(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* I've only just seen the trailer for Abigail. It looks amazing.

* I hate it when authors complain that they 'have' to write m/m to get read and that people are just upright for not also reading f/m. If you hate writing m/m, write something else! Don't bitch at m/m readers like we are the problem.
This is the audience you built and cultivated, don't bitch at us. Fly, be free... get the fuck out...

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

OMG are these writers talking about fanfic or profic? Because the audience for het profic romance is HUGE.

[olivermoss]

It's a fanfic author who looks like they are trying to make the jump to profic, and... yeah, a lot of people who do that need to jump to m/f to make money. I've known a few who made the jump and they all had to switch to m/f to make it, even though they don't enjoy it.

Fanfic is also way more m/f cetric than so many people realize. It's such a myopic view, acting like it's the m/m people who are the dominant paradigm. And, again, m/m is the audience they built. If my photo tumblr didn't like my abstract telephoto landscape shots I wouldn't bitch at them, I've built a specific audience there. My creepy stuff bombs there. People want uplifting stuff.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, there is a huge audience for both m/f and m/m fanfic! Like you said, you just have to know your audience and where they are reading.

[mxcatmoon]

Is it a content, numbers-obsessed culture thing? Forcing oneself to write something one doesn't like? SMH. This is a hobby; I'm not getting paid for it, so I'm going to write what I enjoy (even if hardly anyone reads it). Life's too short.

If I could write on demand, and whatever was most popular, I'd go pro.

[olivermoss]

It sounds like they want to make the jump to pro and are just completely unaware of that market. It's just very myopic and it annoys me.

Also, this person grew an audience and it now dissing them. I wouldn't be upset at my tumblr followers for not liking my landscapes, I grew that account on PDX Weirdness.

[mxcatmoon]

Weird. Maybe the person will work through it and take whatever leap they need to make them happy, but yeah. Weird to complain about one's audience.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I can get being frustrated if you've shoved yourself in a box, but that isn't something you post about on main... especially blaming them for being closed minded. Just... no...

[shipperslist]

...that sounds more like an author who likes to go WOE IS ME just to get attention and shit on other people. 🙄

[olivermoss]

I am just so tired of 'it's the m/m readers, they are the problem... for reasons' type discourse

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh, I so deeply hate the attitude that m/m writers/fans are "taking over" creative spaces or whatever.

AO3 is about the ONLY place where that could be argued to be even slightly true, and basically THE REST OF EVERYWHERE skews extremely het! If you (general complaining you) are seeing an overwhelming amount of m/m and wish you weren't... stop hanging out in the m/m self-pub and m/m AO3 spaces! A world of het awaits! If the audience from your m/m works is less into your m/f works... maybe cultivate an audience that DOES want m/f?

Entitled much, to feel like your audience should change their tastes solely to cater to the work you produce?

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's pretty gross to hang out in m/m spaces and complain that we are boring and don't get het. JFC there is so much to unpack there! The author needs to pull their head out of their butt, and then also get out instead of having delusions of oppression.

I unfollowed because they said some more dumb stuff about fans having bad taste, and so what if we do?

[mistressofmuses]

Super gross! The vibe of "ew, all these weird people need to stop liking the gross gay stuff and consume some more morally pure het" gives me skin-crawls. (Of course it's not phrased that way, it's "ew, why are you fetishizing gay men? obviously it's your internalized misogyny that prevents you from reading my virtuous het!")

I occasionally like het. Not... super often, and when I do it's almost always from something where that relationship is not the focus, but some slower-burn thing that develops over the course of a longer story in a way that vibes with me. It happens once in a blue moon, but I can't say it never does. (Though I'm struggling to think of any at the moment that don't have at least one queer character involved and/or a queer author.)

100% the way to make me the LEAST interested in a het-ship-focused work is to tell me that my interest in queer stories about queer characters is a symptom of my bad taste, or is something that I should be ashamed of, and only consuming the appropriate amount of het to counterbalance it will save me. Fuck right off.

