Hello, fellow refugee from the rest of the internet! Nice to meet you. I’d be happy to share some of my thoughts, especially since I am in Full Procrastination Mode right now and in denial about going back to work on Tuesday. Apologies if this gets rambly or personal.
So I feel like my best experiences with meta have involved fans being willing to look at things with a critical eye, but also being willing to look at meta as a generative exercise that kind of… encourages the creation of more fanwork and discussion. For instance, I remember getting pulled into the feminist side of superhero comics fandom on livejournal around the time that comics was still dominated by older white fanboy types, and boy did we end up exploring gender in our fics and meta.
I also remember the earliest days of BBC Sherlock fandom on tumblr (yes, I know, and in my defense I bailed before the conspiracy theory stuff took over) and somehow I found a group of people that just kind of… liked to go deep and get excited about writing in general, not just sticking with tropes and one pairing? Like, a lot of us had gotten initially pulled in by Johnlock, but the discussions we were having led people to be like “ah, what the hell, I’ll write sherlolly this week, let’s try it out, so and so’s post about them got my brain turning” or “what if I write a fic subverting the Hurt/Comfort trope” and there was a lot of like. Exploration of canon and fanon and such. And experimentation. I remember one particularly memorable week or two where people got talking about how sex gets written, and how so often there’s a “script” where everything’s supposed to be building to penetration and climax. So lots of people in our group decided they’d challenge themselves to write sex scenes, slash and het and femmeslash, that didn’t follow the standard script. We were having such good discussions and so much fun! I was too shy to write something like that then, but over the last few years I’ve been writing a longfic with sex scenes, and to this day I think about how to play with and subvert “scripts” when it comes to sex and romance.
Meanwhile, my worst experiences with meta and analysis… so I could talk generally about social policing and purity culture and flattening of story/characters in fandom spaces, but I feel like that debate is often fraught, and a specific example might make my point better.
Around 2021 I got into a show on Netflix that has some pretty complex characterization—and ultimately it’s a show that deals with cycles of trauma and abuse, and coming of age, and how people break free of the institutions that are holding them back. (This is, as it happens, extremely not what the show is advertised to be about, and marketers would like you to believe it is an angsty queer teen romance. Which it also is, but… with that other stuff thrown in there.) I would also say that this is a show where you are asked to understand all the characters, even when their actions disgust or upset you. Nor does the show rely on the legal system or traditional modes of authority for catharsis.
I was not present in the online fandom for first year or so of loving this show, and having a lot of great discussions with my friend heliza24, which then ended up fueling a longfic that we are still writing. We decided to join a portion of the online fandom after the second season aired to see if we could make friends and talk more to our readers.
So, to be clear, there are some people with some awesome thoughts in this fandom, and there were still great discussions to be had and friendships to be made. But I would say the prevailing tendency on the particular platform we were on was to like… use analysis to rank the characters in order from most to least virtuous, and always interpret the “good” characters as doing the right things, and always interpret the “evil” characters as doing the wrong things. Moreover, the main pairing of the show was talked about by a lot of fans in superlative, glowing terms, as a model love story everyone should aspire to, even if the pairing is interesting because both of the people involved in it are imperfect and have stuff to deal with. Often people would not acknowledge the internal conflicts between these characters, and only saw them as unfairly persecuted by external forces. And when you tried to push back at that current in the analysis, people always pushed back at you and tried to flatten and smooth the characters over again. People also weren’t as receptive to other pairings or characters, or other parts of the story. It wasn’t everyone in the fandom, but it was enough people, and it made it a challenging environment for those of us who wanted to explore things beyond an idealized version of this main pairing.
Anyway that’s kind of a tl;dr story but… I don’t love it when meta is there to flatten characters into who is good and who is evil (I cannot stress enough how much this show wasn’t about good and evil) and which pairings are the most perfect and worthy of discussion, and what love stories are “moral” to write about and which aren’t. Because it just creates an environment where like… people feel like they have fewer options for what to explore. I saw a lot of instances of people who wrote rarepairs getting discouraged to finish fics, and people wanting to say “good” things about the “bad” characters but only being able to say so in secret discord messages.
