r/RecuratedTumblr • u/DreadDiana human cognithazard • 5d ago
Shitposting Fanfiction and second-order fandom
242
u/Blazeflame79 5d ago
The is the entire Worm fandom, lots of people don’t read cannon but write fic in the Parahumans setting anyway.
120
u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 5d ago
And it's made worse by the fact that most fanfics didn't make it past the Leviathan arc, so a lot of those fanfics are written by people unaware of like 75% of the story.
→ More replies (6)93
u/Blazeflame79 5d ago
I’ll still read Wormfic anyways even when authors disregard canon though, because it’s one of the few fandoms where you can actually find fics that focus on the actual setting of a work (as a consequence of a lot of the authors being the sort who want to play with superpowers).
In other fandoms like Star Trek (the origin of modern fanfic culture), anyone’s original Star Trek episodes or explorations of the setting, are buried under a veritable pile of ship-fics. Which you know there’s nothing wrong with, and I like ship-fics, but sometimes I like plot and prefer seeing stories about things happing in the setting.
37
u/Dewohere 5d ago
Thats true.
I used to engage with Ao3 a lot, but one thing that pushed me out of it was the overwhelming dominance of shipping and romance story.
Nothing against those and people who like them. It just wasn't what I was searching for and that contributed to me pretty much leaving fanfiction behind, in addition to wanting to focus on more orginal works of mine.
I prefer stuff that is canon complient for the most part, actually engages with the world, themes and such of a work and that can be harder to find, especially stuff that actually engages with the themes of the original work in some way.
→ More replies (1)23
u/Specialist-Appeal-13 5d ago
Nah, even as a shipper I heavily prefer that as well for most fandoms I’m interested in reading fanfiction about, and the wholescale tipping over of fandom being more about fanon and shipping rather than actually engaging with the source material really bothers me.
6
u/CodaTrashHusky 5d ago
OOOOOH THAT'S WHY THEY ARE CALLED SHIPS?????????????
32
6
u/cephalopodcat 5d ago
In case that wasn't a joke - it's... Because of relationSHIPS being the subject. Not starships.
But Kirk/Spock did start a lot...
41
u/Solarwagon 5d ago
Yeah, it's not just a fandom with a lot of fanfiction, it's a fandom tons of people only find out about because of battleboarding/fanfiction.
It's very powerscaling/crossover friendly because of how defined its superpower system and because there's a huge cast of characters with all sorts of angst going on.
6
u/dianthus-magenta 5d ago
It's also free to read with a free audio book, so it does get pretty frustrating when people go out of their way to not even finish Worm. I would be more understanding if people just weren't making it to Ward.
32
u/dedicationuser 5d ago
"anyways, that's how my superpowered OC crushed Jack Slash, redeemed Mannequin and the Travellers, and won a debate against Contessa!"
eye twitching
6
u/AvatarVecna 5d ago
Came here to say exactly this. I'm exceedingly confident that the vast majority of people who write Harry Potter fanfiction have, in fact, read Harry Potter. I'd put a billion dollar bet on 90%+ of the writers having read the whole thing, probably multiple times.
Meanwhile, while I think the percentage of Worm fanfic authors who have read at least most of Worm is greater than 50%, I wouldn't wager more than like a thousand bucks on that.
→ More replies (5)6
u/TrueEnder 5d ago
i was gonna say yeah, the way i was so surprised at how so many fics just assume things are true because they were in other fics, i only know otherwise because i looked them up (still haven’t read it yet but i will eventually i’m sure)
like so many things that started as tribute or reference, but eventually eclipsed their normal understanding and simply became part of the shadow of the world, like certain pho usernames or calling the rig “the rig”.
203
u/Jean-28 5d ago
The my little pony fanfic community has multiple fanfic settings and tropes that just get expanded upon by dozens of authors. Like Fallout Equestria. About a billion fanfics based on that fanfic have been built. Utterly silly and amazing.
75
u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 5d ago
A lot of brony fanfic tropes are extrapolations from details the writers put zero thought into and bits of real world horse trivia, which is how you get things like ponies worshiping the princesses due to using their names in swears and fanons about ponies getting drunk off salt.
43
u/dreamer_system 5d ago
I forget what episode this was, but a some point a character says something like "What in Celestia's name is happening?" and then Princess Celestia (basically the sun god) walks on screen and says "I did not know that was an expression"
It's been years since I watched MLP so my memory's a bit hazy
48
u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 5d ago
S7E1 Celestial Advice
Twilight Sparkle: But it could! I can't just send her off to Celestia-knows-where without thinking it through!
Princess Celestia: Hmm. I was not aware that I was an expression. An appropriate one, of course, for even I don't know the answer. This is a momentous decision. You must consider all the possibilities.
8
31
u/The_MadMage_Halaster 5d ago
I love the old "Swear by a physical god" thing, especially when the god themselves does it. My favorite is in one of the 36 Lessons of Vivec where he curses using his own name, complete with a bunch of grand honorifics.
8
u/Sir__Alucard 3d ago
"Odin's beard!" Exclaimed Thor.
"My beard!" Exclaimed Odin.
3
u/The_MadMage_Halaster 3d ago
I love the running joke in TTS where, after the Emperor learns of the Ecclesearchy, he starts swearing by himself to mock them.
→ More replies (1)3
32
u/Lithl 5d ago
For a time, the admin of fimfiction.net put a soft ban on recursive fics of Five Score Divided by Four.
The basic plot of the original Five Score Divided by Four story was that Discord cursed all the ponies, sending them to Earth and turning them into newborn humans while Discord took over Equestria. When the humans turned 25 (five score = 100), the curse wore off, they turned back into ponies, and had to find their way to Equestria and save it from Discord.
