rpanons | You sound fat

You sound fat

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To clarify, I don't think that's something special. At all. But it does mean I have a bunch of crazy stories, especially due to hanging out with other BNFs. The internal drama in groups like that was still to date the strangest I've ever seen, and was so bad, I quit writing what made me a BNF, changed handles, and faded into blissful obscurity on purpose.

what was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, and made you decide to cut ties? feel free to blur deets or be vague if anything relating to this question would out you in some way.

Okay, for background I was never really comfortable with the devotion some fans have for BNFs. I know a lot of BNFs thrive on a cult of personality and I really, genuinely loved my fans because they were usually really nice people and a lot of them were young and sweet but I hated being put on a pedestal.

I have to keep this slightly vague but the straw that broke the camel's back was one of the other BNFs I knew (let's call her Britney) was writing this original novel. It was actually pretty terrible and generic but she was super into it and seemed to think it was great. She released the first few chapters to other BNFs in her clique and then to some of her fans, which crossed over into my fanbase because we were...affiliated. (It's hard to explain without getting specific, but you know how some fandoms have subfandoms of interrelated fics or website groups or forum sites). I didn't say anything about how terrible it was because I knew better, but she asked for honest critique and this one girl (who I will call Susie), chimed up and gave some pretty good crit. She was complimentary over the good parts, but really dug into the flaws and was honest that they were generic. It was worded very politely though.

Well, Britney fucking flipped. She lost her goddamn mind. She sent the crit and this giant rant to the other BNFs totally ripping into Susie, which in turn made them all treat her like crap and get snipey. They all dropped her from their LJ friendlists and blocked her on AIM and tried to get their friends to do the same while vaguing up what Susie did to make her look bad. One of them tried to have her banned from the forum we were all at but when I found out they were trying, I quietly shared the actual crit so the mod knew Britney was full of it so they weren't having it. (Britney and co. never knew that I sabotaged that because I asked the mod not to tell). Britney also tried to do something with Susie's school, like tried to get her in trouble there but I wasn't privy to all of that because I think she realized she couldn't trust me to be 100% on her side after I told her I didn't really see what the problem with the crit was.

The way Susie reacted to it was really sad because she took it all to heart and thought she was in the wrong and was way overly apologetic when Britney was the one that was being a tool. I took her to the side privately and told her the crit was fine and that it was perfectly polite. That seemed to help a little but Susie gradually faded out of the spaces we were hanging in, so it was clear it got to her and that she felt pressured out of things.

That was the point that I realized it just wasn't for me. I didn't like the people I was hanging around, I didn't like the pressure of not pissing them off and being the next person they treated like shit, I didn't like watching them treat people badly and either having to keep my mouth shut to stay out of their crosshairs or having the times I politely pointed out that hey maybe this wasn't a big deal completely ignored. I didn't like how they turned everything negative and bitched about people doing harmless shit, while acting nice to their faces. I didn't like how sycophantish the fans were, not because they were bad people for it, but because I knew I didn't deserve it over stupid fic and was scared I'd someday let it get to my head and wind up doing something that hurt somebody. I didn't like worrying that I might accidentally say something that someone might take ten times harder than I meant it and have their feelings really hurt.

So I stopped writing the fic that people followed me over, went quiet for a while until people started to forget about me, changed handles and only had the friends and fans I was closest to know about the change, and gradually just faded out. My fic turned into one of those ones that people occasionally chimed up with "Why didn't the author ever finish this?" and most people didn't know what I'd gotten up to. Then I changed fandoms a few times just naturally. I gradually lost touch with all my fandom acquaintances from back then so nobody can connect who I am now with who I was then. I still dabble in fic here and there but I realized I was just really uncomfortable being in the spotlight so I've tried to stay out of it. I've been a fandom and rp nobody ever since. Never namedropped and while some people like my fics and fanart, I've never really been popular in fandoms since then.

Wow, sorry that got long, but it was pretty nuts. I'm amazed it never hit fandom_wank because this was during fandom_wank's heyday, but it was mostly kept among a small group so I guess nobody wanted to out themselves by accident.

wow. i was also a bnf many, many years ago (predating f_w) and also purposely faded to obscurity because of drama, as well as the weirdness of just... being a bnf. so i totally get this. it is a surreal experience, to say the least.

