First Post

[hoisinsauce]

A space to chat fandom! Anon!

Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

This is probably the only place I can complain about this without getting frozen. Ugh, I was 60K into this fic and mostly liking it--not the best written but interesting plot/character beats that I wanted to follow through--until blammo, the author transed a 6 year old. Fuck you, I'm out. (Of course it's not tagged.) Author also "ackshully sexuality is fluid-ed" away the canon-gay into being attracted to women so I shoulda seen it coming. (Also not tagged, tagged as canon-compliant.)

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Grim. :( If authors treated transing children as a horror trope, that'd be one thing, but...

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Holy shit, WHAT? Why on God's green earth would you need to trans a 6 year old in a fic?

I actually ran across a much milder version of this yesterday...really hot f/f, written by a woman who's actually turned on by it (most explicit f/f is not this, lol)...and she's gotta throw in the main character wearing a binder and wanting a dick. Like, I realize that there are lesbians like this IRL. But it's totally OOC and I just wanted hot porn, not ~adventures in dysphoria.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

DA

That sounds so offputting! My own bait and switch tale from a while back isn't as dramatic; there was a fic that was a few tens of thousands of words long, and which started out building up to a romance. I read faaaaar too many chapters before it became apparent that the author had got bored of the direction and was never actually going to get to the hook up. Still hadn't stopped her from tagging it, though. -_-

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Hah, did the comments start calling her out on it? Some people on Ao3 get reeeeeeeeally angry about tagging!

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I don't remember, I just remember being really annoyed because it was quite a rare pairing that I like, and the fic looked really promising at first; I was looking for a fic that went along those lines (except good). >:( Normally I just find some authors I like and read whatever they've written, but this was one I'd found *via* the tags. So grr.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

SA

Oh oh oh, I forgot the worst bait and switch I've ever come across! It was this looooong Will/Hannibal AU by a well-known author in the fandom who only updated like twice a year or something like that. So I've been following this story forever, really loving it, and slowly...I start to get suspicious about Will's ~dark secret. Then she adds the "trans character" tag to the story. And suddenly I realize that she's writing Will as a TIF. LOLLLL I was so pissed off. She knew perfectly well that tagging it from the beginning would turn readers off, so she snuck it in after everybody was already hooked.

Hannigram fandom unfortunately has a lot of gendershit show up in fics, although the vast majority of it is Will as genderqueer as an excuse to have him crossdress a lot, LOL. Even emungere, arguably the best writer in the fandom, touched her toes into the water a few times - she liked writing Will as like...a gay AGP? And in one story I think Hannibal got Will a new passport that said "female" on it, which I guess turned them on, even though it's not like Will was doing anything transition-wise other than playing houswife. xD But at least she wrote it purely for the kink, which I find a lot more tolerable than claiming your porn is FOR GREAT JUSTICE.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

> But at least she wrote it purely for the kink, which I find a lot more tolerable than claiming your porn is FOR GREAT JUSTICE.

Ugh, I feel that, nonny. If someone's just into something I'm not into, whatever, annoying if the fandom's so full of it you can't find anything else, but eh, people are writing for free. I'm happy for them to enjoy whatever weird shit! But when they're pretending it's *aaaaactivism*, argh, raaaaage! :P I think part of why it's so annoying is the author's assumption that they need to educate everyone else. I like authors who assume their audience is roughly as intelligent and educated as they are (unless they're writing about some niche technical speciality that a layperson *would* need explaining). Maybe that's part of the appeal of genderwhatever, lets people feel like experts while they don't actually have to put the work in to acquire any actual knowledge. They get to larp as teachers! But it's like "ok, so if you 'learned' this off vox, chances are pretty high that your audience also is aware of it or could have thought it up for themselves (whether or not they agree, lol)". But it's like that never occurs.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, it used to just be the aces and demis who'd write lecture-y fic, but then the fujos started transitioning, and suddenly their porn was mlm and ACHILLIAN, and half their protagonists got turned into pussyboys/TIFs/omegas. Heterosexual sex is Great Justice!

(A/B/O is a whole other rant that I won't get into, LOL; it's just romance tropes and not the worst thing ever, but I keep noticing how much it keeps getting tied into TRA stuff.)

