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labingi(Content warning: brief general mentions of sexual violence in fanfic/BL)
For DW folks, a lot of this fannish commentary will be old hat, and I hope you will chime in with your thoughts and experience.
I enjoy Hilary Layne’s YouTube commentary in much the way I enjoy C. S. Lewis. I usually have some philosophical disagreement but also a lot I agree with and definitely respect for her intelligence and rigor.
This video is no exception. In sum, she argues that fan fiction culture (as on Ao3), combined with an educational system that teaches literature badly, has raised a generation of readers and writers whose tastes are “self-indulgent,” prioritizing simplistic self-insertion and personal pleasure over learning and growing through literature. This, in turn, has seeped into much published fiction in a way that makes it read like bad fan fic, full of Mary Sue’s, simplistic storytelling, and a strange combination of sympathy for grotesque behavior (ex. torture) but intolerance of any (nuanced?) depiction of certain negative ideas (ex. racism, sexism).
While I think she misses some of the moral underpinnings of fan fiction, I see truth her narrative. I appreciate her framing the problem as largely having arisen in the past twenty years. Gen Z is two generations younger than me, and her video made me realize I tend to think of fandom in Gen X terms, which is utterly different from what Gen Z has experienced.
The following is some of the reflections, disagreements (or complications), and questions that arose for me watching this video.
Some Defense of BL and Fanfic
Layne notes that she is talking about dominant fan fiction culture—the most popular types of stories, widely used tags, public perception, etc.—and doesn’t deny that good fic exists. I may not disagree much on the facts: I agree fan fic is predominantly smutty, most is badly written, and there’s an annoying amount of author and reader insert. But I think she skips over some of what makes fanfic culturally valuable, so I want to fill some of that in.
She seems mystified by BL, and her characterization of it focuses on how disturbing it is that women like to read about underage boys often paired with older men in noncon situations played as romantic. I agree these pairings are “problematic.” (She seems to see this trope as gaining in prominence, while my impression is it’s fading, but we may be hanging out in different corners of the internet.) In any case, here’s my mile-high defense of BL in terms y’all on DW probably know.
It's been argued, correctly, I think, that BL emerged to allow (initially Japanese) women a psychological space for exploring the complexities (often including violence) of heterosexual relationships without having to directly engage with misogyny and the “heaviness” of childbearing. (Though mpreg happens, it not the norm.) Placing the uke in the role of “woman” allows his feelings and experiences to be taken more seriously than a female character’s generally would be. Even disempowered, he generally has more power than an analogous female character. He is assumed to be “fully human” in a way female character’s often aren’t. Being able to have this space is psychologically and literarily cathartic, but also provides a framework for examining love, attraction, violence, and gender from a somewhat emotionally safe distance.
(This is also why it’s generally more tolerated—desired?—in fandom for male characters to be raped. For a predominantly female-identified readership, the rape of women hits close to home: it’s often not cathartic, just kicking the already disempowered when they’re down. The rape of men allows cathartic examination of what this kind of sexual violence can do/mean to people. This makes perfect psychological sense.)
I completely agree that most BL is bad writing, and part of what makes it bad, for me, is that these issues are often not taken seriously. (Others like that, and I think that’s fine. More below on to what extent we should be morally concerned.) But let it be said that some BL takes it all very seriously and writes it with great nuance. She doesn’t say this isn’t true, but she gives no examples, so I will.
My fav, as readers of my DW know, is Mirage of Blaze, which—odd to say—is probably vying with The Lord of the Rings for most important literary work of my life. Mirage has all the tropes, but it takes them dead seriously, including how very damaging much of this conduct is, and while it’s got graphic sex, and no doubt that’s the number 1 draw for readers overall, it’s not just about sex and desire. It’s about the human psyche, Buddhism, and the Dharma. I became a Buddhist because of this work, which is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, speaking of learning and growing through literature.
All this is to say, BL as a genre has moral validity: it can do good in the world, as a means of catharsis, a site for examining social relationships, and an invitation to learn and grow. And, yes, a lot of it is tripe—even a lot of Mirage is tripe, but when it’s genius, it’s genius.