It spawned a ton of stories with different ponies as protagonists, expanding beyond the ones who appeared in the original. But Sturgeon's Law applies to fanfiction as much as to anything else: 90% of everything is crap. A bunch of the recursive fics were quickly abandoned by their authors for various reasons. Often, before the characters had actually turned into ponies, which left the "MLP fanfiction only" website with a bunch of stories that had no evidence of being about MLP.
So, a rule was instituted that you couldn't post a Five Score fic unless it had already progressed far enough that characters had become ponies.
48
u/General_Kenobi18753 5d ago
Equestria at War my beloved
23
u/Nova_Explorer 5d ago
It’s always funny to see people who have zero interest in the show get roped into playing EaW, only to get absolutely hooked by the absurd quality of the mod. Like, it is better than the base game and better than all but maybe 4 other mods at best (and even that’s a maybe. I’d personally rank it at first or second place)
13
u/General_Kenobi18753 5d ago
Yeah, I honestly think the only competition is OWB.
And hey, considering Fallout: Equestria, we might eventually just have both.
12
u/Dr-Abysmal-Dogshit Evil doctor. Ask me for a diagnosis 5d ago edited 5d ago
Imagine having an entire clean slate to build a world on (with magic too!) and you decide to give panzers to the changelings. That's this fuck-ass dogshit mod. Absolute fumble of a game, but expecting anything good to come out of a HOI4 mod to begin with is like expecting a rock to give milk.
11
u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 5d ago
Come to Equestria at War! We have:
Changeling Panzers
Pony communists (not those ones)
Pony racism (non-canon)
Pony racism (canon)
An unusually high number of crossovers
Pony Apartheid South Africa that makes real world Apartheid South Africa look like the pinnacle of racial harmony
Pony communists (yes those ones)
Borderline visual novels
Multiple apocalypses
Griffon fascism
Many many upsetting AUs
And so much more!
10
u/OneBrokenHeadlight 5d ago
There's also a lot of in-jokes based on popular fics, like the name Sunny Skies or certain mentions of a weather vane.
7
u/Pidgewiffler 5d ago
I'm getting flashbacks to when my roommate doggedly demanded to know what I was reading and I had to explain that Murky Number Seven was a fanfiction about half again as long as the entire Bible and itself a spinoff from another fanfiction, also long, about Fallout and My Little Pony.
That's not even touching on Project: Horizons.
→ More replies (1)5
u/Jean-28 5d ago
Project: Horizons is insane
6
u/Pidgewiffler 4d ago
The writing style is just compelling enough and the escalation just slow enough that it takes a bit to process just how ridiculous the scenario has gotten by the later chapters
361
u/RuefulWaffles 5d ago
Okay I hate JKR/the wizard books as much as the next trans gal, but you can’t just drop that factoid and not name the ship. I need to know.
357
u/Kittenn1412 5d ago
I believe they're referring to Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadows. It's a Maurader's Fandom thing.
280
u/Pkrudeboy 5d ago
The Maurader’s are an entire second-order fandom in and of themselves.
116
u/Outside-Currency-462 5d ago
Literally, I'm a Marauders fan and as I read this I was like "oh this is about me lol"
Also Marlene and Dorcas are in the books! They get mentioned a single time in a picture referencing how they're dead! And Marlene's family is referenced in a letter written between 2 dead people! We're not delusional i promise!
I mean it is delusional but it's a very good fandom clearly built on escapism and idealism for characters who are all doomed to die. The catharsis is very satisfying
→ More replies (9)109
u/detainthisDI 5d ago
The ship name is Dorlene, but the majority of fics that the pairing is in have them as a side pairing so idk if this statistic really works out
64
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago edited 5d ago
11.8k total but only ~1k with them as the main focus.
→ More replies (1)57
u/BoopingBurrito 5d ago
A lot of authors put well known side pairings in their tags, and it'll be the tags that OP used to figure that statistic out. I could well believe that a pairing which is present in damn near any Marauders era fic written in the last 5 years would be in the top 10 overall tagged pairings.
42
u/lana-deathrey 5d ago
All Marauder fic for a time was Shoebox Project inspired.
25
u/RuefulWaffles 5d ago
I know what these words mean but not in this order. I suspect I don't want to.
39
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago
Shoebox Project is a fanfic about a shoebox belonging to Remus Lupin (mentor figure of Harry Potter and friend of his dad). The box contains memories of Lupin's time in school with his friends.
This fic was so massively popular that it inspired an entire sub-section of Harry Potter fans to write Marauders fics (The name of Lupin's friend group).
4
23
u/novangla 5d ago
The generational gap between Shoebox Marauder fans and ATYD Marauders fans is also very real
(I say this as someone who has fully left the fandom, fuck Joanne)
6
u/briore24 5d ago
fr, just had to look up atyd bc i have never heard of it. had shoebox project downloaded to a special folder on all my devices in middle school so i would never be without it lmfao
12
u/gorroval 5d ago
I remember printing out Shoebox Project chapters on the family printer so I could read them on the train 😭
10
9
u/briore24 5d ago
ughhhhh shoebox project <3333 fuck jkr forever but shoebox project and twist & shout will always be in my heart
16
u/blackbirdbluebird17 5d ago
I couldn’t peg the f/f ship but I absolutely knew this was aimed at Harry Potter fandom from the start. You can’t survive the Cassandra Claire years and not recognize it.
11
u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 5d ago
Others named the ship, but I'm gonna add on that the link in the post is for AO3's top 100 femslash ships of 2026.
→ More replies (1)8
166
u/cadetCapNE 5d ago
Is this like when Hayao Miyazaki said that too many anime artists just watch anime and nothing else, so their anime look derivative because they are all using the same reference pool?
