i have no idea what the movie is about. i think clocks are involved.

[sideways]

Something something an interesting Twitter conversation I eavesdropped on about the evolving nature of (a) fandom: "early fic (at least what i read) was deeply in conversation with the source. even aus were very connected to the canon. now, fic is in conversation with other fic." 

Something something the current Goncharov phenomenon consuming Tumblr, in which an entire landscape of fanfiction is being written about a source that doesn't actually exist. A wonderful mess of fleshy fan creation with nary a skeleton to drape it on but familiar patterns and expectations and tropes.

It's been very amusing to watch from the fringes, and there has been gorgeous meta written about the "yes, and" nature of Tumblr and the creative power of collective fandom. But there is something a little bittersweet in it too, for me, and I think the Twitter conversation touches on why.

Comments

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

I honestly think that both types of fic have their relative merits though I do sometimes wish that fic in conversation with canon didn't tend to fade from prominence quite so much over time if only because that's where the fresh new takes tend to originate. When everyone spends too much time writing the same sort of fics as everyone else it can sometimes lead to the creative equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. That said fics that are in conversation with other fics can be fun especially when written by a talented author who has an axe to grind for certain fandom tropes.

[sunlit_stone]

Honestly, to each their own, but I often find it pretty—for MDZS especially I've spent a lot of time with the text, and return to it a lot, and I feel like the in-conversation-with-fic genre ends up...they can be good stories? But they're very disconnected from the source, in a way I find frustrating. (Especially when it leads to things getting widely accepted as canon that are in no way canonical! But that's a different bugbear.)

Ah well—can't control how anyone else fans, and don't wish to; I'll just content myself in my corner with my friends, bugbears and all.

[sideways]

'Genetic bottleneck' is a good way of putting it! There's also elements of the old Telephone game sometimes, or clone degeneration if you will :P People extrapolating on extrapolations over and over until the link to canon gets truly tenuous.

But yes, that isn't to condemn either kind of fic in entirety; as you say, there's usually merits in both.

[sideways]

The Twitter convo did admirably at remaining neutral but, like you, I can get downright grumpy when I leap eagerly into a new array fandom only to find the exact same collection of Story Types That Rake In Kudos with canon names pasted in like a game of mad-libs. "AU - No Powers" my beloathed.

You're correct though - the most that can be reasonably done is a light grumbling and a retreat into filters.

[atamascolily]

Normally, I would be excited about this sort of thing, but something about the whole Goncharov phenomenon unsettles me deeply on a personal level. The whole point of the joke is that it's not real and never was, and yet I can't help feeling my sense of reality shifting in unpleasant ways every time someone waxes lyrically about their fictional experience with a film that doesn't actually exist. I generally don't do well with unreliable narrators in fiction; constantly having to second-guess everything I read beyond the usual background levels is exhausting.

I didn't feel this way about the Cordelia movie poster or whatever the fake European novel that got nominated for Yuletide was called, but in those cases, there was never any pretending that the source material existed the first place. Of course, then that gets into the whole "What is reality?" debate, and how much of what we consider to be real is just collective agreement as opposed to a discrete external thing. (Something something Simulacra and Simulation? Also, the ongoing cryptocurrency trend, to name a non-fandom example.)

[queenlua]

that was a v interesting thread; thanks for the link!

a kinda-related "old fandom" thing i'm sometimes kind of nostalgic/wistful for was when fandom felt more... diffuse? it wasn't just "check the ao3 category for your fandom;" you'd find some geocities site with stuff from a few authors, or you'd find some thread on gamefaqs where someone was updating their fic weekly in the same forum thread, or some fandoms would *strongly* prefer fanfiction.net even when ao3 was coming into vogue...

and those really did *feel* different and sort of implicitly select for different thing—i don't see as many shaggy dog stories where someone's clearly just riffing on their own HIGHLY specific worldbuilding for thousands of words, the way i remember on the weird forum threads. (not because ao3 *bars* that sort of thing, of course, just like... network effects, genetic bottleneck mentioned elsewhere in the comments, etc)

it's not even that that stuff isn't getting written anymore, i think—i'm sure there's subcultures around wattpad and such i'm totally unaware of, and there's always some elementary school kid writing their own fanfic without even knowing there's a word for it—but that kind of experience doesn't feel like the "default" anymore, haha. (and i do get a little bit twitchy when e.g. a certain type of fan wax poetic about ao3 as though it is All Of Fandom, and saved All Of Fandom... i adore ao3 but the world is so wide, yaknow?)

