people on twitter getting mad at the hacktivist catgirl for using neopronouns and being a bi lesbian. like sorry did you expect the avowed anarchist cyberterrorist to love rules but only when it comes to language and identity
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i will literally never understand how “you’re allowed to write fiction about whatever you want as long as you properly tag it when you post it publicly” became a controversial fucking opinion what is wrong with the internet
something about the discourse on if fanfiction is Good or not has bugged me for years and i think i finally put my finger on why: even if reading and writing fanfiction is bad for women– because let’s not pretend all these judgements don’t hinge on whether or not women are having fun in the wrong way–it’s a voluntary activity that people enjoy doing, and that should be that.
fanfic degrades your morals– cool so does football. look at the way football players and football fans behave. when’s the last time supernatural fans set pittsburgh on fire, or tore up a strip club, or assaulted flight attendants? fuck, it would be cool if fanfic was on the level of literally any national sport.
fanfic lures you into sexual activity you might not otherwise have engaged in– so does dancing and drinking and especially drinking and dancing, activities women are also warned against but have enjoyed anyway for thousands of fucking years.
fanfic is a waste of time when you could be reading or writing Literature– almost no one does that anyway! like, if this is your beef you’re not allowed to turn on the TV until you finish Wuthering Heights. meanwhile the rest of us are going to do things that are easy and fun, because humans like doing things that are easy and fun.
fanfic is masturbatory– masturbation is actually healthy and good for you if you care to partake in it. it reduces stress, improves your mood, and acquaints you with your body’s likes and dislikes. isn’t it suspicious that this is something women are also not supposed to be doing?
IN CONCLUSION i don’t care if fanfiction is good for you and neither should you. i don’t care about the latest thinkpiece that argues that fanfiction is intelligent, sophisticated, analytical, healing, creative, revolutionary.
i care that hundreds of thousands of women like it.
because that’s enough.
Ok but, fanfiction IS literature. Even if it’s not held with as great esteem, they are still creative written works that authors put their heart and soul into.
no.
the vast majority of fanfic is crap.
90% of it is amateur work done for free by people who are usually young and unskilled and often writing simply for fun. because they’re horny or angry or sad or excited or curious. most human self-expression and creative work is shallow, unskilled, and unoriginal– and unique and valuable in and of itself, anyway. like, most humans aren’t professionals who pour decades of skill, experience, and pent-up finely-honed love and rage and longing into their work. most humans do things badly. because those things are worth doing badly.
if fanfiction is only Worthwhile because it is Good, if it’s only Good because it’s Worthwhile, then most of it isn’t. most of it is badly written, spelled, plotted, characterized, and formatted. to argue that fanfiction is the same thing as literature is an absurd way to immediately lose that argument, because it’s not. fanfiction is folk art, from everyone, by everyone, for everyone. literature is a commercial product produced mostly by technically skilled writers and it’s mediated entirely by financially-motivated distributors.
but ‘fanfiction is literature’ is a pointless argument in the first place. you sing. you dance. you cook. you tell stories. these are human things to do. are you good at them? are you so good at them that you elevate the entire field and provide the sole justification for engaging in such an endeavor? no. you don’t have to.
fanfic is good and worthwhile because people like to read it and write it. it doesn’t have to have heart and soul. it doesn’t have to be literature. it just has to be human.
Fujoshi
😘 Originally started as a misogynistic slur hurled by Japanese men at Japanese girls and women in fandom
😘 Is a pun or portmanteau that literally means “rotten woman”
😘 Colloquially means “unmarriageable”, “not good wife material”
😘 Basically means someone who is more interested in fandom husbandos than getting married and raising a family
😘 Is a widely reclaimed and self-applied label in Japan by Japanese women, and by other women in fandom throughout the world.
😘 Is still a slur if you use it against someone as an insult, including if that person is not Japanese.
😘 Funny enough if you call a western fan a “fujoshi” or a “fujo” as an insult you are using it in the same way as a conservative Japanese man who thinks women need to get offline and into the kitchen.
Hope that helps!
A few additions:
💖 Fujoshi was originally coined in the early 2000’s on 2channel, a Japanese textboard website very similar to 4chan.
💖 Fujoshi is spelt as “腐女子” using Japanese characters. It’s a homophonous pun based on “婦女子”, where the character “婦”, meaning “married woman”, is replaced with “腐” meaning “rotten” or “fermented”.
💖 It was implied that these girls were “selfish” or “spoilt” because they didn’t want to meet society’s expectations and be a submissive housewife that would obey her husband’s orders.
💖 The anti-fujoshi community was popularized in Western fandom because of TERFs, following the idea that a person who discovered they’re a trans man because of BL is “not a real man” or “fetishizing gay men” or “wants an excuse to read their hawt yaois without any backlash”.
💖 Fujin (腐人) is the gender-neutral term for BL fans, and doesn’t have to be limited to those that are only nonbinary.
💖 You do not add an ’s’ at the end of fujoshi, even when you may be referring to multiple of them.
💖 “Yaoi” is an outdated term in Japan.
Excellent additions to the main points!
I do want to add however, that it was relatively common in early anime fandom (mid-late 2000s through early 2010s) for western fans of anime and manga (especially BL, at the time called yaoi) to also self-describe as fujoshi for the same reasons as fans in Japan.
The term was only later picked up by TERFS etc to hurl as an insult toward trans men.