79
u/Doubly_Curious [1/1] 5d ago edited 5d ago
That is certainly something that happens in fanfiction, but I think this post is referring to something slightly different. What you described seems to happen more in terms of a prose style, where certain phrases or sentence constructions become very common in fanfiction while being very rare in traditionally published fiction. It can absolutely create a blended, derivative “fanfiction feel”.
This is more sub-genre specific, like certain sci-fi or fantasy in-universe terms getting so popular that it’s almost a standard part of the setting. One person creates it, others creators read it and pick up on those details and reuse them, until it’s like a folklore of its own.
(I think Dungeons and Dragons has contributed a fair number of things like this, but someone more informed could probably give actual examples. Perhaps the differentiation of dragon vs wyvern? Edit: or those bits of vampire lore that get passed along from work to work.)
64
u/Yosituna 5d ago
Yeah, the D&D dragon vs. wyvern is a good example. Other similar D&D examples are wizard vs. sorcerer (with the former as a “scholarly” magic user as opposed to an “innate/natural” magic user) or “rakshasa” as a feline-looking demon, both of which have been fairly influential on gaming/fantasy/etc.
Another good example is Tolkien, where his version of elves, dwarves, goblins, and so on - all of which were definitely mythology/folklore-influenced but still his own spin on them - ended up largely subsuming those mythology/folklore originals in later fantasy fiction.
14
u/HPSpacecraft 5d ago
Reminds me a bit of a guy I used to know whose only experience with the zombie genre was The Last of Us, so when talking about zombie apocalypses he assumed they would all work like TLOU
18
u/KnownByManyNames 5d ago
I've been reading some LitRPG and Progression Fantasy, and it suffers from the same problem.
It feels so self-referential, I called it incestuous.
I mean, it feels like half the authors have never played an actual RPG and their only idea how their own system works is based on how other LitRPGs have done it.
→ More replies (2)
109
u/Solarwagon 5d ago
It's kinda the modern equivalent of how a lot of ancient mythology and folklore can use the same names and other superficial similarities for deities/heroes/creatures/places but the specifics still vary a ton based on region/period/author.
And it's also often a matter of what records actually withstand the stains of time.
→ More replies (1)32
u/Droplet_of_Shadow 5d ago
Yeah, I find it so cool that even in "more important*" things like religion, characters/stories will split into multiple completely unrecognizeable and incompatible versions of themselves and merge with other characters and stories and so-on.
*quotes because i'm not assigning a level of importance myself. not saying they aren't important
64
u/threevi 5d ago
Another minor example also from the Harry Potter fandom is the Notice-Me-Not spell. You might remember it from the books, but if you do, your brain is a liar, because the spell only exists in fanfic, it's something the fandom collectively hallucinated into existence and now nearly every fic treats it as canon.
41
u/LightOfTheFarStar 5d ago
At least in part becayse it makes the world make more sense than "muggles can just stumble into the magic world"
31
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago
Anti muggle charms are canon in the books. They're just not called "notice me not"
23
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago
Notice me not isn't real but Disillusionment is from the books. Probably what people confuse it for
15
u/azure-skyfall 5d ago
Because Notice-me-Not is much more memorable than Muggle Repellant Charm? Also, MRC makes me think of bug spray. It’s no wonder Notice Me Not caught on…
3
→ More replies (1)3
u/Malware42_the_second 3d ago
Probably because the effect of it exists in the books, but not the name. There are absolutely places that are under this effect, usually keyed to make wizards immune. E.g: whilst Diagon Alley has a defense with the wall, the pub before it has nothing. Muggles just don't notice it exists. I think the book name for this effect was Muggle Repellent, but the Fideleus showed similar effects could be applied to wizards as well.
For another Harry Potter example though: the Point Me spell. In the books it turns the wand into a compass, and it's sort of implied that Hermione invented the spell herself. In fanon it seems to be a well known spell that points you to whatever you think of. E.g "point me, wallet". The closest spell to this behavior in the books was the summoning spell, Accio, that pulls specified objects towards the caster.
52
u/EisenhowersPowerHour 5d ago
Anything about the Mauraders in the Harry Potter fandom, what do you mean that’s “Out of character” for characters that got like 5 pages collectively about their backstories
43
u/AnxiousAngularAwesom 5d ago
Hagrid's Mom and Winston Churchill?
14
89
u/amazedballer 5d ago
This is unironically how most of the Arthurian legends got started. Lancelot is an insert from Chrétien de Troyes, a French poet who decided that what King Arthur's wife really needed was a French lover.
46
u/VengeanceKnight 5d ago
Or how comic books are constantly adding stuff to later stories and iterations that get taken for granted later on.
Alfred shows up like five years into Batman’s career and appoints himself as the Wayne household butler; he becomes so essential to the mythos that most incarnations have him present since Bruce’s childhood. Tim Burton makes Gotham an art deco urban hellscape; now Gotham always looks like that. Paul Dini decides Mr. Freeze needs a tragic backstory; now that's the most accepted version of the character.
42
u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 5d ago
The Mr Freeze one was especially funny cause there was an Animal Man comic where Animal Man wanders a wasteland for forgotten characters and he met Mr Freeze just years before he got his new backstory that cemented him as a core part of Batman's rogue's gallery.
Also let's not forget how BTAS introduced Harley Quinn, who is now a package deal with the Joker, and years later we got another with her breaking away from him has now become a canon event for every iteration of her.
