Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[UselessBytes]

I definitely agree with that. Fanfiction doesn't really get famous outside of absurd cases, and even then it's still unknown for the most part (The Subspace Emmissary's World Conquest is a good example, as it was for a good chunk of time the longest piece of literature ever written and had a couple of articles written on it. Still, 99% of people you asked would have no clue what it is.)

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

I am not aware of any famous fanfictions for any fandoms I'm a part of. Even the ones I'm seriously engaged with.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I edited in a sentence about "genre-defining" fanfics. I guess I'm just sad that I wasn't there.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

I love PMD, but I've never heard of Silver Resistance.

I've heard of Fallout: Equestria only because I have a friend who was really into it a while back.

The thing is, there aren't really any centralised, mechanically well-designed, flexible, liberated fandom spaces. There are sometimes official forums but not so much these days, there are sometimes dozens of little pockets of community, there are several competing fanfiction hosting websites, none of which serve discussion particularly well, and any social media website is bound to have serious disadvantages (tumblr has a bad rep and terrible website design and functionality, reddit's mechanics create echo chambers and make it harder to have a distinct identity, twitter is twitter, etc).

The ideal fandom space would be a nice hybrid, with dedicated architecture for different kinds of content. Probably it would have a forum-style "overworld" and posts with content could function more like reddit, and people's profile pages could be more significant in turn. It would be amazing! And nobody will ever do it, because there's no money in it.

 

[UselessBytes]

Was about to say, I'm an avid PMD fan (and mystery dungeon in general) and I have also never heard of Silver Resistance. Fanfiction just isn't marketable and isn't going to be widely known in any scope outside of extremely rare cases, and most times they're known because they're notoriously bad. Fanfiction is a niche form of expression, and in a lot of cases, there is much more content for people to actively consume for a given fandom that is either official, higher quality, or easier to enjoy/engage with than fanfiction. Often, it's all three. Things like webcomics (Think Victory Fire, to use another PMD example) or offical shows/literature/games are in general more enticing to any given community, especially given the stereotypical aversion to reading you see in a lot of young adults and university age people. So, the one two punch of more easily digestible content being available and watching/looking at visual media (Fanart, comics, tv/movies) being preferred over reading kills a lot of potential interest in fanfiction. It's, unfortunately, how it is.

 

[canisaries]

Okay, so the MLP fics have a very simple explanation behind them. The early 2010s had an incredible surge of brony content as the fandom's size snowballed due to the strong identity associated with it (sense of community against the majority who don't think girls' cartoons can be good or watched by young adult men and so on). Because of the vocal nature and tightknittedness (is that a word?) of the fandom, certain works that stood out were talked about more, had their own fanbases and even received memetic status. This strengthened the traffic to these works even more, and since they came so early, they managed to occupy niches and always be among the first "big" somethings, meaning people flocked to these to check out what all the fuss was about.

With time, however, people just kind of got used to bronies and the "shock value" of being a man into girls' cartoons?!? went away. Sure, this doesn't mean that there aren't still antibronies or reactionaries, but the point is that both bronies and antibronies lost their traction as a "movement" and settled into simple fandom status for the most part. People stopped caring about MLP so much, either due to not liking where the show was headed or just changing as a person and becoming more into something else, and so modern works don't get the kind of traction they used to. They also have the "classics" to compete with, as if someone new comes into the fandom and wants to get to know it better, they'll likely go for the stuff most talked about. Given the status quo of the show, a lot of fics also don't "get old" and even if they do, someone starting out will likely start out from the beginning and so have that past context as their current one for the time being. I mean, hell, this show ran for nine seasons or something? That's a lot of pony to watch.

As for other fandoms, I'm certain that a lot of the logic used here also applies to them to an extent. Some works are so old that they had their surge when the internet itself was still being formed. Some works are tied to certain platforms, even getting branded in a way(Steven Universe/Sherlock is Tumblr, Rick & Morty is Reddit, so on).

Anyway, I didn't get into Pokefic properly until just a couple of years ago, and while I do like PMD now, I hadn't heard of Silver Resistance of Victory Fire once before I noticed some people started talking about them in chats or on forums. I can't really name any "big" Pokémon fics, either. The only big fics I really know are brony ones for the reasons I explained before, and then some fics that have become memes, usually due to shock value.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

My Silver Resistance example was myopic. I think a better way of putting it is that there aren't many "trendsetting" fanfics anymore - ScytheRider claims that he popularised starting PMD fanfics with a personality quiz, for example. I wish I could be around at the start of a fandom.

My way of measuring how popular a fanfic is is by if it gets a TV Tropes page. Thing is, how likely a fanfic is to get a page depends on how popular the source material is, so MLP and Harry Potter fanfics are disproportionately represented. The Brony fandom also puts way more emphasis on fanfiction and headcanon than any others I've seen.

As for unrepentantAuthor's point about social media sites, there's a site that was made about a year ago called Pillowfort that claims to take the best bits from every other social media site. From what I've seen, it's like Tumblr but with comment threads. I still haven't gotten around to joining it.

