic for fun, it should be absolved from any sort of criticism. In my opinion, this attitude is harmful to writers. Even if you're just writing for fun, good feedback will show you what's working and what needs improvement. We all have our blind spots in writing, and an outside perspective can be beneficial. It's a shame that some people don't see that.
I think you've hit on an important part of why fanfiction feeding mainstream literature is so bad for literature. Fanfiction, for the most part, really is a hobby first and foremost. It was never meant to be serious literature as it was typically just fans exchanging little stories about their favorite characters. So the community never had an organic constructive criticism apparatus. There was never a need or desire for such a thing. So, when fanfiction started to be exported to bookshelves, there was no place to slot that in. Constructive criticism and literary growth are not natural parts of fanfiction. Which is another reason why it simply doesn't work as a pipeline to literature.
"So the community never had an organic constructive criticism apparatus. There was never a need or desire for such a thing."
Been writing and reading fanfiction (on and off) for over a decade now, and I've noticed an evolution in community norms around constructive criticism. The ethics and etiquette of offering unsolicited constructive criticism on fan works inspires strong opinion and debate, which often become highly personal for some reason.
When I first registered for a Fanfiction.net account in the early 2010s, the terms of service stated that accepting constructive criticism on posted works was a must for authors. According to that terms of service, authors were supposed to view constructive criticism as a gift from the reviewer. Users freely offered their constructive criticism in the reviews of posted works, which should be distinguished from hate comments (known as "flames").
However, "unspoken" norms on AO3 dictate that readers should err against leaving constructive criticism in an author's comments unless the author requests it (i.e., by tagging the story with "Constructive Criticism Welcome"). I personally believe that if an author posts a work on a public archive, then they should accept that not all feedback will be positive. But I also understand those who argue that since many authors are teens, non-native English speakers, or absolute beginners, even well-intentioned constructive criticism might drive them to quit the hobby rather than regroup and be better.
Also, go on any fanfiction forum and you'll find authors seeking beta readers, feedback on passages from their work, and suggestions for improving their writing. I've served as a beta reader on a few occasions, and only stepped back because I decided to save that energy for writing and refining my own works. Those people don't necessarily have professional aspirations, but I think it's inaccurate to say there's *no* organic desire for critique or improvement among fanfiction authors.
So I thought I was going to be the first one to bring up Star Trek, but I see that Clint has beaten me to it. While I was not reading ST fanfic in 1968, I became aware of it in 1973 at the age of 12. I so wanted to read it, but, alas and alack, I lived in a small Arizona town in the middle of nowhere, and had very, very little money. When I moved to a big Texas city in the 1980’s, I somehow found fellow fans and was thrilled to be able to borrow their fanzines before going on to buy my own. (Perhaps I should say at this point that I actually did read other things growing up, e.g., The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Le Morte d’Arthur, Pride and Prejudice, etc.) What I had not expected was that nearly everyone but me was into this thing called “K/S.” I was appalled, as I knew this was not how the characters had been written. I also didn’t tend to gravitate towards smut, especially gay smut. I found it rather odd that it was written by straight women for other straight women. Anyway, I drifted away, but a few years ago when I was going through a rather difficult time and needed an escape, I decided to see if there was such a thing as online fanfic. Oh, boy. I believe AO3 was the fist site I came across. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to see that things had gone from bad to worse. There are something like 20,000+ stories under the ST:TOS section. When you filter out what is designated M/M, F/F, and ‘explicit,’ the number of stories drops to about 5,000. Of those, most are not worth reading, often due to the writers’ poor grammar and punctuation skills. That being said, there are a handful of wonderfully written stories, both online and in print, but I suppose my comments are my rather roundabout way of saying that you are spot on.
As a middle-school Trek fan in the late 70s, I read several of the early novelizations, which were a mixed bag, but the only fanfic I read were the stories in the two Star Trek: The New Voyages books (1976 and 1978). At the time I really enjoyed them, but they wowed me less when I reread them a few weeks ago for the first time in ever. There were more than a few implications of romantic feelings of Kirk toward Spock at the least that seem to have completely gone over my head when I read them, and the female authorship is remarkable, now that I've read this post: In the first volume, all nine authors were women; in the second, only two of the eleven were men.
There's a rule in the fanfic community - waddling through 90% of the trash is worth it to find the 10% of treasure. And while I do agree with your points for the MOST part, I would push back and say that there is a heavy negative bias bleeding though. I grew up and then grew out of reading fanfiction - but at the same time, I grew up also reading Milton and Dante and Blackmore and Wolfe, lost in the stories of Wilber Smith and the voice of Homer. To this day, I still read specific fanfic authors simply because they knew what they were doing on a character and world and story.
By and large, fanfiction is bad - but calling it the source of all literary decline is a bit of a stretch - and relieves the publication and writing industry of its own faults and weights in the argument.
