Shipping forecast

I can tolerate shipping fictional characters in any show or media you love, it's fine, it's fun to make jokes about it. But when you start shipping real people, and doing fan fiction about them, I really can't abide you feeling justified in it when said people ask you to stop. While we're at it, if you love an author and they tell you to please stop doing fan fiction, fucking stop. You're being abusive and disrespectful by defying them, they don't want to read your version of their work, I find it horribly tacky that you would send it to them, I don't care if you have fans of your own who told you to do it, or to publish it. Stop. You're riding a legal line and you should be thankful your favourite author is only asking you to literally CEASE and DESIST without LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS. Because you can get A REAL LETTER FROM A REAL LAWYER IF YOU DO NOT DESIST. You are LUCKY to be AVOIDING A COURT ROOM. And while you're at it, RESPECT THEIR DISTASTE OF IT. You aren't being fair, you are intruding where you're not welcome and again, you should be thankful for the polite request to stop. Stop attacking authors for being against fan fiction. Please. They have every right to be offended by it. You've been give so much leeway to keep doing this as long as you're not profiting from it. It doesn't make it right by everyone's standards. People might think you're better than them, it's still not your idea. It's not your work. It still baffles me if you think you're that good a writer, make your own stuff. If you're really that good, why are you using someone else's material? I couldn't have any pride in it. I like making up my own shit. I don't need to steal it from other people, there's nothing in it for me. (I always get told most Star Wars extended universe books are essentially fan fiction. If you've been commissioned by the creator/production company etc to do it, and given access to series bibles or material, it's not the same thing. It's the closest you get to legal fan fic, it's akin to ghost writing for a series like Babysitters Club. If you are asked to do this, then it's been legally sanctioned and you're allowed some respect for it, if it's good. And some of it isn't.) Also, someone mentioned film novelisations aren't a thing now, and yeah, it kinda sucks when they were huge in the 90s. These can be based on previous drafts of scripts, they can be very different to the film, it's a cash in. But it's not fan fiction. It's legally sanctioned movie tie-in merchandise and it used to sell very well.

I only found out the other day the piece of shit that was birthed out of the abortion of a book turned out to be less amended than I thought. There were direct comparisons that weren't altered out of sheer laziness, added with the rush to get this out so they couldn't miss the window of opportunity. I could hear the saltiness in the person who called into the podcast I heard the other day, that they had to explain to the host it was absolutely lifted and should've been struck down for being practically identical. It should've been stopped. I fucking hate the original author rolled over on this and gave the other cunt a pass, so that cunt could GO ON TO SLAP OTHER FAN FICTION WRITERS FOR STEALING THEIR SHIT. You cannot go break into someone's house, actually steal something then cry foul when someone else steals it from you. It wasn't yours in the first place. I will never not feel this way about anyone who bitches about their literal fan fiction being stolen.

But I digress. I've come across a few instances of fans doing this to real people and hoping the leads of a show, or two hosts of a YouTube channel, might actually at the least have sex, and these people had to respectfully ask the fans to stop to stop. They had family members who might come across it, it made them uncomfortable. But then Tumblr comes along, has a big cry because you're ruining the fun for them, and since they have the numbers and the influence, much like Goodreads reviewers, they can ruin you in return. They kick up the biggest collective stink, threaten the very thing they love, and the people behind it have to capitulate it to avoid bad publicity. You are not a fan of something if you are willing to destroy it when it doesn't fulfill this emotional deficit in your life. No singer owes you a signature (I've met terrible fans of other things). No author owes you approval of your fan fiction.

Again, I'm blessed to have missed of all this because I was too old for Tumblr by then. Finding out there were fandoms that were practically stalking the cast members and casting aspersions and making up crazy bullshit that even William Shatner cannot abide, I have to agree it seems very distasteful. I may as well shoot myself in the foot and say I don't understand fandoms and never will, and in many ways I assuage my lack of success reminding myself I don't have rabid fans to deal with or disappoint. I sincerely can live with some reviews on my stuff, I don't have to fret about my online interactions while I don't have a money-hungry publisher forcing me to do my own marketing. I can't cope with it for any reason. My gripe will always be with the lack of professionalism I had with my arrangement and the poor presentation of my work. That was it. I would've been fine with no success had I had something professional to show for it.