One could say something similar of slash fic in the West, with a focus (I think)more on equality in romantic relationships, which m/m pairings make easier to imagine. As much as I would like to think the difficulty of imagining m/f equality is more a Boomer/Gen X reason for slash, the persistence of our society’s violence toward and demeaning of women makes me suspect this applies to Millennials and Gen Z too. I know from my Gen Z students that many young women still feel demeaned, objectified, and threatened on a routine basis.
Seeing grizzly/nasty things in stories has been psychologically valuable since forever. Aristotle articulates this in the Poetics. Fanfic, in general, provides a space where things too outré for polite conversation have been explorable, and many people find this emotionally valuable: not just fun or pleasurable but genuinely important to processing their own traumas, fears, etc. (Layne acknowledges that fic can be cathartic, but I’m not sure she accounts for how terribly important this catharsis can be to mental health.)
Back in the early 2000’s on LJ, people would routinely write about what liberation and community they’d found in fandom, how anonymous user names allowed them discuss things they’d be punished by family or community for mentioning in “RL.” Yet they found value in exploring these things, whether because it allowed interrogation of sex and gender norms, confronted traumatic experiences like violence, or for other reasons. It was a haven. It did, indeed, fill some of the role of therapy. While literary catharsis and psychological catharsis are not the same, they are close cousins. Literary catharsis, Aristotle tells us, purges us: it cleans us out. He’s right, and this is helpful.
I’m sure all this still applies to Gen Z, but it is also true that Gen Z is in a very different narrative ecosystem than we were in aughts: huger, better known, more pervasive, more socially/literarily influential, less guard-railed, less personal, less communitarian, less kind and caring, and younger in its user base.
What Are the Drivers of the Problems?
Layne argues that impressionable young people are getting deluged with fanfic culture too young and without being taught critical thinking skills. I think I generally agree with this. Certainly, as a college English instructor, I agree that our education system sucks.
Sidebar Rant on Education:
In the course of class conversations this term, I found out that only about two-thirds of my college students had heard of A Christmas Carol—I mean, A Christmas Carol! And only three out of about 25 in class had heard of Apartheid, which, given the situation in Israel and Palestine, is terrifying. In an earlier class, a student didn’t know the word “tyranny,” also terrifying, not least in a nation founded on resisting it.
It also makes me very sad when my students say they disliked reading Great Expectations or Wuthering Heights or Romeo and Juliet because they couldn’t understand it or couldn’t “picture” it. This is not their fault! This is symptomatic of an education system (and larger culture) teaching them very little about culture and history, which may severely impede their capacity for cultural sensitivity, intercultural empathy, and understanding of their own biases, beliefs, histories, and cultural situatedness. It is crippling. (I know that word is considered ableist, but I need a strong word here: this kind of liberal education is necessary to creating a society that it is less ableist and all the other -ists.)
End rant
How to fix education is a whole other discussion; here I want to focus on fandom. I believe the answer is not to condemn fanfic. For the reasons mentioned above, fanfic should have a social place. In some form, it always will anyway because retelling beloved stories is a human impulse (though, as Layne notes, “fanfic” as it’s commonly thought of is only a subset of derivative storytelling).
Rather, I’m interested in the core systemic differences that make the experience of Gen Z on Ao3 different from the (more positive, less harmful?) experience of Gen X on LJ, mailing lists, or single fandom web archives.
I see two major differences:
1) Today’s fic reader/writers (can) get immersed in it much younger. I agree this is problematic because younger minds are more impressionable, and, while occasional exposure to the lurid or bizarre (or just really bad art) is generally not harmful, its total normalization within vast swaths of popular culture would logically seem more psychologically influential.
2) Today’s fan infrastructure (ex. Ao3, social media) is orders of magnitude larger and less personal. Discord is probably the closest to the old experience of LJ communities or discussion forums. I can’t speak much to Discord: I personally dislike its architecture and its focus on ephemera and avoid it when possible. But it feels to me more analogous to older chat channels (ex. IRC, which I didn’t like either) than forums or communities designed to be long-term locations for ongoing conversation and community. This vastness and impersonality creates immense “noise,” making it harder to have conversations and find community, and encourages antisocial behavior because it’s easier to be cruel to strangers than to community members.
