Another interesting Fanfic Article · 5:31pm Apr 9th, 2018
I haven’t read any of Seanan McGuire’s books, but she’s got a pretty neat article on fanfic over at Tor.com. Check it!
I love talking about fanfic (to validate my artistic output of the last few years). What’s particularly interesting to me is contrasting the predominantly female world of fanfic as a whole to the more male slant of FiMfiction. Demographics aside, I can’t even remember seeing a Human in Equestria/Anon/Displaced fic that had a female protagonist marry Luna or whatever. Then again I don’t read that kind of fic to begin with, but still.
Which in turn raises various questions about the co-opting of a girls cartoon by a bunch of internet nerds. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems there’s a shit-ton of MLP trollfic. It’s great talking about the transformative nature of fan work ... but then you run into a story where Rainbow Dash eats babies for some hateful reason.
I guess it really comes down to the Featured Box being awful and me telling the kids to get off my lawn.
But what do you guys think?
I clearly haven't had the same experiences as Ms. McGuire, but she raises some very strong points in defensr of fan fiction. And her getting her start in ponies is more than a little amusing in the parallelism.
As for the trollfic, I usually just ignore it.
I view this less as "Why do Girls quit writing fanfic" and more as "Why do people write/don't write fanfic"
I think it's because such a huge number of non-hard Sci/Fi books that I read had female authors. Male authors for spaceships and bombs, female authors for Companions and Dragonriders. (Although if Asimov or Heinlein wrote a Dragonrider-type story, it would still be awesome, and Anne McCaffrey proved she can write harder SciFi with The Ship Who Sang and other such works)
I left a post. I hope it sticks.
My favorite meta topic on fanfiction is trying to estimate what percentage of regular for pleasure readers read fanfiction as a substantial portion of their readings. Bad Horse had a good estimate and breakdown showing that the average moderately popular horse fic here probably has more readers than a lot of short story journals.
And then there are the fics where Rainbow Dash eats babies for hilarious reasons. :D
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Setting aside there's plenty of laser-bomb space opera by women (Andre Norton comes to mind), I find the concept of Asimov and/or Heinlein writing Dragonrider fanfic hilarious. Mostly 'cause Asimov was best at logic-puzzle short stories, and Heinlein would be all about the weirdo psychic dragon bond mating. That dude was into some freaky stuff.
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Oh? That sounds really interesting. Mind linking?
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I still haven't forgiven you for the poopy horse story. Now stand in the corner and think about what you've done!
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https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/725349/literary-fiction-vs-fimfiction-popularity
In retrospect, it's more of a commentary on the lack of popularity of fiction journals, but it does raise further questions.
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*stands in corner*
*thinks about horses pooping*
heh heh
heh heh heh heh
:V
4837129 4837163 Tumble! Look what you made him do! Now go get a broom and clean up. This is a family website.
There's a bunch of troll fic in any fandom, inevitably. And quite a lot of it (and the smut, and the angst, and...) is written by women. Fanfic is one of the great equalizers in that way.