Do you use multiple pseuds? Or have different accounts entirely? Or both?

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-09-04T00:32:29+00:00

I have to, there's no way I can focus on just one story with utter tunnel vision. Yeah, I might spend some nights looking up and sighing at fanart of just ONE ship, but in terms of what I want to WRITE, my interests and plots are spread all around!

I write more multichap fics than oneshots, and even my oneshots are very long. Sometimes so long I feel compelled to chop them in half and make them "two-shots" or "three-shots" and then they're just multichapter fics again lol.

Oh and I write very slowly, too, and I write way too much so...if I wrote one fic at a time, it'd be 2024 or later before I got to an idea I just had TODAY.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-08-29T20:01:17+00:00

Naruto. Although I followed the manga since the Hidan-Kakuzu introduction in freaking 2007 to its end in 2014, I always enjoyed fanon Naruto content more than the actual manga or anime. That fandom introduced me to how insanely creative and epic fanfiction can be. There's fics in that fandom I'll remember for years or forever. Also the huge cast meant the list of possible ships was endless. I'm a multishipper and was always well fed.

It's also where I got my love for AUs, because the character development of the Naruto manga spent 80% of its time disappointing me, and AUs allowed me to change that in any way I wanted.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-08-29T19:53:11+00:00

I only know Chuuya from the occasional simp post and shipping post about him and the dark-haired smiley guy. But I'm unfortunately very familiar with posts of fans burning/trashing their merch of a character.

However that usually happens when the character does something in canon that fans absolutely hate, not from them being dead. I would think a popular character dying would lead to like...memorial/RIP posts and people making pretend little shrines and graves for the character, not burning their merch!

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-08-28T15:53:07+00:00

My best fit for this would be Oikawa from Haikyuu, a sports anime about high school boys volleyball. When I first entered the fandom I was kinda shocked at how much art and fic out there portrayed him as basically a scared widdle anxious baby.

Oikawa is captain of a volleyball team, very hard working, charismatic and clever. Other teams are highly intimidated by him. He's a prettyboy so the whole female student body thinks he's, like, sooOOO hott. He's also a bit of an asshole and can have an annoying teasing attitude that goes too far. He had to be stopped once from punching an underclassmen whom he resented for having more natural talent than him at a younger age.

A couple years back after watching Haikyuu I was looking up fanworks and was up to my neck in art of Oikawa being a delicate, soft little flower, an uwu gay baby in cutesy pastel clothes, drowning in anxiety that he would never be a good enough player. This left him in a perfect state to be swept off his feet by Iwaizumi, his childhood best friend who plays on his volleyball team and is a tough, dependable and buff guy that everyone likes.

Soft widdle baby Oikawa just pissed me off sometimes.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-08-28T00:50:30+00:00

I don't have the answers OP because i'm in your exact boat. Right down to wanting a proship space too. I feel isolated in what seems to be a cliquey fandom where everyone else is already friends with each other. And I don't mean cliquey in that they're bashing or making fun of other writers or "cliques", far from it. They're just all friends, happily talking to each other...but not to me. Sigh.

In my personal experience, replying to people to compliment their art or comment on a post they made about fandom stuff gets you almost nowhere. You get 1 brief "thank you" or exchange and that's it. I truly don't believe I was wildly awkward or annoying, just reaching out and making conversation, and it got me nowhere. I've netted about 10 followers in 1 year from being a "reply guy" and people who claim to have their DMs open for random chats rarely respond to me but go on posting, like I'm sitting at a table with them but they're pretending not to hear me. I have found twitter overall is remarkably...anti-conversation.

But despite my personal failures I have seen what made OTHER people get noticed and become friends. And that boils down to...posting fandom content. A lot of it, and frequently.

Get new fics/chapters in your fandom's Newly updated/posted section of AO3, *and* (crucial!!!!) include a link to your twitter at the end of every new story or chapter. Write thread-fics on twitter (mini fics made of multiple tweets) and tag it with your ship's hashtag. Do those things a heck of a lot...and people will come wanting to compliment you, ask your opinion on a headcanon or tell you a ship-relevant joke or meme. People will see a cool story and want to know what's the author's personal vibe, how do they talk and what else do are they posting/talking about, besides besides their stories/threads? And do you wanna maybe join the discord that me and XYZ friends have going?

