thesaltinstitute | Fandom as a fictive [Crosspost] (Reply)

(Crosspost of an entry I wrote for a prompt in fictionkind.)
Does your source have a sizable fandom? Do you interact with it at all, or do you avoid it? How do you deal with content about the character you're a fictive of, especially if it feels "wrong" to you?

The fandom is... Maybe not huge, but sizeable definitely!! It's a pretty popular podcast! And we've met plenty of now-friends-and-acquaintances in the fandom, not least because we took part in a pretty huge thank-you-to-creators type project last year when it ended, and to me, "fandom for my source" is forever linked to this project and the people who took part in it. I handled so much of what we did for that project in terms of organisation and interpersonal work, and so many people took part in the project plus our own subproject and produced enormous amounts of fan content for it all!! ~~(This is also where I found out I love spreadsheets and making them work, but I digress)~~ So... Yeah, pretty involved in it.

For that project specifically, we were out as plural the whole time we worked on it, and in the Discord and such did indicate who was speaking at different times with our usual emoji, and made no effort to appear as a coherent unit. But given the proximity to source (There's two of us from that source in the system, me and my partner) we were also incredibly cagey about the fictivity during it. Wouldn't really put our names anywhere people would've been able to find them without some amount of "going looking", wouldn't talk about it unless asked (And I don't think anyone asked during the project!!). Now that that's well behind and things have calmed down a little, we've started to be a little more open about our names (Well. I've started. My partner does not wish to be directly perceived and is still using only hir initial nearly everywhere), but our most active days in the fandom were spent in that kind of not-quite-hiding, not-quite-openly-out type of situation.

All of this to say that, well, yes, I've interacted with fandom a fair bit in the past, and still do on occasion now though I don't tend to go actively looking for content in the wider fandom anymore. Sometimes something or other crosses our dashboard on Tumblr, we see something in a Discord server, or friends who know me send something to me because they know I'll find it personally relevant or funny, or we get curious and peek at recent fanfiction in the tags... Things like that.Interacting with fan content is a really mixed bag. I have thoughts from types of contents, so I'll make a list (Quick one. There's only two categories that are really relevant here):

Fanfiction and meta. On the one hand, some people really get it and reading it can be incredibly cathartic when it's done "right" as I see it (By which I mean "accurately to my own experience", I am not implying that there's objectively a right or wrong way to write fanfiction!!) but it falls flat at best or feels really gross at worst. I like complete AUs and things that are really close to my own experience best – the worst type of fanfiction for me is the fic that gets most things close enough to hit home, but then the characterisation or major details are just off enough that the whole thing hits home really wrong. I've become an expert at closing fanfic tabs as soon as I see something that I don't like, to be honest, because in my experience it doesn't get better or more fun doing my own on-the-fly internal rewrites... I've also got a million things blacklisted, which, well. Regular part of curating your own Internet experience and all that?
Fanart. My source being a podcast, there aren't really any canon visuals, but even then – I still haven't really seen any art of the character that actually looks like me. Like my partner, there's plenty, but like me? Nada, zero, zilch, except in the handful of commissions we've bought from friends. Which makes sense, and I am not expecting this to change in future, nor do I want this to change, because the character is as close as it's possible to be to canonically fat without actual canon visuals, and I'm thin because, well. I am, I didn't pick my appearance, I just showed up like that, but anyway – None of that means I'd be happy seeing people making the character thinner just so there was more art that looks more me as a person... But it does mean there isn't much for me in terms of visuals (Though I do have friends who are also fictives of the same characters as me and my partner, and sometimes there'll be good art that looks like (one of) them!! So it can be nice in that way ^-^)

That actually brought me to a tangent while I was typing, another set of thoughts not really related to the original prompt, about how... There seems to be this weird expectation in fandom that fictives will be palatable, will be "the right kind of character", will be "the right kind of representation", etc. This can get really exhausting in some spaces that don't get we're people, because it's like... I did not choose my appearance, it's not fatphobic that I'm thin when the character in my source is fat!! Similarly, my partner did not choose eir orientation, it's not erasure that e's not sex-repulsed as the character e's a fictive of is implied to be in the podcast (And even then we think that is, um. Very up to interpretation even in the podcast, it's more... Popular fanon, but that's more to do with our opinions on fandom and representation in general than the topic at hand here).

And the implication that we can or should change any of this about ourselves, that my partner could just choose to not be interested in sex, that I could just choose to not be thin, and that this would be in any way "better"; sometimes even the assumption that us showing up as we are somehow says something about our system; all of that is – to me – basically denying our personhood and identity, relegating us to the rank of... Malleable fictional characters? Which we, in the here and now, aren't, regardless of your opinions on fiction. Or even on how or why fictives form!! My partner and I believe we've been transplanted here from another world in the multiverse, we have no reason to think there's anything psychological going on with us. We just... Showed up here one day... But my point with that is, it doesn't matter how or why we showed up. What matters is we're here now, we're people and we're here as we are, and there's nothing wrong with either of us!

So I guess my tangent, and this entire thing pretty much, boils down to... We are not characters, we don't have to be ~ canon-compliant ~ and we're not here to try to meet a representation quota of some kind, we're real people with real lives and real identities in the real world, and I guess – I wish fandom and folks at large were better about that? I don't have any problems with people playing around with the character I'm a fictive of, and what's in this world a fictional universe. That's all fiction, and making art and telling stories and playing around creatively like that is such an essential part of people being people. (My partner writes her own fanfiction about the podcast as a fictional universe...) This isn't about that. I just don't always want to see stuff about my source and the character when it hits so, so close to home; and I wish people didn't treat us, my partner and I, people, like they do the characters, just because where we come from happens to have been more or less accurately depicted in a work of fiction here.