The Infantilization of Fandom

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Title:	The Infantilization of Fandom
Creator:	Arduinna
Date(s):	December 2000
Medium:	online
Fandom:	multi
Topic:	fiction writing, feedback
External Links:	online here, Archived version
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The Infantilization of Fandom is an essay by Arduinna.

The essay was posted to Essays: Rants and Rambles.

"The trend toward treating everything in fandom as an infant keeps growing."

Excerpts

I'm sure everyone is aware that there's a tendency to infantilize characters in fanfic. Blair becomes tiny enough to fit in Jim's pocket, and whines and cries and sniffles a lot. Doyle shrinks by several inches, both in height and in shoulder width, and likewise whines and cries and sniffles a lot. Mulder cries a lot -- okay, okay, Mulder does cry a lot, we have to give them that one. Daniel suddenly is slender and willowy, is insecure and afraid, is "the boy", and, yes, cries a lot. Illya, my god, has been reduced in at least one story to not even having an adult penis: yes, he's doomed to having an itty-bitty baby wee-wee, because the poor boy never really hit puberty.

It goes on in pretty much every fandom. Lots of fans dislike it intensely, other fans obviously like it a lot.

Okay, whatever. It's a fact of fanfic, it happens.

One thing I have just noticed and connected to this, though, is that fans also have a habit of infantilizing other things.)

I can't count the number of times I've seen someone say that people shouldn't say anything even remotely negative about a story (right down to "spell-checking this would have been a good idea"), because every story is its author's "baby", the author's precious child. Authors send these infants out into the world and say, "Here's my baby. You are now responsible for taking care of it, for making sure that it's warm and fed and clothed, whether I provided lunch money and a blankie or not." We may not point out that it has no clothing because that's rude to do to a child (and, somehow, hurtful to the parent, who didn't know the child was unclothed and rather than being grateful at being told her kid really does need a new pair of shoes, instead says "how dare you notice that, and imply that I didn't put clothes on that naked little baby!").

I am appalled at the thought that there are people out there who think of fanfic authors as babies, as infants who literally cannot take care of themselves, who cannot handle being told that they fell without bursting into tears, who need "the adults" (i.e., the readers) to walk around after them and pick them up and dust them off. Personally, I stop doing that sort of thing for actual, real babies after they're about -- oh, two or three. By then they know how to walk, and they know how to get back up again. Apparently, they're more capable than grown fans in the eyes of some people...

I mean, aren't these authors posting to adult archives and lists? Doesn't that imply that they consider themselves adults, or at least capable of participating in an adult world?

Can people not see how OFFENSIVE it is to assume that an adult is no more than a baby? To assume this? In case they can't: I'm an author, and I find this incredibly offensive.