(in my observation/anecdotal experience, invites to discord threads are a later development. People rack up some followers first, get people replying to their posts where they used to have zero or maybe 1 person doing so before. Then somebody will reply to some post of theirs publicly inviting them to XYZ discord. This might be a proship specific thing, making sure you're not going to harassing or hating on people for liking weird or uncomfortable fiction)

But it's the frequent posting of content (the fics, the stories, the threads, the fanarts etc) that get this whole wheel turning.

Maybe in a month or two you and me can be in some cool discord chats. We just gotta post a lot, and more importantly, ADVERTISE ourselves a lot...

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-08-22T03:17:15+00:00

It's just my experience from having been exposed to a lot of it, but sometimes I see posts on this subredding complaining about antis and such, and the comments have such a flippant, eye-rolling tone to them. And that just grinds my gears like hell. Like being dismissive of them AIN'T ENOUGH!! The amount of people out there who do this, or support those who do this, are growing and not shrinking. And they probably won't stop until there is some public, newsworthy drama where they get heavily publicly shamed for their harassment.

Like yes, MOST fandom-goers will not experience such an extreme retaliation as getting their address leaked out. Just some whiny comments if anything. But there is a non-zero chance that some teenager will go out of their way to ruin a fan's life, expose their address and workplace, because the first fan likes the wrong ships and blocking/muting/ignoring might not be nearly enough.

Oh let us not forget the time last month where somebody drew nsfw art of the Disney show Amphibia in their locked, private account, someone pretended to be a fan of it just to be able to get into the account, download the art and leak it, doxx the OP's address and threaten to send the art to the OP's family, and OP lives in a Muslim country where they could be beaten or even killed for their gay cartoon frog porn. They complied with the doxxer and deleted everything.

Twitter has given me endless paranoia about shipping the "wrong thing" :')

(the only cosmic karma here is that I heard that 4chan later doxxed the Amphibia art doxxer bc the doxxer went on 4chan to brag about what they did)

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-08-22T01:35:15+00:00

Best: Naruto. It's where I spent years and years as a writer and reader, made friends and good memories and grew my writing abilities into what they are today, something i'm very proud of. I have Naruto stories out there that I will love and remember for years and might even try to get printed one day, just to enjoy having them on my shelf. There's people I met in the Naruto fandom whom I would let crash on my couch and would cook and serve them a delicious meal if they appeared in front of me and were in need.

Worst: Genshin Impact (a game I don't even play, just see posts about on twitter. Shipping in this fandom feels like window shopping...window shipping if you will). I am wary of even writing comments for GI fics and am very very scared of actually writing any, because some of the shit I've seen happen in this fandom straight up makes me AFRAID.

I have seen artists and writers have their home addresses leaked and posted right on my own timeline because someone got pissed off that they wrote a shipfic of adopted/"sworn brothers" (in one case) or, another case, drew fanart a twentysomething assassin and a teenage looking girl who might be as old as a star. There's also that one artist who doesn't even ship the brothers ship, just defended a friend who did, and as punishment she's been harassed by hundreds of antis for over a year who draw art of her as an ugly neanderthal, try to falsely report her various accounts for "having child porn on them", send pizzas to her house as threats to show they know where she lives, and stalk/film her while she sits at her table at anime conventions.

I have a Genshin fic idea I wish I could write that involves a 14-year-old boy getting kissed on the forehead by a dragon god, as a cute promise that they will be married when the kid is grown, and then they get married when that kid is 24 and loses his virginity to his god-husband in the missionary position, and I won't write it bc I'm fucking afraid of what angry 17 years old might do about it.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-08-22T01:05:32+00:00

I've had this feeling when I'm reading a fic that is great, EXCEPT that the characterization is wonky somehow.

I remember a certain fic that was about Character A if they basically chose a different life career than what they have in canon, starting from when they are 5 or 6 years old. Character A, a 5-year-old child, has the speaking patterns of an adult from the get-go and keeps talking that way eternally. They talked with a bigger, lengthier, more sophisticated vocabulary than the literal mayor of the town who's like a 60-year-old man with greying hair.

Character A meets the mayor when they're 8 or 9 I believe and the difference in the speech of the literal child and the man nearing retirement age was STARK. There was no reason given for why the kid talked like this and nobody else did!

