A Little Ditty About Fandom
| Meta | |
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| Title: | A Little Ditty About Fandom |
| Creator: | Rana Eros |
| Date(s): | December 28, 2006 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fanfiction |
| External Links: | A Little Ditty About Fandom, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
A Little Ditty About Fandom is an essay by Rana Eros.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
The topic: feedback.
Excerpts
Fandom is a meritocracy.The merit scale isn't always yours. In fact, usually it's not.
You learn to cope. A lot of stories get recced that aren't your cup of tea at all. Authors you don't think can write a grocery list get pages and pages of feedback. Pairings you don't get are popular. Characters you loathe become fandom darlings. Your favorite authors get involved in fandoms that leave you cold. Your delete, backspace, and scroll buttons get a lot of use.
Sometimes, you get tetchy. You get tetchy enough to exclaim to your pet/SO/resident poltergeist, "What is with everyone writing all this donutfic? Don't they know ice creamfic suits the source so much better? Where's my ice creamfic? And why is everybody reccing Jane Doe? Her characterization's flat, her dialogue's clunky, and her plots are hackneyed. And she writes A/B! Those two would so not work together!" You get tetchy enough to say these things in comments and chat and maybe even make a post about them. Or someone specifically recs donutfic to you and you make a post about that. "Dear fandom, please to not be reccing me the donutfic. I'm just not interested kthxbai."
Some people will disagree with you. Some people will try to talk you into liking it. And some people will say, "Oh, me too! That's why I like Dorothy Smith instead of Jane Doe. She writes ice creamfic!" Dorothy Smith writes ice creamfic! Who is Dorothy Smith? So you ask for a link and you go read Dorothy's stuff and see it's cross-posted to an entire comm devoted to ice creamfic. And you leave Dorothy feedback about her story and she says, "Yeah, I wrote that for last year's ice creamfic challenge and finally got around to posting it here." An ice creamfic challenge! Is there one this year? "Oh, yeah, it's an annual thing. Susan Jones mods it." And you get a URL and Susan's LJ handle and off you go to friend her and check out her friends, and you find an entire community of cool fans who dig the ice creamfic.
Encouraged by group support, you try your own hand at ice creamfic. People like it. They leave you feedback. You write more, and get more feedback. You post, "Squee, ice creamfic!" and other people post back, "Word!" You realize six months have passed since you first lamented about donutfic and now you hardly see any donutfic because you're in a community of ice creamficcers, and you love it. Fandom's a great place!
Or you don't learn to cope. You sit and seethe as Jane Doe gets feedback, as donutfic gets recced, as all the meta circles around A/B and what a great couple they are. You get tetchy. You gripe about character X and the people who love him in chat, comments, maybe even a post. People disagree with you. People try to get you to like the character. And some people say, "Me too! That's why I like Dorothy Smith's work. She doesn't like character X, so she doesn't write him." "Yeah," you say, "that character X just sucks, and anybody who likes him clearly has no taste." "That's a little harsh," says the fan who mentioned Dorothy Smith, and away she goes.