The Problem of "Anon" · 2:00pm Jun 12th, 2016
When I mentioned in my last blog post that I wanted to write about how a lack of understanding and intentionality killed an entire genre of pony-fic, the two guesses most people seemed to respond with were either "Displaced" or "Human in Equestria". While technically the first is a subgenre of the second, what I actually want to talk about is a subgenre of both. This is something that has bothered me more than anything else while perusing the gutter of trash and toxic waste that is "humans in Equestria", and while it is far from the only reason particular stories are bad it certainly has not contributed to saving them from their own stupidity. I am, of course, talking about "Anon".
Where to begin?
"Anon", short for "Anonymous", probably has its origins - like many foul beasts of the net - in 4chan. Given the ties of the brony fandom to 4chan image boards, it's unsurprising that this particular bit of chan culture followed us here to FimFic. What strikes me as odd, however, is not the fact that Anon lives among us. It is that Anon is extremely bad at accomplishing his one purpose.
Let me elaborate.
The overwhelming majority of stories I have seen on FimFic starring Anon are porn or romance - or both. Anon is therefore in some respects intended as a direct wish-fulfillment vector for the reader. This is perhaps going a step further than the concept of a Neutral Mask lead or a Bella Swan - rather than simply making the main character nondescript enough that any reader can reasonably project themselves without much difficulty, Anon is intended as a direct invitation from the writer to the reader to see themselves in the character. There is no other purpose in robbing Anon of an identity, after all. This is a running theme common to most, if not all Anons. While we may learn things about their sexual attributes - for the love of God, Fimfiction, please stop talking about the size of someone's schlong - Anon lacks a coherent physical description. We learn nothing about his appearance, often very little about his hobbies, his desires, or even his skillset.
So Anon is intended to be us, the audience. How well does he fare in this regard?
Let's set aside the fact that Anons are overwhelmingly straight, male, and cis. While those are a barrier for entry for me, overcoming barriers of identity between character and reader is something any good story can strive for. While it's annoying to realize I've walked into yet another sex fantasy catered specifically for an audience I am not a part of, that sort of comes with the territory. And hell, it's not like half the anime I've ever loved aren't themselves male power fantasies on some level. [Note to Self - Type Words someday about Food Wars just so I can explain how to write an unconventional and cool male power fantasy using it as an example]. No, I have a completely different objection to Anon.
It would be one thing if Anon didn't represent my gender identity or my sexuality or my race, religion, or taste in films accurately. All of those are superficial attributes I can overcome. What I object to is that most Anons are shitty fantasy vectors, and even worse neutral masks for the reader to project onto.
I have no problem striking at low-hanging fruit when on the subject of Anon, so as an example of the frustrating lack of understanding most people bring to this particular writing conceit I give you Harem by Chelis. It's an occasional member of the dubious Feature Box Club, and is currently the third search result to show up if you just type the word "Harem" into the Fimfic search bar. Clocking in at just shy of fifty-thousand words as of this writing, Harem is possibly the worst fanfic I have ever read in terms of general quality that was not intended as a troll fic. The prose is uneven, the characters cardboard, and the premise - a harem story - fails before it even gets to the end of the first chapter mostly because the author couldn't be bothered to understand how that genre even functions. It is, in short, an affront to the gods of schlock.
But more than any of that- more than the terrible prose, or the erotic offerings that include such gems as comparing cunnilingus to shucking clams, or even the word "zigger" (ugh), what instantly caused me to explode into a ball of unmitigated feminine rage at this story's incompetence was the fact that the main character is "Anon".
The protagonist of Harem is in high school. He's a white solid kid who lives in West Phillydelphia and hangs out with the black striped kids and is totally cool but like, not actually black striped even though the framing device of this story is literally the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" premise and whatever we're moving on before I get sidetracked again. He has a girlfriend who is totally perfect in every way and likes urban things like basketball and is totally the coolest and shows up that jerk Flash Sentry who is a total hipster and plays guitar.
In other words, despite all his inconsistencies and unattractive elements, there is one thing that is absolutely true of this Anon: he is a defined character with a distinct identity from the reader's projections.
Wait, huh?
