Here We Go Again

The fan I ranted about last month, the one who doesn't see that their blorbo has a nasty streak now and then - I thought it was because they love the character and don't want to see the bad stuff.

Yesterday we were discussing one specific episode and I was talking about the difficulties in Michael and Fiona's relationship and they said, "Oh, but by the end of that episode, they go to dinner with Madeline and Benny and they're having a lovely time and sharing a toast to wonderful couples. It really shows how they've grown in their relationship and how well they work things through now." My eyes were enormous as I read that.

Michael's mother planned that dinner with her new boyfriend; they're at a fancy place and Madeline is thrilled to get them all together so they can get to know each other. And Michael and Fiona are sitting there with plastered on smiles and saying all the right things through gritted teeth because they don't want to ruin it for Madeline while Fiona resists the urge to stab Michael with a fork.

That particular fan talks a lot about how they're autistic, but that can mean so many different things, and then I realised that they have the 'takes words literally and misses body language cues' form of autism. The reason it sometimes feels like we watched two different shows when I'm talking to them is because... we literally did watch two different shows.

And somehow after all these years in so many fandoms, it had never occurred to me that that could be the reason for some of fandom's oddities and clashes. Apparently I can be really blind too.

I was talking with my spouse about tastes in porn the other night (as you do), and I mentioned that I’m currently writing a threesome fic. “Oh, which three?” he asked.

“The original three,” I said. “Michael, Fiona and Sam. Almost all the Burn Notice poly fics are those three.”

And my spouse, who has never sat down to watch an episode of Burn Notice, but has been absorbing more than he probably ever wanted to know through months of chronic exposure, said, “Huh. Well, I’m glad they let Sam in, I thought it would have been Jesse.”

And then we got into a half hour long discussion about ageism in fandom and racism in fandom, and who the fangirls consider conventionally attractive enough to be fuckable, and all the ways the writing can influence that. (It gets harder to dismiss Sam as too old to have a sex life when he’s canonically shagging his way through half the Miami country club set. And there’s the history with those three, going back years before the show even started, which creates a dynamic that can’t be replicated with Jesse.)

But it got me reflecting again, and I’ve always been puzzled by the ageism thing, even back before I got to be middle aged myself. Around the year 2000 when The West Wing was the latest big fandom, I found a fantastic slash fic with Leo McGarry and Lord John Marbury. It was so funny and snarky, and totally in character and yes, it was hot. So I was reccing this fic and getting the reaction, ‘Ewww! Old people sex! I don’t want to read that, I don’t need those images in my head!’ And I was all 0_0 But the fic! It’s so well written! Why will nobody love it? (A couple of people did read it and come around, so kudos to the writer for achieving that XD)

It varies so much with the fandom too. Any fandom that skews older tends to have less ageism (no surprise there). There was never a shortage of sex for middle aged, bald Picard in TNG fics, a show that came with a lot of women who’d been fans of the 60s Trek. In the Hannibal fandom, up until a couple of years ago I would have said that there was no ageism there at all, given the preponderance of opinion that circa 50-year-old Mads Mikkelsen is a definitive DILF. But apparently the Hannibal fans over on twitter found some idiots who were willing to overlook the gaslighting, manipulation and stabbing in that relationship, but thought a ten year age gap was beyond the pale. Honestly? The whole show is about this utterly obsessive, screwed up relationship between these two men – if you find the basic concept of it repellant, why are you even here??

And then there’s the racism issue, which I’ll admit I spent many years in fandom living in complete ignorance of. Part of that is because a lot of the early fandoms I wrote for were So Very White (Due South had one minor Black male character) or anime fandoms, where characters might have been nominally Japanese, but looked about as Japanese as I do. The place I really ran into the racism hard was in Hannibal. The number of people who would happily ship Hannibal and Will, despite the above-mentioned gaslighting, manipulation and stabbing, but who thought Jack Crawford was practically Satan because he talked Will into doing an unpleasant job and got angry and yelled a few times – that was quite an eye-opener. The justifications they would come up with for it were fun too – ‘It’s workplace abuse! Jack’s in a position of power!’ Hmmm, but Hannibal's in a position of power and committing medical malpractice, and having a frustrated boss shouting at you is hardly worse than the drugging and the stabbing, really, is it? So why do you find the shouting Black man so much more offensive than the serial killing white guy?