When behavior is not antisocial (cruel), it is often superficial and shallowly polite. Layne notes that fandom tends not to constructively critique writers, and I agree this is true and truer than it was twenty years ago, when beta readers were the norm. Responses to fanfic today seem largely to fall into the category of simple praise or lashing out in anger. This is to be expected in the current vast, impersonal ecosystem.
What Could Be Done?
Layne suggests that we not read/write this twaddle. For myself, message received. I’ve always tried to write good fic and, when I read it, search far and wide for fics I find of good quality. But the “each individual change your ways” school of social improvement doesn’t work to address systemic issues because they are driven by systems, not free individual preference. (In all Layne’s video, the idea that each of her individual viewers “demanding better” will solve the problem is what I most disagree with. No. No, it won’t.) What systemic changes might help?
Our internet culture, in general, needs to move back toward being “human scale” and more personalized, a “global village,” if you will. This would not only help with sociality but help deconstruct digital oligarchy for greater socioeconomic justice.
Here are a non-techie Gen Xer’s ideas on how to do this. All these ideas would have problems and hurdles; they’re not a recipe but general directions to consider/a brainstorm starting point:
Reinvigorate something analogous to RSS (“federation”?) in order to allow access in one feed to numerous different websites on different platforms. That would facilitate a return to decentralized platforms, like individual fan websites or single fandom archives.
Break Ao3 into smaller, independently managed archives, maybe by fandom, or fandom groupings for small fandoms. They could still “talk” to each other in terms of sharing tags, etc.
Aim for most fandom communities to be fairly small and have human moderation, analogous to a discussion forum or LJ/DW community having a couple of admins. If a community gets too large to manage, encourage a norm of breaking it up along some reasonable line (ex. general and mature fic, ship A and ship B, etc.). Of course people might join both communities, but I expect there would be a limit to how many separate communities a single person could navigate, meaning smaller communities overall and less “noise.” Perhaps non-members could still have “read only” access.
Within these smaller communities, encourage community-building and skill-building structures, like ficathons, beta readers, “meta” (or whatever serious commentary is called today), and edited zines (even print zines!). Encourage horizontal power relations: community members interacting vs. influencer and followers. Of course, one needs admins, but they generally don’t dominate whole communities—and if they do, they probably need to be replaced.
We might head toward rigorous “gate-keeping” of adult content, not via a simple form asking if your 18 or an app reading a state issued ID, but a human moderator receiving requests to join and reviewing them. They could include a questionnaire, for example. This could also include blocking of users who can’t be reasonably mature in following community guidelines around participation—perhaps including no “tags” that are whole sentences of gushing about your personal writing process?
Finally, yes, we do need to transform education. That’s another topic, but I’ll briefly hit some of my high points: it should be “Waldorfy.” It should be largely non-digital, except when explicitly teaching online processes. It should emphasize critical thinking and expansive cultural knowledge, including reading both classic old works and honoring new works that speak to youth in the current moment, with some student choice. It should include social justice, equity, and racialized empire as lenses, not necessarily the only lenses. It should provide mentorship though multiyear relationships with the same teacher.
It should have sex ed that responds to the internet environment with honest conversations about topics like consent, sexual orientation, gender identification, sexual diversity (I mean diversity in sex drives, activities people [don’t] enjoy, etc.), misogyny, contraception, abortion, the cultural construction of gender, BDSM, porn, etc. In a word, it should provide informed context for what youth will encounter online. Of course, families should be able to opt out. Even if many do, having just a percentage of students get this background should help the overall culture. And, yes, constructing this curriculum is much easier said than done.
And none of that would solve all the problems, but those are some of my thoughts. What do you all think?
For DW folks, a lot of this fannish commentary will be old hat, and I hope you will chime in with your thoughts and experience.
I enjoy Hilary Layne’s YouTube commentary in much the way I enjoy C. S. Lewis. I usually have some philosophical disagreement but also a lot I agree with and definitely respect for her intelligence and rigor.
This video is no exception. In sum, she argues that fan fiction culture (as on Ao3), combined with an educational system that teaches literature badly, has raised a generation of readers and writers whose tastes are “self-indulgent,” prioritizing simplistic self-insertion and personal pleasure over learning and growing through literature. This, in turn, has seeped into much published fiction in a way that makes it read like bad fan fic, full of Mary Sue’s, simplistic storytelling, and a strange combination of sympathy for grotesque behavior (ex. torture) but intolerance of any (nuanced?) depiction of certain negative ideas (ex. racism, sexism).
