It's so nice to meet you, let's never meet again

[shamanicshaymin]

(takes a deep fucking breath) Guys. We gotta talk. So there’s a Sally Face fanfic called We Don’t Have to Dance (which I’ll initial as WDHTD), which is probably the most well-known in the whole fandom. Sally Face itself is an M-rated adventure horror game that managed to get a peripheral following with teenagers.

The fic itself is an AU revolving around the most popular and controversial ship in the fandom: Sal Fisher/Larry Johnson. The “controversial” part of the ship is in the penultimate chapter of the game, Sal’s dad and Larry’s mom get married, effectively making them adopted siblings. Due to much of the game focusing on their friendship, there being little-to-no buildup to their parents falling in love in the first place, and the marriage itself happening when Sal and Larry are adults moving out from their parents’ apartment anyway, there’s fierce flame wars whether or not this “counts” as incest. Most Sallary fics don’t go into the familial aspect of their relationship at all, some going as far as making it an AU where their parents never marry, just in case. (Naturally, this doesn’t stop people from being asses)

So not only is WDHTD a rock band AU Sallary fic, it makes it explicitly clear that it’s not for the faint of heart, let alone your average 13-year-old. The opening paragraph is explicit hatesex in a grimy bathroom, and we’re left to wonder what the hell soured Sal and Larry’s relationship from the original canon. The entire cast does problematic and stupid things as expected of humans, and the fic is an emotional roller coaster from beginning to end. Sal and Larry's relationship is messy and codependent most of the time and it takes a lot of personal growth on both their parts before they're anywhere near stable together. There’s depiction of hard drug abuse and addiction that Stephen King would nod his head and be familiar with, including an overdose of a character with all the gross gory details.

WDHTD is understandably not for everyone. I don’t just mean the ship either, as the previous paragraph made explicitly clear. But apparently, enough people have decided that because a single Sally Face fanfic wasn’t to their taste that the author deserves to be harassed and impersonated. Which is why years after the fanfic’s completion, the author had to orphan WDHTD and post a note:

I wish I had never posted this fic sometimes. It is based around my trauma, my lived experiences, and was not meant to glamorize or glorify anything. The people who harass me over this non-for-profit fictional story that is based on my real life has done nothing but hurt me. Please - leave me and this fic alone. I would delete it, but I know how many people used this fic to heal so I would never take that from anyone.

But please. It's been years. I just want to be left alone.

I am orphaning this fic. I want it gone from my life. This journey has been wonderful, but I am a sensitive soul who can't handle being accused of these horrible things thanks to a stupid little Sally Face story.

This is not the first time shit like this has happened. I’ve seen it happen to the Flowerfell AU in Undertale fandom, specifically a fic called Overgrowth by SociopathicArchangel. It got so well-known that people plagiarized and reposted the hell out of it, and now you can only listen to an audio recording of it on YouTube or read it for a dollar at the author’s Patreon. But Flowerfell’s biggest sin is being a Frisk x Sans story at its core: it doesn’t matter that Frisk is 18+ or that the fic is an AU (based off another AU at that), purity police decided it promoted pedophilia and the authors deserved to be harassed until they took down their tumblr forever. I never forgotten the audio recording I listened to where one of the authors was in tears and was begging everyone to leave her friend alone… I didn’t even follow the AU, only Overgrowth, and that haunted me.

Now, I don’t think “PrObLeMaTiC sHiPpInG” is 100% the reason WDHTD got targeted. I remember the controversy when the fic got huge and people started cosplaying from it, including minors on TikTok. TikTok has a TON of problems I won’t get into, and it’s concerning that a whole bunch of kids are cosplaying for a story that uh… wasn’t written for them. But the author in no way could have anticipated how people would’ve reacted to their fanfic, especially one based off their personal experiences. In no way should they be held responsible for the younger fans’ behavior, nor are they encouraging this just because their fanfic exists. Harassing someone for their fanfic because it makes you uncomfortable does nothing to solve the problem.

There’s an awful trend in fandom lately that if a work makes someone uncomfortable, it means it’s bad for everybody. If a work explores uncomfortable themes, then bad faith is immediately taken and believed that the author is a Problematic Monster who glamorizes and encourages all the bad stuff that happens in their story. The author is grilled and water-boarded until they fork over their survivor history/LGBTQ identity/ethnicity/official doctor’s diagnosis/etc for “validity” and even then, they can still be dismissed as “faking it” and/or not tall enough for the trauma roller coaster.