[sideways]

Oh interesting! I've seen several posts around cautioning people not to grow so committed to the bit they become invested in deceiving others, so at least you're not alone in finding the 'unreality' aspect unpleasant. Did you have similar issues with the Berenstein / Berenstain Bears thing, assuming you're familiar with that little meme?

[sideways]

Yeah, that's a really good point! On the one hand I enjoy not having to go searching far and wide for fanfiction (and then losing wads of favourites when sites go down... sob), but otoh AO3 naturally lends itself to a certain homogeneity. Because it's all in one place, and the majority audience will inevitably be loudest, and you can easily see around you what styles of technique and narrative will rake in the most approval.

(Relatedly: I always wrinkle my nose a little when people claim AO3 is algorithm free. It's free of one very particular type of algorithm, sure, but if we're talking literally then it's a website with a search function so of course it has an algorithm, and if we're talking culturally then it still has its ways of prioritising and boosting certain works.)

[atamascolily]

The Berenste/ain Bears thing still fucks with me, but it's not quite as bad, probably because people aren't really elaborating on it in quite the same way? That said, I need to see if we have any of our vintage 1980s copies somewhere, so I can confirm this once and for all, because I totally remember it as "Berenstein".

I wonder if I would be more interested in the Goncharov thing if it was a fantasy movie, but '70s Russian mobster films were never my thing, anyway.

...I do wonder if anyone has told Martin Scorses yet?

[queenlua]

I always wrinkle my nose a little when people claim AO3 is algorithm free

+100, yes, haha. just because i prefer AO3's algorithm to eg "however the heck Twitter decides to show me stuff" doesn't mean it doesn't have one... can't avoid it...!

[anneapocalypse]

That is an interesting thread--and I think the canon-to-fanon drift is definitely a thing that happens in fandoms and that I've witnessed, though I can't help wondering if there's also some selection bias involved. When you're new to a fandom, you haven't read much fic yet, so if the fic you're reading is heavily influenced by and in conversation with other fics, you're not going to see that. You'll just see, oh, this is a certain take on canon, which I do or don't like. The longer you're in a fandom and the more fic you read, the more you notice the patterns spring up.

With RvB, for example, the period between season 13 and season 15 was an especially uninteresting time for me personally because new work and conversation was focused on one ship and one character (neither of which I actually dislike) to greater and greater exclusion of everything else, and thanks to a popular longfic solidifying some already well-liked fanon, the fic about those things was also increasingly similar. But if I look back to the Freelancer era, when I first came into the fandom--if I go back and read fics from that era--I can now see a similar kind of fanonization, of characters and ships and approaches to the world and the story generally. TL;DR while I dislike the extremes of it, it seems to me that where creative work is being made in a community, the conversation with one another as well as the source material is inevitable.

I'll admit I've been rather charmed by the whole Goncharov phenomenon, with all the collective fiction and the art people are creating, and I think I just enjoy the "mutual pretending" game where we both know the thing isn't real but we're talking like it is. This does not, of course, include trying to actual convince people that the fake thing is real, and I've tried to be conscientious about that when reblogging things.

[sideways]

A good point about selection bias 🤔 Plus the earlier phases of a fandom are more likely to be dominated by conversation-with-canon because there is little other fic to converse with yet! On the other hand, one of my personal exasperations is jumping into a few fandom to immediately find the same types of fics as in other fandoms, regardless of whether the fandoms have more than passing similarities; the infamous coffee shop AU is a useful example. That, to me, feels like writers showing their hand from the very beginning as being more interested in conversing with the community than the source.

I'd agree some measure of drift is inevitable, though. And a big part of fandom joy (if also fandom angst) is finding and energising and being energised by other fans, so it's not even an inherently bad inevitability even if, like you, I find the outer fringes can rankle.