While I think she misses some of the moral underpinnings of fan fiction, I see truth her narrative. I appreciate her framing the problem as largely having arisen in the past twenty years. Gen Z is two generations younger than me, and her video made me realize I tend to think of fandom in Gen X terms, which is utterly different from what Gen Z has experienced.
The following is some of the reflections, disagreements (or complications), and questions that arose for me watching this video.
Some Defense of BL and Fanfic
Layne notes that she is talking about dominant fan fiction culture—the most popular types of stories, widely used tags, public perception, etc.—and doesn’t deny that good fic exists. I may not disagree much on the facts: I agree fan fic is predominantly smutty, most is badly written, and there’s an annoying amount of author and reader insert. But I think she skips over some of what makes fanfic culturally valuable, so I want to fill some of that in.
She seems mystified by BL, and her characterization of it focuses on how disturbing it is that women like to read about underage boys often paired with older men in noncon situations played as romantic. I agree these pairings are “problematic.” (She seems to see this trope as gaining in prominence, while my impression is it’s fading, but we may be hanging out in different corners of the internet.) In any case, here’s my mile-high defense of BL in terms y’all on DW probably know.
It's been argued, correctly, I think, that BL emerged to allow (initially Japanese) women a psychological space for exploring the complexities (often including violence) of heterosexual relationships without having to directly engage with misogyny and the “heaviness” of childbearing. (Though mpreg happens, it not the norm.) Placing the uke in the role of “woman” allows his feelings and experiences to be taken more seriously than a female character’s generally would be. Even disempowered, he generally has more power than an analogous female character. He is assumed to be “fully human” in a way female character’s often aren’t. Being able to have this space is psychologically and literarily cathartic, but also provides a framework for examining love, attraction, violence, and gender from a somewhat emotionally safe distance.
(This is also why it’s generally more tolerated—desired?—in fandom for male characters to be raped. For a predominantly female-identified readership, the rape of women hits close to home: it’s often not cathartic, just kicking the already disempowered when they’re down. The rape of men allows cathartic examination of what this kind of sexual violence can do/mean to people. This makes perfect psychological sense.)
I completely agree that most BL is bad writing, and part of what makes it bad, for me, is that these issues are often not taken seriously. (Others like that, and I think that’s fine. More below on to what extent we should be morally concerned.) But let it be said that some BL takes it all very seriously and writes it with great nuance. She doesn’t say this isn’t true, but she gives no examples, so I will.
My fav, as readers of my DW know, is Mirage of Blaze, which—odd to say—is probably vying with The Lord of the Rings for most important literary work of my life. Mirage has all the tropes, but it takes them dead seriously, including how very damaging much of this conduct is, and while it’s got graphic sex, and no doubt that’s the number 1 draw for readers overall, it’s not just about sex and desire. It’s about the human psyche, Buddhism, and the Dharma. I became a Buddhist because of this work, which is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, speaking of learning and growing through literature.
All this is to say, BL as a genre has moral validity: it can do good in the world, as a means of catharsis, a site for examining social relationships, and an invitation to learn and grow. And, yes, a lot of it is tripe—even a lot of Mirage is tripe, but when it’s genius, it’s genius.
One could say something similar of slash fic in the West, with a focus (I think)more on equality in romantic relationships, which m/m pairings make easier to imagine. As much as I would like to think the difficulty of imagining m/f equality is more a Boomer/Gen X reason for slash, the persistence of our society’s violence toward and demeaning of women makes me suspect this applies to Millennials and Gen Z too. I know from my Gen Z students that many young women still feel demeaned, objectified, and threatened on a routine basis.
Seeing grizzly/nasty things in stories has been psychologically valuable since forever. Aristotle articulates this in the Poetics. Fanfic, in general, provides a space where things too outré for polite conversation have been explorable, and many people find this emotionally valuable: not just fun or pleasurable but genuinely important to processing their own traumas, fears, etc. (Layne acknowledges that fic can be cathartic, but I’m not sure she accounts for how terribly important this catharsis can be to mental health.)
