It isn’t a fanfic unless Main Character has to tear their gaze away from the strip of skin revealed above Love Interest’s waistband when they casually stretch their arms above their head.
The thing about reading fanfic (and original slash fic) is that you get used to that particular writing/reading culture after a while. You get used to the frank discussions of sexuality and kink, the close attention to diversity and social justice issues in the text, the unrestrained creativity when it comes to plot. The most amazing, creative, engaging stories I’ve ever read have almost all been fanfiction, and I think part of that is because there’s no limitations placed on the authors. They’re writing purely out of joy and love for the world and its characters, with no concerns about selling the finished product. The only limit is their imagination.
Next to that, most mainstream fiction starts tasting like Wonder Bread, you know?
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’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
I’d like to point out that if you instead search books.google.com for a variety of phrases like “toed out of his shoes”, “toeing out of his shoes”, “toed out of her shoes” etc, you get a total of a couple hundred results – almost all of which are romance novels published in the last decade. Of the fic writers I personally know who have gone on to publish? Pretty much all of them published romance novels, or at least started there.
Obviously, I’m not saying all of these writers wrote fic first, but I bet a lot of them did, or at least read it, and then the language probably spreads to other romance writers. Where will it spread next? 🙂
But my real question is… how do other writers describe the process of using the toe of one foot to push your shoe off the other foot? I’ve certainly seen “kicked one’s shoes off” but that has a more forceful sort of connotation, obviously.
(Also, let’s all remember that young urban women are historically at the forefront of almost all linguistic trends. The “urban” part might be changing thanks to the internet, but given that most fic is written by younger women, it should be no shock if writing trends start there.)
(Another note: I once searched for “praise kink” because I was like, this is a concept I need language to talk about in real life – and all the hits were fanfic.)
I see a lot of posts going around talking about the need to be critical of fanfic, and how we gotta watch out for the messages we’re sending
Well, here’s one thing I’m gonna need us to be critical about:
Every statistic I’ve ever seen says fanfic authors are heavily female (or nb)
And Tumblr, which is a fairly US-centric cross-section of fandom, is filled with this discourse about fanfic writers who create pornography
I need us to stop and think about why we’ve decided that fictional sex is the most damaging thing anyone could ever find on the internet
I need us to think about the culture we live in, which encourages us to be sexually available (to straight men) but punishes us if we (sluts) enjoy it
Because here’s the thing: fanfic is not coming from a position of power and prestige in our society
It is a niche genre primarily written by women, for women, for free
And it is a place where many of us do find power in exploring our own sexuality (or asexuality)
Even when that exploration takes us to gritty, horrifying (or cathartic) places
I’m going to need us to think long and hard about why we’re prioritizing fictional characters over the needs of real women
And I’m going to need it to stop
Fandom purity wank is absolutely about control over women and women’s sexuality. There’s nothing ambiguous about it.
Just think about the hot-button issues in the fannish community, the topics that consistently and reliably get people worked up into a lather, the themes that provoke the nastiest conflicts and inspire the most dedicated resistance movements. Think about the fights that are most likely to spill out over their cyber boundaries and start affecting people in the real world – in public harassment at cons, in doxxing and ‘outing’ to family and employers, in malicious legal allegations.
It’s about sex. It’s always about sex.
From the constant tantrums over ‘problematic’ shipping to the righteous doxxing of ‘pedophiles’ (which in current tumblr parlance means anyone who draws or writes canonically underage characters in romantic or erotic scenarios), fandom’s big efforts at moral reform always seem to revolve around restricting and controlling the sexual expression of the majority-women community. You won’t meet many people who stay up past their bedtime to scream at strangers on the internet about unethical portrayals of non-sexual violence – unless, of course, they suspect the women involved in its creation are getting off on it. You’ll struggle to find an anti blog dedicated to the insidious social ills of torture whump fic, or goopy hurt-comfort where all manner of human suffering is put on display for the viewer’s enjoyment. The purity crew dress up their agenda as a desire for collective self-improvement and raised moral standards, but they don’t seem too worried about aspects of public morality that don’t somehow tie back into sex. What they’re upset about is the same thing conservative minds have been upset about since basically the dawn of time – there are women out there in the world doing icky sex things without the permission of their communities.
And these people, these moral guardians, they’ve gotten really good at couching their fundamentalist views in progressive language. They don’t say ‘you’re to blame if you provoke men to rape’ – they say ‘your fic normalises sexual violence and contributes to rape culture’. They don’t say ‘women ought to be chaste’ – they say ‘your fantasies are socially harmful and you owe it to the world to be more self-critical’. The messages are the same and the desired outcomes are literally identical.
The core assumption underlying all of it – an assumption that I’m sure our puritan forebears would find deeply comforting – is that women’s sexual expression is a matter of public concern, and that women are directly responsible for upholding the moral standards of their communities by restricting themselves to a narrow repertoire of publicly controlled, socially condoned sexual outlets. Anything beyond that repertoire is a grave moral breach.