The name "Anon" is neither a pony name nor a human name - it is a fandom codeword, an identity chosen specifically for a character intended as a wish fulfillment vector. Once you choose the name "Anon", you are effectively making a contract with the reader that this character will be their representative. As such the more distinct and defined "Anon" is, the less effective he becomes as an "Anonymous" character. And while many readers will not care if this is the case, they would care even less if Anon had simply been named anything nondescript - I recommend "Billy" in the case of our Harem protagonist, in honor of the much more charismatic Will Smith. The effect of choosing the name "Anon" when your character is a distinct, defined individual is that your invitation will backfire. Readers who might have been able to project find themselves unable. Even those who are projecting may end up ultimately resenting that projection as Anon continues to do things they may find contrary to their desires- or perhaps even just plain stupid.
However, all of this may simply be me nitpicking and harping on about a pet peeve. Some of you reading this may crave me addressing a more universal, easier to pin down common writing flaw. Something broad. Something dumb.
Oh, don't worry. I have plans.
After all, as long as we're on the subject of wish fulfillment and reader projection, this is an excellent time to talk about how easy those two things are to cheat at, and how satisfying they are to pull off. Join me here in a future installment, won't you?
I think that you are assuming a level of self-consciousness quite a few of these authors actually lack. They aren’t really thinking about their readers. It’s a direct wish-fulfillment for the writer. The shades of anonymity it carries are an element of protection for the writer, just like everywhere else anonymity comes up.
That one might be a meme. Comparison between female genitalia and mollusks come up a lot in whatever Kinoko Nasu writes. Someone noticed, I suppose…
4017318
Sure, but out of that general class of comparisons, is one with a process that 1) doesn't involve the mouth at all and 2) does involve using knives to wedge, split, and slice a particularly apt or fortunate one?
4017333
I tend not to pay attention to the actual sex scenes in TYPE-MOON stories, as in my opinion their textual content doesn't work particularly well. So I am not entirely sure. However, I don't think comparing anything to knives was involved...
4017345
I was thinking from the Anonfic with the shucking, not those. In any case, well, it's not a clam, but here's how you shuck an oyster:
4017318
i try to ignore Nasu's sex scenes when I actually read Tsukihime or F/SN mostly because they were basically tossed in to sell what aren't primarily erotic novels anyway. And also much funnier with a cut to black. Nothing says unintentional hilarity like Tohsaka Rin explaining Tantric Rites.
Tbh, my overall point with the post - muddled though it might be - is probably that authors aren't conscious of what "Anon" implies to the reader. Hence why they keep mucking it up.
4017361
Well, the authors aren't conscious of it, but thinking about it some more, I'm not sure the readers actually read them with this in mind either. :)
Anonymity is a shield, one way or another. The author depersonalizes their wish-fulfillment story, because if it were personalized enough for them to be recognized, any due criticism would be very personal. But the intended reader, in so far as someone like that exists, is also anonymous -- they are just as aware that "anon" is not them, but a mask they use that shields them from scorn. This results in a sub-sub-culture for which the issues you describe are not actually issues, bottled in by those same issues even among the larger pony fandom.
I'd need statistics to confirm or deny that, which I'm not about to dig for right now, but this might be something to use that textual analysis setup I worked out for the Fimfiction mega-archive...
4017354 The actual quote said something about trying to use your tongue to show the clam dominance.
I am not kidding.
4017370
The readers don't have this in mind either, but then, as I stated, the readers who make these stories popular also do not care. They'd be fine with whatever this character is named.
The idea of anonymity being a shield also makes sense... except it doesn't, because that would require the writer to be anonymous. Which they aren't. Maybe you could make an argument for the anonymity of the character being an intentional barrier between character and reader so they can distance themselves from unsavory aspects of the character, but then why use anonymity when it makes the wish-fulfillment transparent? And why is Anon a conceit appearing almost exclusively in genres that are general wish-fulfillment fests?
If the intent is Anon-as-shield, I'd argue it's even less effective on Fimfic than Anon-as-reader-conduit.
4017386
They can't be completely anonymous -- however, they can be pseudonymous and make the character anonymous, which is what happens, isn't it? It's not like that fimfiction handle actually means much of anything unless you actually try to build a reputation with it.
Do the "anon" writers actually try to build such a reputation? Once again, I don't have the statistics, but my guess would be they do not.
4017392 It really depends on what you mean by "reputation". One might argue that the featurebox alone builds at least some level of notoriety. What specifically are we talking about here? Attempted RCL features? Plugs for EqD?