Back in the early 2000’s on LJ, people would routinely write about what liberation and community they’d found in fandom, how anonymous user names allowed them discuss things they’d be punished by family or community for mentioning in “RL.” Yet they found value in exploring these things, whether because it allowed interrogation of sex and gender norms, confronted traumatic experiences like violence, or for other reasons. It was a haven. It did, indeed, fill some of the role of therapy. While literary catharsis and psychological catharsis are not the same, they are close cousins. Literary catharsis, Aristotle tells us, purges us: it cleans us out. He’s right, and this is helpful.
I’m sure all this still applies to Gen Z, but it is also true that Gen Z is in a very different narrative ecosystem than we were in aughts: huger, better known, more pervasive, more socially/literarily influential, less guard-railed, less personal, less communitarian, less kind and caring, and younger in its user base.
What Are the Drivers of the Problems?
Layne argues that impressionable young people are getting deluged with fanfic culture too young and without being taught critical thinking skills. I think I generally agree with this. Certainly, as a college English instructor, I agree that our education system sucks.
Sidebar Rant on Education:
In the course of class conversations this term, I found out that only about two-thirds of my college students had heard of A Christmas Carol—I mean, A Christmas Carol! And only three out of about 25 in class had heard of Apartheid, which, given the situation in Israel and Palestine, is terrifying. In an earlier class, a student didn’t know the word “tyranny,” also terrifying, not least in a nation founded on resisting it.
It also makes me very sad when my students say they disliked reading Great Expectations or Wuthering Heights or Romeo and Juliet because they couldn’t understand it or couldn’t “picture” it. This is not their fault! This is symptomatic of an education system (and larger culture) teaching them very little about culture and history, which may severely impede their capacity for cultural sensitivity, intercultural empathy, and understanding of their own biases, beliefs, histories, and cultural situatedness. It is crippling. (I know that word is considered ableist, but I need a strong word here: this kind of liberal education is necessary to creating a society that it is less ableist and all the other -ists.)
End rant
How to fix education is a whole other discussion; here I want to focus on fandom. I believe the answer is not to condemn fanfic. For the reasons mentioned above, fanfic should have a social place. In some form, it always will anyway because retelling beloved stories is a human impulse (though, as Layne notes, “fanfic” as it’s commonly thought of is only a subset of derivative storytelling).
Rather, I’m interested in the core systemic differences that make the experience of Gen Z on Ao3 different from the (more positive, less harmful?) experience of Gen X on LJ, mailing lists, or single fandom web archives.
I see two major differences:
1) Today’s fic reader/writers (can) get immersed in it much younger. I agree this is problematic because younger minds are more impressionable, and, while occasional exposure to the lurid or bizarre (or just really bad art) is generally not harmful, its total normalization within vast swaths of popular culture would logically seem more psychologically influential.
2) Today’s fan infrastructure (ex. Ao3, social media) is orders of magnitude larger and less personal. Discord is probably the closest to the old experience of LJ communities or discussion forums. I can’t speak much to Discord: I personally dislike its architecture and its focus on ephemera and avoid it when possible. But it feels to me more analogous to older chat channels (ex. IRC, which I didn’t like either) than forums or communities designed to be long-term locations for ongoing conversation and community. This vastness and impersonality creates immense “noise,” making it harder to have conversations and find community, and encourages antisocial behavior because it’s easier to be cruel to strangers than to community members.
When behavior is not antisocial (cruel), it is often superficial and shallowly polite. Layne notes that fandom tends not to constructively critique writers, and I agree this is true and truer than it was twenty years ago, when beta readers were the norm. Responses to fanfic today seem largely to fall into the category of simple praise or lashing out in anger. This is to be expected in the current vast, impersonal ecosystem.
What Could Be Done?
Layne suggests that we not read/write this twaddle. For myself, message received. I’ve always tried to write good fic and, when I read it, search far and wide for fics I find of good quality. But the “each individual change your ways” school of social improvement doesn’t work to address systemic issues because they are driven by systems, not free individual preference. (In all Layne’s video, the idea that each of her individual viewers “demanding better” will solve the problem is what I most disagree with. No. No, it won’t.) What systemic changes might help?
Our internet culture, in general, needs to move back toward being “human scale” and more personalized, a “global village,” if you will. This would not only help with sociality but help deconstruct digital oligarchy for greater socioeconomic justice.