To anyone who’s reading this – and there’s always a few – thinking, “this is just deflection! [X hot-button topic] is really bad and harmful!’, I’d like to encourage you to sit back for just a moment and think about why it is, exactly, that you feel the best and most important place to wage your war against moral corruption is in one of the only pockets of popular media that women unequivocally control. Of all the spaces in the world where you could be fighting for your view of a better society, you’ve chosen a place where women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge. Why?
“…women come together to share the fantasies that mainstream culture refuses to let them indulge.”
I was just telling a friend of mine I attribute my (fortunate) comfort with my own sexuality to a chance encounter, at a very young age, with a paperback titled “My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies,” by Nancy Friday. Found it in a stack of mystery novels, and man, I remember blushing so hard… It was reading all these fantasies other women had that normalized what, at that young age, I considered to be pretty extreme desires, all in the context of this authority saying, “Anything you fantasize in the privacy of your own head is perfectly natural and okay.” She asked hundreds of women to share these fantasies so that others could read them and see we aren’t alone; most everyone has these thoughts and fantasies and desires, and that’s perfectly fine. Since then, I’ve discovered fan fiction as a whole universe of people’s fantasies writ large, and goddamn it, that is perfectly fine. Anyone who wants to argue the point and try to stuff us all back into the cramped cupboard of shame should have a talk with Ms. Friday. I believe she’s still around.
Agreed. Women are shamed for exploring dark themes everywhere else. Fandom does not need to be a safe haven for people who never want to hear about that: the entire rest of the world is a safe haven for anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-woman feelings.
Ship and let ship, don’t like don’t read, and your kink is not my kink and that’s okay: these are the maxims that make fandom a welcoming, creative space.
“Fandom does not need to be a safe haven for people who never want to hear about that: the entire rest of the world is a safe haven for anti-kink, anti-sex, anti-woman feelings.”
There are a lot of corners of fandom that need this (metaphorically) branded on their foreheads.
When I first started in fandom over a decade back the predominant attitude (at least in the fandoms I was in) was ymmv… your mileage may vary…. can we go back to that please.
it is incredible to me that writing pornography about minors somehow fits in to this otherwise interesting and informative post about “problematic” fandom behaviour
telling pedophiles to quit it is not a bad thing btw
Molesting and abusing children is literally pedophilia. Grooming children for molestation and abuse is literally pedophilia. Viewing and disseminating actual child porn is literally pedophilia.
Teenage shippy fanfiction is not literally pedophilia. It’s not even figuratively pedophilia, and I don’t buy for one split second that any of the people trying to derail this post with ~but think of the children~ actually believe that the entire Harry Potter fandom is a malicious network of predators. It is so, so incredibly belittling of CSA survivors to equate their actual real-world suffering with the benign hobbies of fucking Katniss/Peeta shippers. It is so, so cynical and disrespectful to use real live vulnerable children as a weapon in your goddamn ship wars.
Pedophilia is not a joke. It’s not an accusation to sling at anyone who pisses you off on the internet. It’s an incredibly real, incredibly serious issue and I am so, so tired of seeing it trivialised.
I wish I’d appreciated more when I was younger and involved in the fanfic world how something can be “bad writing” in the sense that it doesn’t work as a piece of literature, but good in what it’s doing for the writer.
Especially (but not only) for very young writers, fiction can be a badly needed escape or a way to work through their own problems in metaphor. A girl who feels invisible and unloved in the real world can write a version of herself that’s a half-unicorn half-faerie princess with every magic power simultaneously, and whether it’s narratively strong or not, it means something to her that she can be that princess in her story. A person who has no other outlet for their sexuality can write awful “lol, what even is anatomy” porn as part of the process of feeling out what they want and who they are. A boy who’s afraid to express softness and vulnerability in the real world can write unbearably melodramatic and glurgey hurt/comfort fic, and find in it the tenderness that’s inside him.
And 99% of these stories will be awful and unreadable and embarrassing, just as 99% of therapy session transcripts wouldn’t make good one-act plays. But that’s okay. They serve a purpose beyond conventional literature, and while you may not necessarily want to read them, you should still respect that purpose.
It honestly cracks me up when people compare Yuri and Victor to Shion and Nezumi from No. 6, because like
Victor & Yuri: “I love you so much and I believe in you and support you and let’s hold hands and cuddle with the dog and hug at the airport and then get married and skate in front of a crowd of people to show how in love we are.”
Nezumi & Shion: *crashing out of an exploding building in a car that’s on fire* “BEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!”
pop culture intertextuality is just so damn *fascinating*
today a parody movie (50 shades of black) comes out, based on the 50 shades of grey movie, which was based on the 50 shades book, which was based on twilight, which was somewhat based on interview with the vampire (which anne rice based on an earlier short story she wrote), which was based on Dracula and other vampire stories, which originally came from Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyre (even though Vampires were a thing in folk tales before then, he was the one who made them all classy, etc.)
so really, like so many things, this is all Lord Byron’s fault.
I just have to add that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are based of an amusement park ride which is based on a movie which is based on a book.
In over 50 thousand notes this is the best addition to my post.
sparksoffandommagic 