It's reductive, I mean - in the sense that there are a multitude of points on the timeline where we can point to and call it the start of the decline. Hemingway and his influence, Gordon Lish's influence on the modern editing process, the codification of the Workshop style, and the degradation and misinformation of modern MFA reading techniques. The loss of proper linguistical and etymological knowledge as foundational to writer knowledge, the proper ability to read, the normalization of methodical and slow reading, verbal reading, self critique. I think it's indicative that if people THINK projecting fanfiction ideas and ideals onto other mediums - then there is a broader issue at play. I hate Wattpad, personally, and I found most of the stuff on AO3 to be utter garbage, but I also understand that most of it is self indulgent on purpose.
I think fanfiction is something that is actually healthy - alongside other fringe mediums emerging like Web serials, web novels, Manhwa and Manhua - because unlike publishing, with its own content moderation, and PR concerns, they allow for DIFFERENT story ideas to emerge. Parahumans, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, SSS-Class Revival Hunter - these are all excellent pieces in their own right, in both their web novel format and, for the latter twos, comic form. Ciaphas Cain: Warmaster of Chaos, The Weaving Force, Not This Time Fate, From Fake Dreams, I'm Still Here - all excellent pieces of fanfiction writing (these are just the ones that came to mind in the moment).
To reduce it all down to smut and derivative is not exactly an honest assessment of the medium, and to directly quote your post:
"It’s my belief that cancel culture in literature is in large part due to the growing prevalence of fan fiction community rules in the real world."
I find this statement largely ignores the overall media and cultural landscape we exist in. While there is a LARGE fanfiction community, it is largely divorced from the actual political and publishing industry, though I am aware that there is an overlap of editors and publishers now and previously monitoring these sites for engagement to for an easy "this will sell" author that already has a pre-established community - though this is also not exactly indicative of the role of fanfiction being the cause of writing's decline, and I would posit that it is more illuminating on the nature of the publishing industries capitalistic and LCD approach to writing and reading.
In fact, I can't even say that this is an honest based assessment and that the title and conclusion is hitting on two predominately different points. To quote your blog post again:
"*note: I’ve received many messages since making my jab at fan fiction in my video on romantasy and women’s fiction that insist that smut is not the only kind of fan fiction in existence. I addressed this issue in the current video, the fan fiction video, but to be clear: Smut and explicit content — particularly involving taboo themes like incest or even illegal themes like underage sex and straight-up pedophilia — is so important to fan fiction writers that its protection is 90 percent of the reason AO3 was created in the first place. Moreover, it is one of the most widely talked about “censorship” issues in the community."
Firstly, as you note in your blog post - AO3 was largely created due to the purges that occurred on other sites, predominately Fanfiction Net and its like, and a large majority of the writers who wrote there that were banned and works that were removed migrated over to AO3. It's widely known that AO3's entire brand is built on the inclusion of EVERYTHING - for good or ill. My question is that if you predicated your entire engagement with fanfiction based, from what I have listened to and read, on primarily the immoral and sexual content posted there - then you have not really engaged with Fanfiction - you've engaged with the primary source of not just Smut Fanfiction, but the spaces that actively cater towards it. Then you attribute that, alongside side some general and what I assume are personal biases, to strip the nuance of the discussion around the decline of literature and 'literary fiction' to focus on a largely small role player in the grander space.
I will quote your final paragraph on your blog here too:
"I pose the questions not to start fights, but to start conversations, real conversations. Because fan fiction is ruining not just literature and other storytelling, but also itself. Fan fiction could be wonderful. But it was the first casualty of whatever this thing is that is now infecting the rest of literary culture."
I engage with you thusly - how did you arrive at the conclusion you did that "Fanfiction Has Destroyed Writing (And Everything Else)" - and are you engaging with the concept, or the output of a community within it? Are you engaging with a genuine discourse of the impact it has on writing, as a medium, or on the bits that are now bleeding into the cultural zeitgeist? Because while you are correct- there are absolutely steps needed to be taken in the fanfiction community on the nature of the content produced - but there is a world of difference between THAT and the content itself leading to the decline of readers and literacy and literature and writing ability. That, I think, is a much broader and much more nuanced discussion.
Also note: I am not saying this to be contrarian or defendant - I ask this from a place of genuine curiosity, because the delivery and voice and such feels largely different from your other posts and videos. This largely was written in YouTube comments, but I thought it might be better served posted here, direct and out of the quagmire of the YouTube comments. It just feels more... dismissive? Insulting? Rather indignant and personal - the overall tone and voice. Like a Roman walking into a Celtic camp and calling them all barbarians? At least that is how i heard it - because there is not much of the nuance you'd usually bring, and the entire focus seems to be on the SEXUAL content posted, and not on the medium and nature of fanfiction itself. It just feels different from what you usually post, is all
Also: Yes, Twilight and Fifty Shades were originally fanfiction. Twilight is a bit iffier, as it was largely inspired by My Chemical Romance according to Meyer, and might have originally been drafted as fanfiction of that. Fifty Shades was a fanfic of Twilight.