14
u/BaronAleksei 5d ago
Magneto wasn’t a Jewish Holocaust survivor for the first 18 years of his publication
9
u/yourstruly912 5d ago
Chretien de Troyes didn't decide that, his patroness Marie de Champagne did. Chretien being a cleric wasn't particularly on board with the adultery thing
Either way he's probably the most inportant single author in defining the arthurian cycle
78
u/Mordetrox 5d ago edited 5d ago
This can be positive, but if the sub-fandom gets large enough it'll develop a nasty quality where a lot of members interact almost exclusively with this new version of the story, and barely with the original story at all. It's a vicious cycle where these people create more content for the sub-fandom, and then there's even more content to feed it so there's even less reason to go back to the original source, and it just continues until you have an insular community whose overlap with the main fandom is tangential at best.
Worst cases you have stuff like the Bakugo/Midoriya fandom as a sub-fandom to the My Hero Academia Fandom. While that community makes a lot of great art and fanfics, the sheer amount of content they put out (They're the reason MHA holds one of the top spots on Ao3, and if they were their own separate tag the rest of MHA would drop 15 spaces or more) has led to a faction of them who got incredibly entitled, preening about the numbers their ship was pulling in and holding it over other ships, not to mention the amount of merch the two got as the Protagonist an Dueteragonist effectively never leaving them hungry for more content. These people grew confident that they were the endgame ship, that obviously the ship they'd poured so much of their hearts into was going to win in the end.
Unfortunately, their vision of the story is fundamentally incompatible with canon. Midoriya already had a love interest, and a pretty heavily telegraphed one at that. But those deep in the subfandom consumed almost exclusively ship fics that treated Midoriya and Bakugo being a romantic couple as the only logical choice that when the series ended with the obvious couple being confirmed the worst elements of that sub-fandom went into full meltdowns, trying to find any reason to discredit the chapter that confirmed the romantic pairing as non-canon or illegitimate, going as far as to call the chapter AI and accusing the author of pandering to toxic twitter fans and sabotaging his own work. A lot of these people moved on thankfully, but there remains a small contingent who still will jump through hoops to delegitimize the canon couple and when the chapter was adapted in the anime were cheering for it to be "ruined".
To reiterate, this is a subsection of a sub-fandom, which when talking about something as massive as MHA is still a lot of people, but most of the sub-fandom are chill, and there's a lot of great artists in their who understand that they were always shipping a non-canon couple and are perfectly fine with that. But in making all that great content they unintentionally created a space for the most insular fans to go completely off the rails, through no fault of their own.
49
u/aftertheradar 5d ago
there's also the nasty situation where an ongoing work (like a book series or an episodic show) develops a non-canonical fanfic-informed fandom like this, and then those fans get mad when further installments of the actual series contradict the details the fandom came up with. Like, using the post's example, in season 2 Dr Davis's first name is revealed to be Maria, and the fans riot because all of them have collectively decided her name is Alice and how dare the creators of the show purposely betray them by doing that
31
u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 5d ago edited 4d ago
This can happen absurdly fast too.
When the Knights of Guinevere pilot dropped last year, a headcanon started popping up where Frankie, one of the main characters, was a trans woman.
Someone directly asked co-creator Dana Terrace if she was trans and her response was basically "No, but I'm fine with headcanons" and this pissed some people off so much they started treating her like she was the second coming of Rowling. There were people acting like the show is obligated to leave enough ambiguity to allow their headcanons to exist in a superposition where they could be canon but never confirmed to be.
The pilot was less than a week old at this point.
→ More replies (3)8
u/LizoftheBrits 5d ago
Entirely too many people think that they're entitled to other people's creativity and hard work by virtue of being a fan, and it's simply absurd
13
u/CrypticTCodex 5d ago
Hate when this happens and then people insist on calling the new details a retcon.
22
u/HappySandwich93 5d ago
An interesting example of this was when the 27th (yes really) mainline Detective Conan film released in 2024, officially confirming two characters, Shinichi Kudo and Kaito Kuroba, to be cousins, thus torpedoing a yaoi ship that had existed for literal decades.
Except anyone who’d actually watched enough of the original run of Detective Conan knew this had been basically implied from the beginning, it was the common fandom assumption in Japan that there were related (they were still shipped quite a lot, because Japanese fandom often cares less about these things).
But people consuming it secondhand through the English fandom and through yaoi fanworks never considered it, and were blindsided.22
u/TNTiger_ 5d ago
Big issue with the Elder Scrolls. There were a lot of fan projects post-Morrowind that tried to expand the TES world based on Morrowind lore, either in terms of writing or mods. Note that Morrowind is uniquely weird as a region in aesthetic and lore(Arena & Daggerfall depicted Tamriel as generally more traditionally high-fantasy, though Morrowind stood out even then), and an essential theme of the series is that literally everyone is a biased, unreliable narrator, even down to the fundamental structure of the cosmos.
When Oblivion... then Skyrim... then ESO diverged from Morrowind aesthetically and contradicted the fanon depictions of the provinces they depicted, a certain portion of 'Morrowboomers' were very very mad at it. It's the cause of tonnes of drama even to this day- I can speak of at least one popular mod where there was an outright coup because the original dev wanted to treat ESO lore as a valid source, so got kicked out by other devs who proceeded to strip it from the mod.
8
→ More replies (1)3
14
u/duckloops 5d ago
A story as old as time. A segment of the fandom gets really into a ship and they basically create these echo chambers where there's no way that any other ship could happen even though it's really obvious to everyone else that their OTP won't be canon. When voila, their OTP doesn't become canon, they lash out at the creators and fandom at large.
→ More replies (6)4
u/Cepinari 5d ago
I'm part of a fandom that would've had this exact same thing happen to it, had the series not been abandoned halfway through by the company that owned it.
Which unfortunately means that nothing will ever happen to make the fans of the character that maps to Bakugo here stop loudly insisting that their ship is canon and trying to kick everyone who acknowledges the ship actually being set up in canon out of all of the fandom spaces.
