(Content warning: brief general mentions of sexual violence in fanfic/BL)

For DW folks, a lot of this fannish commentary will be old hat, and I hope you will chime in with your thoughts and experience.

I enjoy Hilary Layne’s YouTube commentary in much the way I enjoy C. S. Lewis. I usually have some philosophical disagreement but also a lot I agree with and definitely respect for her intelligence and rigor.

This video is no exception. In sum, she argues that fan fiction culture (as on Ao3), combined with an educational system that teaches literature badly, has raised a generation of readers and writers whose tastes are “self-indulgent,” prioritizing simplistic self-insertion and personal pleasure over learning and growing through literature. This, in turn, has seeped into much published fiction in a way that makes it read like bad fan fic, full of Mary Sue’s, simplistic storytelling, and a strange combination of sympathy for grotesque behavior (ex. torture) but intolerance of any (nuanced?) depiction of certain negative ideas (ex. racism, sexism).



While I think she misses some of the moral underpinnings of fan fiction, I see truth her narrative. I appreciate her framing the problem as largely having arisen in the past twenty years. Gen Z is two generations younger than me, and her video made me realize I tend to think of fandom in Gen X terms, which is utterly different from what Gen Z has experienced.

The following is some of the reflections, disagreements (or complications), and questions that arose for me watching this video. ( Read more... )