I am going to have to watch your YouTube video. I love reading Fanfiction but I agree with most of the points here! There are far too many degenerate stories and a lot of child porn. It is gross. I love reading Harry Potter fanfiction but I have noticed that the community has an issue with making the children act more adult in sexual ways and it is nasty. And of course, I’ve noticed another fandoms. Over the years of reading fanfiction I have become a lot more discerning about what I read.
Thank you for going through the trenches to gather all these information, it must’ve been traumatic.
I was shocked and baffled by the current state of contemporary literature and reader community when I decided to get back into reading last year — and now the dots have been connected.
This is really insightful and well supported, thank you so much for saying this.
Being a man with as much as zero interest in BL and smut fanfictions, the sense of scale and degeneracy was certainly a surprise. I suppose it's helped overcome some of that feminist programming left over in my mind from high school.
I suspect you would find the research of Hiroki Azuma quite interesting as some further reading into the concept. While you have covered the "symptoms" of this strange disease very well, I feel there is still deeper you can dive into the cause - though the academic analyses are all very postmodern and 'Foucaultian', as most literary research is these days.
linked above is: The Animalization of Otaku Culture, a short primer on the issue of fan cultures from a Japanese perspective.
I was "sent east" late in highschool by a friend but had a similar experience to you regarding "weeb" culture. It seems to me the Japanese are somewhat more advanced along this disease than we are because of the breakdown of their highly rigid social culture - everything was governed through strict procedures that have now been destroyed by modernisation, leaving the socially inept far more isolated and disaffected than they are here. It's an issue much deeper than "Japanese intolerance" or "bigotry".
I've written an overview of all this which is a bit more friendly to those who are outside the Japanese media space which you are welcome to use as well, though of course I am no sociologist.
Thank you for suffering for our sakes, you are a prophet of doom ascending from the underground to bring us painful and hard truths. Hope you can find a way to remain sane.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had the same experience wading into eastern media. I started with Chinese historical dramas (a la Nirvana in Fire) and didn't make my way to Japan till later. But the Chinese fan space is at least as bad as Otaku culture, if not worse in some ways. Over time I gradually stopped talking about eastern media with people I didn't know because I was almost always met with a certain kind of deranged obsession that was very off-putting. I agree with what you've said here, as to the potential causes. I look forward to reading both of the links you've added, thank you! This subject is endlessly interesting to me, so I just keep diving and diving, even if sometimes I enter a particularly disturbing cavern.
I've read the introduction to that article by Hiroki Azuma and I'm already excited to have been alerted to the existence of a such a writer. Thank you! I also like the idea of the databasification of experience, it sounds like a keen articulation of something for which I've been trying to find the words for a long time.
That was interesting and sad, thanks for the link. I think we will figure out how to handle the temptations and excesses of the internet, but a lot of lives have been maimed or destroyed, and a lot more will be until we do.
As someone trying to build an immersive world with great storytelling for young adult readers (without self indulgence and smut), it makes me sad and pessimistic.
It certainly can have that effect, but I think you should also look at just how much resistance there is to this these days. And that resistance is growing. People (readers) are really tired of this kind of thing. They're ready for something better.
I appreciate you taking the time to do a substantive analysis and "calling out" of the degeneracy issue in user-generated content circles, especially in those dark corners of the web that don't even try to self regulate.
I've never been to any of these fanfic sites, but this problem spread to the independent/web game development scenes, too. For instance, the platform Itch.io popped up and offered a great platform to replace the Flash games sites of yesteryear, but I quickly discovered that by the time I found it, there was a growing underground on it for all kinds fetish-driven art. Whether it was an interactive novel, visual novel, or proper game.
Now Steam, though much better at providing content guards, has started allowing some really explicit fetish-driven games onto their platform.
I think I'm mostly just venting/commiserating here, but I just wanted to say I'm praying for your soul. The poor thing sounds like it went through the wringer writing this and the video. 🙏
I appreciate that! I was familiar with the general idea of what I would find, but I wasn't entirely prepared. There were a few times (such as when I was reading the BL comics, especially the one I featured) when I would turn a page and see something and then I was suddenly overcome with this sick pit in my stomach. I imagined it was a very, very toned down version of what those investigators must feel when they stumble upon CSAM.
The insane, accelerating pornification of everything is completely mind-blowing to me. It's been there to some degree for so long, but all/most the restrictions have been lifted in the last decade. So now it seems nothing is off-limits, nothing is safe, everything that can be turned into porn in some way, absolutely will. It's exhausting.
