Interacting with Stranger Things (Steve/Eddie) fandom

[cimorene]

• This makes the fifth (?) fic I've opened (and then immediately closed) where the author notes at the beginning admit that the author hasn't watched any of canon.



• I habitually read only complete works, and there are SO many new authors who mark their work as complete when it's actually the first part of a WIP. I refreshed my memory because I was kinda like, HOW can you make this mistake?! - and there isn't a checkbox that explicitly asks whether it's a complete work; rather there's a ticky box for a multi-part work, and the intention is that you click that box and then leave the default ? if you don't know how many you're going to write. I was tearing my hair out at too great a rate until I composed the following missive a few days ago, which is now pinned to the top of my notes app, and I now leave it as a comment on every one of these I encounter:
  

  This is a good start!
  
  But since it's a work in progress, this should say it's chapter 1/?, not 1/1. Right now it's mislabeled as a finished story. When you post the first chapter of a longer story, you should tick the box for "This work has multiple chapters" and then a box will appear that lets you type the estimate for the total number if you know, or just a ? if you don't. Then until you post the last chapter it will automatically be sorted as a work in progress!

  
  

Comments

[cathexys]

This is one of my serious pet peeves. I want to choose whether I want to read a WIP, but don't trick me into it!!!!

(And at least they told you they didn't know the canon...Again, I may enjoy the story, but I want to be able to decide!)

[cimorene]

Yeah, it's... better than revealing it at the end! Which I have seen once or twice. Although honestly, that doesn't actually make a fic so fanony that I would be able to definitely identify it from the herd. It's a VERY fanony fandom and that is very annoying.

[yvannairie]

The ultimate game of fandom telephone, reading fic for an unfamiliar canon written by people whose only contact to canon is other fanfic.

[zana16]

The Professionals fandom had this problem back in the 80s and 90s because no one in the US had access to the canon…. There is much less excuse nowadays!

[cimorene]

Yeah, if I thought they were having practical or monetary difficulties in accessing canon I would definitely be somewhat more forgiving...

[yvannairie]

yeah like my current main haunt is the Transformers fandom where it's completely unreasonable to expect people be familiar with... all of the canon, but will still read fic cross-canon because there's usually enough gripping surface even if you specialise into knowing just one or two parts of the actual canon like I've done with Aligned and Marvel UK comics.

One of my friends is a foremost Knower of IDW Comics Lore and she's been bemoaning the fact that there's lots of people coming onto her posts about things that blatantly happened in the comics to argue that they're misrepresenting the things that happened, and that there's a lot of "wait, that wasn't just something fandom made up???" going on from people who have only maybe read the one title that brought in the majority of new fans or have not read any of the titles all the way through before getting into fights about what is in those comics.

[cimorene]

Well, I was going to say it's pretty reasonable that a lot of fandom has minimal knowledge of the comics, but actually in that case the reasonable thing would not be to get into arguments about what happened in the canon they hadn't read. So. yeah, that's worthy of lamentation.

[yvannairie]

I think it's slightly less reasonable for the comics fandom to have minimal knowledge of the comics, but IDW'05 was split across like... ten plus titles, I think, so actually it is kind of reasonable that most people have not read all of them.

[cimorene]

Oh yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty predictable that some people will be familiar with just one or two titles/series. Especially when comics generally have such a multiverse kind of nature, and are designed to be readable independently for the most part.

[cimorene]

Yeah, and I mean, some people are self-awarely in it for the fanon and not the canon in the first place. I can't say that's not legit, when I've been there myself at least a few times. But it does get frustrating most of the time, because usually I'm more interested in the canon (and beyond that just in... a little more original thought I guess).

[yvannairie]

Like I've read fanfic before to get a sense of if I'll like the canon or not (a high-risk endeavour, I know) but I can't ever imagine finding fanfic so satisfying that I'd trade it for canon. I'm pretty sure the canons I like will already have the kind of fanfic I like available anyway as long as I go fish a bit.

[zana16]

I’ve heard that some people do this on purpose because they know people avoid WIPs. I can’t say if this is true but it is seriously annoying if so.

[cimorene]

Yes, and I've definitely suspected before, but in this case I really don't think that's it. The fandom is so explicitly and palpably full of first-time writers, first-time posters, first-time ao3 users, and obviously like... young teenagers who are also a) otherwise clueless about life and the world as one can see from their headers and fiction and b) unsocialized in older fandom norms, as one can usually also see from their headers and fiction. It's basically a kiddie pool.

But I agree, anytime someone HAS done it on purpose that's really obnoxious and horrible, and I think if so they should suffer papercuts and lemon juice, or splinters under their toenails, or something.