[ SECRET POST #2781 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2781 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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08.
[Game of Thrones]


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09. [broken]


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[Kevin Sorbo/Hercules: The Legendary Journeys]


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[Transformers: Prime]


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12.
[Darkchylde]






Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #397.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Have you ever been driven out of a fandom by other fans?

[nyxelestia]

Once.

Way back in the early days of Psych fandom, I mostly hung out on a private fanfic archive/forum that was gen and het only. I'd just come into this from a bunch of very large fandoms, and this was a very tiny one. Stuff that would have been unnoticed or benign in the previous fandoms caused serious shit in this one.

I honestly admit I did some really stupid things in this fandom, and some of which probably felt very personal to the others in fandom. (In particular, you know how often similar fanfic tropes get repeated/rewritten? This was how I discovered the large fandoms and small fandoms have very, VERY different thresholds on how similar fanfics can be before people start calling plagiarism on you.)

I was really stupid about this...but I also feel a lot of the backlash and reactions of the other people in the fandom was unnecessary. In particular, this tiny fandom was kinda cliquey. After one fic I wrote turned out to be way too similar to a BNF's fanfic for anyone's comfort, a bunch of the BNFs got together and systematically went through my fics looking for anything I could have stolen from other fanfics, and that's the point it got ridiculous.

Either I stole things that can't really be stolen. i.e. a somewhat childish character doing a somewhat childish thing - this is something a lot of kids do, I did as a kid, and a lot of adults do because they can, but because someone else wrote it as a throwaway line in their fic first, I "stole it". At the time, I tried not to fight, so even though I didn't think I "stole" it, I went and asked the original author for permission to keep it in my fanfic anyway and they agreed. However, at one point they showed me not one but two other fanfics I could have stolen a particular story element from, which was just ridiculous because why was my using that fairly common or obvious trope plagiarism, but the second of those two fics not plagiarizing? Especially when there was no indication that the second author asked the first one for "permission".

This was the point when the site's moderator - herself also kind of a BNF - stepped in and said that this particular trope didn't really qualify as plagiarism. (For context, it was one emotionally stunted character sobbing on their emotionally stunted father, and then bemoaning the amount of snot on their father's shirt once they calmed down.)

I just left the fandom at this point, and actually stopped watching the show. In part, it was just timing, changing access, etc. I probably still would have loved the show if I could still just watch it casually, but at this point I would have had to make and effort to watch the show, and this experience killed my desire to make that effort.

These days, I at least know I'm not entirely alone. I ran into another fan from there a few years later in another fandom entirely, and they expressed a similar problem with the exclusive cliqueyness. I'd also actually seen one of the "lower level BNFs" from that fandom around a few years later. I didn't reach out to them, but I do remember looking through their blog and seeing an abrupt stop to them posting anything about that fandom, so I get the feeling they may have ultimately been driven out, too. (Never confirmed it, though, as they were still one of the bullies so I don't want to reach out and risk finding out that I'm wrong).