fanworks

[illuvium]

i think the treatment of fanfiction is super interesting for multiple reasons. there's treatment of it from inside the fandom & perception of it from i guess not even people outside the fandom, but people who don't interact with fandoms at all online. even thinking about things like people generalizing the types of works based on the site it's posted on is pretty funny. you don't see this with fanartists when they post works on both twitter and instagram, but when you see conversations about fanfiction, there's this immediate sort of assumption that anything posted on ao3 is superior to something posted on wattpad. i feel like it's then surprising, given how common these kinds of takes are within literally every fandom ever, to see the real treatment of fanfiction in fandom circles. generally speaking, i find that it's rare to find fanfiction that's given proper time of day despite having the same effort put into it as fanartists put into their works. it's a strange sort of contrast; as far as i know, there's not really any sort of stereotype regarding fanart in the same way there are all these discussions about fanfiction to the point of having these generalizations widely understood by tons of people on the internet. despite that more marked presence within common ideas, fanfiction really doesn't seem to be valued so much. comparatively less attention is paid to it and i find that writers are typically treated as more mechanical than artists are in the sense that people are far more comfortable critiquing writing and telling the author to produce more content.

as for the other thing i mentioned, of fanfiction's perception from outsiders, i think that's even funnier. it's like the treatment of fanfiction vs fanart inside the fandom but augmented exponentially. fanart's usually not seen is probably one of the reasons why, and the other reason why is what i've mentioned above of it not having any connotations (usually; there are always some exceptions and i've seen examples where youtubers or other content creators have brought fanart into videos to show some sort of disparity between the fanart & the actual content of the series). fanfiction's got something of a reputation, i think, for being more dirty in some regard? i don't really understand it, but there is more of a negative social meaning to saying you read fanfiction than there is for saying you like fanart that i'm really curious about. anyway, there's not really a meaning to this, and it's not a very ironed out line of thinking. i'll get back to this at some point if i'm up to it