You hear all these “you’re not a real fan unless” and it lists a hundred things, but I met a dude today who saw my Deadpool pin and asked what my favorite story arc was, and I explained that while I loved Deadpool, I was new to Marvel (I only really got into it a year and a half ago) and hadn’t been able to find a lot of the comics. Instead of making a face or a derogatory comment, he just offered to send me all the stuff he had. That is a true fan.
I told the guy at the comic shop when I went in for Black Widow that I’d seen a few Harley Quinn panels on Tumblr and thought it looked badass but didn’t know where to start because my entire involvement in DC fandom was watching the Batman cartoon as a kid. This guy sitting at one of the tables playing Yu-Gi-Oh, wearing a comic shirt and carrying a definitely-hardcore-fan amount of swag, spins around and goes “dude! You’ve never read DC? Check out the back issues wall. They’ve got all kinds of Harley Quinn.” He then proceeded to explain how “New 52″ was a spinoff, and had some split opinions in the fandom, but either continuity is good as long as you pick one and stay with it so you don’t get mixed on what’s going on.
True fans love to see other people loving the stuff they love.
YES THIS. I’m one of those terrible people who’s like “Why yes I do own a Marvel Encyclopedia that I read front to back when I’m sad” and the X-Men are, like, my first love, and I have a mental laundry list of all the ways I can share LITERALLY ANYTHING ABOUT THE X-MEN with my friends. You like the animated series? Yeah bro, I’m here for that. Movies? Honey, sweetie, darling, tell me all your opinions ever, my body is ready. You watched X-Men: Evolution as a kid? Dude, I still watch it when I’m sick or upset. Comics? Yeah baby, talk nerdy to me about time-travel plot lines and clones. I heard someone tell a girl a couple years younger than me that she wasn’t a ‘real fan’ of something (the Avengers, I think?) because she’d only seen the movies and I was like “*hisses* THAT IS MINE NOW I WILL TAKE OVER.”
An open letter to executive producers, writers, and cast in the age of Twitter, tumblr, AO3, Instagram, Youtube, whatever social media platforms come next, and global audiences.
Congratulations! If you’re reading this its highly doubtful you’re in any way involved in mass media production but I’m fucking sick of shitty audience engagement by multi-billion dollar media companies and anyway this was better than working on my dissertation you’ve probably got a successful show!
That’s fantastic! Your work is being viewed by millions of people! Pat yourself on the back! But wait! Oh dear. There’s a hiccup. Suddenly you notice tweets and messages and questions at SDCC about your characters - your beloved, money-making, copyrighted intellectual property - being…gay??
You didn’t intend this, your protagonist and antagonist and supporting characters and background characters are 100% heterosexual!! What ever will you do?!
Fear not, my hypothetical content creator! I’m about to break down some key do’s and don’ts for when you find yourself suddenly in possession of a queer fandom. I will categorize my advice in three simple levels to help you best choose which type of engagement with your fandom is right for you, your show, and your network: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. Please note: this is not an exhaustive post. I can’t literally write the book for you on how media producers can engage their diverse, 21st century audiences (well, lol I could but you’re not paying me so suck it) and fandoms - like any subculture - vary greatly in demographics, linguistic quirks, norms, and culture. That means there is no ‘one size fits all’ strategy for dealing with your most passionate fans. Theoretically, you have marketing people who earn a paycheck. Make them work for it by doing some actual research instead of just changing the fonts on the SDCC posters.
Ready? No? Well too fucking bad because here we go.
Actually, no, I’m sorry, hold up. We need to lay some groundwork first. Let’s call these our a priori assumptions about fandom in general but queer fandom in particular.
Assumption 1: Your queer fandom is not going anywhere. You’re fucking stuck with us. You will not get rid of us. Better bigger assholes than you show runners, executive producers, marketing teams, writers’ rooms, and casts have tried. We’re still here. We still show up at all the conventions. We still produce fanfiction, art, videos, meta. We still spend ungodly amounts of money, time, and energy engaging with the media you have created. Even sometimes especially when we are angry at it. We are here to stay.
If you wish to take part in any fandom, you need to accept and respect these three laws.
If you aren’t able to do that, then you need to realise that your actions are making fandom unsafe for creators. That you are stifling creativity.