People like the WDHTD author write what is true to them and are punished for it. Oh, they wrote about rock stars taking drugs? They better include a PSA and a mini-autobio so readers will definitely know that drugs are bad! It’s up to a Sally Face fanfic writer to let impressionable youth know that drugs and unhealthy relationships are problematic. You know, because children might read an NC-17 fanfic for a fandom about a boy with trauma who can talk to ghosts who are gruesomely murdered…

But nobody believes Steve Gabry glamorizes mental illness and killing people, right? =)

This is not a “oh noes people are mean to a story I like!!11!” post. And if you roll your eyes and think that’s only a problem for “dumb problematic shippers,” 1. You clearly didn’t read my essay. 2. You missed the point entirely. Purity police attack anything that doesn’t fit their narrow world view—shipping just happens to be an easy target—and fandom is suffering for it. We shouldn’t be required to stamp a “I don’t endorse any of the bad things in this fic” disclaimer when it used to be something readers took for granted. If something is tagged and you read it anyway and get offended, that’s on you, the reader. Writers are not our babysitters and they owe you nothing.

It's just such bullshit that this has become the fandom norm lately. Or maybe I'm upset because I never finished my writeup and shared my WDHTD fanmix with the author before they took down their tumblr. Phooey.

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

It's so frustrating and upsetting. My favourite fic in the world is Sympathy Crime, a Persona 4 fic by sodomquake. It's a harrowing, beautifully written story about an abusive relationship, and about the victim and his friends trying to deal with the fallout after the relationship ends. It's written with so much thought and care and sympathy, and in part it's an outlet for the author's own feelings of helplessness when friends of hers suffered abuse.

The author was doxxed and forced to delete her AO3 and Tumblr. The people who came after her hadn't even read her work; they just saw it was tagged 'noncon' and 'underage'. In other words, she warned responsibly, and because of that she was driven out of fandom.

Fiction is a space in which it's possible to explore dark concepts safely. If an author 'inflicts' fictional harm on fictional characters, that doesn't matter, because nobody's getting hurt. If people try to 'protect' those fictional characters by harming the author, a real person is suffering. I think it's ridiculous to frame 'protect the fictional people, attack the real one' as the moral stance.

[shamanicshaymin]

It's honestly disgusting and heartbreaking, because it punishes people for daring to write about their own experiences and fears 'cause "oh noes it might disturb someone!111!1" (no fucking shit Sherlock) or "it might make someone think X Bad Thing is okay!!!" (that reader has bigger problems than being "brainwashed" by fiction) And they never actually go after people who have done bad things, like Woody Allen and his ilk; it's much easier to pick on fanfiction writers, who have no impact on the media, and whom a majority are made up of marginalized people. Purity police are just bullies who disguise themselves as crusaders and give zero shits about anything else but looking morally superior.

[sarajayechan]

In other words, she warned responsibly, and because of that she was driven out of fandom.

Further proof that people like this don't care about people being traumatized by untagged dark fic, they just don't want it to exist because it makes THEM upset. Fuck that.

[militarypenguin]

This is incredibly sad to hear, even more sad because it's become so familiar at this point.

The most popular fic in one of my fandoms doesn't even have sexual content or pairings for the usual suspects to get up in arms about...and that author still got ruthlessly hounded for it.

[seerofrage]

That is incredibly saddening to hear, and it's so frustrating and upsetting that creators getting harassed to the point of orphaning their works and deleting their accounts has become so commonplace. It's very not difficult to stay in your own corner of fandom and ignore tags/content that aren't to your taste and leave others to their own corners! Especially when it's minors poking their heads in 18+ spaces and yelling about what they find. :\

I hope the author is okay, and finds some peace moving forward. ):

[sarajayechan]

It's just such bullshit that this has become the fandom norm lately.

It really is and I hate it. For all the problems with fandom in the 2000s/early 2010s, at least we didn't have complete dickheads doxxing and harassing people for writing dark themes. Shit, even CORI FALLS didn't go this far. It's like the moral panic over video games, or cartoons in the 70s/80s having to be sanitized because parents thought their children would do bad things like hit their siblings or set the kitchen on fire or disagree with the group. It's fucking ridiculous and it needs to stop.

edit: I just read the full note you linked and oh my fucking God. The poor author. :/ Fuck those people. The author shouldn't have had to even mention it was based on their real experiences, I hate that this whole "you must reveal your traumatic backstory before we allow you to write x thing" trend is still going strong when it needed to be stomped flat before it grew.

[firedjinn]

Oh man, I didn't even know about the thing with SociopathicArchangel. I remember really enjoying their Homestuck fics back in the 2010s, especially some of their Eridan<>Roxy stuff... if they're still on AO3, they've changed their username and possibly deleted a lot of their old fic :(

[tropicsbear]

It's all so tiring. You can put all the warnings you want on a thing and people will still throw a fit about it existing.