[ SECRET POST #6864 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6864 ⌋

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


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[American Girl dolls]



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[Acotar/ Crescent City/Sarah J Maas]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 32 secrets from Secret Submission Post #980.
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://cdn.imgchest.com/files/cf9b6fe0dd25.png

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

My fandom used to have so many long one-shots and multi-chapter fic. Now there are mostly (very) short fics and chapters. They're still good, for the most part, but I often find myself missing the long, meaty fanfic.

I've tried being the change. I'm only one person, though.

[(Anonymous)]

I can't stand it when people give the "just write it yourseeeeeeelf" advice, anyway. I mean yeah, yeah, sometimes people could contribute if they see a fandom or ship that needs more love, but generally speaking it's such a condescending, low-effort way to shut down the discussion. I'm very certain that the people who give this advice would get annoyed if they were told that every time they had an unfulfilled need in their life.

[(Anonymous)]

just say you don't like animation, then?

[(Anonymous)]

…misfire?

[(Anonymous)]

Simply complaining about a lack of what you want is low-effort too. There are plenty of other things that can be done to stimulate production of wished-for the content. But these take effort.

But OP has tried being the change, so isn't doing that at all. Keep at it, OP! I once had a fandom take off five years or so after I wrote the first half-dozen stories for it, including a couple of longfics.

[(Anonymous)]

Nah, complaining isn't the problem. I say let's all complain.

In this case (write more not less) is the result of the continual shortening of attention spans, the ability to get quick hits of pleasure posting short drabbles on tumblr, and the overall state of fast-moving fandom. I don't think that's something that can be changed by even a hundred fic authors writing 10k instead of 2k word fics, that's a sea change that requires a whole culture change.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess I'm curious as to what fandom OP is in where longfic was the majority of what existed in the fandom because IME that hasn't been the case in any of my fandoms, even the ones from the early 2000s. Like, out of curiosity, I went to look at the AO3 section for one of my fandoms from 2008-2009 and the vast majority of the fic there that was written during that time period was sub-5k words with only a small handful of long stuff.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of the fic I consumed between 00-05 is lost to the internet so I have no idea if they were long or short. Anime fandom in those days was def scattershot, the occasional longfic but a lot of short pwps. SW and Highlander fic tended to be longer overall but fewer giant multi-chapter book-length fics.

[(Anonymous)]

Nah, complaining isn't the problem. I say let's all complain.

While I think mild complaining is fine, I do think there is a point where complaining does become (part of) the problem. For example, if you complain about lack of longfic in a fandom and people in that fandom are already doing their best to work on and put out longer pieces, it can feel like "what you're doing isn't good enough" which is demotivating the few people who could potentially produce longfic. Or if you complain about lack of longfic in a fandom and there IS longfic, with almost no comments or feedback, same -- it will burn out the few people producing it because OP seems to be overlooking it/erasing it. Or if you spend all your time loudly complaining, complaining, complaining in a fandom, then a lot of people might be like "Wow, this fandom sucks, it's so whiny" and leave it, which means fewer people to potentially write longfic...

So yeah, a tendency toward complaining over any other activity such as positivity or engagement with existing long fics, I think absolutely CAN be part of the problem leading to less longfic, so you should be careful about how you do it and the tone in which you do it.

[(Anonymous)]

SA.

Also, to be clear, I didn't think there was anything wrong with OP's secret! You can absolutely vent about missing longfic in your fandom, especially if you're one of the writers burnt out by trying to be the change. The only thing I took issue with was the statement that "complaining isn't the problem" -- I don't think that's *always* true.

[(Anonymous)]

Complaining is fine, and normal so long as you aren't taking it to extremes. Just having a complaint about something in the world shouldn't result in a knee jerk jUsT fiX iT yOUrSelF response, that's just a dick move by people who should close the tab or leave the discussion if they need a break.

[(Anonymous)]

Pretty sure I've said this before in response to an older secret, but...as someone who's said "Write/Create what you want to see," it's more of a call to action in which I know majority of people who read it will not take action, but that's not going to stop me from saying it. Because there's a very slim chance someone will see it and they will take action. And if all they needed was for someone to encourage them to do so, then that's cool. If not, oh well.

And IDK I don't see those words as a means to shut down conversation. If anyone were to respond to "create what you want to read"... I mean, I'm open to hearing where the conversation goes after that. Can't guarantee that I'd respond.
Sometimes people just want to complain, so I likely won't have much else to say aside from "I'm sorry that you can't find fics for your OTP and that you don't want to be someone who creates it."

[(Anonymous)]

As a fanfic writer who used to write a lot of longfic and has been writing shorter stuff lately... I get it. I wish I could write more longfic now too, but... there's just a lot going on, and I think that's true for a lot of writers.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't been in fandom that has longfic at all for some time D:

[(Anonymous)]

I've definitely noticed this trend too. I attribute it mostly to how much higher the engagement-to-time-invested ratio is for short fics compared to long ones, particularly on all the current, major fandom platforms. Also, fandoms seem to be staying popular for less long these days, which I think affects how people create for them. And not to be all yells-at-cloud about things, but attention spans have probably, on average, gotten markedly shorter in the last decade. :/

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I think one of the most depressing things has been watching "Big Bang" min lengths go down from 50k to 20k... 15k... 10k... 5k... even 1k... Like, oof, that's not a big bang anymore! How did fandoms ever support 50k+-word bangs??! It must have been a very different time.

Also, I'm going to be wanky and put some of the blame on this change on the proliferation of -tober-style fic challenges based on Inktober -- Kinktober, Whumptober, Flufftober, etc. It's like every fandom and every genre needs to have a ~30 day challenge with prompts for each day at least once a year. I wish there was anywhere near that amount of effort/events dedicated to people finishing their big multichap WIPs, or rewarding people for putting out a new chapter for the same, longer story every week for three months straight or things like that.

[arcanetrivia]

Something something attention spans in general? (Myself included. Although I will plead that the older I've gotten, the more I've had to do things like care for elderly parents, which really cuts into reading time.) But otoh I still see people posting in a fanfic writers' community on tumblr about their long fics, like in the many tens or even hundreds of thousands of words, so...

(btw that community's size still shocks me. 36k members last I looked. even in my days of being in HP fandom on LJ I was never in any community so large. criminy.)