Like vaccination, fandom only works if everyone respects these rules. Creators need to be free to make their fanart, fanfics and all other content without fear of being harassed or concern-trolled for their creative choices, no matter whether you happen to like that content or not.
The First Law of Fandom
Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)
It is up to you what you see online. It is not anyone else’s place to tell you what you should or should not consume in terms of content; it is not up to anyone else to police the internet so that you do not see things you do not like. At the same time, it is not up to YOU to police fandom to protect yourself or anyone else, real or hypothetical.
There are tools out there to help protect you if you have triggers or squicks. Learn to use them, and to take care of your own mental health. If you are consuming fan-made content and you find that you are disliking it - STOP.
The Second Law of Fandom
Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)
Simply put, this means that everyone likes different things. It’s not up to you to determine what creators are allowed to create. It’s not up to you to police fandom.
If you don’t like something, you can post meta about it or create contrarian content yourself, seek to convert other fans to your way of thinking.
But you have no right to say to any creator “I do not like this, therefore you should not create it. Nobody should like this. It should not exist.”
It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create. That’s censorship. Don’t do it.
The Third Law of Fandom
Ship And Let Ship (SALS)
Much (though not all) fandom is about shipping. There are as many possible ships as there are fans, maybe more. You may have an OTP (One True Pairing), you may have a NOTP, that pairing that makes you want to barf at the very thought of its existence.
It’s not up to you to police ships or to determine what other people are allowed to ship. Just because you find that one particular ship problematic or disgusting, does not mean that other people are not allowed to explore its possibilities in their fanworks.
You are free to create contrarian content, to write meta about why a particular ship is repulsive, to discuss it endlessly on your private blog with like-minded persons.
It is not appropriate to harass creators about their ships, it is not appropriate to demand they do not create any more fanworks about those ships, or that they create fanwork only in a manner that you deem appropriate.
These three laws add up to the following:
You are not paying for fanworks content, and you have no rights to it other than to choose to consume it, or not consume it. If you do choose to consume it, do not then attack the creator if it wasn’t to your taste. That’s the height of bad manners.
Be courteous in fandom. It makes the whole experience better for all of us.
Yup.
Slaps onto blog.
I’m reblogging this everytime I see it, because holy hell, it seems that some people need to be reminded of this every now and then. And it always needs repeating with every new “generation” of fan, or when new fandoms appear.
oh my god ok, you guys, so @blackdogrunning and i were talking about rpf and crackfic, and something amazing has occurred to us, which is this:
even before team leverage was team leverage, they were all (save nate) pretty well known, in certain parts of the population, for doing what they do. but you know what happens with any group of well-known people?
THAT IS CORRECT, FRIENDS, IT IS FANDOM. consider the way that mattingly says, ‘wait, the parker?’ and his face is like holy shit this is all my guilty spank bank fantasies come to life. somewhere in the leverage universe, in some weird corner of the internet (lbr prob on ao3) there lives rpf crime fandom. it pops up every yuletide and normal people who aren’t criminals are never sure if it’s, like, rpf, or if there was an unaired pilot for something that didn’t get picked up, or what, but there it is, every year!
so starting even before team leverage gets together, we’ve got, like:
infinite fic about sophie’s backstory, none of which is anywhere close to the truth, all of which she reads, some of which she uses to create new personas, none of which she will ever admit to
(it’s still kinda flattering tho)
there’s a part of fandom that’s convinced that she’s the descendant of the grand duchess anastasia and the government is after her, and that’s *very* flattering, even though it’s obviously ridiculous
there’s another theory going around that she’s actually twins, or triplets, because surely no single person could–
shippy fic about hardison and cha0s. and hardison KNEW THAT WOULD HAPPEN because he knows how the internet works, ok, and it makes him kinda crazy because that dude is the WORST and he would never do THAT, and certainly not in the weirdly domestic way that some of these fics suggest
# LEVERAGE # ELIOT SPENCER # ALEC HARDISON # PARKER # SOPHIE DEVEREAUX # LIKE I’M NOT EVEN SORRY ABOUT THIS # WE’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT IT FOR LIKE THREE HOURS # AND WE’RE STILL FUCKING GOING # APPARENTLY WE’RE GOING TO DIE IN THIS UTTERLY RIDICULOUS BIN # SO I HOPE THAT EVERYONE IS COOL WITH ME REBLOGGING MY OWN SHIT SO I CAN ADD TO IT # BECAUSE THIS IS ENDLESSLY HILARIOUS TO ME # LIKE ENDLESSLY # E N D L E S S L Y # THINK OF THE SWEET SUMMER CHILDREN WHO READ THE YULETIDE FIC AND WERE LIKE WOW THAT WAS GREAT # AND THEN SUDDENLY ARE NECK DEEP IN WEIRD CRIME FANDOM # AND THEIR ONGOING FRUSTRATION THAT THEY CAN’T FIND THE SOURCE ANYWHERE # LIKE WHAT # IS IT REGION LOCKED # IS IT ONLY AVAILABLE ON VHS IN CZECH # WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE # SORRY THAT I’M BASICALLY THE WORST Y'ALL - @bydaybreak
It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?