My honest guess is that rather than pseudo-anonymity, these writers are mostly participating in a community where this device is common and abused without thinking of what it implicitly represents or conveys.
I suppose there is something to be said for the concept of Anon being a concept that's owned and used by a group, allowing for general readers to more easily accept it in a way they might not an "OC" because of associated stigma. But on the other hand, that brings us right back to my point about how a defined Anon then defeats the purpose of using the conceit in the first place.
4017401
Reputation is something that you would lose by abandoning the identity. Featurebox builds a lot of notoriety, but unless they actually treasure it, it doesn't matter. Any attempt to exploit the reputation off-site -- say, Patreon or EqD -- would indeed imply abandoning the anonymity for good.
That too. But, well, pony fandom does this a lot, whether anonymous characters are involved or not. :)
I didn't think about this aspect, actually, but indeed, that could be a good motivation for at least some people. I hate that acronym... :)
4017414
Yeah, Fimfic in general commits the sin of writing with bad intentionality and inherited silliness. However, I think Anon in particular gets absolutely wrecked out of the gate because it only has one purpose in service of the actual story. All of the other purposes we've mentioned are essentially external and do no good for the reader, And while the authors may not care about their readers I do. Because someone has to.
4017420
You're a better person than I am. :)
P.S. Imagine, an Anon ending up in Equestria, but Discord, or whichever other inappropriate force they choose to use, made a typo, and now we have adventures of Onan in Equestria...
P.P.S. Lysdexics of the world untie.
4017425 "I am Onan, the Ararian!"
4017386
Wow. Okay. I guess I can give some ground on aptness, then, but I'm not yet feeling I want to budge on the unfortunate part.
4017401
I'd add, in addition to the avoiding OC part, there could be an element of Anon as conscious substitute for 2nd-person, which itself has a generally low reputation outside of, as best I can think of off the top of my head, two CYOA stories. Granted, to the extent that is accurate, it makes the failure to maintain a blank slate all the more baffling.
Pretty much the perfect way to summarize Anon fics.
Honestly, the best use of "Anon" so far that I've seen would be Not the Hero, and that's not exactly the most conventional application of the concept.
4019444 "Not the Hero" is essentially using "Anon" specifically to highlight the fact that our antagonist is an analogue for reader self-inserts in other stories. Hence why it works.
Devil's advocate time!
4017370 4017386
The idea of anonymity as a shield is a fascinating one, and I think Oliver hit on a really interesting point, and the mention of OCs crystallized something that I think you're both talking around.
I think that's almost it, but anonymity-as-a-shield doesn't come in denying authorship. It comes from denying identity.
Anon is not (as this blog post points out) the reader. Anon is not (as this blog post points out) a concrete character. Anon exists in some weird Schrödinger state in between, and I suspect that ambiguity is deliberately invoked.
The shield it offers the author is that, if they unleash their id, that behavior and characterization becomes just one grain in a huge pile of "Anon" stories. An OC they create is them, in a sense, even if is not literally based on their own self-perception. For instance, Lero forever will be the specific character in Xenophilia, and if someone has Negative Opinions on Lero then they are going to have Negative Opinions on that specific story written by that specific author, but if someone has Negative Opinions on Anon then they hate a genre, and there's never any story they can point to as a "foundational" or "canonical" Anon. Everyone who is ever going to categorically hate Anon already categorically hates Anon, so you can write something outlandish or reprehensible and your story won't taint the character; you can write a different Anon story next week and start with a blank slate again.
That ambiguity also shields the author from personal wish fulfillment charges, especially the further you go down the reprehensibility rabbit hole. Everybody knows that Anon is a 4Chan creation, and Anon readers are a fanbase of chan shitlords; aren't they just writing what the audience wants to project on? It's the literary equivalent of Donald Trump's "A lot of people say Ted Cruz's father helped JFK's assassin, but I wouldn't stoop to repeating those rumors"; having Anon, say, wander down the streets of Ponyville and grab Rainbow Dash between the legs is such a stereotypically Anon thing to do that the author has built-in cover for it. If your wish-fulfillment OC is a rapey fuck, that can't help but say something about you as a human being; if Anon is a rapey fuck, well, clearly you're just writing the character, shrug emoji.