If we don't vent a little, I think we might explode. Anyway, thank you for the prayers!
Surprisingly Neon Genesis Evangelion (through the manga, anime and later films) provides an interesting examination of this phenomena, particularly the escapism that gives rise to self indulgence. The YT video "The Curse of Evangelion" is worth watching as a sort of preface to the series. Another show worth watching is Twin Peaks, which offers David Lynch's critique of the self indulgence of crime shows at the time, but which became, in the Return, a broader commentary on the industry, fans and media landscape as a whole. The Twin Perfect videos on the subject are worth checking out in this regard.
The 80/20 comparison is interesting in that if we take the printed books market we shall see the same or almost the same 80/20 distribution for bodice-rippers and male fantasy/quality literature. Thus the distribution doesn't seem to me peculiar for fanfiction but a general rule for any literary work with the only difference being, bodice-rippers and male fantasy authors usually are as far from self-indulgence as possible and rip the bodices/conquer and dominate with no incentive but the financial one.
Also you somehow fail to notice a male fanfiction sphere that is maybe less robust than BL-dominated female one, but no less interesting. Though perhaps since it has less of an impact on American formula literature it's of less interest to you?
I don't expect to be heard, but I am consistently surprised that discussions of fanfic seem unaware that fanfic has its origin with the original Star Trek. In David Gerrold's 1973 book, The World of Star Trek, he documents what was then a novel phenomenon of the increasingly cult like following developing around Star Trek. He attempts to document every aspect of it including something that seemed bizarre at the time: fans writing their own Star Trek stories. These stories were very specific. They involved "shipping" before such a word was used. (Gerrold seems unaware of either that word, or the label "fan fiction.") What he documents is a group of female fans known as K-S Ladies. They write stories of Kirk and Spock having a homosexual relationship.At the time, such things were not widely talked about, but this is the real beginning of fanfic.
I'm familiar with the early days of Star Trek fan fiction. But from what I can see, having not been there when it was occurring, the nature of that era of fan fiction was quite different from what we have in current year, even if there were marked similarities. I don't consider Harry Potter the origin of fan fiction, but rather I view the collision of Harry Potter and fan fiction as what produced our current iteration of fan fiction.
Thank you for the book recommendation! I'd be very interested to read his account of that phenomenon.
K-S ladies specifically wrote stories about Kirk and Spock in a homosexual relationship, which is to say fanfic did not "degrade" to what it became with Harry Potter. It started there. Pornography is endemic to the form. Harry Potter pronographic fanfic was simply inevitable.
I’ve heard (or read) your comment, at least, and assuming it is accurate I’m glad you shared it. Ms. Layne’s perspective seems to suffer from a slight recency bias, but I would consider it adjacent to the purpose of her argument. Her description of how modern writers have been infiltrated by members who developed their writing skills (if they can even be called that) in the culture of fan fiction is accurate, even if she is mistaken in attributing the origin of that phenomenon to Harry Potter. It seems more of a description of how it currently functions, why it is a problem, and brief suggestions for how to address it and less a thorough diagnosis of how it originated.
Personally I wonder if the nature of a serialised television series, with an overarching universe created by one author and individual episodes delegated out to individual subordinate authors, had anything to do with it. And the nature of a story changing from a (comparatively) short hour- to two-hour film, consisting of a story-based sequence of events and narrative purpose, to an open-ended depiction of what are almost daily experiences with no set narrative time limit until the season finale.
My suggestion that it is relevant comes from how illicit relationships between characters was not an aberration that metastasized or developed in later iterations of fanfic, but was intrinsic to the original form. It didn't become that way, it started that way. Harry Potter "shipping" was simply an inevitable upshot of a decades-old form at that point. The K-S phenomenon developed entirely spontaneously among female fans with no connection to the production. They were sending these stories to each other by mail. Female fans were among the earliest and most fervent fans. One of them, Bjo Trimble, organized a massive letter writing campaign to save the show from cancellation, which gained a third season from a quite startled and puzzled NBC. Today, we take fandom as for granted as we do oxygen, but back then it was weird and new and started with Star Trek. Not even comic book fans had this bizarre kind of cult-like relationship to the material.
Your recent YouTube video was one of the most insightful things I’ve watched in a long time. I came over here because your work deserves far more reach. Please keep going.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I came here after watching your YouTube video, and your analysis was spot on!
Something I've noticed in the fanfic community is the inability to handle constructive criticism. From what I've seen, some people think that since most people write fanfic for fun, it should be absolved from any sort of criticism. In my opinion, this attitude is harmful to writers. Even if you're just writing for fun, good feedback will show you what's working and what needs improvement. We all have our blind spots in writing, and an outside perspective can be beneficial. It's a shame that some people don't see that.
