Entitled knobnuts, part #758

[veronica_rich]

Fandom!Secrets may have moved to DW, but it's just as much fun as ever to read for venting. *G*

A theme I see brought up time and again is entitlement in fandom. As in, "I'm entitled to get to read stories/see fanart of THIS" and "I'm entitled to have what I like be the dominant force in my fandom" and "I'm entitled to do some name-calling when people waste their time on fanworks of things I don't like instead of what I want to see." Pre-Internet, I honestly don't remember fans I knew and met being so judgmental of fanfic or art beyond the usual "is it good or not?" which is fair enough. What I mean, there was none of this "quit wasting your time on slash and build me a het epic, bitch" that's become a staple at FS (which, FS is a concentrated dose of general fandom, so my guess is this maybe goes on in some individual fandoms out there to a lesser degree; I saw just a tiny bit of it back in POTC). I'm not talking about people who simply express a desire to read something specific they would like - I mean those who tear down other people for writing other things that aren't what the bitchers want to read.

And it is all het, occasionally gen. Even the femslash fans, who might have a point about not seeing enough of what they like, aren't whiny and entitled like the het fans who make these secrets or agree with them. I remember just a few occasional threads in parts of POTC where J/E fans (it wasn't ever W/E or even Norribeth or other het fans doing it) would sit around publicly wondering why anyone would like slash in that fandom. Or the few who insinuated from time to time it was down to misogyny because we didn't write Liz as much as they did. But it didn't come up with near the frequency it does on FS, and every time I see it, I wonder, why don't those people write what they want to read?

Seriously. This is how fanfic STARTED long before the Internet and even paper 'zines. Fans wrote what they liked to see and kept them to read again. Or traded with fellow fans. Or copied and passed around. Hell, this was going on into the 90s. So the bitchers who counter with "but I'm not a writer!" - well, I have no sympathy. Non-writers and professional storytellers have been telling themselves stories to beat boredom and fall asleep for tens of thousands of years; if you're so damn lazy you're the type who'd rather publicly bash because you're not getting what you want from people doing it for free, you deserve to be mocked by all of us who do it at FS and anywhere else.

Comments

[kronette.livejournal.com]

Ya know, this is why I'm staying out of the "core" of fandoms (that includes RD; I don't read the boards). I stay away from discussion lists now, and my fandom life is sooo much easier. I remember a few postings back in the day, not very many, implying that if I wrote het I couldn't write slash. As if one is exclusive of the other. I wrote what I consider my best story in Highlander fandom, it happened to be slash, yet it was so G-rated it was unreal. Then I turned around and posted a completely Gen story featuring Methos and it got just as much positive reaction. The crossover audience for both stories was probably 60% - those who read both. Maybe the late 90s was the last of the "we'll read a good story, regardless of content" type of fans? I do recall fights with the X-Files fans who insisted that Mulder/Scully was slash, no matter how often we stated that the traditional definition of slash was a same sex pairing, and that they were confusing multitudes of new fans. Their argument was that slash was defined as a non-canon pairing, therefore M/S qualified, but Brian/Justin from Queer as Folk didn't. It made my head hurt. I left that fandom and haven't missed it one iota (XF, not QAF)

I left Sentinel fandom soon after when we had to put an explicit warning section for stories if we had Blair cut his hair. I shit you not. Now this was only on one list, the main fandom list, but it was where everyone posted their stuff. Like I'm going to warn for something as silly as that? I wrote what I wanted, posted it on my own site, and announced it with only the disclaimer "This story has warnings. Consider yourself warned." I wouldn't stoop to the majority (at least it seemed like the majority at the time) stupidity.

When I first started reading fanfic, I didn't think I could write. I had friends encourage me to try, and it was initially to be accepted as part of the group. I wrote gen, then het, then slash, and from that point on, I wrote what I wanted to read about. I wrote Trip/Archer because that was the minority in Enterprise fandom and I wanted to read more. I wrote Amanda stores in Highlander because I didn't like the characterization I was reading.

Those LOLcats pictures with cats walking with their tails in the air with the caption "haters gonna hate"? That's all those "fans" are - whiny, spoiled brats who are used to getting their way. Can we blame parents for this kind of me-centric thinking throughout all walks of life?

[johnnypenn.livejournal.com]

I congratulate you.
It's awesome how you handled your fandoms.
I agree though, Mulder/Skully isn't a slash pairing. It may not be a canon pairing, but they had so much UST that it'd be so easy for the show to put them together. They just didn't because they wanted to keep fans interested. That's why most show's don't do the fans favorite pairing sunless it's something that's all ready been established from the start. To keep the interest and keep playing on the fans desires.

Sometimes I'm glad I just read fan fic in a fandom and don't get involved. Some fandoms have so many hater's it's hard to even feel excited about a fic to put out in that particular fandom.
Funnily enough, I found that this entitlement schtick not only crops up in fandom but in other area's of life and it's so annoying.

I totally agree with you by the way. On everything. And I am duly impressed. It was funny to read about the hair cutting thing. I'd have laughed at anyone who "ordered" me to put warnings up for that!

[kronette.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you by the way. On everything. And I am duly impressed. It was funny to read about the hair cutting thing. I'd have laughed at anyone who "ordered" me to put warnings up for that!

Sentinel fandom got very, very strange right as the show ended, and what I deemed the "good" writers, those who cared about trying to put out a good story, did research on cop procedures or medical jargon, and who tried to keep the guys from falling into whiny crybabies (my GOD, were there a lot of people who wanted to see Blair cry) all left the list because of the stupidity. Canon, as in the show finale, had it strongly implied that Blair may go into the police academy. For those of us who liked to keep our writing mostly in "character" or in line with the canon of the show, those writers had him going to the academy, which meant his hair needed to be whacked off from the hippie vibe he'd had since the pilot. Then a small group of writers got it in their head that "smarm" (a term they either came up with, or was so underground none of us had heard of it before) dominated the list and the rest of us sane people left. Smarm, by their definition, was the guys sleeping in the same bed, french kissing, showering together, but it WAS NOT SLASH. Arguments were hot and heavy, but they insisted it wasn't slash (and even went so far as to have penetration, I believe, yet it STILL wasn't slash) so we gave up and let them take over the list.

tl;dr - some fans be straight up stupid, yo. (I've been watching too much Breaking Bad - sorry!)

[day221b.livejournal.com]

Smarm, yo! Don't get me started on smarm. ;)

[johnnypenn.livejournal.com]

oh wow.
That's like saying "No Homo".
I'd say Smarm was slash though. Weird.
Those people just couldn't accept it, I suppose. Oh well.
Well, there is less tress when you're not dealing with idiots and people who actually want to read that pairing. Without being bogged down by stupid rules that shouldn't exist.

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

Oh boy, I didn't realize the Sentinel fandom had been that crazy - I knew a few people in it and they were pretty normal human beings. They never mentioned any of that (then again, maybe they stuck strictly with the fic, too). But I can believe craziness like that; you wouldn't believe the things I got yelled at for relating even tangental to POTC fandom that I would've never expected, really.

I *like* discussions and thinky posts on fannish stuff. But what I like are fans who like to be goofy, yet you know they're sane and they act like that even while being "obsessive" on the particular post they're writing. I haven't seen much in RD fandom yet to concern me (I hope influx of new canon and fans this fall doesn't change that - it seems when fandoms get that influx of new "mainstream" casual fans, there's the possibility for them to regard fandom like the rest of their real life ... which is to say, conform to what they want instead of them having to get along with people already there).