Fic What You Wanna Fic

Every so often, fandom decides to have a wank over fanfic, whether it's too porny or freaky, whether it's dangerous or infantile or stupid or too easy for kids to find, whether it's oldfen being creepy or grooming babyfen. Etc., etc. Basically, whatever you want to have a moral panic or responsibility crisis for, you can have a fandom wank over fanfic for. One of the current flavors wafting its way through the parts of Tumblr I see is some babyfen complaining that oldfen aren't protecting them.

My perspective is this: You go. You write it, you read it, you enjoy it, and fuck the haters. Work out your demons, practice your skills, engage your imagination. Be moderately polite, like using labels, so that you let readers know what they might be getting into, and if you read something that fucks with you, put it down and read something else. But you go. Fanfic away. Anyone who tells you not to fic what you wanna fic is being a jerk.

Now, the babyfen v. oldfen thing is also weird; there's a thread (which the current flavor is an aspect of) that basically is babyfen trying to insist that oldfen should have aged out of fandom. I don't get it, except perhaps in the hippie sense of "Don't trust anyone over thirty". But otherwise? Older people, mostly women, invented fandom, at least in the modern sense. Teenagers didn't save Star Trek, that was Bjo Trimble. The demand that fen age out is ridiculous, weird, ahistorical, ageist, sexist, and offensive.