#fanfic worked different from fan art likes did pay the rent for fanfic writers

[a9saga]

do you guys know that your likes are appearing on people's dashboards now? not in large numbers or anything. i've been seeing smutty fanfictions on my dash and i mean i'm not judging you, but i do wanna give fair warning that it may just appear on there for other people.

#first time i saw this a blog i have not seen on my dash in years liked a harry styles fic last week #what's interesting is that knowing this is both good for small artists whose likes didnt pay the rent (but ppl didnt wanna reblog) #but ppl realizing this are ultimately going to make it bad for fanfic writers whose readers wont want to interact w the post #fanfic worked different from fan art likes did pay the rent for fanfic writers #bc they still boosted the piece in tags of people actively seeking out fanfiction #people didnt actively seek out fan art in as large numbers #tumblr stop trying to make likes visible people actually dont want that here #peoples dont reblog/delete later posts are gonna be seen by more people when their followers leave a like as a sign of concern or sympathy #and more embarrassingly frankly im gonna know whos lurking looking for harry styles smut #and i dont know that people want me to do that! people took advantage of likes being private #you cant just change that after all these years that sucks #tumblr #fandom #bullshit #shut up kaily #edit: i just disabled seeing likes on my dash but still this statement applies #i dont think that keeps your likes off others' dashboards

[probablyintraffic]

fandom, profit & 50 shades

To follow up on this post, I’ve found the main primary source that I was working off of when I wrote that part about 50 Shades. A year and a half ago this reddit comment was making the rounds through fandom, from a member of the Twilight fan community. It alleges that E. L. James (“Erika”) "ripped off” already very popular fandom tropes and stories, and identifiable stories in the fandom at that. The redditor wrote (emphasis mine):

Erika never looked back. She actually has blocked every single person I still know from fandom on her twitter account. She used the community to get her book (most ideas created by the community itself) to #1 then essentially shut the door on them all.

Pretty brilliant, really.

But then, that's why she's not putting out any new content, and why she probably never will. She is likely incapable of producing fiction without the use of existing characters and a collaborative community. Erika Leonard is not a creator, she is a marketer.

This is an interesting piece of history, which makes the ahistorical claim that the inability to “produce fiction without the use of existing characters and a collaborative community” is somehow a flaw and not the default mode of fic writing. Needless to say I don’t agree with a lot of what hurricangst wrote, so I quote this history not as wholehearted endorsement but because of what it records, which is partly sequence of events, and partly the language which fans did not yet have to express anger and sadness at the incursion capitalism into fandom.

In broad outlines the post (& many follow-ups) described a dysfunctional fandom community in which too much attention accrues to a few BNFs, who took financial advantage of the situation. Savvier writers devised ways to rack up high reviews counts and gain reputation, or wrote only stories formed with tropes they already knew would be a success. Eventually many writers published and pulled down their stories, inspiring much wank and unpleasantness. As I argued the last time, I think this was the case of authors claiming individual ownership on communal property (which all fanfics are), and bringing in capitalism where it didn’t belong.

These discussions, however, tend to devolve into referendums on the individual authors or fandoms--Is the Twilight fandom especially no-good-terrible because it’s Twilight? Was E. L. James an uncommonly successful scam artist who stole ideas from other fans? (If so I admire the hustle.) Sometimes the discussion turned to some historical precedent or another, and some folks here did manage to touch on the issue of fandom and profit, which is the actual, real, perennially open wound at the heart of, scientifically, 50% of all fandom angst. Repeat after me, hate the game, don’t hate the players.

The game is fandom and profit. Good lord, these fucking meta essays on fandom and profit have endlessly prattled on about what Being a Good Fan meant or to what exact degree the fan authors should bend their heads to beg for money, which is all comedies of manners, all of it. The language they used is one of admonishment for the people who dared to set a toe out of the unspoken bounds of fandom manners. Take this quote from an essay about that Buffy controversy, where an author asked fans to pay for WIP updates:

The biggest problem with cousinjean's post, to my mind, is the arrogance of it.

L. O. L.

But despite the massive, collective angst, fandom remains vulnerable as ever to corporate takeover. Sure, fandom has repelled several attempts to commercialize fanfics, and revulsion to profit making runs deep, but it is mostly out of survival instinct. The language and reasoning used is never explicitly anticapitalist, never, because we don’t think of this problem as a systemic one, but a specifically fannish one. Do we really think that our anxiety about commodification has not been felt and replicated thousands of times over by writers and artists? 

The ultimate fantasy of fandom is that we live in a separate world, that we can protect it, and tend it day by day, vigilant of the mainstream/market/corporate attempts to intrude. But that’s not quite true. We will keep having to fend off these attacks until we are no longer able, because we don’t engage with the world which produced them.

I really have not used the words “socialism” or “Marxism” here when I’m talking about fandom, partly because I didn’t think it was necessary to name the mode of analysis and partly because it would sound a little bit pretentious, but it is necessary here. We need more of this language and this mode of analysis in fandom so that we may understand the difference between compensation and profit, between the capitalist and the worker, so that we can name our enemies and not just kill ourselves. When people appeal to readers for rent and healthcare, we should be able to say, they deserve rent and healthcare, but not because they wrote a story I liked, but because they are human.

Such analyses force us to think beyond fandom. I know many of you probably already do reblog social justice stuff, but it’s not working, and this poverty of our analyses remains. Why do we so often stop short at critiquing commodification in the larger world but comfortably condemn it in within our own? Because we cannot imagine a different reality other than the one we have, and besides which we’re not quite ready to devise a resource distribution system which does not predicate on a “free” market. 

I read this Jacobin article last year and I couldn’t put my finger on what troubled me about it, when I sympathized with so much of its sentiments. In it, Kate Robinson wrote that she was so disillusioned with the politics of fandom that she abandoned it altogether (”ditched the Snape wars”), in favor of socialist politics. The article suggested that socialism and fandom are somehow incompatible, or that if one wanted sound socialist politics one should look elsewhere, and I admit I’ve seen fewer socialists here than I would have expected of a place so overrun by academia, but that is not really the case. We can apply the Marxist lens anywhere (how? very carefully) and fandom seems in sore need of it. (Aca-fandom is a different matter.)

For precedence, we can look at the very substantial body of literature on the social history of art. They looked at art as an artifact of history, influenced by and influencing politics. They looked at what the artwork responded to, and how people responded to it, and they ask, how was the artwork produced, and how was it distributed, and in which ways did the meaning of it change when we understand more about the context for which it was meant? This kind of work doesn’t want to condemn, it wants to understand, and isn’t it the precise kind of approach that we as fans so often ask of outside journalists and commentators when they write about fandom? 

#fandom history #fandom meta #fandom and profit