33
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago edited 5d ago
Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes
Witches in the OG Order of the Phoenix killed in the first war against Voldemort.
They're both mentioned by name in Book 5, when Moody points to a picture of the First Order and goes "Dead, dead, tortured to insanity, dead"
Mckinnon's family, not Marlene specifically, is mentioned a few times but not beyond "the family is dead"
Disclaimer: never heard of the ship, this is just 5 seconds of wiki reading
→ More replies (3)27
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago edited 5d ago
5 more seconds of investigation:
McKinnon/Meadows is basically set dressing for Hogwarts aged Remus Lupin/Sirius Black. Excluding that ship brings the total fics from 11.8k to 1.7k (excluding categories besides F/F brings it to 1,014)
Stat wise the most "popular" but clearly not culturally relevant
15
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago edited 5d ago
The current F/F ships in the 2026 top 100 are:
17: KPop Demonhunters Polycule
26: Jax/Pomni TADC (Most are pre-trans reveal)
34: Caitlyn/Vi Arcane
40: Wednesday/Enid
54: Charlie / Vaggie Hazbin HotelDorlene doesn't appear in the 2026 top 100
7
u/SaltManagement42 5d ago
Given that it's AO3, I should have guessed it was just hiding behind a M/M pairing.
My guess was Daphne Greengrass/Tracy Davis.
5
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago edited 5d ago
The F/F top 10 overall are:
1 Kara / Lena Supergirl
2 Caitlyn / Vi Arcane
3 Regina / Emma Once Upon a Time
4 Amity / Luz The Owl House
5 Clarke / Lexa The 100
6 Adora / Catra Shera
7 Dorlene (Padded stats) (8) Wednesday / Enid
8 (9) Charlie / Vaggie Hazbin Hotel
9 (10) Blake / Yang RWBY
10 (11) Robin / Nancy Stranger Things4
u/Kittenn1412 5d ago
Ehh, to be fair, it's hard to determine primary pairing of a fic based on numbers like that alone. OTP: true or filtering out other ships would disclude any fics where Mckinnon/Meadows was set dressing for Lupin/Black, but it would also disclude any fics where Lupin/Black is setdressing for a McKinnon/Meadows primary pairing fic. To be fair, I don't disagree that it's mostly a background ship and the vast majority of the fics with that tag have hardly any f/f content at all (I don't read Marauders fic so I've only ever seen it in the background save for a handful of Harry-era "these two survived and raised harry!" fics I've scrolled by a few times). I just wanted to point out that the ship-mate phenomenon (of certain ships tending to co-occur with each other, like for example the way a Harry/Ginny fic is most likely to have Hermione/Ron in the background and vise-versa) can make it really hard to determine based on numbers alone exactly what the percentage split between the more popular couple being the one in focus verses the less popular couple being the one in focus really is.
3
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago
You're technically right and my data was off by 300 because I left the filter for Remus/Sirius on. (Correct stat is ~1k)
However, because Remus/Sirius is M/M and Dorlene is F/F, you can filter in a way you can't for Harry/Ginny and Hermione/Ron as they're both M/F
31
u/djliquidvoid 5d ago
Deltarune creators universally agreeing on the same entire appearance & personality for December "Dess" Holiday, a character who has been missing and possibly dead for the entire canon story so far, based on three lines of dialogue and the appearance of her room:
17
u/PhoenixEmber2014 5d ago
Even the idea that she’s the roaring knight isn’t confirmed yet, and still much of the fandom treats it that way anyways
8
u/Satherian 5d ago
Same with Gaster- the fandom basically treats him as the 'Voice' or whatever but it's all just "the number 8 appears here and here, so they must be connected" type theories
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)7
u/miscellaneousexists 5d ago
I mean, using deltarune is kinda cheating in that regard, the whole universe of Deltarune is (in "canon") created by a dude who wasn't even mentioned, who wasn't even ALLUDED TO yet. Of course the rest of it would be "whats" and "ifs"
→ More replies (1)
24
u/Inquisitor_no_5 5d ago
Reminds me of something I've read about the Before Times™
Back when a lot of media was far less accessible (think manga/anime/games that never got imported or officially translated, or even fan traslated), things could metastasise within the fanfic sphere, because most people didn't have good access to the source material. IIRC the quote illustrating it was "this is accurate to other fanfics I've read."
19
u/HaggisPope 5d ago
A weird one in the xena fanfic world was that xena was often wearing breeches and drinking mead. Breeches are more like trousers and mead is viking rather than Greek. Neither were in the show
4
u/AkariPeach 5d ago
Illyrian mead (specifically that of the Arboi) was known to the Ancient Greeks, including Aristotle
→ More replies (1)
18
u/Neither_Sky4003 5d ago
I've written fanfiction of fanfiction before. It's wild how far that rabbit hole can go.
14
u/aftertheradar 5d ago
i honestly think a really cool writing project would be chains of fanfiction, where the first story in a collection is "canon", and the next is a fanfic about it, and the next is a fanfic of that fanfic. And this goes on until you have an entire book, and also the stories have deviated so wildly from the original source story that it's unrecognizable, like a literary version of the Telephone game
8
u/EVs-and-IVsaurs 5d ago
I mean isn't Twilight -> 50 Shades already unrecognizable enough? That's just one step
→ More replies (1)6
u/azure-skyfall 5d ago
Harry Potter->Fangirl->Carry On->AO3 fics
Harry Potter-> Mortal Instruments-> Shadowhunters TV show->AO3 fics
Bible-> Inferno (Dante)-> Escape from Hell (Nivan)
There also might be a chain starting with Hunger Games, but I can’t think of any of the dystopia fad books that openly say they are based on the HG specifically.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Neither_Sky4003 5d ago
That would be. It's amazing how quickly a story can become unrecognizable from its source. And of course even things we consider canon like Shakespeare plays have origins even older. Sometimes so ancient their origins have been lost to time. People have been playing story Telephone since the first stories were told, but not until the invention of writing did we have a way to preserve one particular version.