And honestly, I don’t have anywhere I’m really going with all of this, other than just to vomit out what I’ve been pondering over, and to say that we fans can be strange, and shallow. And blind, sometimes. So very blind.

I woke up this morning, and found this wonderful comment, on one of my old Trigun fics.



And wow, it’s just taken me back about 16 years. It’s amazing to me that a tiny, niche manga fandom that seemed to have died out around 2007 has still been gaining new fans in all the years since. I still get the occasional comment from new people who only just read the manga.

And it’s really reminded me of two things. One is how MUCH I miss the old LJ/DW-style fandoms, with communities, where everyone could have discussions in one place, and everybody could see and reply to everyone else’s thoughts and comments, and then (even better!) go back and easily find them again when you wanted to. It all felt so much more friendly and inclusive than tumblr does, where anybody new feels like they’re struggling on the fringes of a fandom, barely seen.

And the other is that I should finish uploading my back-catalogue of fanfics, because I still have a couple of fandoms I haven’t put on AO3. It really does mean something to people to have them there, it’s not just me collecting all my stuff in one place to be a completionist.

Also, anyone who thinks there’s no point commenting on older fics because the authors won’t care about that stuff any more, you are so, so wrong.

This might come off as something as a rant, and I guess to a point it is - but mostly it's just genuine puzzlement. Because I honestly don't understand the entirely different responses from the two creative halves of fandom.

I'm a fanfic writer, and when people comment on my fics, I always reply. And it's pretty much universal, it seems, because when I comment on other people's fics, I almost always get a response. If my comment was fairly short, it may be, 'Glad you liked it, thanks for letting me know.' If my comment was more detailed, the reply will often be, 'I'm so glad you liked that bit, it was one of my favourites, let me tell you my inspiration for it!' Basically, enthusiasm is met with enthusiasm, and everyone wants to talk about their work. I think I've commented on maybe four or five fics EVER across twenty years and over a dozen fandoms where the author hasn't responded.

And then there are the artists. I've reblogged fanart on tumblr and pillowfort with detailed comments explaining what I loved about it - the light, the shading, the composition. I've sent direct, personal messages to fan artists across various forums telling them how much I love their work. I've promoted artists, linking to their work, and to their sites, and tagging them, and telling everyone who'll listen how fabulous they are. And out of the dozens and dozens of fanarts I've praised and pimped publicly and privately, do you know how many of the artists ever bothered to reply to me? Three. Yes, three. Basically, it's the exact inverse of what I get from writers, and what I give as a writer.

Is is that fanfic writers get so few responses, they'll do anything for more? Is is that fanartists who get hundreds, and in a few cases thousands of notes on every piece of art, don't have the time to respond to them all? Is it because writers write for free with praise as their only reward, while artists are selling their work for cash and don't need to bother with verbal feedback when they're getting paid in actual money? I know that some of them don't speak English as a first language, and maybe they don't reply because they'd find it hard to communicate with me beyond the basics, but that's not true for most of them and I'm honestly just... ???

I can tell you that as a result of this, I'm commenting less and less on art. I'll still reblog it if I like it, but I rarely say anything personal about it any more. I have to ABSOLUTELY love it to say anything, or if it's art by a new artist to a fandom with very few notes, I'll say something to try and encourage them. But for the vast majority of fanart by the vast majority of fanartists, I'll just reblog and move on, because I get tired of shouting into the void.

I've been telling people for the last few years that season one of the Hannibal TV series is basically Tokyo Babylon, and season two is Death Note. Then last night someone pointed out to me that Hannibal is also Pet Shop of Horrors, and OMG, how the hell did I miss that?

Lets see - Immaculately dressed, exquisitely mannered prissy perfectionist with a sideline in murder falls in love with a scruffy, lonely law enforcement guy who lives like a slob, and while said law enforcement guy is supposedly trying to entrap the murderer and get evidence to arrest them, they actually spend a lot of time hanging out with a killer and being far too friendly. Oh, and there’s a sort of informal shared custody arrangement with a kid who isn’t theirs. The only difference is, in Hannibal it's the detective who hordes animals, not the killer.