Detective Pikachu
Jun. 2nd, 2019 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThis is a story about a guy who bullied me in college for writing fanfiction.
During college I put together a ton of scholarships and got to spend a year in Japan at a study abroad program, where I ended up in a relationship with a guy who went to a different school. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, but I was young and stupid and genuinely believed that I could fix things if only I could become a better person, which mostly entailed never saying anything when my feelings were hurt.
I worked three jobs during my senior year of college (on top of a full courseload, a senior thesis, and the grad school application process, fun times) in order to be able to fly to go see this boy at his university. I couldn’t afford a hotel room, so I would stay in his dorm, where he lived in a suite with two other boys.
One of these boys was really funny and smart and outgoing and talented, but he was also vaguely misogynistic in a way that young men at fancy colleges can be sometimes. He considered himself to be a writer, and one of his favorite topics to discuss when I was visiting seemed to be how much he hated fanfiction. Like, what’s more sad and pathetic, furries or the disgusting people who are too dumb to write anything other than fanfiction? Haha.
My charming boyfriend later told me that this guy knew that I wrote Pokémon fanfiction, and that he would sometimes perform readings from my LiveJournal in front of an audience for shits and giggles.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. What I do know is that this guy had a giant dildo suction-cupped to the wall above the television set in the dorm suite’s common room. The dildo’s name was "Dick Rambone." More than once I found myself sitting on the common room couch and slowly dying inside as this guy addressed his diatribes against fanfiction to Dick Rambone, as the dildo above the tv was presumably familiar with how horny and gross women and gay men are. Especially people who write Pokémon fanfiction, how sick is that?
So this is one of the guys who wrote the story and script for Detective Pikachu.
........
I actually discuss this in my book, how fanwork by women is often treated as amateurish and embarrassing while the exact same work done by men gets turned into Hollywood movies.
It’s weird – it’s so goddamn weird – that this ended up hitting so close to home.
During college I put together a ton of scholarships and got to spend a year in Japan at a study abroad program, where I ended up in a relationship with a guy who went to a different school. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, but I was young and stupid and genuinely believed that I could fix things if only I could become a better person, which mostly entailed never saying anything when my feelings were hurt.
I worked three jobs during my senior year of college (on top of a full courseload, a senior thesis, and the grad school application process, fun times) in order to be able to fly to go see this boy at his university. I couldn’t afford a hotel room, so I would stay in his dorm, where he lived in a suite with two other boys.
One of these boys was really funny and smart and outgoing and talented, but he was also vaguely misogynistic in a way that young men at fancy colleges can be sometimes. He considered himself to be a writer, and one of his favorite topics to discuss when I was visiting seemed to be how much he hated fanfiction. Like, what’s more sad and pathetic, furries or the disgusting people who are too dumb to write anything other than fanfiction? Haha.
My charming boyfriend later told me that this guy knew that I wrote Pokémon fanfiction, and that he would sometimes perform readings from my LiveJournal in front of an audience for shits and giggles.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. What I do know is that this guy had a giant dildo suction-cupped to the wall above the television set in the dorm suite’s common room. The dildo’s name was "Dick Rambone." More than once I found myself sitting on the common room couch and slowly dying inside as this guy addressed his diatribes against fanfiction to Dick Rambone, as the dildo above the tv was presumably familiar with how horny and gross women and gay men are. Especially people who write Pokémon fanfiction, how sick is that?
So this is one of the guys who wrote the story and script for Detective Pikachu.
........
I actually discuss this in my book, how fanwork by women is often treated as amateurish and embarrassing while the exact same work done by men gets turned into Hollywood movies.
It’s weird – it’s so goddamn weird – that this ended up hitting so close to home.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-03 01:46 pm (UTC)Welp there goes whatever inkling of interest I had for the movie right out the windowI experienced something similar in art school, though with fanart. Not that I drew fanart myself, but like, half of the people I knew in the illustration department got into drawing thanks to fanart. So many people bullied them for drawing dumb things and wasting their time on it, especially the girls. I made friends with one of them freshman year because I noticed she was drawing Metal Gear Solid characters in her notebook during one of the mandatory freshman lecture classes. Around sophomore year, she stopped altogether. I remember she wanted to do a comic about the Turks from FFVII and what happened after VII while also ignoring Advent Children. When I asked her about it (because man, I was 200% on board with reading that), she got angry at me and was all, "It's all stupid anyways. Why should we bother with it?" Sadly, we drifted apart after that. I really hope she revisited it later in her life, even if she never published it.
I also remember being met with so much hostility, especially from guys, when it was revealed that I wrote fanfiction in high school. Like it was bad enough that fan communities on LJ attacked me for Shipping Differently Than Them, but to have my supposed peers steal my notebooks and read shit out loud as a joke was not ok. I also knew a guy in college who was very vocal about being anti-fanfiction. He was an English major, because of course he was. I remember him talking about his senior thesis project that was something like a modern day Dante's Inferno, but with something else that wasn't hell (I think it was fairy tales? I can't remember). But I do remember telling him, "So you're writing fanfiction?" And boy oh boy did he shit a million bricks and try to tell me how wrong I was.
It's so odd how that works out. Furthermore, it's sad that when you mention fanfiction, people feel the need to jump in and cry about how all it is is badly written porn about single, fat ladies who are absolutely pathetic. Hell, people get shit for reading traditionally published erotica that's 100% original content. It's like society just doesn't want women to enjoy anything, whether mentally, emotionally, or sexually.
I also remember when I finally decided to dive back into fanfiction (with Darkness/Starlight, actually) and I felt so damn ashamed. I was a month into it and my boyfriend asked what I was working so hard on and I just cried and confessed to him and hoped he wouldn't laugh at me or think I was sick or sad or something. Instead, he was nothing but supportive and thought it was really awesome I was expanding on something that was bare minimum at best and was even more impressed I managed to whip up 200k words for it. Hell, he even helped me out with all the French in it.
In short, I wish people didn't write off fanfiction as something pathetic. I know fic writers who can run circles around published writers. Some of it is actual trash, yes, but lemme tell ya, you also don't need to go far to find equally terrible garbage in published, triple-A, "Hollywood quality" stuff, too.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-03 04:01 pm (UTC)fucking wow
I. I got nothing except yeah, I blame the patriarchy.