That viral post that’s going around about how people who write “book quality” mlm fic are too “normal” to publish and have real jobs so only “weird” people publish their “shitty” fanfic is so completely out of touch with reality and I am giving a massive side eye to everyone reblogging it.
Not only is it completely, easily verifiably untrue (you cannot enter any professional writing space without tripping over a dozen grizzled scifi writers who got their start by filing off the serial numbers and publishing their Star Trek fanfic even going back decades ago??? it’s a whole thing?? plus how can you look at the mlm category on Amazon right now and say with a straight face that people aren’t publishing shitty Sprik and Stucky fanfic??? Oh, honey…) it’s also the perfect example of this kind of sneering elitism that true artists would never sully themselves by seeking profit, they do it only for the purity of the thing that always somehow leads back to, “no one should be paid to make art, actually.”
The only reason you’re seeing more published fanfic right now has nothing to do with the idealistic purity of your hypothetical government employee written smut of the past vs the debased scribbles of those awful straights of today and everything to do with the fact that a) self-publishing has created a voracious readership that wants a ton of content so it’s become a viable, flexible income stream for many, especially disabled people b) anyone can publish now with self-publishing tools so there are less gatekeepers and c) lockdown got a lot of people into fandom and therefore writing who never tried it before.
And if you really think there’s no “shitty” published mlm and no “book-quality” m/f writing out there that started as fanfic, then you are clearly not a reader so why are you even talking about this?
Just… take the ship names out of it entirely and look at how openly contemptuous this is about fanfic and published writers. Most people on Tumblr would immediately recognize this for what it was were it not for the ships they mentioned which is *exactly* why they picked those specific strawmen.
“Good, normal writers would never try to get published, they have real jobs! Only shitty weird writers do that!” Is not the progressive take some of you seem to think it is…
Also, it’s been reported that it was a literary agent that reached out to Ali Hazelwood, author of The Love Hypothesis, with a proposal to have her fanfic published with the serial numbers filled, which shatters that narrative that it’s all on the hubris of bad het porn writers to think themselves worthy of publication, especially since there have been always a market for cheap sappy romance novels since publishing exists (where y’all asleep when Nicholas Sparks was leading the best seller lists on the 2000s or what) and I don’t see where’s the shame in someone looking at their coffee shop au with side porn and thinking “I could make some bucks out of it, you know”. On average, the writing is not worse than what we are used to have in this genre.
The original post is such a funny cope lmao. The trying to find an angle in which becoming a published writer is somehow a cringe thing and the completely made up fact that people who write Actual Good Fics For Actual Good Ships are too busy having real dignified jobs like working on the government [citation needed] to pursue a lowly literary career are such a wild combination of reaching. Deep down they’re not mad because the fanfiction-to-publishing pipeline is destroying real literature (real literature is fine and well, you just have to leave the devil’s sacrament, I mean, the ya section of barnes&noble every once in a while and try to visit the adult lit aisle sometimes), it’s because, as a mutual of mine has put it, dunking on reylo has become such an instant clout button on the internet that them terminally online kids have lost sight that no one in the Offline World gives a fuck if the star wars ship is problematique and every new reylo fanfiction that gets published and makes numbers is another burst in their bubble that reylo is a niche ship for freaks that Normal People despise for its toxicity. because actual Normal People who don’t spend 24/7 on twitblr don’t give a fuck as to not even have an opinion on it.
(also Thea Guanzon, author of serial filled numbers reylo fanfic turned into novel The Hurricane Wars, is an author of color from a third world country, Philipines, who said she’d never have a chance of making into the american published fiction scene prior to the fanfic-to-publishing phenomenon. as a latina from the global south who also aims to become a published author in the english speaking world this makes me so happy for her and so hopeful that I might have an entryway I’d otherwise not have to make it happen, but american whitey gerardpilled here is too busy whining about how the democratization of publishing is allowing “bad” authors to make it instead of what it could means for marginalized authors who otherwise would only see shut doors on their faces)
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