I'm not really active in this particular fandom anymore, but I spent 16 years there, I was there when it was just starting out, and I've written over 200 fanfics for one of the characters & I made some fanarts.
About two days ago, one of the writers I-used-to-be-friends-with-but-we-no-longer-have-much-contact-with sent me a link to this video, and — tbh, I've been irritated ever since.
Even before the author (they/he) of this piece went on to "analyze" fanfics from that era, their video was full of nonsense! Like, they didn't even check the dates of certain events!! They were accusing fans of a certain character of an incident when the incident occurred in 2010, and the character first appeared or was even mentioned in 2013 and so on.
Besides my own fanfics, there were others. I knew some of them but hadn't read them in years, and yet... what surprised me was that even though I didn't remember them very well, I knew the author of video was spouting bullshit. Like, on the one hand, they kept saying things like "hmmm, that sounds like something a teenager would write" (yeah, no shit, most authors were kids back then! I wrote one of my fanfics that made it into this video when I was 12), and on the other, he kept getting the simplest scenes completely wrong or deliberately pretending that certain events had no context. He also changed which of the characters were saying something several times just so he can tell the audience, "this is confusing".
This looked like this:
His video:
"Something something," said Sophia
"Something something?" Susan asked
"Something!" said Carole
"Soooomething" said a character you've never heard of in this fanfiction before.
His comment: omg sooo confusing, where carole even coome from in this scene, who's this 4th character whaaaaaat
Meanwhile, the original:
"Something something" said Sophia
"Something something?" asked Susan
"Something!" said Sophia
"Soooomething" said Susan
Then we get to my work, and, I don't know, this person decided to spend 99% of the time joking about how one of the characters in my fanfiction was considering abortion. It wasn't even the tone or the delivery, but he just found the idea so funny that he made like 40 jokes about it in 25 minutes.
Other things:
- The guy really believed he was spilling the tea and revealing some shocking news, trying to tell everyone that me and another author had a fight and hated each other. We didn't do that. We were friends, wrote a lot of fanfiction together, and are still friends. There was never any drama between us
- He claimed it was my fault that a certain trend in fandom had become popular, only that my fanfic, which he pointed to as the beginning... was inspired by 15 other fanfictions with that trend. I was so damn late to this.
- Apparently, I had some accident in 2013, and that was the genesis of one of my most popular fanfics
- He tried to convince everyone that I hated every ship with character X except X/Y, where like... just going to my ao3 account will reveal that I shipped character X with literally everyone
and their mothers
Which brings me to the most offensive and infuriating thing (/hj). Lies? I can live with that. Incorrectly quoting everything? Oh well. I still can live with that, but after he told all this nonsense, he claimed that before recording the video, he had a brief conversation with me and even showed a screenshot (spoiler: there was no conversation), and said that during that conversation, I confessed to him that "You're right, YouTuber H, your assumptions are not wrong and u so smart. I wrote about character X because I saw him as self-insert for myself and wanted character Y to fuck me uwu." For fuck sake, I've written so many fanfics and created so much fanart in which character X's ass is destroyed by everyone including ugly bastard and in the end I've been assigned a bottom by some YouTuber. Life devastated. I'll never recover.
And I try to laugh it off, but it terrifies me that his video has become quite popular in our part of the fandom. There are over 300 comments under his video, with people thanking him for "an interesting lesson about this fandom history" or telling more strange stories about both canon and fanfiction authors here.