RS: EXAMINE YOUR LIFE, EXAMINE YOUR CHOICES
So, my computer is still out of commission. Because of that I only wind up checking fandom_secrets a day after the last post was relevant, which spurs some... odd fits of impotent rage/sadness/irritation. The 4/20 secret post was absolutely RIFE with bitchy secrets related to people posting unanon on kink memes, by which I mean there were two of them, and I was spontaneously filled with the desire to write a short essay justifying myself because this is what social anxiety does to me, it makes me want to apologize for everything ever even when I don't think I've done anything wrong. Chances are if you're reading this you probably don't give a fuck about me deanoning/are only mildly put off by it, but this is mostly just here for me to blow off steam. If there ARE any irritable anons wandering around who have a bone to pick with me, feel free to come at me, bro; I'm fairly certain I set this thing to stop screening anon comments after LJ mysteriously reset all my settings without informing me (sorry, anyone whose comment was momentarily screened! my bad!) but really, who the fuck knows. I will try to reply with an equal amount of tact as you offer me, as my point here is not to come off as a blustering, egotistical windbag (which I guess I already have but oh well?) but to address some actual concerns I, personally, have with being anon in the Homestuck kink meme in particular.
So.
To start off with, I have some existing kink meme baggage. I'm not going to name any of the memes I've filled for except the Katekyo Hitman Reborn! meme, which was two years ago. Prior to my involvement with Homestuck fandom I never posted logged in on kink memes because, as I saw it, there was no reason to. I didn't need name recognition (still don't) and none of my fills wound up being longer than three or four commentboxes long. Awhile later I deanoned on some of those fills-- on my own journal. And, once or twice, in the relevant pairing community, because it was a tiny ship with next to no fic and I thought it couldn't hurt. I never posted unanon on the meme, at least intentionally-- there might be a misfire here or there that I am not recalling accurately at this time.
And then, after Reborn! fandom, I briefly flirted with Soul Eater and then dropped out of fic-writing fandom entirely for about two years in favor of RPing through AIM and other chat clients. My involvement with kink memes was pretty much terminated between August of 2008 and January of 2011. This January, I was introduced to Homestuck and that changed.
Right away, I knew I wanted to write something for this fandom, and I wanted it to be shameless porn (at least to start off with), and I didn't have any ideas. So I started reading the kink meme and lurking, occasionally leaving nice comments where I thought appropriate-- never logged in. About a week in I was ambushed by a prompt I liked, with something that I could spin out into a lengthy plot (or, at least, more lengthy than anything I'd written for fandom on my own in years) and I started writing. That fic, in its initial run, was posted entirely anonymously, because that was just what you did on kink memes.
It was incredibly fucking frustrating. Writing the fic was the most fun I'd had in months, but cutting each day's installment up into small pieces and trying to make the section breaks flow properly was a nightmare, especially when I kept hitting the wrong buttons and posting things in the wrong parts of the thread. That fill was over 20,000 words long, and I was very unhappy with the fact that I was unable to go back and fix some of my mistakes and unintentional formatting errors later, in addition to my misfire problems.
So that was point number one. The length of fics and the utter impossibility of posting something over five thousand words to the meme anonymously without getting angry and wanting to throw the computer across the room. It only got worse when I wrote that damn cowboy AU, which topped out at twenty five thousand words, and that is currently being eclipsed by the Revelations Cycle stuff, which is already long enough to submit to NaNoWriMo as a winning piece, involved complicated HTML maneuvers to make the text colors (and other coding things that haven't come up yet, but will) work, and is not even half fucking finished yet.
Which brings me up to point number two. Now, I don't always do pesterlogs in fic. In fact, the current AU project is, as far as I recall, the first time that I ever have. But that project alone would justify my deanoning, I believe, just because of the absolutely colossal difficulty of making LJ comments do your bidding with respect to HTML.
I'll give you an example. About a month ago I began working on another fill, with the prompt of High School AU (sidebar: this will be finished eventually. I was going to do it this weekend, actually, and then my computer imploded and that plan escaped me entirely). Because I thought that it would be a bit shorter, I decided to post it in comments directly to the meme, but logged in because I wanted text colors to show up, and it was my understanding that that HTML often does not work when it is utilized in anonymous comments. After posting the first installment and realizing that I'd been fucked over by my shoddy understanding of computer code yet again, I decided to just write the rest of the damn thing and post it to my journal in one go-- which I would have done anyway.
I think working in this fandom it's pretty inevitable that people are going to deanon for fills. Beyond name recognition-- which, let's be honest, nearly everyone who creates a significantly large body of work, in a fandom or anywhere, probably secretly wants to some degree --there are actual legitimate issues with coding. Especially if you want to imbed a picture, which I don't but people such as cephiedvariable do, it's a goddamned nightmare trying to fuck around with this in LJ comments, especially the anon ones.