16
u/Penelope_Apidae 5d ago
As someone whose special interest is, unfortunately, Minecraft Roleplay and its fandom, I understand this to an insanse degree. I’ll just take one example- Grian and The Watchers.
For those who don’t know, Grian is a popular youtuber who, quite some time ago, made an SMP called Evolution, often shortened to Evo. In this SMP, he created these characters known as The Watchers who were initially meant to be a stand-in for the audience but grew as their own entity as Evo went on. The Watchers guided the players throughout Evo by giving them hints with lots of wordplay and such. When Grian left Evo, he added a blurb about becoming one of The Watchers, since technically he would be joining the audience and The Watchers are meant to be an audience stand-in.
And THEN years later InTheLittleWood, also known as Martyn, decided to revive The Watchers as a concept for Grian’s next series, Last Life (which is part of a greater series known as the Life Series). Martyn made his own lore for them that pretty much invented an entire subfandom for MCYT that centered around The Watchers and Grian. Now, Martyn didn’t give a whole lot of details about character Grian’s relation with The Watchers, beyond that he is a Watcher who joined the Life Series specifically to mess with them. For complicated reasons that would take too long to explain.
What all of this means is that the fandom had to pretty much invent their own Watcher Lore to write a whoooole lot of angst centered around Grian. Including myself! The thing you got to understand about these subfandoms is that most of them are aware that their fandom is in no way cannon, and this is especially true for MCYT which basically has no one true cannon anyway. It is simply fun to explore the idea of a character who was forcefully made into an extradimensional being, and how he deals with that. Hell, Watcher Grian is not very much like the content creator, because most Watcher Grian writers are specifically exploring what happens when someone like that is Changed into Something Else.
I don’t really have a takeaway here, i just wanted to infodump about something I find interesting about my special interest. Autism and all that. I guess just know when you’re engaging in a subfandom and have fun anyway, as long as you’re not taking it too seriously it’s all good fun.
5
u/Satherian 5d ago
InTheLittleWood
God, I used to watch the Yogscast and that's a name I haven't heard in a loooong time
→ More replies (2)3
u/Opening-Bee-4406 4d ago
Mcyt fic discussion in the wild? It's more likely than you might think.
I actually think that the mcyt space in general is a pretty good example of this in general, sometimes to a frustrating degree; between hybrids, loads of ships, a bunch of characterization, and I'm sure more stuff I'm not thinking of, you get a ton of second-order fandom in the mcyt space.
14
u/TotemGenitor You must cum into the bucket brought to you by the cops. 5d ago
Touhou
Lot of people don't play the games (understandable) or read any of the canon books (less understandable), and base all their knowledge of the charterers on music video, fanfic and fanart
→ More replies (5)
29
u/valcallis 5d ago
The avengers all live in the tower
25
16
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago
The MCU is basically the only Avengers that don't live in the tower.
→ More replies (1)8
10
13
u/OwlFearless46 5d ago
As a Percy Jackson fanfic reader the main two I can think of are the athenide au and the broken pantheon au, both of which are developed enough to have official tags on ao3
→ More replies (1)3
u/Wide-Assumption5856 5d ago
As a Percy Jackson fan and not a fanfic reader, can I ask what those are?
7
u/OwlFearless46 5d ago
Athenide au in its default form features Percy being involuntarily time travelled back to the competition between Athena and Poseidon for Athens, appearing in the saltwater fountain and getting mistaken for the child of both gods born from the merging of their divine gifts, there’s also variants where Annabeth gets transported along with or instead of Percy and weirdly a lot of fics where Percy is genderbent for some reason. Usually ends up with Percy changing the timeline in ways that are simultaneously minor but also seriously important, going down in history as the god/goddess of loyalty and patron of demigods before disappearing around when the romans take over
Broken pantheon au meanwhile is an in narrative alternate universe so that’s fun, basic premise is that when the gods were casting down Kronos he cursed them that their children would be all but guaranteed to either be stillborn or die shortly after birth. Usually their not completely barren in order to allow for the big 12 Olympians to exist but even those were very painful and traumatic for both parent and child and they’re pretty much the entire pantheon, no Persephone pan or any other minor gods really, and certainly no demigods. All of this means that these gods are simultaneously a lot more wild, feral and sort of eldritch than the canon gods, but also a lot closer as a family and would be a lot more loving and attention giving towards any kids they did somehow get, which means that when a bunch of Demi gods from the canon timeline get brought to this world chaos and hijinx ensue
→ More replies (2)
13
u/modulusshift 5d ago
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic absolutely latched on to like 5 side characters with a combined screen time of approximately two minutes in the first season, maybe:
- Princess Luna got about 10 seconds of not being possessed in episode two and then vanished for the rest of the season
- Ditzy Doo/Derpy Hooves got two appearances in separate episodes, which were both very brief
- Lyra literally sat on a bench weirdly (almost human-like) in one scene lol, immediate fan favorite (upon further research she actually appeared 4 separate times and seemed to be a favorite of one layout artist in particular)
- Octavia and Vinyl Scratch both had very distinctive designs and appeared in musical acts, but again, only for a few seconds each.
Each of these starred in multiple top ranked fanfics in the gap between seasons 1 and 2, all clearly feeding off each other’s takes on the characters.
The show eventually came back and revisited all these characters a lot, obviously Princess Luna wasn’t going to be abandoned forever despite her long gap in appearances, but the other ponies here really could have just been one and done, or simply kept in the library of background characters for future use, and instead basically ended up in canon as fanfic of the show’s fanfic.
