supergee | (Reply)

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Hmm, i dunno. I mean, on the one hand, i think it's great when pro authors who came up through fanfic talk about it.

And she's not wrong about the link between opinions of fanfic and the fact that primarily women write it. If i had a nickel for everyone i've heard say "fanfic is trash, except Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is great," i would have a sizeable army of nickels with which to defend my thesis that this statement is not unrelated to the fact that the author of Methods of Rationality is known to be a dude.

On the other hand, i think you actually have to do some work to demonstrate that fanfic is primarily out there fixing gender representation in fiction. I'm not saying there's no relationship between shitty representation and the existence of fanfic, but i am saying the numbers don't support the idea that fanfic is written to "fix" representation, so you gotta make the qualitative argument some other way, you can't just assert it.