Because Anon does have a character, no matter how blank-slatey he's designed to be. As the post notes, he's male, cis, and straight — and young, let's not forget that. (Anon is, at least, ambiguous of race, so points for that — at least when the author isn't cracking zigger jokes.
Also, while Anon's often physically fit, that's really a spectrum that varies with the author's self-awareness/self-deprecation and how much abuse they're heaping on the character.) His behavior is a blank slate, but he has young cishet male interests, typically including memes, vidja games, and wanting to cum inside Rainbow Dash. Permission to engage those interests without standing your ego up on a pedestal is a pretty powerful thing for a writer.
(n.b.: I feel comfortable talking about these traits as categoricals when, for example, the number of female-anon stories can apparently be counted on one hand.)
As for readers … yes, Anon is shit as a neutral mask, but the benefit of anonymity isn't the blank slate (every Anon is you) but that he's so self-contradictory. Some Anons are silently you (at least for the target, largely cishet-male-young audience), and others are characters you want to be, and the rest you can throw out — and nobody knows the difference unless you tell them. It lets you project and experiment with power fantasies. This is pretty much the second-person-fic use case, but I think the ambiguity of Anon helps here too: you can go into a story hoping to directly identify with Anon, and not have to get ejected from your engagement if you don't, because you knew going in that "Anon" is a lot bigger than just you.
None of this, by the way, should be taken to imply that Anon tropes aren't shit from a literary/storytelling angle. But Oliver's line about "a sub-sub-culture for which the issues you describe are not actually issues" seems pretty apt from here.
4022628 Horizon, you're banned from commenting on my blog posts now for being smarter than my blog posts. A good chunk of what you said crystalized where my gap in understanding was coming from, because until now I really couldn't divine a concrete purpose for Anon that wasn't reader-projection. Now I can.
Of course, that also leads me back to something else I brought up in discussion with Oliver. While I'm all for writing what you love, and many of the things I love more than all else in the world are cult hits for good reason, I think the use of Anon strikes me as a disservice to potential and future readers of the story precisely because a nameless character can only be seen as a wish-fulfillment vector when reading the story proper. The meta-fictional Anon is an entity spanning worlds and countless stories upon stories, but the concrete Anon of an individual story is definitely intended as either a reader or writer surrogate. Since the writer in most cases is not completely anonymous, I'd argue the greater value intended is for the reader. The writer is opening the door and inviting everyone to come in for a shared fantasy.
And of course, that fantasy is usually stupid and likely to end poorly.
While you're also right in that the pile of Anon-fics obscures all else, that's true of more story types than just Anon. Pony Does ____, Displaced, and arguably even spin-offs to popular stories like Fallout: Equestria and the like are effectively shared universes and fanons that allow for the same level of obscurity. The difference is that Anon has no purpose but the creation of an invitation to wish fulfillment coupled with obscurity, while all the preceding story types at the very least require you to go in with a simple premise formula and to present a character who may not immediately be understood as a mask. Anon strikes me as the most self-defeating as a concept. It may do the writer some good, but it does the audience very, very little good. An audience satisfied with stories of Anon has set its bar so low that I doubt they need Anon.
4022673
An audience satisfied with stories of Anon is probably trying to convince itself it likes stories about ponies ironically and failing. :)
"This blog's comment-section looks dead," he casually stated while looking around at the mossy remnants of civilization, hands in his pockets. "But I thought I'd try and get a response regardless."
I've picked some of your blogs at random which interested me, and they're some pretty good reads. Maybe you've addressed thi in another blog post already, but I'll ask here anyway,
There was one thing here which made me think, and I've thought about for ooh, like, ten minutes now, and I still haven't figured it out. Suffice to say that I am absolutely vexed.
You hear the term 'male power fantasy' every now and then. When I hear it, I think I know what it is, or at least in the context where I mostly hear it, because it's often about whoever is talking about it rolling their eyes at a character who's tough and cool and does awesome violence and shit: Yeah, roll all the eyes at that, because that shit is for babies and stuff... *laughs* Actually, when you read some of the stuff in this site, such an opinion can be somewhat understandable
But really, is that what it really means? Action, violence, and getting all the girls (and then sexing them up in certain cases)? Is there anything else? What is a male power fantasy?