My point here is that it's not egotism that by definition drives namefagging on the kink meme. It's a kink meme, for Christ's sake, not an anon meme. I do think it's bullshit when people post requests logged in, to a certain degree, since it seems to me that kink memes are mostly for the point of sharing your kinks without having to worry about having things that you might be ashamed of for whatever reason (or that you wouldn't want tied in with your online name, possibly because that name is tied into your non-internet life), but to be honest even that doesn't bother me all that much as long as the people who are requesting are also filling, which for the most part I think they are. For the record, I have requested a grand total of four things, ever. And all of those requests?
They were anonymous.
So.
To start off with, I have some existing kink meme baggage. I'm not going to name any of the memes I've filled for except the Katekyo Hitman Reborn! meme, which was two years ago. Prior to my involvement with Homestuck fandom I never posted logged in on kink memes because, as I saw it, there was no reason to. I didn't need name recognition (still don't) and none of my fills wound up being longer than three or four commentboxes long. Awhile later I deanoned on some of those fills-- on my own journal. And, once or twice, in the relevant pairing community, because it was a tiny ship with next to no fic and I thought it couldn't hurt. I never posted unanon on the meme, at least intentionally-- there might be a misfire here or there that I am not recalling accurately at this time.
And then, after Reborn! fandom, I briefly flirted with Soul Eater and then dropped out of fic-writing fandom entirely for about two years in favor of RPing through AIM and other chat clients. My involvement with kink memes was pretty much terminated between August of 2008 and January of 2011. This January, I was introduced to Homestuck and that changed.
Right away, I knew I wanted to write something for this fandom, and I wanted it to be shameless porn (at least to start off with), and I didn't have any ideas. So I started reading the kink meme and lurking, occasionally leaving nice comments where I thought appropriate-- never logged in. About a week in I was ambushed by a prompt I liked, with something that I could spin out into a lengthy plot (or, at least, more lengthy than anything I'd written for fandom on my own in years) and I started writing. That fic, in its initial run, was posted entirely anonymously, because that was just what you did on kink memes.
It was incredibly fucking frustrating. Writing the fic was the most fun I'd had in months, but cutting each day's installment up into small pieces and trying to make the section breaks flow properly was a nightmare, especially when I kept hitting the wrong buttons and posting things in the wrong parts of the thread. That fill was over 20,000 words long, and I was very unhappy with the fact that I was unable to go back and fix some of my mistakes and unintentional formatting errors later, in addition to my misfire problems.
So that was point number one. The length of fics and the utter impossibility of posting something over five thousand words to the meme anonymously without getting angry and wanting to throw the computer across the room. It only got worse when I wrote that damn cowboy AU, which topped out at twenty five thousand words, and that is currently being eclipsed by the Revelations Cycle stuff, which is already long enough to submit to NaNoWriMo as a winning piece, involved complicated HTML maneuvers to make the text colors (and other coding things that haven't come up yet, but will) work, and is not even half fucking finished yet.
Which brings me up to point number two. Now, I don't always do pesterlogs in fic. In fact, the current AU project is, as far as I recall, the first time that I ever have. But that project alone would justify my deanoning, I believe, just because of the absolutely colossal difficulty of making LJ comments do your bidding with respect to HTML.
I'll give you an example. About a month ago I began working on another fill, with the prompt of High School AU (sidebar: this will be finished eventually. I was going to do it this weekend, actually, and then my computer imploded and that plan escaped me entirely). Because I thought that it would be a bit shorter, I decided to post it in comments directly to the meme, but logged in because I wanted text colors to show up, and it was my understanding that that HTML often does not work when it is utilized in anonymous comments. After posting the first installment and realizing that I'd been fucked over by my shoddy understanding of computer code yet again, I decided to just write the rest of the damn thing and post it to my journal in one go-- which I would have done anyway.
I think working in this fandom it's pretty inevitable that people are going to deanon for fills. Beyond name recognition-- which, let's be honest, nearly everyone who creates a significantly large body of work, in a fandom or anywhere, probably secretly wants to some degree --there are actual legitimate issues with coding. Especially if you want to imbed a picture, which I don't but people such as cephiedvariable do, it's a goddamned nightmare trying to fuck around with this in LJ comments, especially the anon ones.
My point here is that it's not egotism that by definition drives namefagging on the kink meme. It's a kink meme, for Christ's sake, not an anon meme. I do think it's bullshit when people post requests logged in, to a certain degree, since it seems to me that kink memes are mostly for the point of sharing your kinks without having to worry about having things that you might be ashamed of for whatever reason (or that you wouldn't want tied in with your online name, possibly because that name is tied into your non-internet life), but to be honest even that doesn't bother me all that much as long as the people who are requesting are also filling, which for the most part I think they are. For the record, I have requested a grand total of four things, ever. And all of those requests?
They were anonymous.