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Haha, it's so weird seeing how much it varies from fandom to fandom, the ace side of my fandom was always fine. Mostly older adults and no overlap with ace reddit. While the most obnoxious TRA I can think of always wrote het-- but now she thinks her bf is a "demigirl" and thus thinks she herself is "hella gay", so she probably still writes het but doesn't describe it that way.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

A/B/O is so mysterious to me. I took a break from fandom before it was a thing. I came back and it was *everywhere*. What happened? Why was everyone suddenly a rapey wolf? Was it Twilight, popularising werewolves? Something else? What did I miss?

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I'm...pretty sure it's mostly because of Supernatural? There was a hella large amount of dogfucking in that fandom, after all. I still love the story of how the RPF side of fandom wrote dogfucking with one of the actor's dogs, but then the dog DIED, and so they had to change all of the pairings to Original Male Dog instead. XD

The thing that I can't get over with A/B/O is the idea of shitting out babies, I just can't keep a straight face! Just write magical mpreg! Or strict top/bottom roles! I think it even killed off the dom/sub AU worlds that used to be so popular, not sure if that's a good or bad thing. xD

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

SA forgot to add Teen Wolf, or course! I think the beginning of A/B/O predates that a bit, though.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt

I managed to miss all things Supernatural, so that would make sense. I know there are demons in in it and some guy called Sam and some guy called Dean and someone called Castiel? And the fandom argue over who loves who? And also it's cursed. And that's about it.

Also lol, I like how *that's* the line they wouldn't cross. "I'm fine writing rpf with a real dog but the dog has to be alive irl, otherwise the integrity of my fic will be destroyed!"

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

SA

I went looking for a fic with those tags to see the phenomenon for myself, but got distracted seeing 4 works for the fandom "Supernanny". "Wtf, fanfic of that show??? Is this some godforsaken rpf???" But no. One is some kind of crossover, but the other three have just been miscategorised. I can sleep a little easier tonight.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

NA

Same, nonny. I read it once and regretted it, not my cup of kink. But where why how ... ?

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Right? And it's not just ao3; back when I tried wattpad, I quickly saw there were three romance genres: billionaires, mafia, and a/b/o. 50 shades explains the billionaires thing (I know it's an older trope, but there are So. Many.!), mafia seems to be a wattpad thing, and then a/b/o is everywhere and inexplicable. I can think of few things less appealing to my tastes (always been firmly on the 'vampires' side of 'vampires or werewolves?'), and I see so many others say the same, it's mysterious! xD There are probably some acafan articles on it somewhere, but I don't really trust them.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Pop social justice hath damaged the beautiful irreverence of yaoi; is there anything it won't defile??? ;_; I was always happy that somewhere out there were women writing men banging men in implausible ways for nothing but their own pleasure, without giving a shit about what other people thought, for once. Deciding that their creations must now be socially "useful" to be permitted to exist feels very ugly.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Yeah, it used to just be the aces and demis who'd write lecture-y fic, but then the fujos started transitioning, and suddenly their porn was mlm and ACHILLIAN, and half their protagonists got turned into pussyboys/TIFs/omegas. Heterosexual sex is Great Justice!

Wait what.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

When surprise A/B/O started showing up in all my fics, in all my fandoms, at first it was sort of interesting (if you skipped the weird sex) because there were clearly a lot of young women and girls kind of exploring how they felt about gender (actual gender) through stories in which both sex classes were men (and thus, people). It would then get strange and messy if they tried to include any actual women, and odd things would happen where all the women would be Betas, and none of the men would be (because only the Omegas and Alphas were interesting to them) and I’d just think about the endless essays you could write about what this all said about cultural depictions of men and women, and emotions, and sexuality, and these young women’s self-image.

Of course, most of those young women probably don’t identify as women anymore, and maybe those essays will be even weirder and more interesting when historians finally write them. And when surprise A/B/O shows up in my fics now, it seems to be more aggressive and sexually unpleasant. But then, that seems to be a pattern in fics across a few fandoms in general.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I tolerated it for awhile until all the f/f a/b/o had girlpeen. WHY. My unpopular opinion is that all the dick that started being written into femslash was a (mostly) unwitting psyop by certain bi fic writers to normalize MTFs being "real" lesbians.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

It’s all psyops, all the way down.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

I remember reading some early (het) a/b/o where, unlike male alphas, the female alphas didn't have girlpeen and knots, rather some sort of elaborate tentacle system that was internal until arousal. Kind of wish that's where the a/b/o female alpha physiology descriptions had stayed.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

Haha, I remember seeing that! Yeah, I'd take a weird sea anemone genitals before the girldick any day.

Re: Fandom Venting

[(Anonymous)]

That’s amazing. Whatever happened to weird genital fics?