[ SECRET POST #4273 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4273 ⌋

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

01.



__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________


03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.













Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #612.
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

[fscom]

01. https://i.imgur.com/jJeb23a.png

[(Anonymous)]

IDGI either. Sure, there are more haters in large fandoms, but I just block them. And there's more fic, but very little of it works for me, so I still end up writing what I want to read.

[(Anonymous)]

Same, OP! I always want more fics for my rarepairs and more discussions for my obscure fandoms.

[(Anonymous)]

I want any fandom I'm in to be popular and well-known just so I can find other fans to chat with about them, and maybe join me in going to/watching things related to them. It adds to the fun when you have other people to squee about your favorite stuff with, and you can feel more comfortable talking about your fandoms with people who'll get it.

[rosehiptea]

I used to want my small fandoms to stay small but then I realized my reasons were basically elitist: I didn't want bad fic written, didn't want to see people do things with the characters that I didn't like, etc. So I got over it.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for making my lazy text secret a real one, anon! <3

[(Anonymous)]

They made it so pretty, too!

[(Anonymous)]

I know right!

[(Anonymous)]

I think there's a 'perfect' level of popularity for fandoms.

I don't like huuuggge fandoms - there's so much fic, you can barely read it, and a lot of it is crap. There's always one or a few people (who can't possibly work or have any normal responsibilities) who endlessly churn out fic after fic after fic for the main OTP of the fandom who I do inevitably NOT ship and they are the highly worshipped BNFs who always win every fic writing contest & nobody else gets a look in.

But then there's me and my miniscule fandoms where I am often the only person out there writing certain pairings and that is as depressing as fuck. It's like being the only person to turn up to your own birthday party.

[osidiano]

I really hate the assumption that other people in fandom don't have "normal responsibilities" that keep them from being productive and so should be (however subtly) shamed for having high output. I get that it's frustrating when you have a rare pair, and that it can be discouraging to compare yourself to other people, but maybe those people just write faster? Maybe that's how much non-depressed people write? Or conversely, maybe they write as a way to deal and wow, do they have A LOT of problems right now? Maybe they prioritize their writing better? Or have insomnia or need less sleep than average and so spend more hours awake and able to write? Maybe they're like Stephen King or Spider George and just don't get writer's block? Maybe they don't waste a lot of time scrolling through their FB or Tumblr? Like, there are lots of less crummy reasons than "oh, this writer I don't care for must have no life and not do anything else outside of fandom because they publish a lot of fic in a year."

One of my fave MCU fic writers, who is very prolific and writes for the Big OTP, is also a published romance writer. Like, publishing original novels is her day job. Her output is far and away more than I could ever DREAM to write and edit. But at the same time, I know people probably thought the same thing about me during those months when I was depressed on Active Duty and publishing chapters of my fic every week, and acting as a chat moderator and Charms Prefect on HiH while turning in extra credit assignments for House Points. But when I left the Army and wasn't working? I wasn't writing. At all. So the burden of "normal responsibilities" doesn't affect everyone the same.

[(Anonymous)]

Same, tbh, and for the first time ever I'm actually in a massive fandom that has over 11k fics on AO3 for my specific pairing alone, and it's AMAZING!!!

[nightscale]

Yeah I'm definitely in the camp of 'more fic is always good' and ofc people's opinions will vary which is fine, but I do like having more fic to explore.

[(Anonymous)]

I like to write fic more than read it, and being in what I guess is a pretty small fandom (small enough that I might give away my identity if I name it), I get to feel like a big damn hero for the few who do read my stuff. I guess I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than vice versa? If I were writing for a huge fandom, I'd feel like no one's going to give a shit if I post or not. I like my cozy corner.

[(Anonymous)]

That's the situation I'm in at the moment: My fandom is so big no one gives a **** about the fics I post. So I don't even bother posting anymore.

[(Anonymous)]

It's nice to have lots of content. But I've been burned by BIG fandoms too many times. A medium size is probably the best.

[(Anonymous)]

It's kind of nice to have several fandoms going at once that are of different sizes, or to ship the juggernaut pairing but also a non-competing rarepair in the same fandom. You get the best of both.

Personally, I come down on the side of More Fic is Always Better. I don't find that the proportion of fic that's bad in small fandoms is all that different than to big fandoms, it's just that the actual NUMBER of bad fics will be greater if there is more fic overall. I get why that's annoying, but I have more motivation to weed through stuff I don't like when I know there will be more fic I do like buried in there, whereas in a small fandom, there just might not be much at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, but you have to weed out so much bad fic. I'm not saying that a small fandom guarantees better quality fic. I'm just saying it takes less time and effort to filter out the fic that's worth reading. A medium-sized fandom seems about right to me.

[(Anonymous)]

I've had the same pairing in small, medium and mega fandoms - I had a long-running ship from a comic that was then made into a movie and was a respectable size in quite a big fandom, then another movie sometime later and it was HUGE (and the dominant pairing). The medium-sized fandom was pretty much the best, I think - there was a lot of good fic to read both with them as the main characters and in the background, and not too many modern mundane high-school AUs to filter through.

I can see not wanting to deal with some aspects of big fandoms.

[(Anonymous)]

There is a lot more fic, but a lot of big fandoms I know usually have some sort of bizarreness as part of them (sometimes it's tin-hatting, sometimes it's like the Supernatural Kink Meme, sometimes you can't even really understand it, even with charts). Sometimes it's not great to be associated with that, even peripherally. And yes, you can avoid those parts of fandom, but you do still have to explain to other people, when you say you're part of that fandom, that you're not one of those fans.

[(Anonymous)]

I love how close-knit my small fandoms are, but boy would I love for them to be at least a little bigger... It's lonely being literally the only person to have written a fic for something-- not just for a ship, but to have had to create the AO3 tag for the property itself.

I know big fandoms have a lot of drama and people take fic writers for granted when there's a million fics for a ship already, but... a nice medium-sized fandom would be nice sometimes.

I'm just super into obscure things with zero fandom right now, or else the existing fandom is almost all trivia-mastery-and-collectible-collecting dudes rather than fanart-and-fanfic-and-shipping folks, so there's technically a fair-sized fandom but only four people who even semi-ship my ship and a bunch of dudes who would be aghast at my non-canon (queer!) shipping if they looked at the non-gen, non-canon-ships side of the fanfic. (there's like... *one* 'fandom approved' fic and I hate the guy who wrote it, it's... this is a rough fandom to not be a middle-aged straight man in)

[(Anonymous)]

You sound a bit of a kindred spirit, OP :-) How can one person be the only person in the world writing certain ships? I mean, it's a big world! But yeah, I'm always having to create new AO3 tags for my pairings.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm much more of a fic-writer than reader, but more importantly, fandom for me is about community. So, I usually just pick a cozy little corner of friends and never leave it, which means it doesn't really matter how big the "whole" fandom is.

[(Anonymous)]

Yesssss! It's so frustrating when I go looking for a fandom or pairing and there are only a couple dozen fics, usually written by the same people. (I just wanna read it! I don't wanna write it myself! Although that can be just as frustrating, writing something and having no one to share it with.)