 

[zoroarctic]

@unrepentantAuthor Take whatever you can get right now. I can relate; after I graduated college, I had to freelance for almost 3 years before I found my first full-time job. I was making $50-65 per assignment, and only getting 3 or 4 assignments on a good week (none during the summer months).

I think I'm (finally) in the mood to get started on my story reboot. The only hangup is whether to wait until I've played Sword and Shield so I could incorporate some of the new elements.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

What story are you rebooting?

 

[canisaries]

My way of measuring how popular a fanfic is is by if it gets a TV Tropes page.

I would not trust that. Literally anyone can make a TV Tropes page. I've heard of stories where some authors' friends make a page for their fic just for fun. It's all about whether someone who reads wants to make a page or not. Naturally, if you have more readers, the chance is higher, but one simply existing doesn't necessarily prove anything - nor does how in-depth it is. People like to put different amounts of effort into stuff, and some very excited tropers can do a lot.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

My way of measuring how popular a fanfic is is by if it gets a TV Tropes page.

Nah. That only proves that a troper thought it was notable. Popularity denotes a large audience, not that a single dedicated reader exists.

Hits and reviews are the ticket.

Pillowfort

Tell us if you check it out and it seems any good.

Take whatever you can get right now.

I don't know, mate. I don't like the thought of working a full time job for so little pay.

 

[Cresselia92]

I think that fanfics become popular when they divert greatly from their source material. Think of Cupcakes from the MLP fandom, which takes a franchise for children and twists it until it becomes a gorefic. Sooo… from the way I see it, a popular fanfic becomes popular when it becomes infamous, rather than famous.

 

[canisaries]

What Cress says is true, bad or strange publicity is more effective than good publicity. Even if Fallout: Equestria is not generally considered bad from what I've heard, it absolutely has the reputation of "that one fanfic that's super long (and has a considerable fanbase so it actually has to be of some quality and not just random words strung together)".

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I'm trying to think of non-MLP fanfics that fit Cress' description, but I can't. I guess Pokémon Reset Bloodlines is like Fallout: Equestria? It's a long-running, M-rated AU with a detailed TV Tropes page, except the Pokémon fandom doesn't put as much emphasis on fanfic. I've never read either.

Tell us if you check it out and it seems any good.

Turns out you have to pay $5 to sign up. I can afford that, but I don't feel like faffing around with online payments right now.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

I really don't have any interest in edgy, M-rated fics for franchises that cater to kids. I mean, sure, I'd enjoy a hypothetically excellent M-rated pokémon fic, but in practical reality, the supermajority of Mature stuff doesn't have that rating because the story is better told that way, but because the author thinks that excessive profanity, violence and/or sexuality is enjoyable content regardless of context. I say this as someone with a very foul mouth and few compunctions about adult themes in fiction.

@canisaries excellent analysis of the Brony phenomenon. Particularly relevant is that the older a fandom is, the higher the perceived bar for entry or "required reading" becomes. Pokémon is a weird example because it's both old and huge, but it's also fragmented and a really simple concept that reboots itself constantly. The entry points are numerous, and deliberately so.

@UselessBytes seconding the shout-out to Victory Fire. It's absolutely excellent stuff, I really do love it. I recommend it to anyone. However, I don't agree that people don't read. People do read! They just read the very specific stuff that caters to their personal tastes, and they don't develop public communities around it.

 

[zoroarctic]

What story are you rebooting?

A Pokémon-Harry Potter crossover called “Witch Hunt.” I think I posted the first chapter on here back in 2016; the other chapters are on FFN. Went a while without uploading a new chapter, and I lost my sense of direction for it. Hence the reboot effort.

 

[hanecco]

Oh yeah - speaking of improvements to the forum format, it would be nice if people could set up threads somewhere - perhaps in a dedicated subforum - which act as author's profiles. That way, people could have a comprehensive, easy-to-find list of their works, alongside other relevant information, such as projects they're currently working on or plan to do.

I'm not sure how much demand there is for it, but I think it would be useful. Currently, most people have links to their fics in their signatures, which has limits on how much you can put there. And sure, this stuff could go into users' actual profile bios, but let's be real, how often do we check and update those? (I'm pretty sure there's a character limit on those, too, so... yeah).

 

[Beth Pavell]

Oh yeah - speaking of improvements to the forum format, it would be nice if people could set up threads somewhere - perhaps in a dedicated subforum - which act as author's profiles. That way, people could have a comprehensive, easy-to-find list of their works, alongside other relevant information, such as projects they're currently working on or plan to do.

It's not a bad idea. You could currently use a blog to act as the master list for your works, and link to that in your sig. I am intending in the future to look into the possibility of tagging, but that's kinda far down on the priority list at the moment

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Having centralised author pages would go a long way to improving the mechanical viability of a community like this. So would tagging. The directory is a brave effort, but far from ideal.

 

[kintsugi]

^having a place to compile a user’s favorite authors/stories would also be nice; I know FFN has a lotta disadvantages vs XenForo (looking at you, formatting manager), but this is one of the features I like. defs beats having to search