(Same as the whole concept of duty-fic or "eat your vegetables" femslash. I like f/f fic too, but not as penance for "indulging" in m/m.)

And look, it is no one's damn business if we (fandom) have bad taste. Go find your own sandbox of whatever you consider "good taste" and stop trying to kick us out of ours!

Does that sort of strategy ever work? Trying to insult a group of people into liking your stuff instead? And if we all have bad taste, why do you want us as your audience?

[olivermoss]

It's just such wild takes, acting like m/m is the dominant paradigm oppressing all the other content and chaining creators to it, when to become big a LOT of slash writers had to pivot to m/f, especially to make writing a career. People need to have their heads so far up their butts to think that way. Clearly, something is going on with them... but they are taking it out on us.

I like m/f once in a while. I've even written it! (But one of the times I did the numbers popped off so fast I panic orphaned the work. It's almost like het actually is the dominant thing)

I feel bad for f/f fans because there is so little of it, but also there are few readers. It's a cyclical problem not a massive ignored audience. I wrote one f/f thing and despite all the desperate cried for more of that content and people acting like it's praxis to writing it or to include f/f in my m/m, nah the audience just isn't there. I hear about Ronance (Robin/Nancy) constantly, but after I posted that fic I look at the tag and there were fics with more chapters than kudos. For all the chatter / pleading / discourse / etc, it's just not actually popular.

The eat your vegetables / practice your praxis stuff is just so insane. I wouldn't want people treating my stuff like vegetables.

Maybe it does work. Preying on guilt can be effective, for maybe it's just that I know too many people prone to the insane kind of liberal guilt who want to be told how to be good people.

If people think the finer qualities of het are lost on us, they should go find their people... their people are everywhere...

[mistressofmuses]

That really is just such a baffling take for it to be so common. Like... what world do you live in that m/m is an unstoppable market force that leaves no room for the poor, marginalized het writers?
(This feels like that whole "are you trying to buy a milkshake at the hardware store?" problem. Like... if you've surrounded yourself with slash fandom or m/m indie writers, maybe that's coloring some perceptions of how prevalent it is. But maybe you just need to leave the hardware store, rather than demand they pivot to serving milkshakes.)

Het is by far the dominant thing! AO3 is the only major fanfiction hub (as compared to ff.net or wattpad, which are the other two biggest that I know of that are still around) where m/m is the biggest relationship type... and it's not THAT much higher than the proportion of het. Everywhere else the het is by FAR the most common relationship type! (Though lol, I'm sorry you had to panic-orphan your work!)

That is exactly the complaint I've heard from most other people who've written or shared a f/f fic here or there... they've heard over and over how there's no f/f out there, how no one writes f/f, how all the female characters get sidelined... but when you write f/f, it's basically crickets.
I don't know if all the "there is no f/f" complainers just... aren't actually bothering to *look* at what's out there and just make assumptions, or what the issue is. But if someone is genuinely interested in trying to get more f/f fic into the world (and not just bitching about m/m fans), encouraging the people who do write it with hits and kudos and comments and reccs sure does seem like it'd be the better way to do it!
(I also hear a lot of complaints about unreasonable demands for moral purity/"good rep" in f/f fics, which is pretty stifling when it comes to making writers want to explore anything interesting between the characters!)

But exactly! I want my f/f to be just as indulgent as my m/m, or my rare m/f. Or my less-rare m/m/f. I'd hate for readers to only read something of mine because they feel obligated to grudgingly make themselves eat a bowl of unseasoned canned peas.

That is unfortunately true: guilt is effective on some people. Particularly people who want so badly to appear that they're doing things right, and that they're a Good Person. That kind of liberal guilt is super easy to manipulate.
The faux social-justice language (by liking m/m you're fetishizing gay men, which means you're homophobic. liking ship A/B means you're bigoted because you clearly hate character C, so you should ship B/C instead. not consuming enough het means you obviously just hate women.) probably DOES make a lot of people feel bad and guilty over the things they do enjoy.

