Fanfic and the Social Dynamics of Fandom

Last week someone posted a beautiful picture of Ganondorf and Link from Breath of the Wild that completely destroyed me. It's a cute picture, but it's really the social dynamics behind it that wrecked my heart.

( Read more... )

Again, I'm not yelling at or hating on these artists, who are brilliant people doing fantastic work, but it's awful to feel like the work I do doesn't count. It's not even about whether or not my writing is good; rather, within Tumblr-based fandom communities, fanfic is considered to be so unworthy of attention that it might as well not exist. Essentially, I am garbage, and my writing is garbage, and nothing I do will ever amount to anything more than garbage. Fun times!

I mean, we all know that this is just how things are, but it hurts to be reminded of just how worthless my writing is, you know?

ETA: So like a boss I just asked the Human Bowser artist to reblog a fic summary post, and lo and behold she did. Sweet!

2017 Weekly Writing Log, Part 41

- I finished, edited, and posted the fourth chapter of The Price of Wisdom. Dear god I just want this story to be over and done with.

- The editor of the novella-length translation I just submitted an introduction for wanted me to reformat the translation itself. Because the manuscript is fairly long, this took a while.

- I submitted a short essay about the online debates surrounding Hetalia to a certain publication back in the spring of 2014. The editor thought that my argument, which was essentially that the rhetorical violence of these debates marked a critical turning point in fandom, was a bit too farfetched to publish. Now, however, it seems that maybe I might have had a point, so she asked me to update the essay and resubmit it – which I did, gladly.

- I carried a whole host of bad feelings with me throughout the week, and at a certain point I became so distracted and distressed that I decided to sit down and process my anxiety by drawing. I therefore gave myself an assignment to create a three-hour comic: one hour to draw it, one hour to ink it, and one hour to scan and color it. Despite being an obvious rush job, the result of this experiment isn't that bad, all things considered. Maybe I should do more of these?