I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.
Totally.
A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.
(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)
Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:
Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36
TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66
Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.
The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?
YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!
Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.
I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.
This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.
But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.
Yay, mathy arguments. :)
This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.
In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.
I’ve seen the screen-time/representation argument before, and I’m still not sure I buy it. Yes, @destinationtoast is absolutely correct that more female characters equals more het and more femslash. My other big fandom is Battlestar Gallactica, which features a pretty gender-balanced cast and one canonical lesbian ship, and the result is both more het and more femslash. I’m getting into Mad Max fandom as well, and again, more het, and more femslash. So yes, absolutely, some of the blame falls on the (usually male) canon creators for not creating enough well-round female characters with screen time in the first place.
But when I look at say, Sherlock fandom, the glaring example that always jumps out at me is Mormor. I have nothing against Mormor or people who ship it, but it’s pretty astounding to me the amount of effort that fans have invested in a male fanon character who isn’t even on the show. And, to @observethewalrus’ point, there is no corresponding fandom interest in say, Violet Hunter, or any of the ACD female characters who are mentioned in passing but aren’t on the BBC Sherlock show who could be fleshed out, and I doubt there ever will be, because fans tend to call OFCs “Mary Sue.”
So I do think there is some validity to the internalized misogyny critique, especially when we consider that it’s not just that there isn’t much representation of female characters, but that when we do see female characters in fic, they are often vilified or otherwise reduced to one-dimensional cartoons that don’t encourage reader empathy.
I understand what people are saying about it being easier to blame the fans than the creators. We have closer ties with fellow fans and it’s easier to call out someone we think might actually listen. But for me, this isn’t about assigning blame as much as it is about being the change I want to see in my fandom, to use the old cliche. I write as much het as I do slash, and I’ve started writing femslash as well, though that was harder for me because of the math, as people have pointed out, there are fewer possible femslash pairing and I didn’t really find one that spoke to me until Morkins and obviously both those female characters were introduced in S3.
And I defend people who ship Warstan, Sherlolly, Molliarty, Adlock at every opportunity from people who insist these ships are homophobic. Because I know my friends who ship het pairings are interested in further development of the female characters, and have nothing against IRL gay people (many of us are queer ourselves). Fandom seems to me overwhelmingly about making space in the canon for people and relationships who are not otherwise represented, and women are still underrepresented in mainstream media in major ways.
So, that’s my $.02.
Thanks, @anarfea, for the very thoughtful response. The more time I spend in fandom, the more I think there’s a lot to what you say, and also that it’s really, really complicated.
There was a really good article I reblogged on this within the past couple days called The Femslash Gap that tries to brainstorm & analyze a number of these factors and more – and my response, FWIW. I really like the non-reductionistic approach there.
When I first entered fandom and started seeing arguments about why there’s so much slash and so little femslash, the arguments bothered me because most of the ones I saw were really reductionist and non-mathy. People often assumed there was one reason (usually a bad assumption), and they threw around terms like misogyny on the one side and homophobia on the other (and at the time I hadn’t yet realized how subtle or broad the application of these terms has grown, either), often without paying much attention to the possible combinations afforded by the underlying media. And that seemed absurd to me, as a fan, a Johnlock shipper, and a fandom statistician.
