Yeah and like I do make a lot of jokes about my "brand" because there are a few very weird niche things I've been drawn to repeatedly, but I think that people certainly can get caught up on taking it as a serious idea that they are (for example) A Fluff Writer, so they shouldn't write angst, or A [insert ship here] Writer, so they can't ever write those characters in other ships, or explore the dynamic from another angle. Which is, like, if you only want to write a certain kind of thing then great, go for it! But if you're holding back from writing things that you'd like to write out of a perceived obligation to maintain your fandom brand identity then that's very much a joy killer ime.
I don't think I've ever outright deleted anything, but I've put a bunch of things in the anonymous collection because I don't want to be associated with them anymore.I have a weird neurosis about deleting fic, because part of me is like That's Destroying Literature—which, to be clear, I do feel objectively is a very frivolous comparison for me to be making, especially with the rise of censorship happening at the momentand an author choosing to delete their own fic is nothing approaching the same thing as book burning, but I somehow can't shake the feeling. I also don't want to orphan works, because I'm a control freak, lol. But taking my name off them seems to work for me. On that topic though, I do also want to get around to putting a bunch of my LJ-era fic on AO3 at some point, but I Do Not want to put it on my account without also putting it in the anonymous collection. It's kind of weird reconciling these twin feelings of "This does not reflect my current values and in many ways I do not think it should have been written" with "It would be morally wrong for me to remove access to this work to others." And, again, no it wouldn't be morally wrong for me to do that and I am not relevant enough to the literary canon to merit this kind of chin stroking in the first place, but I guess some feelings are hard to shake.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2023-09-18 04:21 pm (UTC)Yeah and like I do make a lot of jokes about my "brand" because there are a few very weird niche things I've been drawn to repeatedly, but I think that people certainly can get caught up on taking it as a serious idea that they are (for example) A Fluff Writer, so they shouldn't write angst, or A [insert ship here] Writer, so they can't ever write those characters in other ships, or explore the dynamic from another angle. Which is, like, if you only want to write a certain kind of thing then great, go for it! But if you're holding back from writing things that you'd like to write out of a perceived obligation to maintain your fandom brand identity then that's very much a joy killer ime.
I don't think I've ever outright deleted anything, but I've put a bunch of things in the anonymous collection because I don't want to be associated with them anymore.I have a weird neurosis about deleting fic, because part of me is like That's Destroying Literature—which, to be clear, I do feel objectively is a very frivolous comparison for me to be making, especially with the rise of censorship happening at the momentand an author choosing to delete their own fic is nothing approaching the same thing as book burning, but I somehow can't shake the feeling. I also don't want to orphan works, because I'm a control freak, lol. But taking my name off them seems to work for me. On that topic though, I do also want to get around to putting a bunch of my LJ-era fic on AO3 at some point, but I Do Not want to put it on my account without also putting it in the anonymous collection. It's kind of weird reconciling these twin feelings of "This does not reflect my current values and in many ways I do not think it should have been written" with "It would be morally wrong for me to remove access to this work to others." And, again, no it wouldn't be morally wrong for me to do that and I am not relevant enough to the literary canon to merit this kind of chin stroking in the first place, but I guess some feelings are hard to shake.