Strange_radio

Dec. 15, 2014 at 3:20pm with 584 notes

that got long oh shit I meta'd fandom meta WHEN WILL FANDOM STOP TRYING TO RUIN NICE THINGS

bewaretheides315:

juno-magic:

stuffimgoingtohellfor:

annundriel:

cautionzombies:

Someone put “300 Things” on Goodreads with a mock book cover and I am pretty upset about it.

Please do not rate or review this on Goodreads. It was done without my knowledge or consent, and I have requested that Goodreads remove it as quickly as possible. This is not an area of social media I would like my fanficfion on. Thank you for understanding.

Someone has done this with Summer Holds a Song (We Might Sing Forever). Please DO NOT do this. As cautionzombies said, this is not a part of social media I want my fanfiction to be included on. Especially with art that may or may not have been consented to.

why would someone do this. don’t fucking ever do this.

I don’t understand why recommending publicly posted fanfic on a website intended for recommending literature is a problem.

There are a couple of problems that I have with it personally, but to momentarily set aside the fandom issues for a moment and talk about a purely safety one: I’ve seen several people in the past couple of days mention having personal information like their IRL social media profiles and even pictures of them being posted on ‘their’ author page on Goodreads. Since Goodreads author pages can be made by people who are not, in fact, the author of the pieces in question, that means that people are going to Goodreads and discovering personal information about themselves being disseminated entirely without their knowledge, which I hope we can all agree is super creepy and not an okay thing.

Next, while I agree with your point that fanfiction is literature and that hiding it like it’s something shameful does nothing but breed more shame about it, I also think there’s an important difference between deciding to be public in fandom for ones self and being forced to be public by someone else without any input.

And you’re right, these are also publicly posted fics/art, but just as my Facebook profile is public, there’s a social contract about what is an is not acceptable - if I found someone was flashing, say, pictures of me and my family around on their own site, commenting on them, I would still be upset. Would it be legally alright for them to do that? Sure, I posted it publicly. But that doesn’t make me the asshole in that scenario.

The next part gets a little more into that fuzzy moral place that fandom has long struggled with as far as being a safe space, but there it is. Fandom, to me, and to a lot of other people, is a safe space. A place of encouragement within a limited group of like minded people. It’s why we get into these big debates about concrit vs reviews, and untimately this is exactly what these are.

I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but essentially what it comes down to is reviews are designed for readers, to inform them whether a book etc. is worth their time. Crit is about making the artist a better artist. And the difference here, the really big difference, it that these people are reviewing, in some cases tearing down, work that was done for free, that didn’t have the benefit of a professional editing team or perhaps even a beta, and treating it to the same level of scrutiny as published work that does have those benefits without so much as a by-your-leave from the author.

I read one (and only one) review, a mostly positive one in fact, from the Goodreads of one of my fics that was put up without my consent. You know what I want to do right now? Pull every fic I’ve ever posted because of all of the little typos that I apparently make all the time. Because now all that’s going through my head is how this is bothering every person who’s ever read my fic and they were too nice to say so. It’s like having all of them laughing behind my back.

Is that silly? Of course it is. But it’s also true, and suddenly a place where I used to find joy is a little less bright, a little more riddled with self-doubt, and a little more discouraging. And for a group of people who are constantly encouraging comments and kudos to motivate writers and make them feel good, it’s frankly a bit hypocritical to say that writers should just handwave off people who say shitty things about their work.

So yeah, those are some of my issues with the Goodreads debacle. If you want to rec fanworks, rec them - fandom has had structures in place to that for a long time. If you want to pick on fanworks, fine, - fandom’s had structures for that too. But putting it out there in public, mixing it in with literature that operates on an entirely different paradigm and doing so without letting the people most effected by it know? That I’m so not okay with.

Hear the truth coming out of BTI’s mouth.