But like, if I have bad taste, why do you want me to like your stuff..? Wouldn't you rather find your "good taste" audience?

There is not some drastic lack of het out there. Or het fans! That's the vast majority of most of fandom as well as most of both the mainstream and indie romance/erotica audience. Find the people into that, because there are a lot of them!

[olivermoss]

At the risk of saying stuff I've probably said before, at AO3 you can search by T4T, Lesbian, Bi, ect, where every other site tosses everything into the catch-all LGBT+ tag. You can't find stuff elsewhere. AO3 is set up like an old fashioned queer bookstore with separate sections. Of course this is where the readers and writers are.

Honestly, with how much I hear about Ronance and the seeming hunger for it, I was surprised to not get a single comment. Kudos are... fine, but a single comment does a lot more. I didn't get anyone happy I'd posted something and kudos-wise my fic strongly out-performed single-chapter fics posted around the same time. It wasn't a flop. Like, if you actually care about this scene and aren't being performative, it's easy to grow the scene through just commenting.

Liking Ronance and trying to support Ronance doesn't give people Praxis Points that makes liking m/m okay actually.

I'd don't know if I'll ever free myself from thinking that liking queer men is predatory. I wish I could, but man it's ingrained deep and comes from a lot of places.

Growth as a writer is hard, but that is no reason to throw tantrums about it. If they've decided they want to write het they need to build a new audience, not whine that we wont follow.

I wish I'd know about how to hide fics on your own account. That would have been better than panic-orphaning, but at least now I know.

[mistressofmuses]

Right? AO3 allows you to get really specific in terms of what particular queer arrangement you're looking for, rather than treating it as a catch-all category. Offering relationship type as a top-level way to sort stories is hugely different than most other sites I've ever used, where you could at best filter for, like you said, a LGBT+ category, or hope that a fic being tagged with two character names meant they were the main ship. And if you're into queer relationships in your fic, of COURSE you're going to be hanging out on AO3, where it's expressly welcome, instead of grudgingly tolerated.

I love kudos, but comments really do outweigh them in terms of showing interest/engagement/appreciation for a work. I feel like it'd be way more effective at encouraging f/f works by making it a welcoming and enthusiastic experience to share works. (Because honestly, even if there *are* fewer f/f readers, if they were enthusiastic and welcoming and provided an excited community, that would be really motivating for a lot of writers!)

It was a while ago now, but back in college I fell into the trap of trying to rework a lot of my original fic ideas to be something other than m/m, because while my ideas weren't exclusively m/m, that was still the majority of what I had. I kept hearing how terrible that was, and felt like I could only "excuse" it if I tried to make sure I had a nearly exactly even number of m/m, m/f, and f/f. (Which feels just plain silly to say now, but at the time felt like the only way I could "prove" I wasn't being biased in some way.)
I eventually realized that nah, that's not how it works actually, but I think I likely still have some baggage from feeling that way and buying into that mentality for a few years. It also might be why those were years in which I didn't actually write much at all.

But yeah. I get that trying to find your niche is hard. And I can only imagine that it sucks to have a following that's interested in a type of work you no longer want to write. (Though lots of people within fandom have that experience, moving from a big ship or fandom they've lost interest in, and losing that readership.) But the answer is definitely not to get mad that your old audience won't all simultaneously change their tastes just to follow your work.
(And like, I HAVE followed writers to a different fandom/genre/relationship type/etc. if I like their stuff, with varying success in terms of how much I wound up enjoying it. But a writer throwing a tantrum about it just makes me not want to read their old stuff either, ha.)

It's nice that there are options for hiding fics/marking them anon/etc. I'm glad orphaning is an option, too! But it's a bummer that you didn't have those other options available at the time. If it happens again, at least you do have choices on what to do!