Here are a non-techie Gen Xer’s ideas on how to do this. All these ideas would have problems and hurdles; they’re not a recipe but general directions to consider/a brainstorm starting point:
Reinvigorate something analogous to RSS (“federation”?) in order to allow access in one feed to numerous different websites on different platforms. That would facilitate a return to decentralized platforms, like individual fan websites or single fandom archives.
Break Ao3 into smaller, independently managed archives, maybe by fandom, or fandom groupings for small fandoms. They could still “talk” to each other in terms of sharing tags, etc.
Aim for most fandom communities to be fairly small and have human moderation, analogous to a discussion forum or LJ/DW community having a couple of admins. If a community gets too large to manage, encourage a norm of breaking it up along some reasonable line (ex. general and mature fic, ship A and ship B, etc.). Of course people might join both communities, but I expect there would be a limit to how many separate communities a single person could navigate, meaning smaller communities overall and less “noise.” Perhaps non-members could still have “read only” access.
Within these smaller communities, encourage community-building and skill-building structures, like ficathons, beta readers, “meta” (or whatever serious commentary is called today), and edited zines (even print zines!). Encourage horizontal power relations: community members interacting vs. influencer and followers. Of course, one needs admins, but they generally don’t dominate whole communities—and if they do, they probably need to be replaced.
We might head toward rigorous “gate-keeping” of adult content, not via a simple form asking if your 18 or an app reading a state issued ID, but a human moderator receiving requests to join and reviewing them. They could include a questionnaire, for example. This could also include blocking of users who can’t be reasonably mature in following community guidelines around participation—perhaps including no “tags” that are whole sentences of gushing about your personal writing process?
Finally, yes, we do need to transform education. That’s another topic, but I’ll briefly hit some of my high points: it should be “Waldorfy.” It should be largely non-digital, except when explicitly teaching online processes. It should emphasize critical thinking and expansive cultural knowledge, including reading both classic old works and honoring new works that speak to youth in the current moment, with some student choice. It should include social justice, equity, and racialized empire as lenses, not necessarily the only lenses. It should provide mentorship though multiyear relationships with the same teacher.
It should have sex ed that responds to the internet environment with honest conversations about topics like consent, sexual orientation, gender identification, sexual diversity (I mean diversity in sex drives, activities people [don’t] enjoy, etc.), misogyny, contraception, abortion, the cultural construction of gender, BDSM, porn, etc. In a word, it should provide informed context for what youth will encounter online. Of course, families should be able to opt out. Even if many do, having just a percentage of students get this background should help the overall culture. And, yes, constructing this curriculum is much easier said than done.
And none of that would solve all the problems, but those are some of my thoughts. What do you all think?
no subject
Date: 2025-12-08 12:57 pm (UTC)What strikes me about this is that the arguments are always the same. I have seen her arguments over and over -- trying to get rid of badfic, trying to make the writing better, trying to protect people who find fandom too young. The moral panics are certainly not new.
Fandom's current visibility is intertwined with the pervasiveness of the internet and the growth and mainstreaming of SFF. Fandom is so huge now and the platforms on which it happens are so splintered that it feels very different than the LJ culture of the early century that I started with. I don't think there's any putting the genie back in the bottle.
I don't think badfic is bad. I think if people want to write, they should write. People liking simplistic or badly written fic, fan or pro, is nothing new.
There is some fascinating academic writing out there about media fandom. You might enjoy that if you haven't discovered it already, like Transformative Works and Cultures and various books that have been published in the last 20 years.
Thanks for the thinky meta!!!!
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-11 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 04:17 pm (UTC)This is true, as sallymn also noted. I find myself wondering how much of my amenability to these concerns is just me getting old. I agree that badfic is not bad to read or write, in general.
As to TWC, I haven't read any of their work in quite a while; I'm behind the times in current fandom discourse. I mostly see people posting/forwarding posts about racism on Ao3 and the like. If I have time, I should read more of their commentary.