It was like walking through a Twilight Zone portal into a backwards dimension where people were incapable of acting like normal logical human beings.

I just hated it. I still have no regrets about dropping all that popularity and walking away. I stopped focusing on fandom stuff and focused more on my schoolwork in college and that's something I definitely don't regret because I did well in school and have a nice career now. I also learned to cut out people like that and surround myself with nice, decent people as friends both online and off.

...britney sounds exactly like cassandra clare, except for you saying ti never hit fandom_wank.

Honestly, it's a behavior pattern that I think is very common for many BNFs. They let a little popularity get to their heads and then basically start thinking their shit don't stink and treat people horribly. When I saw all the CC wank hit FW all I could think was that it seemed like they must factory produce these people en masse or something.

Behavior is one thing but the "awful YA book" is pretty specific.

I never said it was YA. It was a fantasy book but it wasn't YA. And it wasn't HP fandom.

A lot of fanfic BNFs hold delusions of being big shot original authors, and a lot of people who write fic share original writing. That's how it's always been. She wasn't even the only one in that group that shared original writing, she was just the one that flipped the most at crit.

for me what triggered it was the thing with trying to get her kicked out of school, and then she got mobbed and totally blamed herself. didn't both of those things happen with the same girl and cassandra clare?

i'm not doubting your claims that it was a different person/fandom, but god damn, that's spooky.

I haven't seen the CC FW stuff in ages, but if CC did the same exact thing wow that is fucking sad. All I remember about CC was some of the plagiarism debacle wank and the laptop incident. But like I said, BNFs thinking they could be hot shit original authors has always been a thing, and wankers trying to get people in trouble IRL has always been a thing, too. In all my years in fandom, I've seen people try it more than once. And I'm still not sure what Britney tried or how successful it was, so it's possible it didn't even do anything.

I can't lay down specifics but with what happened it'd be like if someone wrote a ripoff of Pern and got pissed that someone pointed out it was a Pern ripoff. It was more straight fantasy than YA, we were in a different fandom (though I'll give a hint that it was also a scifi/fantasy fandom, too), and I never saw it hit any wank comms. It also happened before I remember seeing anything with CC explode. I don't think it was that long before it because I remember starting to see things about CC not long after, but it was definitely pre-plagiarism debacle. Fandom Wank was created in '02 and CC's wank debacle really exploded in I think '06 and it definitely happened in between. (Maybe in '03 or '04?)

idk it's hard to remember everything now, especially since I deleted my original LJ and a lot of the forum sites are gone now so I can't go back to look. It's been over a decade. But honestly that is common BNF behavior. I can tell you that from observing. All the ones I dealt with thought they could be real authors but couldn't take crit to save their lives. Especially back then, a lot of fic writers harped on fic being real, legitimate writing and were extra snobby about it. I feel like attitudes towards fic have changed a little since then where people feel a lot less need to try to justify how it's real writing, just as good as original writing, and accepting it's fine as just a casual hobby without having being a real author as an end goal.

did you ever interact with other BNFs or fans IRL?

No, I was actually pretty young at the time, younger than a lot of the BNFs I was hanging with who were in their late 20s and even 30s. IIRC the fics I wrote started getting traction when I was about 18 and I think I was only about 19-20 when I bailed. Most of it's long since taken down so I can't even check dates now. It all happened when I was in college and I was living on campus without a car so I really didn't have a way of meeting up with anyone and then by the time I graduated and had a car, I already had backed away from it all.

That was another thing that made it all so surreal. I was actually fairly young, closer to the age of a lot of the teen fans in our little crossover fandom than the ages of my fellow BNFs, and these people throwing tantrums were close to 10 years my senior, if not older. I think one of them was even 40 so she was twice my age.

That was part of why I felt like I couldn't handle it. I just wasn't emotionally equipped to navigate everything at that age.

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You sound fat

former fandom BNF

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"sounds like cc" anon

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Re: former fandom BNF

Re: former fandom BNF