I think you've hit on an important part of why fanfiction feeding mainstream literature is so bad for literature. Fanfiction, for the most part, really is a hobby first and foremost. It was never meant to be serious literature as it was typically just fans exchanging little stories about their favorite characters. So the community never had an organic constructive criticism apparatus. There was never a need or desire for such a thing. So, when fanfiction started to be exported to bookshelves, there was no place to slot that in. Constructive criticism and literary growth are not natural parts of fanfiction. Which is another reason why it simply doesn't work as a pipeline to literature.
"So the community never had an organic constructive criticism apparatus. There was never a need or desire for such a thing."
Been writing and reading fanfiction (on and off) for over a decade now, and I've noticed an evolution in community norms around constructive criticism. The ethics and etiquette of offering unsolicited constructive criticism on fan works inspires strong opinion and debate, which often become highly personal for some reason.
When I first registered for a Fanfiction.net account in the early 2010s, the terms of service stated that accepting constructive criticism on posted works was a must for authors. According to that terms of service, authors were supposed to view constructive criticism as a gift from the reviewer. Users freely offered their constructive criticism in the reviews of posted works, which should be distinguished from hate comments (known as "flames").
However, "unspoken" norms on AO3 dictate that readers should err against leaving constructive criticism in an author's comments unless the author requests it (i.e., by tagging the story with "Constructive Criticism Welcome"). I personally believe that if an author posts a work on a public archive, then they should accept that not all feedback will be positive. But I also understand those who argue that since many authors are teens, non-native English speakers, or absolute beginners, even well-intentioned constructive criticism might drive them to quit the hobby rather than regroup and be better.
Also, go on any fanfiction forum and you'll find authors seeking beta readers, feedback on passages from their work, and suggestions for improving their writing. I've served as a beta reader on a few occasions, and only stepped back because I decided to save that energy for writing and refining my own works. Those people don't necessarily have professional aspirations, but I think it's inaccurate to say there's *no* organic desire for critique or improvement among fanfiction authors.
You have a Substack! How wonderful! I enjoyed your YouTube Video on "Romantasy" and its associated problems, and I'm looking forward to this.
So I thought I was going to be the first one to bring up Star Trek, but I see that Clint has beaten me to it. While I was not reading ST fanfic in 1968, I became aware of it in 1973 at the age of 12. I so wanted to read it, but, alas and alack, I lived in a small Arizona town in the middle of nowhere, and had very, very little money. When I moved to a big Texas city in the 1980’s, I somehow found fellow fans and was thrilled to be able to borrow their fanzines before going on to buy my own. (Perhaps I should say at this point that I actually did read other things growing up, e.g., The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Le Morte d’Arthur, Pride and Prejudice, etc.) What I had not expected was that nearly everyone but me was into this thing called “K/S.” I was appalled, as I knew this was not how the characters had been written. I also didn’t tend to gravitate towards smut, especially gay smut. I found it rather odd that it was written by straight women for other straight women. Anyway, I drifted away, but a few years ago when I was going through a rather difficult time and needed an escape, I decided to see if there was such a thing as online fanfic. Oh, boy. I believe AO3 was the fist site I came across. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to see that things had gone from bad to worse. There are something like 20,000+ stories under the ST:TOS section. When you filter out what is designated M/M, F/F, and ‘explicit,’ the number of stories drops to about 5,000. Of those, most are not worth reading, often due to the writers’ poor grammar and punctuation skills. That being said, there are a handful of wonderfully written stories, both online and in print, but I suppose my comments are my rather roundabout way of saying that you are spot on.
As a middle-school Trek fan in the late 70s, I read several of the early novelizations, which were a mixed bag, but the only fanfic I read were the stories in the two Star Trek: The New Voyages books (1976 and 1978). At the time I really enjoyed them, but they wowed me less when I reread them a few weeks ago for the first time in ever. There were more than a few implications of romantic feelings of Kirk toward Spock at the least that seem to have completely gone over my head when I read them, and the female authorship is remarkable, now that I've read this post: In the first volume, all nine authors were women; in the second, only two of the eleven were men.
There's a rule in the fanfic community - waddling through 90% of the trash is worth it to find the 10% of treasure. And while I do agree with your points for the MOST part, I would push back and say that there is a heavy negative bias bleeding though. I grew up and then grew out of reading fanfiction - but at the same time, I grew up also reading Milton and Dante and Blackmore and Wolfe, lost in the stories of Wilber Smith and the voice of Homer. To this day, I still read specific fanfic authors simply because they knew what they were doing on a character and world and story.
By and large, fanfiction is bad - but calling it the source of all literary decline is a bit of a stretch - and relieves the publication and writing industry of its own faults and weights in the argument.