I do think, though, that we have new problems and whatever is going on in fandom is a symptom/microcosm of the larger problem, which is ultimately the collapse of global civilization due to climate breakdown brought on by our imperial economy. But in the context of fandom, the "macro-symptom" is, I think, cultural polarization. We're 15+ years into an era sharply marked by the social "left" and "right" coming to hate each other (as a cultural generalization). In media, I think this does contribute to more simplistic, one-sided storytelling because "nuance" is often attacked from within as showing sympathy for ("collaborating" with) the enemy. I think fanfic culture is involved in this, both as a symptom and driver. Our huge, socially fragmented social media culture is, of course, a principal culprit of this polarization. (The sharp rise in polarization seems to me coincide pretty closely with the advent of social media as a major social force.)
Hence, I do think we need to strive to decentralize and re-personalize the internet, in fandom and elsewhere. Maybe we can't; maybe the genie is just out of the bottle until the collapse gets so severe that much of the infrastructure for the internet collapses, and then, I guess, something else will eventually be built. But in the meantime, I think it's worth trying to mitigate the damage, which is the spirit of my suggestions above. Mind you, I'm not making in headway in actually helping achieve any of this. I'm just ranting online, like one does.
I appreciate your perspective and the thinky thoughts. It's good to be reminded that some of my susceptibility to the moral panic is just my "get off my lawn" phase.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 05:25 pm (UTC)I agree with
Limiting the discussion to AO3 ignores other important contributing historical factors. Eg, I'm really puzzled why Layne made no mention of the first true juggernaut fanfic site, i.e. Fanfiction.net. That pre-dated AO3 by 11 years (1998). One of its nicknames was The Pit of Voles because of its reputation for badfic. There was no shortage of MST3K comms on LJ, set up precisely to mock the more egregious badfic.
It's tempting to blame the Harry Potter phenomenon as the root of "fanfiction has destroyed writing," but the Harry Potter phenomenon was the result of 3 intersecting major factors: 1) a years-long children's/YA book series, 2) aimed at a large generation of young Millennials, 3) published at the same time the internet underwent a massive expansion into homes and schools. It made fandom more mainstream for sure, which has only expanded with the rise of social media.
I noted that Layne did not credit her statement that "80-90% of fic is crap." That's Sturgeon's Law, published in 1957 with respect to science fiction/fantasy (SFF) writing, pre-dating the rise of the Internet by decades. (Which kind of disproves the theory that "Harry Potter destroyed writing." Bad writing has always been around as long as the written word has.) The problems with bad writing, however, are magnified today, no doubt because of the influence of social media--but also because of a failure of public education to teach reading and writing effectively to a large number of later Millennials and Gen Z.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 11:12 pm (UTC)I was also thinking of Sturgeon's Law. None of this is new, but it is worsened by our education system. As an English instructor, I'd like to be part of the solution to the ed part, but I feel like, at best, I'm bailing water out of a sinking boat.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 05:29 pm (UTC)This is all so depressing to me. Both the acknowledgment that m/m pairings get rid of the often unconscious bias against women as equals, and the fact that this bias is still out there.
I don't understand your reasoning for breaking AO3 into pieces. As a centralized archive, it's a good thing, I think - it has resources that smaller archives wouldn't have, and supports multifandom events and crossovers in ways smaller single-fandom archives can't. The important thing here is that AO3 is an archive, not social media or a forum or a community. I think it works well with individual single-interest communities, for example discords (though I would love to see Dreamwidth/LJ-style communities resurge!).
I also agree with what
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 11:30 pm (UTC)I guess what I might advocate is not necessarily breaking up Ao3 as a space so much as administratively sub-dividing it more. (I have to confess I don't know its governance structure well, so please feel free to correct/educate me.)
By analogy, if Ao3 is like a country, different admins' zones of responsibility (ex. a fandom) could be like municipal governments: under the national government but also managing some of their own affairs. Right now, they seems to have different committees with different tasks, but I'd offer that more sub-division might be helpful. For example, they have a committee for Policy and Abuse, but perhaps this could be sub-divided into fandoms or other more "human scale" segments for careful adjudication of complaints.
Again, I'm talking about something I have little knowledge of and my ideas may be totally unworkable. The larger principle--which I do believe in--is that we need to swing back toward institutions (of all kinds) that are human scale in the sense that human beings can manage them effectively with a reasonable workload without deleterious reliance on automation, AI, etc. to serve as proxies for human relationship and management. (Examples of "deleterious" would be when you can't easily reach a human to talk to or procedures around flagging/blocking are not transparent or are too "cookie cutter.")