What she really means: I don’t mind people disliking a ship for their own reason but the anti-shipping movement is driven by hate and bandwagon bullying to police what people are “allowed” to enjoy. They use fundamentally abusive and manipulative tactics on real people in the name of protecting survivors from speculative things in fiction. Antis want to act morally superior over ship wars and claim that to ship something problematic you must be a survivor. By doing this antis force survivors who may be uncomfortable with coming out with their status to out themselves and then hold them to impossible standards. Except when it does come to survivors who ship anti-deemed problematic things we are attacked, harassed, and then pushed under the bus anyway. Antis trivialize terms such as abuse, rape, and pedophilia by using them so often and out of place against a group made up of many survivors and minors– the people they claim to be protecting. They have bullied and suicide baited artists and other content creators they dislike in the name of “policing the bad ships uwu.” All antis are at fault for this, even if an anti claims not to send hate themselves they are still influencing this bad behavior because they are part of this hate group. The entire anti-shipper movement is a toxic cesspool that makes me feel sick.
The above are the first half of the slides I presented at GeekGirlCon (along with some annotations to explain things I only said out loud 🙂 ) – for the second half, read more below the cut. I’ll also be sharing the slides from the other presenters here, too, as they’re posted!
The gender representation work is part of a longer analysis that I will be posting in full soon!
Beneath the cut are also a few additional slides that I would have presented with a bit more time – several of which address things that came up in the question session. Edit: warning for some mature text content in the extra slides.
Edit 2: Also, if you want more notes about when and how I collected this data (e.g., some of the data in the first section is a couple years old), or you want to get at the raw data, check out the links in the speakers notes in my Google Slides!
…And the extra slides (content warning for mature themes in text):
livejournal, fanfiction.net and ao3 which one were you?
I HAVE LITERALLY LIVED THROUGH ALL OF THEM WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT SAY ABOUT ME
Oh bb there is so much more to it than that.
First there were zines, lovingly mimeographed and stapled by our fandom foreparents, and those who remain to us from the Zine Age are powerful and wise.
Then there was Usenet, where formatting went to die. You know not the strength it takes to read 60k fics entirely in Courier New, or the pleasure of a really artistic looking section break marker composed of ASCII characters.
Then there was the Great Schism, as fandoms spread far and wide across the Web, and basic HTML was the whole of the law. Many of us lied our way into private “18+” listservs, and roamed the webrings, lamps aloft, in search of one virtuous author (or at least somebody else who shipped the thing).
From this dark age rose FF.net, that pit of voles from whose bourn many a hungry reader has returned, starved for citrus and heartsick from the cutesy author notes.
And FF.net begat Livejournal, which allowed easy archiving, threaded comments, flocked posts and invite-only communities. And it was Livejournal, in its death throes, that begat AO3, which once seemed like only a utopian vision and now bestrides the world like a Colossus.
Many people, encountering fanfiction for the first time, wonder why so much of it is erotic. Anne Jamison, in Fic, gives a pretty good answer: a lot of fanfiction questions mainstream assumptions about gender, sexuality, and desire. But writing erotic fanfiction is also a wonderful game. The fanfiction community might be the first place where a woman is encouraged to enjoy her sexual fantasies and praised for the dirtiness of her imagination. Writing and reading fanfiction is a social, communal activity, and considering how much shame is still attached to the expression of female sexual desire (what’s so funny about it?) the creation of shared erotic fantasies is still radical.
my favorite thing about au fanfiction the sheer range of it. how like sometimes the tag is like “alternate universe- they’re werewolf space pirates in charge of stopping their planet from being blown up by ancient immortal aliens from another realm” and sometimes it’s “alternate universe- chefs”
There most be some fangirls in Gotham ship Bruce Wayne/Batman.
I’m imagining the fanfic, and it is filling me with glee! “The billionaire playboy shrank back a little from the vigilante. ‘W-what are you doing?’ He couldn’t help noticing his heartbeat had picked up. Batman looked back at him, his gaze expressionless. ‘I’m here to save your life, Mr. Wayne.’”
Bruce probably started the trend.
“Where did this ship even COME FROM?”
“IDK, someone wrote a really popular fic about it two years ago and everyone got on board.”
“Yeah, wasn’t his username grandfatherclock or something like that…”
No, see, this is brilliant because it actually works, because their “personalities” are so opposite that this ship would really appeal. “You need to lighten up, Batman.” “You need to take things more seriously, Mr Wayne.” “When was the last time you had any fun?” “When was the last time you did anything else?”
3hr long arguments about whether the best way to reform Gotham is through the Wayne Foundation charities and rebuilding initiatives or taking down the mobs and crime families that secretly run the city.
At the end, Bruce uses his rich-boy skills to take down a few henchmen – “What, you think I’ve never swung a golf club before?” – and Batman lets himself reluctantly be convinced to go out for ice cream.