It's reductive, I mean - in the sense that there are a multitude of points on the timeline where we can point to and call it the start of the decline. Hemingway and his influence, Gordon Lish's influence on the modern editing process, the codification of the Workshop style, and the degradation and misinformation of modern MFA reading techniques. The loss of proper linguistical and etymological knowledge as foundational to writer knowledge, the proper ability to read, the normalization of methodical and slow reading, verbal reading, self critique. I think it's indicative that if people THINK projecting fanfiction ideas and ideals onto other mediums - then there is a broader issue at play. I hate Wattpad, personally, and I found most of the stuff on AO3 to be utter garbage, but I also understand that most of it is self indulgent on purpose.
I think fanfiction is something that is actually healthy - alongside other fringe mediums emerging like Web serials, web novels, Manhwa and Manhua - because unlike publishing, with its own content moderation, and PR concerns, they allow for DIFFERENT story ideas to emerge. Parahumans, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, SSS-Class Revival Hunter - these are all excellent pieces in their own right, in both their web novel format and, for the latter twos, comic form. Ciaphas Cain: Warmaster of Chaos, The Weaving Force, Not This Time Fate, From Fake Dreams, I'm Still Here - all excellent pieces of fanfiction writing (these are just the ones that came to mind in the moment).
To reduce it all down to smut and derivative is not exactly an honest assessment of the medium, and to directly quote your post:
"It’s my belief that cancel culture in literature is in large part due to the growing prevalence of fan fiction community rules in the real world."
I find this statement largely ignores the overall media and cultural landscape we exist in. While there is a LARGE fanfiction community, it is largely divorced from the actual political and publishing industry, though I am aware that there is an overlap of editors and publishers now and previously monitoring these sites for engagement to for an easy "this will sell" author that already has a pre-established community - though this is also not exactly indicative of the role of fanfiction being the cause of writing's decline, and I would posit that it is more illuminating on the nature of the publishing industries capitalistic and LCD approach to writing and reading.
In fact, I can't even say that this is an honest based assessment and that the title and conclusion is hitting on two predominately different points. To quote your blog post again:
"*note: I’ve received many messages since making my jab at fan fiction in my video on romantasy and women’s fiction that insist that smut is not the only kind of fan fiction in existence. I addressed this issue in the current video, the fan fiction video, but to be clear: Smut and explicit content — particularly involving taboo themes like incest or even illegal themes like underage sex and straight-up pedophilia — is so important to fan fiction writers that its protection is 90 percent of the reason AO3 was created in the first place. Moreover, it is one of the most widely talked about “censorship” issues in the community."
Firstly, as you note in your blog post - AO3 was largely created due to the purges that occurred on other sites, predominately Fanfiction Net and its like, and a large majority of the writers who wrote there that were banned and works that were removed migrated over to AO3. It's widely known that AO3's entire brand is built on the inclusion of EVERYTHING - for good or ill. My question is that if you predicated your entire engagement with fanfiction based, from what I have listened to and read, on primarily the immoral and sexual content posted there - then you have not really engaged with Fanfiction - you've engaged with the primary source of not just Smut Fanfiction, but the spaces that actively cater towards it. Then you attribute that, alongside side some general and what I assume are personal biases, to strip the nuance of the discussion around the decline of literature and 'literary fiction' to focus on a largely small role player in the grander space.
I will quote your final paragraph on your blog here too:
"I pose the questions not to start fights, but to start conversations, real conversations. Because fan fiction is ruining not just literature and other storytelling, but also itself. Fan fiction could be wonderful. But it was the first casualty of whatever this thing is that is now infecting the rest of literary culture."
I engage with you thusly - how did you arrive at the conclusion you did that "Fanfiction Has Destroyed Writing (And Everything Else)" - and are you engaging with the concept, or the output of a community within it? Are you engaging with a genuine discourse of the impact it has on writing, as a medium, or on the bits that are now bleeding into the cultural zeitgeist? Because while you are correct- there are absolutely steps needed to be taken in the fanfiction community on the nature of the content produced - but there is a world of difference between THAT and the content itself leading to the decline of readers and literacy and literature and writing ability. That, I think, is a much broader and much more nuanced discussion.
Also note: I am not saying this to be contrarian or defendant - I ask this from a place of genuine curiosity, because the delivery and voice and such feels largely different from your other posts and videos. This largely was written in YouTube comments, but I thought it might be better served posted here, direct and out of the quagmire of the YouTube comments. It just feels more... dismissive? Insulting? Rather indignant and personal - the overall tone and voice. Like a Roman walking into a Celtic camp and calling them all barbarians? At least that is how i heard it - because there is not much of the nuance you'd usually bring, and the entire focus seems to be on the SEXUAL content posted, and not on the medium and nature of fanfiction itself. It just feels different from what you usually post, is all
Also: Yes, Twilight and Fifty Shades were originally fanfiction. Twilight is a bit iffier, as it was largely inspired by My Chemical Romance according to Meyer, and might have originally been drafted as fanfiction of that. Fifty Shades was a fanfic of Twilight.