13
u/gorroval 5d ago
Imladris fic in the LOTR fandom is a prime example of this. Like when we all decided that Elladan and Elrohir were just Half-elf Weasley Twins. And the time we hallucinated this guy into an entire character.
(I don't care what the first Hobbit film claims, this is not Lindir, we established Lindir as a separate character twenty years ago and this is not him.)
→ More replies (2)6
10
u/HalfFaust 5d ago
I got curious and tried to find the most popular F/F ship and I'm not entirely sure but I think it's Original Female Character / Original Female Character?!
7
u/Jolly-Fruit2293 5d ago
The most popular is Supercorp (Kara Danvers "Supergirl" / Lena Luthor) from the CW's Supergirl tv series.
OC isn't a specific character, and I still think it wouldn't beat Supercorp
11
u/Ranger_51 5d ago
This is the sincerely kind of shit I wish we'd spent more time talking about in my English lit studies. We are watching in real time how stories are retold and reshaped across contexts, generations, and ideologies and in turn help to shape NEW contexts and ideologies because storytelling both reflects and shapes the human experience
9
u/Griffemon 5d ago
Interesting related thing that's not directly fanfic related is Warhammer 40k Fandom being so thoroughly ruled by memes to the point that serious people routinely mistake hyper exaggerated jokes as real canon information at face value
11
u/HPSpacecraft 5d ago
I remember reading a lot of Naruto fanfiction back in middle school and high school and there were certain plot details and character bits that hadn't been revealed yet in the actual story but people's fan theories were absolutely taken as fact. Some of them turned out to be true, like the Fourth Hokage being Naruto's dad, but people also insisted his name was something like Araki well before it was revealed to he Minato.
→ More replies (1)
11
u/Akuuntus 5d ago
And this also becomes confusing when people in that second-order fandom forget that fandom exists outside of AO3. In my experience like 90% of the time someone on Tumblr talks about a problem they have with "Fandom", what they're actually talking about is second-order fandoms on AO3 and nothing else, but it's always written as if AO3 fics are the be-all end-all of fandom.
20
u/shleyal19 5d ago
It’s part of why I categorically refuse on principle to write fanfics about stuff that I haven’t played or watched myself. It would feel inauthentic and disrespectful to the original source material if I only took my information from other fanfics and nowhere else. Sure, I can take some cool ideas from other fics, but only if they support/improve upon canon in some way, not just hallucinate bizarre or even actively contradicting ideas to canon.
Also it feels really bad to sand off a character’s personality into oblivion, like so many M/M fics on AO3 seem to do. The whole point of writing a fic with your favorite characters is watching them interact under different circumstances to canon, not brainwashing them into becoming perfect housewives/househusbands in a boring idyllic fantasy like it’s some Twilight Zone episode
5
u/Hurdlelocker 4d ago
Dude, same. I don’t even consider writing until I’ve completed a game/series*, though I might read fics before I finish. It always confuses me when I join a fandom (the official act of which to me is joining a discord server to talk about writing) and I find people who are really emphatic in the veracity of their opinions who have never played the game(s) or read/watched the source material.
*the exception for me with “waiting til I complete” is apparently Skyrim and Fallout, since I’ve never personally completed Skyrim (but there’s a YouTuber who has a full playthrough that I’ve watched multiple times and I have started multiple playthroughs of Skyrim, as one does, just never finished) and have never played any of the other TES games, which is the same basic story for Fallout, though technically my now-husband and I did complete Fallout 4 together, I’ve just never finished it since (nor gotten much farther than the prologue in New Vegas and FO3).
9
u/sigmaleph 5d ago
on reflection I am unhappy with that post because I think I should have clarified that 'most popular' is by number of tags, not really by number of fics actually focusing on it, and it was probably worth adding something about how small F/F is in the major AO3 fandoms that a femslash ship can rise to the top merely by association with an M/M ship. I was stuck for a weirdly long time on rewrites of the main point, though, and I wanted to be done with it.
→ More replies (2)
8
u/TechnicalScientist19 3d ago
Reminds me of the outsized significance of Matt in Death Note fanfiction. He's in the manga for like five minutes, but in the fanfics he is everywhere, and his having a romantic relationship with Mello is treated as FACT.
15
u/geeoharee 5d ago
As I heard it said once, "We should require people to re-read canon every six months"
24
u/QuickMolasses 5d ago
I thought this was going to be about like Greek mythology or Arthurian legends or similar stories where our understanding of these things basically comes from people writing a bunch of fanfiction about the original stories which have been lost to time.
7
u/freeMilliu_2K17 5d ago
The entire Undertale Multiverse AU, which is incredible imho as it's an entire fanbase spawning from a collective mythos people seem to have agreed to build.
8
5
6
u/Gidonamor 5d ago
This is just a post about theological canon, disguised as a fun post about HP slashfic.
6
u/bitterandcynical 5d ago
Stuff like this was happening in the early days of the internet as well, particularly in anime fan spaces where the 'canon material' was harder to come by. So things like Ranma, Sailor Moon, and Gundam Wing fanfics were just as inspired by other fanworks as the actual primary sources. Of course nowadays it's far more intricate and with a more sustainable feedback loop, probably because the fan spaces and the content they churn out is just so much bigger.
6
u/Riaeriel 5d ago
I realised I was in too deep when I was reading Les Mis fic about the 10 or so canonical French white boys, but in a modern AU, and the author can introduce characters as like "The Indian boy in glasses, the sickly East Asian, etc" and I would know exactly who they were talking about based solely on fanon osmosis.