People don't like it when you act with hostility to the fandom behaviour, if you're not okay with it, you get attacked, and I don't find that particularly fair. Fans of anything should show respect, to each other and the person they're a fan of. I get Shatner's a piece of shit person, but I don't really agree with the principle of shipping. I can see why people get weirded out by the twincest/incest crowd who ship related characters. You shouldn't sic one fandom on another either. Which again makes me sincerely grateful I don't have an online presence. I worry this blog and my associate blogs might have to be taken offline if I did suddenly get attention and people tracked me here. I already spent a year removing posts due to another personal issue. The stance apparently got messy over this instance I'm finding out about now, and dragged the free speech argument into the mix. I get a grimace finding this stuff out, I get verbally aggressive and have nobody to vent to, so here I am at 9:30 pm on a Thursday screaming into the void yet again. People shipping One Direction members made them unhappy, it even led to someone thinking the old Apple logo (the rainbow Apple fans like me hold precious) was an indication one member was, in fact, gay. It's depressing to think people who supposedly love these celebrities would be so destructive with their own conspiracies and hopes. Why would you get so fucking angry and toxic about two people you don't personally not being together? People you don't even have a parasocial relationship with, like you might do with a YouTuber. You can think of all this, and yes, you can write it down and keep it to yourself. I will never tell you to stop writing fan fiction, or your fantasy scenarios, I get that part of it, I sincerely do and I don't believe in thought policing. I'm asking you to keep it to your fucking self. Don't post it online, share it privately if you must, I'll draw the line at a secure server but you risk it being leaked, so just don't put it out there. And getting hostile and affecting other people's lives because two real people aren't fucking in real life is the major reason people are hating on you. You're making your fandom look bad. You don't even have respect for your fellow fans. What's wrong with you, really? Seeing people in these fandoms get so indignant about the backlash and criticism they receive over their weird and sometimes disgusting behaviour. Seeing them double down on their stance after polite requests to stop incense me. I am autistic, it is an injustice you are displaying to me, and I will get violently angry.

I also want to bitch about the author of Outlander being able to share her stuff online and still have it published. I can't remember if she was established, and maybe this was a long time ago, but she had an online presence early on. Another thing they warn you about is avoiding putting stuff online as a publisher won't want it, it's previously published, yet the amount of shit that is posted and does get published again contradicts this golden rule I had to abide by. I argued for a short to get picked up by a competition in light of this, I didn't think it was fair to disqualify it. Meanwhile, Wattpad gets away with this shit. It became a vehicle for bullshit to get made. I am so fundamentally tired of hearing of success stories coming off the back of a stack of broken rules for the sake of profit. You can all look the other way if millions are on the line, they make exceptions for these assholes as long as the cash is good. You can't tell me to keep going when this discouraging shit keeps happening. Hell, they made a movie off a book that didn't even really exist, and asked another author to write it then made a false persona for them and didn't publish the book for months after its release date. Most of the publicity existed around the anonymity of the author, who was discovered anyway despite the pen name. The gamification of the publishing system is real. The only way you fuck up is by writing fake bad reviews for your friends' books and get caught doing it, then you lose your agent and lucrative deal. (Apparently, this was a bunch of cosplayers or people who again had some kind of established online presence which included fans, I think. I won't go looking for details since it made me livid hearing about it). But even then, those deriding you would've forgiven you if you'd just stuck to giving yourself fake positive reviews. Apparently that's still acceptable.

Go away. I'm done. 

Anyway, the weird thing is celebrities who write books know they probably won't do that well and still take a shot at selling several thousand copies, they accept their fanbase might be relatively small and the results smaller. It doesn't seem to make them any less hesitant to do it, everyone just seems to want to do a book these days, and I don't fucking get it. Writing sucks when there's facets like this attached to it.

Having now watched Neon Genesis Evangelion through to the end and reading about how fans hated the creator's original ending enough to want him dead, which made him understandably suicidal, I think I've finally hit my limit with these so-called fans. That's the essence of a real toxic fan base. It's not so much those who go on the attack in defense of the creator - and I'm not excusing it, it's bad - it's turning on the creator and holding all your disappointment against them, even if you were "only kidding". You meant it to some degree, and if you love a piece of art that much you're willing to see its creator suffer when you think they've sullied it some way, you need to reevaluate your entire fucking existence. Seriously. Go to fucking bed. Leave these people alone. If you have no fucking respect for creators when you yourself either create nothing but hate or some derivative piece of art in response, you have no right to happiness. You don't deserve these people making anything for you. You have to respect the artist you claim to love, whether they do something you hate or not. They're going to fucking disappoint you at some point, they're going to deviate from your lofty expectations. They're going to fail. What the fuck have you done in your life that gives you the fucking right to behave this entitled? You haven't done shit. Unless you can demonstrate some fucking creativity of your own, fuck off with this attitude. I don't have fans and thank fuck I don't, I can't live in a world where people like you exist and this is your baby response to not getting what you wanted. Grow the fuck up. Artists don't owe you perfection you can simply stop paying attention to them. We carry on, regardless. You want to think we can't exist without you but we carry on, regardless. We create because it's what we're meant to do. We carry on, regardless. I wish I could say the internet birthed this bullshit but it didn't, artists' lives have been threatened for centuries, the internet just makes that vitriol plainer to the creators. Go out and make something else, if you can. You might then realise it's not that fucking easy.