just in general: i find conversations surrounding fanfic on twitter so frustrating. queer fanfic is SO popular –– to the point where roughly 90% of the top ships on ao3 are queer –– but when it comes to paying for queer books or finding non-fanfic notoriety... another story.

there's a push to use fanfic language for marketing (awesome!), tweets about "how can quality fanfics can be for free?" (true!) but it dances around the fact that many of the people who write these are marginalized and have a harder time breaking into the industry, baseline.

i'm not saying reading fanfic is bad (far from it), or saying queer art doesn't exist (not true either). i'm just thinking... maybe we can say less of "fanfics are amazing, why are they free" and start asking ourselves "why does all this marginalized content end up being fanfic?"

this person crunched the numbers and broke down the most popular ship stats for 2020 if anyone is interested in specifics:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/25671457