I've been trying to purge my YouTube algorithm, so when you put fanfic in your title, or a title of a book I can't stand hearing about, I'll tell it I don't like the video. I wish I had more options, like "I don't like it and please don't ever put this word in my feed again" or "Stop putting this shit in here, you know I won't watch it". But people I follow discuss fanfic in depth, and if their research includes something interesting and annoyingly piques my interest, I'll watch it. But I have to put up with references to those books, and the content creator saying positive things about fanfic, which makes me want to reach out and give them something else, before I realise they'll ignore it and I go back to feeling like shit about fanfic.
I'm sitting through this because it relates to a movie I love, and has interesting factoids. I think the problem is I know what communities develop from fanfic, it breeds the type of Goodread readers and reviewers you come to resent because they wield all this power they haven't really earned to sink or swim a book. That if you don't grab enough of them by the throat and excite them into telling other people, who tell their people etc, you'll never get your work seen. I guess it's the joy the content creator is describing that fanfic readers get, the geeking out and enthusiasm that is often derided. I think I went to Literotica to get the same sensation of giving people something they were affected positively by.
When it gets into the public discourse that a recent work was fanfic inspired, it leads to speculation and hype that I can't generate for anything I've done. If you link shit back to a possible fanfic, it's a net insult and cause for comedy, not something to be celebrated. Making the statement "a lot of writers grew up and started out in fanfic" infuriates me because I didn't. I didn't even know it could be a thing, if it predates the internet, someone who did it would have had to put it into the internet to get it seen. (I realise it does, it's called Star Wars extended universe literature). It's depressing because I didn't break the rules for attention, I didn't even do it ironically and accidentally and got recognition that way that elevated me to a status of being noticed by a traditional publisher. I didn't cheat to win. I feel cheated. If I wrote online a giant missive about how unhappy I am and deride all these people, I'll get slapped. I can't ingratiate and I can't change their minds, but I want some acknowledgement I didn't cheat and was robbed anyway. I want some recognition for not playing in someone else's sandbox. But then I look like a pick me "not like other authors" person. They think I'm a snob for looking down on their community not someone who should be acknowledged for having my own ideas. Having known people who did this and liked it, I'd still say okay, do it and make it a jumping off point to finding your own voice, and quietly hope they don't get recognised for it or expect sympathy from me if someone sees it, steals it and claims it as their own. I've seen that happen and wanted to yell, "You can't steal a vase from someone's house, put it in yours and then bitch when someone else breaks in and steals it from you, idiot."
I didn't have to do that. I could make my own characters from scratch, like I was supposed to, including creating my own names without an online generator, so why am I disregarded? Because I can't put a dollar sign or raise potential for dollars with what I do. I'm not in a bookstore beside the others because nobody will buy me. Which is stupid because fanfic inherently cannot make money in the first place, it isn't legally profitable, it has to modify itself to be published. And it makes it accessible to everyone in that regard, but I can publish ebooks for free too, I'm not asking for fucking money and nobody cares. I could post it all as downloadable .pdfs on a website. I've tried all that.
I'm so done, again. I'm so fucking tired.
I can't find where I bitched about two of the Kardashian spawn getting a book deal but unsurprisingly it wasn't just ghost written, it was likely not even read by the two of them, they just had to hold the books and pretend they even know what it was about. Fuck me, right? I'm glad someone doing a video about one of them being a nepo baby brought it up.
