🔥 how about an opinion about fanfic?

Fanfic is held to a ridiculous standard most of the time and it’s annoying as hell. The scope of influence that fanfic actually holds isn’t very big (because not only is it limited to the fandom it’s in, it’s also limited to the sub-fandom of the ship and the people who’ve willingly read it). Anyone who’ve busted their butts on a fic only to get less than a five hundred hits can tell you it’s a pretty niche market. But the constraints that some people would have you put on fanfic because of it’s perceived potential to ruin everything that’s good in the world wind up killing creativity and fucking with peoples heads. As fanfic writers we’re supposed to be “better” than the media we’re borrowing from which sometimes means there’s a pressure to “clean it up”. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen “well as long as it’s not romanticized” thrown at certain darker themes to which I go “yeah, I’m assuming that if you’ve clicked on my extensively tagged work you’re a grown up who doesn’t want to be moralized to”. I’m not here to read happy stories about happy people who have vanilla sex in their affordable apartments. I’m here to read about people who fight and get pissed and have issues with themselves and each other, who struggle but find happiness (or don’t) and grow and change. I’m here for pain and progress. And sometimes I’m here just to watch everything burn. 

I think it’s fair to criticize certain trends or patterns in fic and to get upset about them, but ultimately if you’re not doing anything to try to counterbalance that by actually making what you want to see (and not by yelling at strangers on the internet) it’s just hot air. Be the change you want to see in the world, you know? Don’t like that your faves get sidelined? Write your faves in important roles. Don’t like that one trope? Write a different trope. 

But I just personally think it’s almost laughable that fanfic is seen by some as this paragon of writing where we can “do it better” than the media in question by eliminating conflict and darker topics all together. It’s not going to cause a complete social collapse if I write my fucked-up foursome serial killer fic and we’re not going to be heralded into a new age of enlightenment if someone else writes their coffee shop AU where Character A is a firefighter and Character B volunteers at an animal shelter and their only conflict is they’re both too shy to make a move. “Doing it better” so often just leads to boring ass fic. 

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