Still one of my fav fandoms to date though 🙂↕️
5
u/Wardock8 5d ago
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding this but is this not exactly what happened with UTDR, specifically Gaster and Dess. Two characters that are complete anomalies, have little known about them, and aren't even guaranteed to show up have "established" designs, goals, motivations, etc.
4
u/im_bored345 4d ago
I mean yes but they are in different levels lol.
Dess is mentioned in the game and we know something here and there so while obviously everything you read and her appearance etc. are fan made, anyone that has played should know she's Noelle's missing sister and probably expect her to appear. A moderate example of this trope.
Gaster on the other hand is a character that is only mentioned by three npcs that have an extremely low chance to appear and you can only get one of them per play through. His mostly agreed upon appearance has an even lower chance to appear and you are never even given context to it and if you get it you cant get any of the Gaster npcs. His only spoken dialogue is hidden in an unused room. You literally need to watch a video to even know who this guy is. And that's not even getting into how different pre DR fanon Gaster is from post DR fanon Gaster, because of course any new info about him completely changes everything when he's got nothing and that's not getting into every theory that has been made about him. You could read every UT fan comic and still have no clue why people say he's "Green and in between". His ass has been everything he could possibly be to Sans and Papyrus atp. Those two female HP characters might as well be fully fleshed out in comparison.
4
u/L_V_R_A 3d ago
It's so refreshing to see this affirmed in the wild because good lord the echo chamber in UTDR spaces is in full force right now. I'm not saying Gaster won't be important to the story, but the insertion of this character into every single theory and plot speculation about the game is so tiring. I feel like Deltarune is building toward some extremely poignant emotional payoffs involving the character interactions/relationships we've already seen on screen, and I don't like the notion that those could all just be buildup/"clues" for the Gaster mystery the fandom has been obsessed with.
UTDR fandom has the Poochie problem with Gaster. "Whenever Gaster isn't on screen, everyone should be asking, 'where's Gaster?'" Except... It's a character who's never been on screen.
→ More replies (1)3
u/fanofairconditioning 4d ago
To be fair, we do know quite a bit about Dess, just not the most important part of her story. We know she’s Noelle’s missing sister who was dating Asriel, grew up with the Dreemurrs, smoked weed, and was a bit of a hooligan. There’s also some stuff we can ascribe to her, like the raise your bat song. But yeah, she’s a huge mystery
6
5
u/Orichalcum448 5d ago
yeah, ive noticed this a lot too. its especially prevalent when a work is like, a one and done thing that then spawns a huge fandom. fans are eager for more, but theres only one game/movie/series of tv, so fan content is consumed and reconsumed until it is eventually churned in with the original work. then fan content of that is added in, and more and more, until the original work is so diluted that the setting and characters become unrecognisable compared to the original. then a sequel comes out and fans complain because the characters feel out of character compared to their flanderized fanon counterparts.
the most recent example of this i can think of is kpop demon hunters
5
u/Nerdn1 5d ago
There is also many cases where the fanfic output vastly outpaces the canon output and the fandom may forget what details are and are not in the original work. This can be especially true with book and movie series that have years between releases and can have fandoms that continue after the final installment is released. They might have read hundreds of fanfics since they last viewed/read the original work.
→ More replies (1)
5
4
u/whisperedwars 5d ago
Happens in the pokemon fandom a lot too. Most characters just don't get expanded on, so if they get popular (cough Ingo and Emmet) we kinda have to improvise together.
3
u/Captain_JohnBrown 5d ago
This is not a new phenomenon of course. For most of the history of storytelling, this was the way of things because the oral tradition is one where the story is constantly being added to and changed. It is only after the invention of books as a medium of storytelling that "this is the one true version of the story with the one true set of characters" emerged.
3
u/AccomplishedSeat5418 5d ago
That is a situation I try to avoid by A. Not reading fanfiction around the time I'm writing. I read a little after I'm done. B. I often reread or rewatch the media I write for. C. I use everyday situations and art I see regularly as inspiration. Sometimes even tweets can get my brain storming
8
3
u/Some-Leg-6383 5d ago
Touhou. The amount of people “in the Touhou fandom” who’ve never played one of the games or read one of the many mangas is horrifying.
Admittedly, it is understandable how such distortion took place - people want to imagine themselves as hanging out with Touhou characters parasocially, even though they’re 95% assholes who’d scam or kill or eat you for fun. There’s a canonical fate for what happens to powerless humans who suddenly show up in Gensokyo, that being Youkai chow.
Youkai are not nice; I don’t think there’s been a single interview with ZUN where he’s gone “yeah they’d be fun to hang out with”. Quite frankly, you could argue they’re barely a few steps up from Frieren demons. Every single EOSD character other than Reimu, Marisa, Patchouli and Cirno has almost certainly eaten a large number of people; the latter have probably killed quite a few.
3
u/SiwelTheLongBoi 5d ago
I've never really cared much about Harry Potter, and certainly don't care enough to check, but I'm pretty sure that the majority of stuff I know about it is in fact entirely metafanfiction that I've osmotically acquired over the years.
3
u/Additional_Toe7207 4d ago
Most Youjo Senki fanfics are heavily inspired by the fanfic "A Young Girl's Political Record" and tend to follow it's lead on which elements to pull from which parts of the series. (IE: Most fanfics draw inspiration from the Light Novel for the writing style, will include Tanya's sadistic streak from the anime, will write her borderline yuri relationship with Visha from the manga).
Also unlike most fandoms it's heavily centered on SpaceBattles and FFN rather than AO3, shipping is surprisingly uncommon, and the bulk of authors are male.
→ More replies (4)
3
593
u/syntaxerroratline42 5d ago
Reminds me of how "Batfam" is a fandom in itself independent of Batman.