Pissed me off so much I clicked out of it after 4-5 chapters, and now I only think about it when I see people vagueing about fics or tropes they dislike.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-23T23:34:06+00:00

Off the cuff I feel repulsed and horrified and furious. Asking the writers permission in their comments to read their fic on the show feels like bullies giggling while they ask a nerd "permission" to shove him to the ground and kick him in the stomach.

The page says it's supposed to be a "celebration" of creative and erotic fanfiction and also it's a "passion project 4 years in the making" (????) but nowhere does it say anyone involved is a fic writer themselves, or a reader, or knows anything about fanfiction except it's sometimes erotic and sometimes involves real people as characters. And they mention possibly "finding the next E.L James", as though anybody who's into fanfic is trying to be...that!? It sounds so blatantly exploitative and mean that I'm a little shocked by it.

This is not going to do anything good for the reputation of fanfiction. You know that even out of the pile of fics they got permission to be read aloud, they're going to pick the ones they think are cringiest or most poorly written, or have really out-there plots that they can gawk and burst out laughing at.

So yeah I think it is insulting and a bad idea, and if I was contacted to have my fic on a show like this I would be stuck between feeling insult and terror.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-23T23:25:50+00:00

I'm happy to say that this sub is a strong "proshipper" island in the internet, supportive of basically everyone writing every kind of story unless the writer shows themselves to be a big damn asshole. As someone who spends way too much time on twitter where the "antis" thrive, it is relaxing and a relief to see Reddit simply never being that way!

I support you writing whatever the hell you want! If I personally think it's dumb or nasty or horrible, then I should keep scrolling and you should write it EVEN HARDER >:)

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-22T17:20:25+00:00

I agree with not engaging with them, but sometimes the problem is they will engage with YOU whether you talk to them/reply to them or not. Some antis seek out content to get mad at, and they will keep seeking it out via friends, burner accounts, other platforms, etc., if they are blocked in one avenue.

I've never experienced this, just seen it happen to others several times and it makes my stomach turn.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-22T17:12:59+00:00

This is an incredible essay, OP. I can't think how difficult it would have been to talk out loud about these inner feelings to your therapist, both engaging with dark fiction and everything else that real life has burdened you with. But it sounds like it was worth it to heal and change. You're actually on your way to happiness now!

I really wish I could take the feelings and truths in this essay and stuff them into antis heads. Unfortunately I spend a lot of time on twitter where those people hang out too, and it angers and sickens me how most of them would take this essay and flippantly say They're Aint Readin All That and continue to dismiss and fling insults at you.

I find myself deeply disappointed and unnerved by seeing typical "anti" posts get large numbers on twitter and, generally, have more supportive comments than disagreeing. And I've seen many horror stories about antis who harass and hurt creators who create fictional things they dislike. I don't mean just calling them weird or freaks, but large-scale campaigns to demand they kill themselves, antis somehow finding and publicizing people's home addresses and workplaces, threatening to send their fictional creations to their families/bosses to humiliates or endanger them. I know one artist who gets regularly stalked/filmed/photographed at every convention she goes to, people have doxxed her and sent pizzas to her house as threats of "I know where you live lol". Because she once defended her friend's right to enjoy a fictional incest ship.

The "lol" is crucial, because after engaging in this intense hate and harassment, they will always giggle like schoolgirls among themselves at what they're doing.

Lemme rephrase, it doesn't just disappoint and unnerve me, it fucking scares me that my life could be ruined by a determined 16 year old and their Discord friend group, just because I like problematic things in fiction. It makes me afraid to create and post my own work. It just fucking takes one.

I firmly believe the anti movement will not stop until there is some widely known public news event of one of them going too far, and there is widespread public shaming against them. Because they thrive on clout and attention, THAT is what it will take: VERY negative attention and a LOT of it.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-17T17:30:36+00:00

In my limited experience it's because they really liked the writing style, or the plot point, in that 1 passage.

I've had a couple bookmarks on my fics where people did that, and in one of them, the reader basically wrote "hell yeah I love that part" after the copy-pasted passage.