I am going to have to watch your YouTube video. I love reading Fanfiction but I agree with most of the points here! There are far too many degenerate stories and a lot of child porn. It is gross. I love reading Harry Potter fanfiction but I have noticed that the community has an issue with making the children act more adult in sexual ways and it is nasty. And of course, I’ve noticed another fandoms. Over the years of reading fanfiction I have become a lot more discerning about what I read.
Thank you for going through the trenches to gather all these information, it must’ve been traumatic.
I was shocked and baffled by the current state of contemporary literature and reader community when I decided to get back into reading last year — and now the dots have been connected.
This is really insightful and well supported, thank you so much for saying this.
Your analysis is, as always, excellent.
Being a man with as much as zero interest in BL and smut fanfictions, the sense of scale and degeneracy was certainly a surprise. I suppose it's helped overcome some of that feminist programming left over in my mind from high school.
I suspect you would find the research of Hiroki Azuma quite interesting as some further reading into the concept. While you have covered the "symptoms" of this strange disease very well, I feel there is still deeper you can dive into the cause - though the academic analyses are all very postmodern and 'Foucaultian', as most literary research is these days.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41503736.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3Ace2adbd508a3bf245a4ee221793e42bc&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1
linked above is: The Animalization of Otaku Culture, a short primer on the issue of fan cultures from a Japanese perspective.
I was "sent east" late in highschool by a friend but had a similar experience to you regarding "weeb" culture. It seems to me the Japanese are somewhat more advanced along this disease than we are because of the breakdown of their highly rigid social culture - everything was governed through strict procedures that have now been destroyed by modernisation, leaving the socially inept far more isolated and disaffected than they are here. It's an issue much deeper than "Japanese intolerance" or "bigotry".
I've written an overview of all this which is a bit more friendly to those who are outside the Japanese media space which you are welcome to use as well, though of course I am no sociologist.
https://substack.com/@bdgodde/p-174583734
Thank you for suffering for our sakes, you are a prophet of doom ascending from the underground to bring us painful and hard truths. Hope you can find a way to remain sane.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had the same experience wading into eastern media. I started with Chinese historical dramas (a la Nirvana in Fire) and didn't make my way to Japan till later. But the Chinese fan space is at least as bad as Otaku culture, if not worse in some ways. Over time I gradually stopped talking about eastern media with people I didn't know because I was almost always met with a certain kind of deranged obsession that was very off-putting. I agree with what you've said here, as to the potential causes. I look forward to reading both of the links you've added, thank you! This subject is endlessly interesting to me, so I just keep diving and diving, even if sometimes I enter a particularly disturbing cavern.
I've read the introduction to that article by Hiroki Azuma and I'm already excited to have been alerted to the existence of a such a writer. Thank you! I also like the idea of the databasification of experience, it sounds like a keen articulation of something for which I've been trying to find the words for a long time.
That was interesting and sad, thanks for the link. I think we will figure out how to handle the temptations and excesses of the internet, but a lot of lives have been maimed or destroyed, and a lot more will be until we do.
Thoroughly enjoying watching your video about this on YouTube!
Thank you!
As someone trying to build an immersive world with great storytelling for young adult readers (without self indulgence and smut), it makes me sad and pessimistic.
It certainly can have that effect, but I think you should also look at just how much resistance there is to this these days. And that resistance is growing. People (readers) are really tired of this kind of thing. They're ready for something better.
I sure hope so!!!!
And I’m sure you’re playing a role in that.
That’s good news!
I appreciate you taking the time to do a substantive analysis and "calling out" of the degeneracy issue in user-generated content circles, especially in those dark corners of the web that don't even try to self regulate.
I've never been to any of these fanfic sites, but this problem spread to the independent/web game development scenes, too. For instance, the platform Itch.io popped up and offered a great platform to replace the Flash games sites of yesteryear, but I quickly discovered that by the time I found it, there was a growing underground on it for all kinds fetish-driven art. Whether it was an interactive novel, visual novel, or proper game.
Now Steam, though much better at providing content guards, has started allowing some really explicit fetish-driven games onto their platform.
I think I'm mostly just venting/commiserating here, but I just wanted to say I'm praying for your soul. The poor thing sounds like it went through the wringer writing this and the video. 🙏
I appreciate that! I was familiar with the general idea of what I would find, but I wasn't entirely prepared. There were a few times (such as when I was reading the BL comics, especially the one I featured) when I would turn a page and see something and then I was suddenly overcome with this sick pit in my stomach. I imagined it was a very, very toned down version of what those investigators must feel when they stumble upon CSAM.
