It is perhaps the saddest thing, to go through your bookmarks on AO3 only to find the words “deleted work.” (And you know you’re missing something you wanted to keep, but there’s no link and no summary, no bones left behind to tell you just what it is that you’ve lost.)
look…………….. write as much shitty fic as you want. nobody can stop you. you’re learning constantly and it’s better to write hackneyed implausible ridiculousness than it is to not write at all out of fear of fucking up. you’re good
“Ew you’re an adult why are you in fandom” Kid, if being mocked for fandom shit wasn’t enough to stop me when I was an actual 15 year old, hearing it from a 15 year old when I’m 30 is genuinely hilarious
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
So a scathing article on the fetishization of gay men by white women stumbled into my feed and I got pissed.
Rather than argue that there is no fetishization, I’m simply going to list a few of the reasons why I ship gay ships. Which – shock, horror – are nothing like what you’re suggesting, and paint a far richer picture than your eagerness to jump on your high horse and ‘burn the hypocrite’ would suggest.
I ship gay ships because I’m sick of reading heterosexual romance with all its sexist stereotypes. Not including the het traits prevalent in yaoi, slash fiction focuses on the relationship between two personalities rather than the reinforcement of two gender roles or, even worse, the attempt at being edgy and feminist by doing nothing more than reversing those gender roles. Slash and Femmeslash – yes, believe it or not we can read both – as they exist today have been molded by significantly different tropes and practices, and are therefore refreshingly free of those stereotypes that quite simply make me gag.
I ship gay ships because I don’t give a fuck about their gender. I don’t go out in search of a new ship by scrolling to find which two men I can fetishize next. I latch onto chemistry that often happens to be in the form of a bromance. Why is it always a bromance instead of a female friendship? Because female friendships of depth are still underrepresented in pop culture. Maybe you should write an article about that.
This brings me to my next point. Extending a bromance into a romance, to me, is the figurative equivalent of shoving a sword through the “no-homo” attitude that I see far too often. Just like my first point, this is a way of using slash fiction to counter sexism: male sexism. No homo? Full fucking homo. Get over it. I want to see more of it, not because it gets me off, but because it normalizes the natural extension of a male friendship into a gay romance, rather than reinforcing the concept that men should act as homo as they like but then get weirded out when love is brought into the mix.
Finally, slash fiction removes the vicarious appeal, and I like that. This is not the sort of romance that I’m meant to mentally slot myself into and then spend the rest of my life searching for, only to feel hideously incomplete if it doesn’t show. This is a romance experienced by two people who are not me. There is no ‘relateable female protagonist’ who I’m meant to model myself off, which means I am free to appreciate their happiness for them. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Because this is the most powerful point and the one that is most difficult to articulate. Slash fiction teaches me to appreciate the happiness of others, without then hinging my own happiness upon it. It teaches me that there can be just as much joy in playing the role of the Pansy or the Hermione who set up the two dorks, as there is in being the romantic heroine. It teaches me to appreciate the love that other people share without experiencing jealousy or aggression, which teaches me to be relaxed and happy in my own skin, and to value myself by qualities far removed from whether I’m single or taken.
Since you’ve stuck with me to the end, I actually am going to argue against the concept that the fetishization of lesbian porn by men is the same as the love of gay ships by women. It’s not. Women support gay romance in fiction to the same extent that they support it in real life. The issue that can arise with men supporting lesbian porn is that they often don’t also support those relationships as they exist in the real world.
Women read gay romance because it’s liberating. It squashes stereotypes and sexism, and allows us to read a romance that for once in our fucking lives does not require us to be either the damsel or the femme fatale.
We read it because gender and gender roles shouldn’t matter when it comes to romance, and if the only way we can get that is through unpublished, amateur fiction, then maybe you could throw us a goddamn bone and think twice before devaluing the richness that is slash fiction by reducing gay romance to a fetish.
Zynn's Exodus 