Post by overmore on Mar 13, 2024 13:47:07 GMT
This very often crosses my mind the more time I spend in this fandom and it’s fic spaces. Now, I’ll start with saying idv as a fandom is much, much smaller than any of the ones I’ve been in before (just the fact that there’s only a bit over 18k fics and most of my previous ones had that amount of fics for a single ship is saying enough here) and that over time, the way people interact with fanfics has changed, and that was even before the pandemic started. I have been here for a much shorter time compared to most people I imagine. This also means I don’t know how it was at the start and how people were about fics before 2023.
So I can’t help but notice certain things, and how people are about fics and fic writers. Now a lot of these can be applied to any fandom, but as idv is much smaller, I think it is a lot more noticeable than it would be in, let’s say, a fandom like Genshin. Because of it, I think it’s affecting writers negatively and in a way harming fics, for the lack of a better word.
These days, regardless of the fandom, fic writers don’t get as appreciated as artists do. It can get very visible sometimes, with how people approach things like unfinished fics that are still being written and sometimes just outright rude behaviour towards writers for daring to write something the reader didn’t enjoy. I always wonder where those come from, as someone who is both a reader and a writer, but again, it’s different when you don’t have the perspective of the creator and don’t know what happens behind the scenes of that fic you like a lot.
One of the things I noticed is the overall lack of engagement with fics, point blank. And I’m not even talking about leaving comments, but people are straight up not even leaving kudos. I am boggled by this action because, to me, that’s the bare minimum you do if you like the fic. Whether it’s finished or not, I’d always leave a kudo no matter what. Where has this odd thing come from I wonder? (I’m saying this because I have seen people outright say they don’t leave kudos when reading fics. It’s very bizarre to me.)
Next one is everyone’s favourite topic, comments. This one feels like a losing situation at current point in time. Yea, writers are not owned comments, but then people get surprised when someone does stop writing or just doesn’t share their writing publicly anymore and only with friends. Yes, people who write fanfic do it for themselves, but if one is putting things out there for everyone to see and then get’s nothing in return, what makes one think they’d want to continue posting? I’ve had some moments where I would write stuff and then just not post it, because I knew no one would bother with it for a long while. This goes for anything multi-chapter the most, as these types of fics seem to suffer the most with this problem.
Another one is just the lack of new long fics. Considering what was mentioned in the previous point, it is not surprising, but very sad. As someone who loves long fics with over 80K words and up, it is very unfortunate that people don’t seem to want to engage with those. I have a single long fic that I’m working on, and really the reason I’m not giving up despite a very bad writer’s block rn are the nice comments that I sometimes go back to. They remind me that there are people who love this fic so much and would love to see how it ends. I know the ending and they do not, and I know it would make their day when that fic is finished, not ongoing anymore, with that payoff of waiting for that ending. I’ve felt that in the past, it was very satisfying to see it. But again, because people don’t comment and don’t leave kudos sometimes, it's hard to see that interest and you tend to forget why you even wrote that fic in the first place (alternatively all the comments are “when is the next update?” which does the opposite effect). Then the work ends up abandoned and unfinished, and people wonder why that happened.
A lot of these can be applied to any fandom really, but here it had been a lot more noticeable.
And I don’t particularly don’t want to get into events, which again, can be a bit unwelcoming at times depending on what you’re doing unless you’re doing a fic-only event. There could also be a lot more nuance here, as many things depend on what ship you write, are you even writing ships or you just do gen stuff and, what I do think has a lot of effects, if you’re also an artist or you already have a build in audience. There’s so much that could be said here that I might not be aware of too.
I’d like to hear what others think too. Maybe this is just my own specific experience and I’m maybe not seeing the wider picture.
