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cimorene- "Hey, this pseud rings a faint bell. What do I know about them? ... Wait a second... hey, Wax, is this the person who took all their fic offline and made an entire password-protected website where you had to join a mailing list and then solemnly swear you were not Anish Kapoor, were not associated with Anish Kapoor, and were not going to in any way leak the contents to Anish Kapoor in order to get the password? And the reason was because the Anish Kapoor in question was accused of stalking them?"
"Hmm... I think so, yeah."
- The last time I was here there was this quaint little coffee shop au where nobody is an alien or in space at all and I read a couple but it wasn't my thing. Since then apparently hundreds of new writers have written takeoffs of it, some of them spinning off their own sub-aus as if it was the fucking cthulhumythos and not a contemporary restaurant setting. They don't all use the same tags. They don't all use any tags at all. It's impossible to filter them out. Sometimes there's almost a whole page of results filled with them.
- Enough time has passed for there to be fanfiction for this fandom that originated in the 1990s by people who clearly don't know what answering machines are or how they work.
- A notable fan writer wrote this one piece of meta that an army of young enthusiastic writers have since taken as gospel. This new fanon doesn't appear naturally, as if it were canon information; it's celebrated in ways both twee and uncomfortably fetishizing. And occasionally it appears normally as well. But that's not the majority.
- I see that cultural sea change since the 2000s has converted the annoying plurality fanon from "overcoming his internalized homophobia" to "he's a wise queer elder who is so queer that it retroactively renders him out and flamboyant in canon from their perspective" here in this fandom too.
- As fanon goes, one of the most pointless as well as one of the most baffling is just pretending one of the principal characters had a tail in canon too. I'm reminded of that Pros writer who only wrote independent (of each other) aus where Illya had glasses and a ponytail and a history of CSA. This is definitely less weird, but the fact that it's a whole bunch of different writers is maybe weirder. But I mean, fine. Fine! It's not like it changes anything, right? I can just read these and ignore any mentions of the - "He flipped his tail against the floor". Nope.
- Somehow this never bothered me very much at the time, but now that I'm reading this stuff again twenty-five years post finale, I'm turned off by this whole huge subgenre of the fandom based on an alternate interpretation. I definitely used to read these, but I find them fundamentally uninteresting now.
- Some new writers: "What if this character had this personality trait that they actually clearly are shown to have in canon but I apparently didn't notice, but instead of being thoughtfully expressed in a way conditioned by their environment and upbringing and the society they are from, it was expressed exactly the way it is in modern teenagers, and also used the same terminology they use about it on Tumblr?"
- Over time I had forgotten that a huge portion of work in this fandom is just written in an au version of canon where everything is just the same except it's not a comedy and there's no magical realism, which is a bit like getting an au version of a chili dog from a fast food drive through that is just a hotdog bun without anything in it, which once happened to my aunt, or a hamburger that is just a beef patty in a bun without any of the toppings, which once happened to my dad. If only there were some way to filter that out.
"Hmm... I think so, yeah."
- The last time I was here there was this quaint little coffee shop au where nobody is an alien or in space at all and I read a couple but it wasn't my thing. Since then apparently hundreds of new writers have written takeoffs of it, some of them spinning off their own sub-aus as if it was the fucking cthulhumythos and not a contemporary restaurant setting. They don't all use the same tags. They don't all use any tags at all. It's impossible to filter them out. Sometimes there's almost a whole page of results filled with them.
- Enough time has passed for there to be fanfiction for this fandom that originated in the 1990s by people who clearly don't know what answering machines are or how they work.
- A notable fan writer wrote this one piece of meta that an army of young enthusiastic writers have since taken as gospel. This new fanon doesn't appear naturally, as if it were canon information; it's celebrated in ways both twee and uncomfortably fetishizing. And occasionally it appears normally as well. But that's not the majority.
- I see that cultural sea change since the 2000s has converted the annoying plurality fanon from "overcoming his internalized homophobia" to "he's a wise queer elder who is so queer that it retroactively renders him out and flamboyant in canon from their perspective" here in this fandom too.
- As fanon goes, one of the most pointless as well as one of the most baffling is just pretending one of the principal characters had a tail in canon too. I'm reminded of that Pros writer who only wrote independent (of each other) aus where Illya had glasses and a ponytail and a history of CSA. This is definitely less weird, but the fact that it's a whole bunch of different writers is maybe weirder. But I mean, fine. Fine! It's not like it changes anything, right? I can just read these and ignore any mentions of the - "He flipped his tail against the floor". Nope.
- Somehow this never bothered me very much at the time, but now that I'm reading this stuff again twenty-five years post finale, I'm turned off by this whole huge subgenre of the fandom based on an alternate interpretation. I definitely used to read these, but I find them fundamentally uninteresting now.
- Some new writers: "What if this character had this personality trait that they actually clearly are shown to have in canon but I apparently didn't notice, but instead of being thoughtfully expressed in a way conditioned by their environment and upbringing and the society they are from, it was expressed exactly the way it is in modern teenagers, and also used the same terminology they use about it on Tumblr?"
- Over time I had forgotten that a huge portion of work in this fandom is just written in an au version of canon where everything is just the same except it's not a comedy and there's no magical realism, which is a bit like getting an au version of a chili dog from a fast food drive through that is just a hotdog bun without anything in it, which once happened to my aunt, or a hamburger that is just a beef patty in a bun without any of the toppings, which once happened to my dad. If only there were some way to filter that out.