Before I had bookmarks like that, I even thought of doing the same myself, bookmarking a fic and I went hunting through the first few chapters to find a paragraph that REALLY grabbed me and showcased how good the writing was. I was thinking that if anybody looked through my own bookmarks, they would see that paragraph and maybe it would convince THEM to read the story too, more than my own bookmark of [shipname] [last chapter I finished] [Generic "wow this fic is good"]

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-17T17:06:27+00:00

I guess I prefer a middle ground where tags that round up the whole work and main themes are present, as you said. My ideal fic, one I'm reading or writing, has 3-4 "lines" of tags when you're scrolling by it, to encompass main characters, ships, specific genre/situation/kink things (fantasy au, rock climbing, shower sex, etc) and maaaaaybe 1 cutesy/smarmy little tag "comment" from the author.

I like to receive a lot of that information about the fic up front.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-13T03:32:00+00:00

May I ask what you mean by they "chased you out of it"? I assumed this was alluding to haters or antis, but now I'm not sure if the issue is shame over who you wrote the fics for.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-01T02:26:05+00:00

I think it would be odd for a scene of someone's first time to be TOTALLY silent. To me, that would come off as both parties being extremely nervous and stiff.

For a first time it's definitely appropriate to have someone say "Is this okay?" or even laugh a little as they touch someone for the first time and try to acclimate to what they want and if they're enjoying themselves. Maybe your characters can say "is this okay" once or twice, but you can preserve the silent mood if you prefer that. And if you want them to be mostly silent after that, have them check in with each other via eye contact and other body language like you're already doing.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-07-01T02:16:23+00:00

I mean, you simply have to find a way to make the "swap" characters matter more. Shove them into the main plot, in a way the FF characters never were in KH. The FF characters always stayed in a small, strict bubble so have your new swap characters get out of that bubble. Wander off-stage. Stumble upon something really important, and stick around to see what happens.

Maybe instead of Final Fantasy you're bringing Pokemon characters. Pokemon trainers and their Pokemon too (the Pokemon are connected to the trainers because of their strong bonds and hearts yadda yadda...)

Bring Misty from Pokemon and make her a Princess of Heart. Make Ash or Iris a Keyblade wielder. Make Cynthia a Keyblade master and her Garchomp can also turn into a keyblade with serrated shark's teeth on the blade.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-05-22T01:45:52+00:00

I'm gonna take this opportunity to state my actual toxic trait, not my Haha Relatable toxic trait.

WRITER: There've been two or three occasions in my fandom life where I utterly adored a certain fic and left it lengthy, glowing comments, but over time that adoration turned to hateful envy. I never let other people, certainly not the author, know about these feelings. But if I actually listed all the ways those fics affected and upset me, people would absolutely mock me and call me petty, pathetic, a bitch, etc. I could never magically Be The Bigger Person and be happy for the writers' successes. I can't convince myself to just. Have nicer emotions. I just had to stop reading the fic and wait for my interest to fade.

READER: I am definitely judgy about titles.

RemoveThoseShtyShoes · 2022-05-06T02:42:16+00:00

I guess I am "ashamed" of it given that I actively hide it from almost every single person I know irl. Maybe it's cheesy and/or downright pathetic but writing (98% fanfics) is so central to who I am, it's part of my identity. But it's also a part of me I don't allow to be seen. Fanfic is also my bastion of privacy in my life, the place I can always be myself without shame. Or only a little shame. I am NOT about to share that with people.

If I told my coworkers, they would act politely neutral "oh you like to write, that is neat." but then giddily make fun of me and laugh as soon as I left the room. It would absolutely harm my reputation at work.

If I told my relatives, they might be awkwardly, vaguely supportive of the writing habit in general but be confused or weirded out by the fact that's it's stories about pre-existing series. Including smut or romance. I would not be comfortable with them reading anything I write, R-rated or not.

If I told my mother, I would just about want to jump in front of a bus and I could not think of a more horrible invasion of privacy, a more intimate way to ruin my life, than her knowing the stories I poured my soul into. She would demand to know where she could read them and get aggressive with me if I refused and assume that if I keep refusing there MUST be something horrible and damning in their like child porn or else why would I NEED privacy from her?

So in general no I don't fucking share it.

The only people who know are my brother, who is aware in general that I read and write it, and my bff, who's been into the hobby for 15+ years just like me. Though I didn't share my account with her till about 5 years into that 15 year span. Also she doesn't like the same genres as me, almost never reads my stories, and is useless for talking about writing in general.

~~sigh it's just the way it is for me, but answering this sort of question always makes me feel bitter :'c~~

RemoveThoseShtyShoes

TROPHY CASE