(But maybe I’m just bitter because my main ship consisted of the two characters most people deemed the most evil in the show. Who knows.)
I might have some smarter thoughts about this later. But feel free to respond to any, all, or none of it! I hope you’re having a good day.
no subject
So I feel like my best experiences with meta have involved fans being willing to look at things with a critical eye, but also being willing to look at meta as a generative exercise that kind of… encourages the creation of more fanwork and discussion. For instance, I remember getting pulled into the feminist side of superhero comics fandom on livejournal around the time that comics was still dominated by older white fanboy types, and boy did we end up exploring gender in our fics and meta.
I also remember the earliest days of BBC Sherlock fandom on tumblr (yes, I know, and in my defense I bailed before the conspiracy theory stuff took over) and somehow I found a group of people that just kind of… liked to go deep and get excited about writing in general, not just sticking with tropes and one pairing? Like, a lot of us had gotten initially pulled in by Johnlock, but the discussions we were having led people to be like “ah, what the hell, I’ll write sherlolly this week, let’s try it out, so and so’s post about them got my brain turning” or “what if I write a fic subverting the Hurt/Comfort trope” and there was a lot of like. Exploration of canon and fanon and such. And experimentation. I remember one particularly memorable week or two where people got talking about how sex gets written, and how so often there’s a “script” where everything’s supposed to be building to penetration and climax. So lots of people in our group decided they’d challenge themselves to write sex scenes, slash and het and femmeslash, that didn’t follow the standard script. We were having such good discussions and so much fun! I was too shy to write something like that then, but over the last few years I’ve been writing a longfic with sex scenes, and to this day I think about how to play with and subvert “scripts” when it comes to sex and romance.
Meanwhile, my worst experiences with meta and analysis… so I could talk generally about social policing and purity culture and flattening of story/characters in fandom spaces, but I feel like that debate is often fraught, and a specific example might make my point better.
Around 2021 I got into a show on Netflix that has some pretty complex characterization—and ultimately it’s a show that deals with cycles of trauma and abuse, and coming of age, and how people break free of the institutions that are holding them back. (This is, as it happens, extremely not what the show is advertised to be about, and marketers would like you to believe it is an angsty queer teen romance. Which it also is, but… with that other stuff thrown in there.) I would also say that this is a show where you are asked to understand all the characters, even when their actions disgust or upset you. Nor does the show rely on the legal system or traditional modes of authority for catharsis.
I was not present in the online fandom for first year or so of loving this show, and having a lot of great discussions with my friend
So, to be clear, there are some people with some awesome thoughts in this fandom, and there were still great discussions to be had and friendships to be made. But I would say the prevailing tendency on the particular platform we were on was to like… use analysis to rank the characters in order from most to least virtuous, and always interpret the “good” characters as doing the right things, and always interpret the “evil” characters as doing the wrong things. Moreover, the main pairing of the show was talked about by a lot of fans in superlative, glowing terms, as a model love story everyone should aspire to, even if the pairing is interesting because both of the people involved in it are imperfect and have stuff to deal with. Often people would not acknowledge the internal conflicts between these characters, and only saw them as unfairly persecuted by external forces. And when you tried to push back at that current in the analysis, people always pushed back at you and tried to flatten and smooth the characters over again. People also weren’t as receptive to other pairings or characters, or other parts of the story. It wasn’t everyone in the fandom, but it was enough people, and it made it a challenging environment for those of us who wanted to explore things beyond an idealized version of this main pairing.
Anyway that’s kind of a tl;dr story but… I don’t love it when meta is there to flatten characters into who is good and who is evil (I cannot stress enough how much this show wasn’t about good and evil) and which pairings are the most perfect and worthy of discussion, and what love stories are “moral” to write about and which aren’t. Because it just creates an environment where like… people feel like they have fewer options for what to explore. I saw a lot of instances of people who wrote rarepairs getting discouraged to finish fics, and people wanting to say “good” things about the “bad” characters but only being able to say so in secret discord messages.
(But maybe I’m just bitter because my main ship consisted of the two characters most people deemed the most evil in the show. Who knows.)
I might have some smarter thoughts about this later. But feel free to respond to any, all, or none of it! I hope you’re having a good day.