(They’ve headcanoned Batman as blond to fit the necessary slash pairing requirements)
The comments are all, “OMG, have you ever noticed how Batman always intervenes when something shady goes down with the Wayne Foundation? I mean, not that it’s like, out of character, foil Penguin’s plot to block a low-income housing proposal so he can put up another casino there, or whatever, he does that for everyone, but have you noticed that he’s involved every time it’s Wayne Foundation? OMG THEY ARE DATING IN REAL LIFE THIS IS TOTALLY CANON!”
It’s the most popular Real Person ship in Gotham.
(Robin: “You know like, half the internet is shipping you with yourself.” Bruce: “I am large, Tim. I contain multitudes.” smirk.)
Clark Kent interviewing Bruce Wayne. Some snazzy photo makes its way to the press, ‘Reporter dates millionaire’ the crowd goes WILD. Clark gets hounded by enthusiastic batman fans who assure him they’ll keep quiet, protect his secret. Kent is so confused. Batman is laughing it up. (Batman is pretending obliviousness because Robin hasn’t stopped laughing about it in a week.)
Batman deliberately dropping hints for anyone who thinks about it. He uses their reactions to fuel his psych profiles.
Ohmygod
Ivy and Harley kidnapping Bruce for a girl’s night out jkhkhhhlfsafssf
Bruce exasperatedly informing the league that he might not be dating Wayne but too many people think he is, so he needs to be protected while Batman is away on this super secret special mission. Bruce swans around the League, flirting shamelessly and mercilessly roasting himself (tall dark and spooky is so overdone) until the entire league would just like to forget he exists at all, thanks.
The things you find lurking in your basement. I thought these were gone forever but thankfully, I kept them all: my favorite X-Files fics from Gossamer back when I was spending several hours a day on Gossamer, all printed out on various shades of tinted paper and each with a cover I made by hand–as you see–bound in several volumes, and some of these migrated to AO3 but many indeed vanished from the Internet forever. I always meant to do a similar collection of favorite MSTings, back before Web Site Number 9 died, but most of them were both too hair-raising to reformat for printing and just far too long.
Sonetimes, figuring that since I was only altering them for my collection it wasn’t a crime or nuthin’, I would go through stories and rephrase a line here and there, remove passages I didn’t like, on occasion rewrite random paragraphs or change, say, an in-story reference to Sarah MacLachlan lyrics to a band I actually liked; every altered story had a scrupulously enumerated log of “editorial” changes attached as an appendix, since someday I might be called on in federal court to testify to exactly what I had altered and how. I started making larger “edits,” rewriting the occasional ending and once, since I have no shame, reworking a Mulder/Scully story into a Mulder/Samantha one (I still think it worked better that way). Eventually this did, in fact, lead to my sitting down and writing my own fanfic from start to finish, though ironically, other than one never-posted-anywhere practice run I’ve never written any X-Files fic. And that’s how I began to write anything at all.
If you ever want to find a permanent home for these wonderful items….
I had just assumed they wouldn’t take them as they’re not “proper” zines, but thanks for the heads-up! I do actually need to sit down and decide who gets the posthumous keys to my tiny fannish fiefdom (and where to donate that shelf of non-fannish zines, while I’m at it), so this is good to know.
In fact, so many of these “custom zines” were donated to Iowa that we had to invent the name for them. And make a page on Fanlore.
There have been a bunch of posts about Fanzines and the Iowa Special Collection on this blog before, but I (the mod here, Janita) made an extra-excited sound when I saw this post, because it looks like stuff that I have. In fact, for my 17th birthday, a friend of mine printed out a fanfic by one of the authors of the fics pictured above and had it professionally bound in hardcover so that the pages wouldn’t get scrunched and worn out (which happened to my other printed copies). I still have that book, and I tried to dig it out to take a picture just now, but it’s in a box somewhere in the back of my closet, and while I was searching I had a bunch of extra bedding and a pair of shoes fall on me twice, so I reluctantly gave up.
So if you made these custom zines like @braindamageeclipse and I did, why not talk about your own collection on Fanlore?
We made up a term for these types of zines when we started seeing them pop up in the University of Iowa’s finding aide. “Custom Zines”. We then asked Iowa to put the code “(CZ)” next to these zines so that people would not jump to the conclusion that someone had taken their fic and published it for sale without their permission.
once upon a time young young teenage me used to write fan fiction like my life depended on it, new fics every week and I had no idea there was someone out there printing out my fics and putting them in a box to read when they needed something to cheer them up
anyways fast forward to 20 year old me on my third date with Emily and she mentions offhand that she’s got this box of fic she printed out and saved
it’s a few months later after that and she shows me one of the fics in the box and holy shit that’s my garbage fic from so long ago
anyways my point is life is a fucking trip my dude
i still remember when we found this out. i don’t think either of us stopped yelling for hours
look it’s been eight years and I’m still like LMAO I MARRIED A FAN
This is the cutest thing I’ve ever read in my whole life
Solutions Without Problems 