As someone who had to yank down a bunch of fic and an entire pseud a few years back due to the mere threat of an outing like the one described in BTI’s first paragraph, there, I don’t think the potential negative impact of an outing can be emphasized strongly enough. I’m not ashamed of fic or fandom, but that doesn’t mean other people can’t use it to hurt me. It’s great that a lot of people don’t need to worry about it (really it is!) but for those who do, it can be serious and I would advise you to keep that in mind if you don’t want to look like a complete howling fucknozzle.

Next up, I have a comment on the nature of “publicly posted” work: all public places are not the same, either on the internet or in the physical world. I can shuffle down the block in flip flops and jeans with holes in them to buy mountain dew at the gas station and there’s nothing inappropriate about my clothing selection. If I try to go into an upscale clothing boutique wearing the same thing, I’m gonna get followed around, politely shooed away, and/or accused of shoplifting if I’m unlucky that day. Behavior that is entirely appropriate at an outdoor concert or a bar is entirely inappropriate at a grocery store or the doctor’s office. Different public spaces have different standards of acceptable behavior. Just because something is public and ok in one space doesn’t mean that it will be acceptable in other, equally public spaces. So people can take their “wahhhhh but you posted it publicly wahhhhh” bullshit and chuck it off a cliff. Goodreads and the AO3 aren’t the same kind of public space, and that’s a valid thing for writers to be concerned about.

I also want to add something about the crit/review dichotomy BTI is talking about up there. I think they’ve described those two things accurately, but there’s a third, important element to the way that criticism and reviews work in fandom, which is that in every fandom space or community I’m aware of, the author is part of the conversation. Reviews or criticism are typically posted to a fic that the author posted originally, and even things like reblogs and recs and ugly rants on anon memes are posted with the full understanding that the author can see that shit and respond, if they like. (and frequently, we do like, because feedback is awesome!) One of the biggest perks of fanfic is that you do it with other people, in the company of other people, and for the shared enjoyment of other people. It’s a neighborhood open jam session, not a professional concert.

Putting fic on goodreads for reviews effectively destroys that environment, and that’s even if we assume that the “reviews” actually function as such, which they very rarely do. From the above example: a review of a fic where the reviewer is upset about typos or editing errors is a review that was written by a goddamned moron. Fanfic is written on phones and in google docs and on public transit and in tumblr reblogs and during meetings and in the last 15 minutes busy people have before they pass out for the night; it’s lucky if it gets hurriedly proofread, let alone thoroughly beta read. So there’s literally no value to anyone in that type of “review”. It’s not useful, it’s not effective, it’s not informative, and it’s not fun. It won’t even be accurate if the writer catches mistakes and corrects them later. I’ve heard goodreads described as a space for readers and not writers, but 1) uneducated, poorly informed reviews aren’t actually any good for readers, either, and 2) fandom isn’t compartmentalized like that, even for fans who only read and never write. People who want to see fic moved into an environment that writers aren’t part of automatically get my hackles up, and based on some of the other comments on this post, I’m not alone in that.

Also worth keeping in mind: the less control I have over where my stuff is being read and discussed, the more likely I am to pull it entirely, because that’s really my only option at the end of the day. If the public places where I post become unsafe or unpleasant, or if my work is being shoved into inappropriate contexts where I never intended it to be, my only recourse is to set up an elaborate private system of emailed stories and password locked posts somewhere or to withdraw the fic entirely. And let me tell you: I’m unlikely to go the route that involves a fuckton of extra work. That’s not going to be a tragic loss to fandom in my case, but there are plenty of people in the same boat that I promise would be missed if they disappeared. So if what you’d really like is for a bunch of your favorite, delicious plotty long fics to be yanked down off the internet, then by all means, keep arguing with authors when they politely ask you to not run around yelling about their stuff in places where it will be poorly understood, poorly received, and likely to draw the attention of jaw flapping shitwipes to the internet spaces they enjoy hanging out in.

Finally: if you’re a fanwriter who does want your fic up on goodreads? More power to you! Go for it. I’d recommend upping your beer budget, but you’re a grown up, and I don’t get to make your decisions for you.

Just like you don’t get to make mine for me, interestingly enough.