The mutual pretending is very funny, as is the just... absurd hilarity of people making such nice art for this non-existent thing! The bittersweetness is really just my grumpy inner hag muttering that well, of course fandom is primed to create a bunch of works sans a source, its been celebrating fanworks ridiculously divorced from the source for decades :P

[sideways]

I saw a post suggesting someone had and he had responded in a way that maintained the bit - but I can't verify whether the interaction was real, lol. I do know Neil Gaiman has proved unwilling to be drawn into the game (which is fair enough).

[anneapocalypse]

Heh, yeah, I'll admit I've never really gotten the coffee shop AU thing, or most other mundane AUs since I mostly like sci fi and fantasy, and the setting and how the characters fit into it is part of the appeal to me. People have explained to me that it's about imagining how characters would behave and interact under different circumstances, which I can sort of understand though it's never held a huge appeal for me--I think I just see who a character is as too tied up in their life circumstances to be especially interested in separating them. But it could be considered a conversation between the writer, the canon, and other tropes that they enjoy.

And I think you're right that the Goncharov phenomenon is sort of similar! It's people having conversation about character archetypes and genre tropes, with this made-up film that is at once an amalgam of those things, and a pastiche of them.

[sideways]

BIG ol' mood on not being that into the desire to remove characters from the core experiences that shaped them. Don't get me wrong, if wild AUs are what's available then I'll read them and sometimes I've had an excellent time, but it's not what I really want and it's almost always more of an issue the bigger a fandom is. Crack open a juggernaut ship like X-Men's Charles/Erik and of the top ten most kudos'd fics, maybe 2.5 aren't some kind of alternate universe. Not even the canon divergent kind. The 'they're a wedding planner' kind. This for two characters whose backgrounds and abilities are critical to their personalities, ideals, and dynamic. There comes a point I just don't think it can be said the author is conversing with canon as much as they are the desire for a good romcom.

I wonder if something like Goncharov could occur with a director and genre type without so many ready, familiar tropes to draw upon, heh. Tumblr Creates A David Lynchian Horrifying Absurdist Piece?

[anneapocalypse]

There comes a point I just don't think it can be said the author is conversing with canon as much as they are the desire for a good romcom.

Okay, I laughed. 😂 I've never been in a fandom as big as Marvel (Dragon Age is probably my biggest) but the way you describe that distinctly reminds me of that era where the RvB fandom was All Tuckington All the Time but weirdly, even though it was their canon interactions in season 11 that really launched that ship, like 90% of the fic was AU. Like there was clearly something in canon that got people going on it, but very few writers seemed to actually want to deal with the characters' canon circumstances.

Tumblr Creates A David Lynchian Horrifying Absurdist Piece?

I'd pay to see it.

[sideways]

Oh interesting! It's funny, I never really delved into RvB fics on AO3, so I mostly saw what my moot-circle of similar taste filtered to me + that sweet, brief time on RvBFics and the forums. (Though in the case of the latter, I do recall a few titantic AUs - the prison one comes to mind.)

Popular ships do seem particularly prone to AUs, and my (unresearched, unproven) theory is because there are so many ready templates for the romcom out there. To write something like Tuckington in canon, you have to commit to the canon: to the tone of the show, the impact of the histories, the holes in the plot :P You have to operate within boundaries. Now, I like trying to decipher and follow the rules of canon, but it's certainly much - well, I was about to say 'easier', but maybe that's rude. It's a different challenge, at least, to shuck all those boundaries and instead scoop together your favourite list of genre tropes and see if you can give it a distinctly Tuckington flavour.

I would also love to know if kinkmemes had anything to do with a rise in AUs as a fanfiction type or if they were just always a popular thing.

[sunlit_stone]

(mundane AUs are something that always end up on my DNWs in exchanges. It gets worse when the power's so fundamental to who they are—I always have trouble when fics have Charles Xavier not a telepath!)

Grumbling and retreat into filters... in MDZS I've had some success with writing grumpy posts about how the fanon take I'd inaccurate because of canon points X Y and Z but only very locally in the tumblr Jin Guangyao corner, and even then only because I've been obsessed with him+Lan Xichen enough to write a truly stupid number of words about it.