That was one question. The one I find even more interesting, and even more difficult, is a myriad-question: What are female power-fantasies? In fact, what is a power fantasy period? Are the non-gendered power fantasies? Non-gendered plain fantasies?
One of the images that popped in my head when I thought about what a female power-fantasy could be, came from this trail of thought: Male power fantasy = the stuff you saw aimed at boys during the Saturday morning cartoon commercials = action figures with guns and gadgets, adjusted for adults. Then just take the stuff that was aimed at girls, dolls and plastic babies who you had to take care of (sometimes even cleaning their bodily fluids), and adjust that for adult ages. But I'dunno, this sounds kinda iffy, if for no other reason than how cleaning up baby-urine doesn't sound like anyone's fantasy (with apologies to people with diaper-fetish
).
What do you say? What are fantasies, power fantasies, and the different kinds of such?
4400442 Answering this in detail might be an entire post. I use the term "male power fantasy" on this blog mostly because it's matter of marketing. While power fantasies are technically genderless and the fact that I still want my own giant robot is living proof of that, the divide is mostly in the consumers they're marketed to rather than what they actually are. Something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows off a heroic fantasy that isn't inherently feminine, but does become a female empowerment fantasy in part because that's the audience it's trying to reach. I use the term not because I believe that this is a good divide that should exist, but because fantasies sold to men have so many elements in common that it's just an easy category to refer to, if a bit broad.
It's also worth noting that not all power fantasies are created equal. The quality of the fantasy is often more important than the fact that something is or isn't. My blog on Food Wars actually details why I think that particular fantasy works so well - even if you're conscious of the fact that you aren't the target, you can feel pulled into the story and empathize with the character in spite of that.
Incidentally if you want real female power fantasies, please go check out any number of magical girl things ever, and age them up appropriately. Or check out female romantic fantasies, which are more common in the west.
4400453
I'd love to see your take on that.
See, when I sit alone at the breakfast-table, or in some other situations where one's left to their thoughts, I, like I assume that most others do, fantasize about things. Storytelling and pony-fics are some of the primary subjects in this era. Like, 'story X was really good, but story Y didn't work for me.' And then there're power-fantasies. 'I'm a space-warrior, landed in Equestria, I have both a lightsaber and the cool energy-blades from Mass Effect... Also, I'm a level 40 DnD-fighter-mage-thief! Because why not? I'ma save Equestria and it'll be awesome!' <- This stuff can be really fun... to think about for about 5 minutes, in my head, where I don't have to worry about proper storytelling and prose and stuff.
You wouldn't write a story from that premise, and yet, the entertainment was there. It was short-lived, but it was there. Can you capitalize on that? Can you make a good, or at least entertaining, displaced-fic? I have one idea that I find promising, but it's a parody, so it might not count.
I'm not asking you to answer these questions for me, but like I said, I'd be interested in hearing your take on power-fantasies. To see them from a perspective I might not have considered. Who knows? It might even provide insight into non-power fantasies; proper stories, if you will.
Mmm, yeah. Although as a gamer and medium-weight nerd, I'm tired of the male power fantasy I've been fed with throughout the new tens. I was never particularly interested in seemingly realistic, gritty, yet still vaguely futuristic military-shooters in the first place, and burying me in that stuff didn't help matters. Like one guy from an old podcast I listened to once said: "If you have a science-fiction shooter, don't give me an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, and a shotgun. I want a fucking arse-missile! That homes in on aliens' rectal opening and buries themselves in their intestines before unfolding into a kitchen-blender!" A bit gruesome, but I agree with his point
No wonder colorful ponies seemed so fresh when I first started watching, and still do, really.
Noted. I might check it out. Both the blog and the show, I mean.
I've never been quite sure on this: Is Oh My Goddess a magical girl fic? Or a harem fic? It seems to contain elements of both, though I'm leaning towards it being the former because I remember it being rather tasteful in its portrayal of boyish fantasies.
... I might pass on that
4401084 If you want recommendations, Sailor Moon, any of the Pretty Cure shows (Happiness Charge is cute), shows like that? They tend to be targeted at young girls, so they're much more of a female-power-fantasy equivalent than, say, Oh! My Goddess. That one's primarily focused on the male protag.
But yeah, general point stands. Male power fantasies aren't exclusively male, they're just linked to the kind of stories sold to men.