To break that down a bit, because I think many fans – maybe especially noob fans – are in a similar boat on the first couple points:
Oh, and let me make clear– because I think I left it implicit above – I find the “homophobia” accusations hurled by some M/M fans against some het shippers (or non-fans of a given M/M pairing) to be ludicrous and terrible. Who you ship is not who you support rights for IRL. And very many of us in fandom are various stripes of queer, as @anarfea points out and @centrumlumina’s AO3 census data supports:
http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/post/62840006596/sexuality
I find that argument so ridiculous I don’t bother to engage with it, but that may be a mistake on my part (not to mention johnlock/ot3 shipper privilege). And I certainly didn’t want to skip over that excellent discussion by @anarfea and appear to dismiss it.
THIS: “ So I do think there is some validity to the internalized misogyny critique, especially when we consider that it’s not just that there isn’t much representation of female characters, but that when we do see female characters in fic, they are often vilified or otherwise reduced to one-dimensional cartoons that don’t encourage reader empathy.”
I keep wanting to discuss this more– how we write women in slash fic. I’m thinking about how many times a female character– no matter who she is– is portrayed as vapid, shallow, timid, a straight up bitch– a doddering old lady who say’s “dear” every five seconds– or a murderous vixen, etc, etc, …
Okay. In Sherlock, part of the problem is that the women we are given to work with are caricatures to begin with. Ella, the “motherly” Black woman. Mostly invisible. Sally Donovan, the Angry Black woman and a slut, besides. Mrs. Hudson– see doddering, motherly granny stereotype. Janine? Ho’. Mary? Assassin who just wants life in the suburbs. “I’m not really bad, I’m just drawn that way.” Molly, the girl-woman desperately in love. Or, as they used to say– “Fish”. (ugh)
And what do we do? Our women “chirp” and “giggle”, or they are cartoon villains. Or they are window dressing. They have no real purpose. We seem to want them gone. Or– they must stay in their tropeish roles.
I think that’s how much we have been influenced by media.
But because we are independent of popular media– in other words, we are in it, but not of it– and we can pick and choose what we want to do, how we want to show these characters– we have the power to change how women– who are reflections of ourselves– appear in our own wing of underground media.
It’s a shame that oftentimes, we can be more chauvinistic in our writing where women are concerned than the men writing the original series…
Sorry for blathering, but y’all made me think! :-D
how is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?
like, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking ‘VERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELS’
was caesar like ‘ET TU ODYSSEUS’
sometimes i wonder
oh my GOD
the answer is yes they did. there’s a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print.
here’s a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasn’t very good. but then it got better over time and by the 16th century there were publications, novels, scientific journals, folios, pamphlets and newspapers all over Europe. at first most were educational or theological, or reprints of classical works.
however, novels gained in popularity, as basically what most people wanted was to read for pleasure. they became salacious, extremely dramatic, with tragic heroines and doomed love and flawed heroes (see classical literature, only more extreme.) books in the form of letters were common. sensationalism was par the course and apparently used to teach moral lessons. there was also a lot of erotica floating around.
but here’s the thing: due to the greater availability of literature and the rise of comfy furniture (i shit you not this is an actual historical fact, the 16th and 17th century was when beds and chairs got comfy) people started reading novels for pleasure, women especially. as these novels were highly emotional, they too became…highly emotional. there are loads of contemporary reports of young women especially fainting, having hysterics, or crying fits lasting for days due to the death of a character or their otp’s doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men weren’t immune-there’s a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he can’t handle all his feels, if they don’t get together he won’t be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroine’s tragic state (IIRC ehh).
conservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on people’s mental health, and thought it damaging to both morals and society. so basically yes it is exactly like what happens on tumblr when we cry over attractive British men, only my historical theory (get me) is that their emotions were even more intense, as they hadn’t had a life of sensationalist media to numb the pain for them beforehand in the same way we do, nor did they have the giant group therapy session that is tumblr.
(don’t even get me started on the classical/early medieval dudes and their boners for the Iliad i will be here all week. suffice to say, the members of the Byzantine court used Homeric puns instead of talking normally to each other if someone who hand’t studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.)
I needed to know this.
See, we’re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly’s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.
Ancient Iliad fandom is intense
Alexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (It’s possible that this story is apocryphal, but that would just mean that ancient historians were writing RPS about Alexander and Hephaestion RPing Iliad slash and honestly that’s just as good).
And then there’s this gem from Plato:
“Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus - his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far)” - Symposium
That’s right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.
More on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do
Man I love this post.
