Read on Twitter
it's incredibly bleak how many vaguely obscure, published writers cut their teeth on trying to take down fanfiction, an endeavor that actively ensures you a dearth of future readers who then bait you into tweeting worse
"but some published writers go big with legal action against fanfic" yeah Anne Rice and JK Rowling--they're fucking terrible
controversial take: mainstream sanitized corporately approved strictly to be morally marketable writing is bad actually
"But PUBLISHED lit is occasionally queer." Great; but did you know that queer literature is inaccessible in some countries? It's a lot more meaningful to read legitimate queer stories online where you can access them for free than to smuggle in contraband print material
If anything, the sanitization and respectability politics of mainstream publishing has served to exclude meaningful queer literature. Queer kids shouldn't learn what it means to be queer by what Disney allows in the last ten seconds of Star Wars. Don't revere or honour that.
IMO arguing that women don't or shouldn't need fanfiction is profoundly myopic. I'm a woman, and I can read and write whatever the fuck I want to. I don't need an auyhority to ratify my creativity.
but hey if any of you actually believed in social justice in publishing, you'd be concerned about more than one issue at once, and wouldn't be tossing red herrings into the ether to try and up your twitter count
"buh everything is fanfiction because it uses letters and words that existed in previous works of literature" not quite, but the transformative nature of storytelling is such that we can allow for reimaginings and retellings ad nauseam without shaming an entire community, yes?
btw if you're gonna use an identity-based argument I'm half-Chinese diaspora and queer, so you're out of luck, I win diversity bingo or something
"Legitimate publishing process is the only true mark of success" "it's about true art" nah sorry it's all corporate IP. Literally, someone else legally owns the right to produce, distribute, and profit off it, and you are choosing to sell a corporate entity your creative energy.
Those of you who claim that mainstream publishing is the only real avenue for queer creatives--you know what, I cannot transform a appeal to legitimacy by invoking a SUICIDE attempt into anything funny or respectable. But maybe I'm just not radical enough to be that edgy.
