Fanwork Is A Garden
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Fanwork Is A Garden (not the actual title but one used on Fanlore) |
| Creator: | brightmouth |
| Date(s): | September 23, 2022 |
| Medium: | Tumblr |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Fanwork Is A Garden, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Fanwork Is A Garden is a meta essay written by brightmouth and posted to Tumblr.
Some Topics Discussed in the Post and Comments
- fandom as a gift economy
- commercialization of fandom
- curating your fandom experience
- AO3 as a fandom run community
- differences between each generation of fans
- worries about fandom communities losing agency
- demands by some fans that AO3 create an algorithm to recommend fanfiction designed to their specific tastes
From the Post
Fanwork is a garden. You do not plant seeds in a garden and then get to watch fruits of your labor sprout by just staring at your rows and doing nothing.
Labor: a key word. There should be nothing passive about fan communities.
You cannot harvest your funky little purple potatoes or your butt-shaped carrots without tilling the rows; watering them; getting dirt in the lines of your palms and the rinds of your fingernails. You must give as much as you are wanting to take from the garden. You can have nothing worth anything at all from that garden besides fallow mud unless you’re prepared to do the work to grow it.
Curate the tags you like. Find authors, artists, subsets of larger fandoms, that speak directly to the things you love; the specific characterizations you adore, the dynamics that light you from within. Tell them you love them. They will, most likely, love you too. That’s what happens when you give someone a handshake: they hold you back for a moment. It’s fucking electric.
Do not deny yourself this.
... I think my generation seems to be one of the last that has any sense of organic community-building left in it when it comes to online spaces. It makes me so angry and fucking sad that younger people on the internet don’t know how to cultivate their fan communities because they’ve been raised in spaces optimized for maximizing advertiser dollars and spoon-feeding shit that makes money to consumers accordingly.
In a later post the author clarified
Some of the comments & tags on this don’t seem to understand that I’m not coming at this from a perspective of trying to “get noticed” with fanwork.
The commodification of transformative work is an oxymoron. By its own definition, transformative work is intangible—it’s liminal, and it exists in many layers of margins at once. If you quit practicing the thought pattern of “I am making this to explore subjects I enjoy in my media” and it becomes “I am making this to gain popularity and be the most fuckable shopper in the produce aisle,” you’re gonna have a bad time.
Fanwork is by nature incompatible with hypercapitalism, popularity contests, fame, because it cannot legally make money (regardless of loopholing, which isn’t my horse nor my rodeo). I urge you to do the work to separate your joy in fandom from commercial creative pursuits. They are extremely different. Trying to apply the modern social media morays of an endless popularity contest to fanwork is only going to lead to disappointment.
....Learn to measure your happiness from the inside-out, or none of this will ever mean anything deeper to you and that’s a very sad concept.[1]
Fan Comments
[that1valiantcougar]: This is a wonderful take on community building online, my goodness.
[consistentsquash]: Something I notice a lot as a reccer is that people hesitate to rec things/talk about liking things others haven’t already liked publicly and talked about. So nothing gets endorsed until somebody else already endorsed it....
[machidielontheway]: #fandom # 'but the algorithm will know what i like and give it to me' #no one than yourself will ever know what you like best #i have trouble understanding what is so good about algorithms #the idea of potentially loosing thing i would have loved to see #and that could have open doors #because of something choosing for me #you're your own algorithm!!
[esinofsardis]: #important #fandom #ao3 wank #fandom isnt for consumption #its for echoing back and forth to each other #its not content its mutual joyous creation #writers and artists create fanworks and their audience mirrors back their joy #its like when you have two mirrors across from each other #and they echo back endless doorways to each other #corporate media is a leech that lulls you into thinking theyre not draining your life from you #fandom is a call and response song #creators take turns singing the verses and the rest sing them back #we all join in for the chorus