And to add my personal favourite story: after reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in the 18th century, Elizabeth Echlin decided that she was NOT HAPPY with the ending and basically wrote her own fix-it fic. No-one dies and Lovelace (the villain) was totally reformed and became a super nice guy. It’s completely OOC and incredibly poorly written and it’s beautiful.
Also, so many women fell in love with the villain, Lovelace, and wrote to Richardson about it, that he kept adding new bits with each edition to highlight what a hideous person Lovelace was. So it’s almost unsurprising that reading novels in this period was actually considered dangerous because it gave women unrealistic ideas about men and made them easier prey for rakes.
Basically, “I want my own Christian Grey” has been a thing for hundreds of years.
Also a thing with fix-it/everyone lives AUs: at various points in time but especially in the mid 1800s-early 1900s (aka roughly Victorian though there were periods of this earlier as well) a huge thing was to “fix” Shakespeare (as well as most theater/novels) to be in line with current morality. Good characters live, bad characters are terribly punished – but not, you know, grusomely, because what would the ladies think? So you have like, productions of King Lear where Cordelia lives and so do Regan and Goneril, but they’re VERY SORRY.
Aka all your problematic faves are redeemed and Everyone Lives! AUs for every protag.
Slightly tangential but I wanted to add my own favorite account of Chinese fandom to this~ I don’t know how many people here have heard of the Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (红楼梦), but it is, arguably, the most famous Chinese novel ever written (There are four Chinese novel classics and A Dream of Red Mansions is considered the top of that list). It was written during the Qing dynasty by 曹雪芹, but became a banned book due to its critique of societal institutions and pro-democracy themes. As a result, the original ending of the book was lost and only the first 80 chapters remained. There are quite a few versions of how the current ending of the book came to be, but one of them is basically about how He Shen, one of Emperor Qian Long’s most powerful advisers, was such a super-fan of the book, he hired two writers to archive and reform the novel from the few remaining manuscripts there were. In order to convince the Emperor to remove the ban on the book, he had the writers essentially write a fanfiction ending to the book that would mitigate the anti-establishment themes. However, He Shen thought that the first version of the ending was too tragic (even though the whole book is basically a tragedy) so he had the writers go back and write a happier ending for him (the current final 40 chapters). He then presented the book to the Emperor and successfully convinced him to remove the ban on the book.
According to incomplete estimates, A Dream of Red Mansions spawned over 20 spin offs, retellings, and alternate versions (in the form of operas, plays, etc.) during the Qing Dynasty alone.
In 1979, fans (albeit academic ones) started publishing a bi-monthly journal dedicated to analysis (read: meta) on A Dream of Red Mansions. In fact, the novel’s fandom is so vast and qualified and rooted in academics of Chinese literature that there is an entire field of study (beginning in the Qing dynasty) of just this one novel, called 红学. Think of it as Shakespearean studies, but only on one play. This field of study has schools of thought and specific specializations (as in: Psych analyses, Economics analyses, Historical analyses, etc.) that span pretty much every academic field anyone can think of.
(That being said, I’ve read A Dream of Red Mansions and can honestly say that I’ve never read its peer in either English or Chinese. If for nothing else, read it because you would never otherwise believe that a man from the Qing dynasty could write such a heart-breakingly feminist novel with such a diverse cast of female characters given all the bitching and moaning we hear from male content-creators nowadays)
Never in my life did I think I would live to see the day where an entire fandom is in denial of, not only A character’s death, but a majority of a film’s characters’ deaths in general.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Everyone lives according to this fandom, and there’s no telling them, ahem, us otherwise.
If you’re asking yourself if it’s weird to comment on a fic that has been up for years, that hasn’t been touched in ages, that was posted long before you were even in a fandom or even if you think the writer isn’t around or doesn’t care–
The writer cares. Leave the comment. You are the best person alive in that moment just because you have something to say. Even if they don’t hit you back for a while, even if they don’t EVER respond, it is NOT weird to comment on that fic. Fire away.
I love comments and usually write way to much in response out of sheer fucking gratitude. Like a person who hasn’t spoken to another adult in years, hobbling around, offering them stale cookies and talking way too much.
Someone recently said to me ‘you know you don’t have to reply to every comment’ and I was like ‘NO BUT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.’ I feel all of this so hard.
There is no expiration date on reading or liking a thing, much less letting the author know it.