The insane, accelerating pornification of everything is completely mind-blowing to me. It's been there to some degree for so long, but all/most the restrictions have been lifted in the last decade. So now it seems nothing is off-limits, nothing is safe, everything that can be turned into porn in some way, absolutely will. It's exhausting.
If we don't vent a little, I think we might explode. Anyway, thank you for the prayers!
I have enjoyed your videos! Thank you for making them
Thank you!
I haven't even read the piece yet and I agree with it
Surprisingly Neon Genesis Evangelion (through the manga, anime and later films) provides an interesting examination of this phenomena, particularly the escapism that gives rise to self indulgence. The YT video "The Curse of Evangelion" is worth watching as a sort of preface to the series. Another show worth watching is Twin Peaks, which offers David Lynch's critique of the self indulgence of crime shows at the time, but which became, in the Return, a broader commentary on the industry, fans and media landscape as a whole. The Twin Perfect videos on the subject are worth checking out in this regard.
Thank you for the great videos!
Wow! I had heard that there were problems with fanfic, but I had no idea!
Plus, this does give context to the way some storytelling is going nowadays.
The 80/20 comparison is interesting in that if we take the printed books market we shall see the same or almost the same 80/20 distribution for bodice-rippers and male fantasy/quality literature. Thus the distribution doesn't seem to me peculiar for fanfiction but a general rule for any literary work with the only difference being, bodice-rippers and male fantasy authors usually are as far from self-indulgence as possible and rip the bodices/conquer and dominate with no incentive but the financial one.
Also you somehow fail to notice a male fanfiction sphere that is maybe less robust than BL-dominated female one, but no less interesting. Though perhaps since it has less of an impact on American formula literature it's of less interest to you?
I don't expect to be heard, but I am consistently surprised that discussions of fanfic seem unaware that fanfic has its origin with the original Star Trek. In David Gerrold's 1973 book, The World of Star Trek, he documents what was then a novel phenomenon of the increasingly cult like following developing around Star Trek. He attempts to document every aspect of it including something that seemed bizarre at the time: fans writing their own Star Trek stories. These stories were very specific. They involved "shipping" before such a word was used. (Gerrold seems unaware of either that word, or the label "fan fiction.") What he documents is a group of female fans known as K-S Ladies. They write stories of Kirk and Spock having a homosexual relationship.At the time, such things were not widely talked about, but this is the real beginning of fanfic.
I'm familiar with the early days of Star Trek fan fiction. But from what I can see, having not been there when it was occurring, the nature of that era of fan fiction was quite different from what we have in current year, even if there were marked similarities. I don't consider Harry Potter the origin of fan fiction, but rather I view the collision of Harry Potter and fan fiction as what produced our current iteration of fan fiction.
Thank you for the book recommendation! I'd be very interested to read his account of that phenomenon.
K-S ladies specifically wrote stories about Kirk and Spock in a homosexual relationship, which is to say fanfic did not "degrade" to what it became with Harry Potter. It started there. Pornography is endemic to the form. Harry Potter pronographic fanfic was simply inevitable.
I’ve heard (or read) your comment, at least, and assuming it is accurate I’m glad you shared it. Ms. Layne’s perspective seems to suffer from a slight recency bias, but I would consider it adjacent to the purpose of her argument. Her description of how modern writers have been infiltrated by members who developed their writing skills (if they can even be called that) in the culture of fan fiction is accurate, even if she is mistaken in attributing the origin of that phenomenon to Harry Potter. It seems more of a description of how it currently functions, why it is a problem, and brief suggestions for how to address it and less a thorough diagnosis of how it originated.
Personally I wonder if the nature of a serialised television series, with an overarching universe created by one author and individual episodes delegated out to individual subordinate authors, had anything to do with it. And the nature of a story changing from a (comparatively) short hour- to two-hour film, consisting of a story-based sequence of events and narrative purpose, to an open-ended depiction of what are almost daily experiences with no set narrative time limit until the season finale.
My suggestion that it is relevant comes from how illicit relationships between characters was not an aberration that metastasized or developed in later iterations of fanfic, but was intrinsic to the original form. It didn't become that way, it started that way. Harry Potter "shipping" was simply an inevitable upshot of a decades-old form at that point. The K-S phenomenon developed entirely spontaneously among female fans with no connection to the production. They were sending these stories to each other by mail. Female fans were among the earliest and most fervent fans. One of them, Bjo Trimble, organized a massive letter writing campaign to save the show from cancellation, which gained a third season from a quite startled and puzzled NBC. Today, we take fandom as for granted as we do oxygen, but back then it was weird and new and started with Star Trek. Not even comic book fans had this bizarre kind of cult-like relationship to the material.